Anxious and Uncertain: Syria in a Flux

There is uncertainty all around, despite relief at the end of a cruel one-family dictatorship. The coming days will tell if Syria — and the Middle East — will see peace and justice, unlike what is happening in a brutalised Gaza 

By Amit Sengupta

Barring his American and Western allies, an internationally isolated and discredited Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have entered yet another cathartic ‘war zone’, despite the insatiable blood lust displayed in Gaza and Lebanon, where mostly women and children have been massacred. Now he seems to be eyeing territory in an unstable Syria much beyond the Golan Heights, a large chunk of which it had illegally captured in the six-day war in 1967, refusing to leave it despite an international consensus, once again with America the sole dissenter in support of Israel.

Now Israel has created a so-called ‘buffer zone’ beyond Golan Heights inside Syrian territory, and has reportedly moved into many other areas, which amounts to nothing else but a ‘military invasion’, reflecting yet again its thirst to expand its mythical ‘Holy Land’. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have criticised this move by Israel.

Damascus is not far from the Golan Heights, and from its high areas one can see the populated villages of Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. The population in Golan Heights has been reduced to just one-third, now, though it had reportedly more than 150,000 Syrians living there before Israel captured it. Most Syrians have fled to their homeland.

Meanwhile, while Americans have allegedly bombed areas still controlled by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL), Israel has confirmed that it has militarily targeted a Syrian naval feet, has troops on the ground, and bombed several strategic military installations inside the country. Indeed, is Israel now greedily eyeing large parts of Syrian territory, after having brutally taken over West Bank and Gaza, rendering more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza into refugees, in a totally ravaged and destroyed landscape?

Syria is currently at a “seismic turning point,” according to the international editor of BBC, Jeremy Bowen. The fact is that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, is not in complete control of the entire country. There are several rebel groups, including armed Kurds, Turkish and Islamist forces which are controlling miscellaneous, remote areas in the country. 

Julani himself was once a part of Al Qaeda and linked to the underground jehadi organisation led by the late Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the first ‘caliph’ of the Islamic State. He was arrested in Iraq and then mysteriously released. Political observes believe that there was the ubiquitous American hand behind his release from prison. That  is the time when he seemed to be turning into a new leaf ‘moderate’, following the bogus American theory of ‘good Taliban and bad Taliban’. 

So who are the main actors in the overnight tectonic shift in Syria?

Clearly, Turkey, a key member of the Western alliance of NATO led by the US, is directly involved, in this complex kaleidoscope. Then there is, of course, Israel and America, who have used the recent ceasefire deal between Lebanon (with Hezbollah firmly entrenched inside with its huge, armed and underground and overground fighters), to enter this new war game. Without their backing it was well-nigh impossible for HTS to so quickly capture town after town, and then, quickly, Damascus, the capital of Syria. 

Clearly, in the current scenario, it’s Advantage Israel, the main player propped up and sponsored by the US in the Middle East. 

The other players are Russia and Iran — which directly funds and arms the Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Yemen, led by the Houthis, is the other nation in this Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’.

Iran, run by a fundamentalist regime with a newly-elected moderate president, is currently economically weakened due to US sanctions, in an off-on war with Israel, politically and socially discredited among large sections of  its own population, especially women, who led a massive movement for months against the ‘repressive and brutal moral police’ and the compulsory wearing of Hijab. The movement picked up and spread across the country after the murder of a Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amin, by the moral police in Tehran, and thousands of women and school girls joined it. It was crushed and many protesters were sent to jail, including the 2023 Nobel prize winner, Narges Mohamedi, a woman activist. She has been temporarily released in early December this year.

Indeed, Iran desperately wants the sanctions to be lifted, which was yet again imposed by Donald Trump in his first term, and which was earlier lifted by Barack Obama when he was president. Besides, while it might be buying arms from a tactically silent China, its main ally, Russia, has also been terribly weakened since its invasion in Ukraine, in a war which has killed thousands of Russians and Ukrainians across the border, mostly the young. 

Many of the dead had lost their family and friends of earlier generations who fought and sacrificed their lives against the invasion of the Nazis in the then Soviet Russia. More than 20 million people died defending their motherland against the fascist forces led by Adolf Hitler. Russia invaded Ukraine claiming that NATO is trying to rope it in and that means the Western military alliance will be breathing down its neck.

Russia provided air power and thousands of its troops were stationed on the ground in Syria earlier. They had to be brought back to Russia to fight in Ukraine, with Russia using prisoners and mercenaries to bolster its depleted army. 

Meanwhile, the Hezbollah, Hamas, Russia and Iran, simply did not have the military power to help Bashar-al Assad, the dictator of Syria, who has now been given asylum in Russia. Assad fought a 13-year long war against the ISIL and other armed groups with the help of Russia; Iran and Hezbollah had their forces and commanders on the ground.  So much so, the Syrian army and its Sunni generals resented the power and control of the commanders from Iran, who were mostly Shia. Besides, Iran is not Arab, it is Persian.

Assad belonged to the Alawite sect, part of the Shia community, in a nation populated by the Sunnis. With the influence of Iran becoming overwhelming in all spheres of Syrian life, there was intense simmering anger against this kind of fundamentalism, in what was largely a modern and secular society, especially in a ‘great’ city like Damascus, with its legendary glory and fame of the past. 

Assad was also apparently secular — and that is why the people seemed to tolerate him — despite his legacy of mass executions, torture chambers and prisons where thousands of dissenters and others have been rotting. A Western-educated ophthalmologist, with earlier signs of modernity and democracy in his regime, he brutally crushed the 2011 uprising in Syria seeking democracy and freedom — an integral part of the larger ‘Arab Spring’ which rocked the Arab world. 

The fortified and notorious Saydnaya prison, not far from Damascus, was known for its invisible executions and torture chambers, with thousands languishing inside it for years. Many went inside and never came back. Not even their dead bodies were found.

Now, the prisoners have been released by HTS, including women. Desperate families are therefore searching for those who are dead, hoping against hope that they are still alive.  

According to a BBC report: “The family of a Syrian dentist who was arrested along with her six children has told the BBC they are still hoping to find them — as is the sister of a single mother who disappeared mysteriously. Meanwhile, the daughter of a US-based psychotherapist, who was snatched in 2017, and is thought to be dead, says she has been buoyed by videos of people who were declared dead being found alive.”

Among the many rebel groups, the People’s Defense Group (YPG), led by the Kurdish armed forces, many of them women, control liberated zones inside north-east Syria. They are also aligned to the overground and underground Kurdish forces fighting for their own homeland in the border of Turkey. It is a trained armed organisation led by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDS), which, ironically, is backed by America. They played a crucial role in the defeat of ISIL in Syria and in the neighbourhood. The SDS reportedly did not attack the Syrian army. 

The dictatorial Turkish regime led by Recep Erdogan is in a running battle with the YPG and SDS in the northern border of Syria. Turkish fighters too are on the ground in Syria led by the Syrian National Army. 

The US has earlier backed some Islamist forces dubbing them as ‘moderate’. Barack Obama backed the pro-democracy movement and waged a war in Syria with Hillary Clinton as secretary of defense. President-elect Donald Trump has said that Syria is in a “mess”. He has also reportedly said that the US should not go to war in Syria. This has been a consistent  position of Trump, who refused to go to war in other countries during his first term in the White House. As president earlier, he withdrew US troops from Syria. Only about 1000 soldiers are stationed there right now, according to reports.

Meanwhile, Ali Khameni, supreme leader of Iran, has said: “What happened in Syria was mainly planned in the command rooms of America and Israel. We have evidence of this. A neighbouring government of Syria was also involved,”. The neighbouring government he is referring to is obviously Turkey. 

Khamenei said that the Iran-led ‘Axis of Resistance’ will not lose its power despite the absence of Syria now. “The more pressure you exert, the stronger the resistance becomes. The more crimes you commit, the more determined it becomes. The more you fight against it, the more it expands…Iran is strong and powerful—and will become even stronger,” he said.

Indeed,  in this complex and fast-moving scenario, the current situation in Syria is in a flux. A prime minister has been appointed by the HTS. Electricity, water, traffic is being regulated. Ordinary citizens have not been targeted. Minority groups such as Christians, Alawites, Kurds and others are not being hounded. 

However, it is still not clear if the HTS will start operating like the Taliban, and impose orthodox and oppressive laws on women, banning them from all forms of primary and higher education, restricting their movements from public space, stoning them publicly on fake or real charges of adultery, and pushing them into the four walls of the house, while relegating them into second class citizens in a totally male dominated and dogmatic society.

Surely, there is uncertainty all around, despite relief at the end of a cruel one-family dictatorship. The coming days will tell if Syria — and the Middle East — will see peace and justice, unlike what is happening in a brutalised Gaza.