DAMASCUS – The demise of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s repressive regime in early December was achieved by a surprise push into the capital Damascus led by a group of Islamist rebels. The group, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, which grew out of the radical al-Qaeda organisation, has declared an interim government to administer areas under its control.
What comes next for Syria, after 13 years of civil conflict, will depend on how radically or moderately the victorious Islamists impose their will, especially on women and on minority groups that don’t share their Sunni Muslim religion; how Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham and other armed forces coalesce; and how foreign stakeholders exploit the power vacuum created.
For Syria’s people, the stakes are enormous. As many as 500,000 have died over the years of fighting, more than 14 million have fled their homes, tens of thousands remain missing, and the economy has been shredded.
What do we know about Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham?
Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant) is estimated to have about 15,000 fighters. It is the successor to the Nusra Front, which was an affiliate of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the Sept 11 attacks on the US.
Its leader is a Syrian named Ahmed Al-Sharaa. He joined al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 US invasion of that country and was jailed by the Americans there. The Nusra Front publicly split from al-Qaeda in 2016 and rebranded itself Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) the following year.
Still, the group is designated as a foreign terrorist organisation by the US among others, including the UK, Turkey and the United Nations. The US offers a US$10 million (S$13.6 million) reward for information on Mr Sharaa, alleging that under his leadership the Nusra Front carried out terror attacks in Syria that often targeted civilians.
Human Rights Watch implicated the Nusra Front and other extremist groups in an August 2013 rampage on villages inhabited by Alawites, the minority religious group to which Mr Assad’s family belongs. It led to the killing of almost 200 civilians and the abduction of more than 100 others.
According to the US, the group claimed responsibility for the massacre in June 2015 of 20 residents in a village populated by the minority Druze community, who are considered heretics by jihadists.
Recently, Mr Sharaa has sought to project a moderate image and, to a degree, disassociate himself from his past. “A person in their 20s will have a different personality than someone in their 30s and 40s,” he told CNN as HTS advanced on Damascus. He called the terrorist classifications “primarily political and at the same time wrong.”
In an effort to allay fears about how the organisation will handle minority groups, HTS commanders have reached out to religious and community leaders in captured areas. Apart from Damascus, those include the cities and provinces of Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Latakia and Tartus, the latter two of which are considered the traditional home of the Alawites.
“These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years and no one has the right to eliminate them,” Al-Sharaa told CNN. “There must be a legal framework that protects and ensures the rights of all.” HTS also issued a statement prohibiting its fighters from interfering in personal liberties, particularly those of women.
HTS tasked engineer Mohammed Al Bashir with forming the transitional government. Mr Bashir has served as the head of a quasi-government that HTS set up in 2017 in Idlib for the purpose of governing that north-western city and other territories controlled by the group. Mr Sharaa was instrumental in setting up that administration but opted not to head it.
Who are the other relevant local forces?
There are the forces that had fought for Mr Assad who – with the help of Russia, Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah – had managed in recent years to confine the territory held by non-regime groups to about a third of the country. HTS said on Telegram that it would give amnesty to all military personnel who’d been conscripted into the Syrian armed services.
The Syrian National Army, a Turkey-backed umbrella rebel group, worked with other rebels in the assault on the regime. It’s not a cohesive group but its constituents and another allied coalition known as the National Liberation Front appear to share a common goal of containing HTS.
Other armed anti-Assad groups to reckon with and who number in the thousands and don’t share HTS’s Islamist agenda include forces under the command of Ahmed Oudeh in southern Daraa province and the so-called Men of Dignity in south-western Suwayda province, where the population is predominantly Druze.
Another player is the People’s Protection Units, or YPG. It’s the armed wing of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party of Syria, which seeks autonomy for Syria’s Kurds and has shown a willingness to work with any power capable of advancing that goal. Syrian Kurds control a zone in the north-east of the country.
And then there is Islamic State, a different al-Qaeda spinoff that used the turmoil of the Syrian war to conquer territory in that country and in Iraq. The group was driven from its last stronghold in 2019, but remnants continue to operate in both countries.
What’s at stake for the foreign stakeholders in Syria?
Mr Assad’s overthrow is a setback for Russia, a Cold War-era ally of Syria. Russia, which granted the deposed president and his family asylum, has long maintained its only naval base outside the former Soviet Union at Syria’s Mediterranean port of Tartus and in 2017 made a deal preserving access to an air base near Latakia.
Russia had turned the war in the regime’s favor with a bombing campaign starting in September 2015, but its attention lately has been focused on its war in Ukraine. After Mr Assad’s fall, Russian officials were pursuing an agreement with HTS to enable them to keep the two bases in Syria.
The regime’s demise is also a blow for Iran. Under Mr Assad, Syria had been Iran’s main state ally in the Middle East. Accordingly, Iran had deployed its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria in an effort to ensure the regime’s survival.
The alliance gave Iran a land corridor stretching through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon through which it could more easily transport arms and equipment to Hezbollah, which is aligned with Iran and has been greatly weakened by more than a year of conflict with Israel. In the final days of Mr Assad’s rule, Iran began withdrawing both military and civilian personnel from Syria.
Portraits of deposed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad at a Syrian Air Force Intelligence office in Damascus.PHOTO: NYTIMES
Turkey has played a complex role in Syria. An ally of Mr Assad at the onset of the uprising in 2011 and then a supporter of the Syrian rebels, Turkey has been a part of the US-led coalition against Islamic State.
Turkish troops, however, have repeatedly attacked the bloc’s most effective ground force, the US-armed YPG. Turkey considers the YPG an enemy because it has roots in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has battled for an autonomous region inside Turkey on and off since 1984.
Turkey is pushing to play a major role in shaping Syria’s post-Assad future. It wants to dismantle the YPG and has an interest in forging a stable country next door, not least to facilitate the return of the roughly 3 million Syrian refugees it hosts.
The US for years provided covert support to Syrian rebels fighting the regime, but it pulled back on those efforts in mid-2017. The US played a major role fighting Islamic State with an air campaign against the group in 2014 and sent in ground troops the next year to assist the Kurdish forces fighting the jihadists.
After Islamic State lost the territory it had controlled in Syria, the US reduced its presence while still maintaining a small force there for the purpose of combating remnants of the radical group. After Mr Assad’s regime collapsed, US forces conducted scores of airstrikes against Islamic State targets in an effort to prevent a resurgence of the group. However, President-elect Donald Trump, who is scheduled to take office Jan 20, has said the US should “have nothing to do” with Syria.
Israel was no friend of Mr Assad ‘s regime or previous Syrian governments. The two countries have fought each other in three major wars, and Israel has occupied a chunk of Syrian territory in the rocky plateau known as the Golan Heights since the 1967 conflict.
Israeli authorities are at least as distrustful of the new Islamist rulers in Damascus. Taking advantage of the disorder in Syria, they mounted a massive air campaign to degrade the country’s military capabilities – targeting chemical-weapons stocks, missile-storage sites, airbases and ships – and capturing tanks and weapons during a land incursion.
What’s the state of Syria’s economy?
The war has taken a massive toll on Syria’s economy. A scarcity of reliable data makes it difficult to pin down the country’s exact output. However, the World Bank estimated that gross domestic product fell by almost 90 per cent in the decade after the war started to just US$9 billion. The country has been classified as a low-income nation since 2018 as a result.
According to data from the United Nations Development Program, employment was at roughly 50 per cent as at 2020, and Syria’s human development index had rolled back 35 years because of faltering education and health services.
Syria was a minnow oil producer even before the civil war broke out, hardly meeting its own domestic fuel needs. There was a niche export market in olive oil and pistachio nuts, but that’s largely gone as the war led to a collapse of Syria’s agricultural production. What the country has become known for is exponential growth in illegal trade in drugs, specifically the cheap amphetamine-like Captagon pills.
How did Syria become a trouble spot?
Once a French-run mandate, Syria became independent after World War II. In 1966, a splinter group from the Baath Party led by military officers belonging to the Alawite minority took power. That assured the domination of the group, whose faith is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, in a country where about 74 per cent of the people are Sunni Muslim. In addition to Druze and Kurdish communities, Syria’s population includes a sizable number of Christians.
Hafez al-Assad, one of the figures of the 1966 coup, carried out a counter coup in November 1970 against his army comrades and built a regime underpinned by absolute power, a cult of personality and brutality against his opponents. After his eldest son Bassel died in a car crash in 1994, Hafez groomed his second son Bashar to succeed him. Hafez died in 2000 and his son was initially embraced by Syrians and Western powers as a reformer.
As part of the wave of pro-democracy unrest known as the Arab Spring, protests erupted in Syria in March 2011. Using his father’s playbook, Mr Assad used any means necessary – including chemical weapons – to crush dissent. The conflict broke largely along sectarian lines, with Syria’s Alawites supporting Mr Assad and Sunnis backing the opposition. BLOOMBERG
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