SYRIA. SO WHAT?
CHACR COMMENTARY // DECEMBER 2024
BY: Major General Dr Andrew R D Sharpe, Director CHACR
O
N the morning of Sunday the 8th of December we woke up to learn that the turn of the tide in the Syrian civil war had become a tsunami that had swept President Assad from power. He had fled the country, leaving Damascus in the hands of ‘the rebels’. This turn of events has occurred at a time of considerable global uncertainty, change, instability and turmoil. The context is almost as important as the events themselves if we are to glean any meaningful understanding of what the ‘so whats’ from this event may mean for us. Bashar al-Assad has been in power in Syria since the turn of the Millennium, when he, unwillingly, assumed the mantle from his father, who, in turn, had ruled since 1971. More than 50 years of brutal dominance by one party, indeed, by one family, inevitably means that the structure of the country will have become entirely dependent upon loyalties to that regime/family. It’s removal, for good or ill, will equally inevitably produce a vacuum that
the surrounding elements will all rush to fill, colliding with each other as they do so. Thus, the newly-liberated Syria is far from cohesive, but is instead a patchwork of armed agents, all with very different agendas, all of whom have long investment in this armed struggle (and are therefore not likely to go quietly at the behest of a new regime, no matter what its origins or complexion). Most prominent, and leading the charge on Damascus, are the combined rebel forces, with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to the fore. Hayat Tahir al-Sham, a Jihadist organisation affiliated to Al Qaeda, but now claiming a degree of moderation, remains categorised as a ‘Terrorist Group’ in the UK, the US and much of the West, and is sanctioned accordingly (which suggests that those sanctioning governments will struggle to conduct meaningful business with the new power-holders). Regardless of what is going on in Damascus, however, huge swathes of the country, especially in its north-east quarter, are held, and have long been held, by Kurdish
forces (themselves not unified under a single command). Next (and decidedly anti-Kurdish), are the areas in the north of the country, along the border with Turkey, that are held by the so-called Syrian National Army, which is an organisation backed by Turkey. Inevitably there also remains a considerable swathe of the population (concentrated for now in the west of the country) who are either the tattered rump of the Syrian Government Forces who have still not laid down their arms, or are those so heavily
Picture: Kremlin.ru, CC BY 4.0
1 // SYRIA – SO WHAT? // CHACR
invested in loyalty to Assad (for either personal, Alawite or wider Shia reasons) that they are highly unlikely to accept (or be accepted by) any new, Sunni, regime without further turmoil and bloodshed. So, to be clear, this turn of events in Syria may well be the end of a long period of Alawite/Assad rule, but it is only the very beginning of the next phase of difficult, disruptive, violent and unpredictable Syrian