Syria

After Assad, much promise — and risk and uncertainty

Author: Editors Desk Source: The Washington Post

December 9, 2024 at 02:22

Rebels celebrate the takeover of Damascus, in Homs, Syria, on Sunday. (Bilal Al Hammoud/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Putting Syria back together will be a daunting task after more than a decade of bloody conflict.

With the sudden collapse of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s proxy empire in the Middle East has been devastated — in Gaza, Lebanon and now Syria. But filling the resulting power vacuum across the Middle East with stable governance will be an urgent and complex challenge.

The worm turns: Just 14 months ago, Israel was terrorized and reeling after Hamas fighters surged across the Gaza fence. Now, Israel’s enemies across the region are dead or in flight. It has been a convulsive process, rich with promise but perhaps carrying a toxin of regional instability and turmoil.

Assad fled Damascus for Moscow on Sunday, leaving his capital to the control of a Turkish-backed jihadist insurgency called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS. Arab sources told me Sunday that HTS was securing Syria’s intelligence headquarters in Damascus and trying to contain violence in the capital. But with thousands of Syrians suddenly freed from years in Assad’s torture prisons, there will be a yearning for revenge.

Arab regional powers are attempting to steady the transition. Led by the United Arab Emirates, they had been trying to persuade Assad for months to break from Iran and rejoin the Arab fold. Assad hesitated too long and was ultimately abandoned by his erstwhile allies. “In the end, the Syrian military didn’t fight, and Iran and Russia didn’t show up,” noted a former CIA officer with extensive experience in the region.

“At long last, the Assad regime has fallen,” President Joe Biden said Sunday. For the United States, the ouster of a despot backed by Moscow and Tehran is “a huge strategic move of the needle in the right direction,” as one administration official put it. The United States has been seeking Assad’s replacement, through overt and covert means, since 2011. Still, as Biden rightly cautioned, it brings “a moment of risk and uncertainty” for the region.The chaos in Damascus on Sunday was eased by HTS’s decision to allow the current Syrian prime minister to operate an interim government, with HTS protection, a senior Biden administration official told me. The group has said it intends to maintain current government administrative institutions, including the army. That would certainly ease the transition.

Qatar, which has long been a covert backer of HTS, appeared to be leading the Arab effort to create a transitional government under United Nations sponsorship. A Qatari statement Sunday underscored “the necessity of preserving national institutions and the unity of the state to prevent it from descending into chaos.”

The Qataris urged implementation of years-old U.N. Security Council resolutions calling for a new Syrian government that would include members of the regime and the opposition. But for the moment, Syria is a violent mosaic, with Turkish-backed groups controlling western Syria all the way to Damascus, a U.S.-backed Kurdish militia controlling the northeast and Jordanian-supported militias dominant in the south.

The United States and Russia will doubtless play a diplomatic role in shaping a future Syria, but it’s the regional players that will be decisive. “There was a time when great powers would sort out what happens next. No more. For better or worse, this is now up to Israel, Turkey, the Saudis, the UAE and Jordan,” noted the former CIA official.

President-elect Donald Trump underlined his lack of interest in an American role in Syria in a social media post Saturday, which stressed: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. … DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” In a post Sunday, Trump suggested that after abandoning Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin should negotiate an end to the carnage in Ukraine. Trump wrote: “I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!”

The 10-day transformation in Syria has echoes of three other events, each carrying its own lesson. First, the speed of Assad’s demise recalls the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan. The fall of Kabul happened just nine days after the loss of the first provincial capital to the Taliban. When an army feels abandoned and demoralized — by the United States in Afghanistan and Russia and Iran in Syria — it slides into a free fall.

A second analogy is to Hamas’s rapid thrust across the Gaza fence and its success storming nearby Israeli kibbutzim and military bases on Oct. 7, 2023. Like Hamas, HTS was well-trained and well-equipped, with rapid-assault capabilities that defenders never imagined. Turkey obviously played a big role in Syria, as did Qatar with its long-standing ties to HTS leadership.

A third parallel is Iraq, which shows the chaos that can follow regime change. When the United States toppled Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003, it set off rumbles of ethnic and regional conflict that continue to this day. Similarly, Israel has crushed the military power of Hamas in Gaza. But that enclave is now a lawless region of bandits and gangs, without a hint of stable governance.

One ominous fact is that since the Syrian uprising began in 2011, jihadist groups have been the strongest military faction. I learned their power in the opposition firsthand in October 2012, when I smuggled myself into Syria to report on the early days of the uprising that finally triumphed Sunday.

A nominally pro-Western opposition militia was battling Assad’s army the day I reached Aleppo. With shells raining down a few hundreds yards away, I asked one of the secular leaders whether the potent al-Qaeda offshoot known as the al-Nusra Front was fighting alongside his forces. Of course, he said, pointing to their headquarters a block away. “They’re the best fighters.”

HTS, leading the battle that just toppled Assad, is a descendant of the group I glimpsed 12 years ago. As a senior administration official told me Sunday, along with the White House’s exhilaration over Assad’s demise, there’s a recognition that “we have a counterterrorism problem.”

In the Middle East, there is no silver lining that does not have a cloud.

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