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Recalling the past week, two famous quotes spring to mind. Lenin is often credited with saying: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” (although whether the Russian revolutionary leader actually uttered these words is a matter of fierce debate). Less ambiguous is Ernest Hemingway’s line in The Sun Also Rises, where one of his characters is asked how he had gone bankrupt: “Gradually. And then suddenly,” came the reply.
And so to Syria. This time last week, rebel forces had taken the country’s second city of Aleppo, the strategically important city of Hama and were poised to sweep down on Homs. As regular contributor Scott Lucas, of University College Dublin, rather perspicaciously observed at that stage: “The Russia-Iran-Assad ‘axis of the vulnerable’ is cracking in Syria”.
That was Thursday. By Saturday December 8 reports emerged that Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, had fallen – cutting government forces off from the Assad Alawite stronghold along the coast and opening up the road to Damascus. There were also reports that the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad had fled with his family to Russia where they were granted asylum. The following day it was confirmed that rebel forces, spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) under the leadership of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, had entered the Syrian capital of Damascus. In 11 days, more than five decades of oppression under the Assad dynasty had been brought to an end.
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There is, understandably, a degree of apprehension about who will run the new Syria. HTS was formed in 2017 as a union between a number of Islamist armed groups in northwestern Syria, including the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda, known as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham or the Al-Nusra Front. As a result, some observers wondered whether the cure would be worse than the affliction if the result was another militant Islamist group with more experience in insurgency than government.
William Plowright, an expert in international security at Durham University, interviewed some of the people who would go on to be involved in HTS while researching a book on why some armed groups follow the rules of international humanitarian law and others do not.
He believes that HTS has moved away from its radical origins and is keen to engage with the outside world. A lot will depend on how the outside world chooses to engage: “As I learned by speaking with them, armed groups such as HTS tend to listen when the international community tries to engage with them … Key to determining the future of Syria will be the actions of other countries who seek to engage HTS and its affiliates.”
So, what sort of leader is al-Jolani (or, as he is also referred to by some, al-Golani, such are the vagaries of transliteration)? Sara Harmouch of American University in Washington DC has worked with Nato on religious militant groups in the Middle East. She has traced the metamorphosis of HTS and al-Jolani from its militant beginnings to a more pragmatic style of leadership encompassing the notion of public service as well as his obvious military prowess.
Under his leadership HTS has focused its message increasingly on protecting the people from the cruelty of the Assad regime. He has also consolidated many of the other armed groups in northern Syria under the HTS umbrella. Harmouch notes that the US and UK, at least, appear to be giving him the benefit of the doubt. She reports that Washington is considering removing the US$10 million bounty on his head, while the UK government is talking about removing HTS from its list of proscribed terror organisations.
It’ll now be interesting to see how Mohammed al-Bashir, the electrical engineer who has been tasked with heading Syria’s interim government, sets about laying the ground rules for a democratic transition. We will have more on him once the dust begins to settle.
A region holding its breath
Much attention is now being focused on how this may affect power dynamics in the Middle East. It’s something of a cliche to describe Syria as a fault-line – there are, after all, so many of these in the region right now – but it’s no less accurate for that.
A lot will depend on Turkey, writes Natasha Lindstaedt, an international affairs expert at Essex University. Turkey gave HTS the go-ahead to proceed with its offensive after Ankara’s attempts to normalise relations with Damascus fell on deaf ears. Assad offered little or no help to Turkey in its strategy of trying to contain Kurdish national aspirations. To the contrary, Damascus’s directive to Ankara that all Turkish troops must leave Syria would probably have resulted in even more Syrian refugees heading north as well (Turkey already hosts the most refugees from Syria).
Ankara will want a say in how Syria deals with the 2.5 million Kurds estimated to be living in the north of the country. At present Washington funds the Kurdish-led Syrian Defence Forces which holds sway in the north-east. Turkey’s proxy force, the Syrian National Army controls much of the north-west. The future stability of a new-look Syria will depend, in large part, on how it – and its neighbours and backers – deal with the warring factions.
Read more: What Syria’s rebel takeover means for the region’s major players: Turkey, Iran and Russia
The rapid fall of the house of Assad has exposed two of the other powers in the region with the most invested in Syria: Iran and Russia. Iran and Syria have enjoyed close relations since the Assad dynasty took power in the 1970s. When the ousted dictator’s father, Hafeez al-Assad, seized control of the Ba’athist party in 1970 there were questions about where his Alawite sect sat as a branch of Islam. Iranian clerics ruled that the Alawites are a branch of Shia Islam. This ensured that, when the ayatollahs took power in 1979, Tehran looked to Syria and the Assads as natural allies.
When the Arab Spring threw Syria into chaos in 2011, Iran offered military and logistical support to Damascus and, as Ali Bilgic observes, took the opportunity to weld Syria into its “Shia crescent” which stretched from Iran-backed militias in Iraq to Hezbollah in Lebanon. This is now in disarray, particularly after Israel’s recent war against Hezbollah.
Bilgic, a Middle East expert at the University of Loughborough, believes that Iran has a range of options to consider and its focus will be sharpened (something you have read here a lot recently) by the propect of an imminent Trump presidency. It could opt to divert the considerable funds it has been spending in Syria to hasten its programme of uranium enrichment. If the new regime in Damascus is not as happy to host its Quds force fighters, Tehran could opt to try to destabilise the new regime. Both of these options, writes Bilgic, “could escalate regional uncertainty beyond the impacts of the past 13 years”. This would likely be as bad as it sounds, given how conflict-ridden the region already is.
Or it could try to resurrect the programme of normalisation between itself and Saudi Arabia, which was brokered by China in the spring of 2023 and had led to the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries. This would represent a major foreign policy shift for Tehran, but could considerably ease tensions in the Middle East, an outcome greatly to be desired.
The view from Moscow
Russia, meanwhile, has also caught short by the rapid turn of events that toppled Assad. Since 2015, Russia has been one of Assad’s most important guarantors, flexing its considerable military muscles to crush resistance in much of the country.
Moscow has considerable interests in Syria, including two enormously important bases: its warm-water ports on the Mediterranean coast at Tartus and, further north, the airbase at Khmeimim, which it was handed in 2015. The future of both of these bases is now in doubt.
But perhaps more of a blow to Vladimir Putin, writes Stefan Wolff, is that Russia was unable to do anything to save Assad: “The fact that Moscow was unable to save an important ally like Assad exposes critical weaknesses in Russia’s ability to act, rather than just talk, like a great power.”
Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham, believes that Russia’s position in the Middle East is in “peril”. Iran and Hezbollah are greatly weakened, Syria looks to be gone and its regional rivals, Israel and Turkey now find their hands considerably strengthened.
Read more: What the fall of Assad says about Putin’s ambitions for Russia’s great-power status
It’s hugely embarassing for Russia, writes maritime security expert Basil Germond of the University of Lancaster, and is compounded by the fact that if it loses Tartus, its naval assets in the Mediterranean would be “forced to either start a long – and frankly humiliating – journey back to Russian bases, or find another temporary base in the region”.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Turkey exercised its right under the Montreaux convention to close off access to the Turkish Straits to Russian warships. This has closed off access to Russia’s bases at Sevastopol and Novorossiysk in the Black Sea.
But like Wolff, Germond also sees the fall of Assad and the possible loss of its bases as a blow to Russia’s credibility as a world power. It remains to be seen what the incoming US president, Donald Trump, wants to make of that. At the time of writing, Russian sources were reporting that Moscow was close to doing a deal with Damascus over the future of its bases. This will be well worth keeping an eye on as it could have consequences beyond the Middle East.
Read more: How the loss of its Mediterranean naval base in Syria would weaken Russia as a global power
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