Fort Down In A Fortnight: Syrian Insurgents Oust Assad Regime

A half-century of Syrian rule by the Assad family came to a sudden end this month with the stunning advance of insurgents who forced out Bashar al-Assad from power. It was a stunning denouement to an exceptionally bloody war, featuring no less than four foreign armies – Iran, the United States, Russia, and Türkiye – and numerous armed factions; many of whom united to expel a notoriously tyrannical government and send much of the country into widespread rapture.

The facts are these: at the end of the autumn last month, a coalition of insurgents bottled since 2018 in the northwest region of Syria burst out with unprecedented coordination to seize the major northern city Aleppo. They then cut south in a pincer movement to take the long-embattled city of Hama. As they swept into central Syria, from the south another set of militants – many of whom had surrendered and been recruited as militias by Russia in 2018 – defected and captured the Daraa and Qunaitra provinces. The capital, Damascus, fell with stunning speed and Assad’s regime collapsed even as he fled abroad, apparently via mediation by the United Arab Emirates, to Russia. A long-expected standoff at the central city Homs largely failed to materialize; instead, the insurgents proceeded to Damascus amid massive celebrations as long-filled dungeons around the country were emptied. Prime minister Ghazi Jalali, a technocrat only recently promoted by Assad, was kept in place, but there was no doubt that the insurgents were running the show. And as thousands of Syrians streamed back into the country after years of exile – the war had displaced some half of its population – there was no doubting the optimism in the air.

To see how the regime fell with such stunning speed and who these insurgents are, we must look briefly at the history of the regime and the war.

Background 

Assad had inherited power from his ruthless and cunning father Hafiz (1971-2000), whose reign had been marked by nimble flexibility abroad and iron-fisted suppression at home. These traits were in evidence when in 1976 he maneuvered Syria into a thirty-year occupation of Lebanon, directed initially and principally at the major Palestinian groups in that war, and in 1982 crushed a largely Islamist Sunni revolt that resulted in northern Syria with pointed brutality. But they were also evident in Hafiz’s cynical balance between his principal foreign backers in Moscow and the United States, as well as regional states such as Iran, Iraq, Türkiye, and Saudi Arabia.

Hafiz had come to power amid an intense power struggle within the then-powerful Baath party in the 1960s; he led a secretive military committee that expelled the original Baathists into Iraq and seized power. Throughout his rule, his major rival was the neighboring Baath regime in Iraq, mutual hostility to which united his own secularist regime with the supposedly “Islamic revolutionary” government of Iran and even led to occasional collaboration with Israel. Though Hafiz and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had briefly fought Israel in 1973, this served mainly to bolster their own standing: Sadat thrust himself energetically into the American camp while a more distant Hafiz nonetheless primarily directed his gunsights at the Palestinians, then led by Yasser Arafat, in Lebanon. This coupled with the fact that he did not challenge Israel’s occupation of the Golan heights meant that Washington was prepared to overlook his Soviet inclinations during the Cold War. In the aftermath, Hafiz played an important symbolic role by joining the American-led war against Saddam Hussein, and was assiduously courted by Washington through the 1990s. His regime’s model of survival, however, was to balance off competing powers: in Lebanon, for instance, both Saudi Arabia and Iran saw him as a useful buffer against their rivals.

Bashar inherited this balancing act but played it to far less effect: he managed to stave off initial American threats with close intelligence cooperation – Syria’s notoriously brutal dungeons played an important intelligence role for the Americans – as well as a withdrawal from Lebanon under American pressure. With the American occupation of Iraq, the Syrian regime tried to corral public outrage by keeping an open border – which permitted fighters to enter and refugees to leave – but also frequently imprisoning prisoners who were used as a form of leverage. Mounting American hostility to Iran also enabled Assad to posit himself as an intermediary, which did not go unappreciated. Though Damascus refrained from the sort of open collaboration that was emblematic of Amman and Cairo, its services were valued enough by enough competing foreign parties that when the Arab revolts broke out in early 2011, Assad’s wife Asma Akhras was being serenaded in foreign media, Hillary Clinton was hailing him as a “reformer”, and he confidently predicted that the revolt would pass Syria by. Instead it would be the site of the bloodiest war of the 2010s.

Repression and Revolt

Putin with Bashar al-Assad in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, on November 20, 2017. (Reuters)

When the protests did arrive in Syria, Bashar resisted conciliatory advice – including from Türkiye’s Tayyip Erdogan, Hamas’ Khaled Mashaal, and even Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and instead resorted to his regime’s tried method of brutal suppression, with thousands killed over 2011 and several cities besieged before a revolt broke out, principally armed by mass defections by soldiers of the mostly Sunni majority and by Türkiye in particular. Other states, such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, sent weapons to the insurgents. France, Britain, and the United States – fresh off backing an insurgency in Libya – diplomatically flirted with the Syrian insurgency but ultimately abandoned it, largely because a large proportion of the insurgents were considered Islamists and because it was seen as too much of a risk to Israel. Iran heavily sided with the regime, decisively bringing in its Lebanese “Hezbollah” militia and breaking with Hamas, who had backed the revolt instead.

Although a major target of both regime and foreign ire it was a certain “Abu Muhammad Jawlani” – Ahmad Sharaa, then the Qaida commander sent to Syria, who organized an efficient and fierce insurgent group called Nusra Front. In actual fact the Syrian revolt was too much of a mass uprising to be corralled by any one faction. An exile “government” founded in France and based largely in Türkiye had minimal influence on the ground, and was soon discarded as it broke up by 2014. What was clear, and alarmed the United States, Russia, and Iran, was the major role played by largely Islamist insurgents of varying types. They included long-imprisoned militants Hassan Abboud (Abu Abdullah), Zahran Alloush, Ahmad Issa (Abu Issa), and Hasan Soufan (Abul-Baraa), as well as Iraq insurgency veterans such as Hashim Shaikh (Abu Jabir) and Nusra’s founders Sharaa, Maysara Musa (Abu Maria), and Iyad Nazmi (Abu Julaibib). The largest, best-organized groups were the tightly controlled Nusra and the more confederal Ahrarul-Sham founded by Abboud and Shaikh. In the mid-2010s, their joint collaboration yielded the capture of several key cities including Raqqa and Idlib: other cities such as Aleppo and Homs, the sites of massive battles, were eventually lost.

Conflagration

In the mid-2010s the conflict rapidly spilled across borders, fueled by fighters on different sides from around the world. The Syrian war affected events in Lebanon, and was in turn affected by events in Iraq. This coupled with Sharaa’s fallout with Qaida’s autonomous wing in Iraq – soon to be renamed Daesh – which broke away from the parent organization and announced a self-styled “caliphate” that sprawled across both sides of the border by summer 2014. Iran, along with a large number of mostly Shia militias, invaded as early as 2013 to fight the insurgency.

The United States entered in 2014: they targeted Nusra, which was their first target and several of whose commanders they killed in the battlefield, and then Daesh. In the process they exacerbated frictions between the Syrian insurgents who had already been fighting against Daesh, with Nusra generally. They also supported militias, largely through Jordan and under the misleading name of “moderate rebels”, who formed a buffer zone in the south and failed to cooperate with other rebels: this was an American attempt to redirect the revolt away from Assad and against either Daesh or other American targets. The main American vassal, however, was the so-called “Democratic Forces” or Qasd led by Mazloum Abdi, a leftist militia linked to Türkiye’s Kurdish insurgency and wanted their own region called Rojava. Having evicted Daesh from the Syrian east, the American military occupied this strategic region in league with Qasd. This also prompted conflict between the American-backed Qasd and the Turkish-backed Syrian insurgents. Indeed, the Americans soon began to bar weapons that might reach rebels, conditioning their support on fighting only against “terrorists”.

American intervention influenced escalation by other foreign powers. In 2015 Russia mounted a full-scale invasion to support the regime, killing Alloush in the process. In 2016, Türkiye, whose leader Erdogan had just arrived a coup strongly linked to the Americans, entered the Syrian northeast to head off Qasd. Turkish failure to help the Syrian insurgents against the Russian-Iranian capture of Aleppo from the insurgents prompted Sharaa, who had criticized reliance on Türkiye, to strike against his former allies in the Turkish-backed Ahrarul-Sham, whose leader Shaikh defected to join him. They set up an autonomous emirate in Idlib, both cooperating and competing with groups under the Turkish umbrella. Sharaa renamed his faction Tahrirul-Sham and formally cut off its links with Qaida, whose loyalists such as Iyad broke away: many of them were subsequently killed off by the Americans. In the south, American-backed militias on the Jordanian border caved with little resistance against Russia, many of them switching sides and serving as regime militia.

Breathing Space

With a shared mistrust of Washington, Erdogan and Vladimir Putin set up a back-channel during the late 2010s. This enabled Erdogan to negotiate the excavation of insurgents defeated by Russia into the northwest, where Türkiye promised to restrain Tahrirul-Sham. In fact, this enabled the rebels to rebuild and refashion their cooperation: for example, Ahrarul-Sham leaders Soufan, Abu-Ubaidah Shaikh, Ahmad Dalati, and Inad Darwaish (Abul-Mundhir) wanted  closer links with Tahrirul-Sham. By now the Idlib emirate led by Sharaa, Hashim Shaikh, Maysara, and Murhaf Abu-Qasra (Abu Hasan) had proven a stable if severe rule, and was already tacitly reconciling with a Turkiye who had meanwhile evicted Qasd from the north and repulsed a regime assault.

The arrival of first American-Jordanian-backed militia and then Russia in the Syrian south had cut off Hamas from the rebels, forcing them to reconcile with Iran, agreeing to disagree on the Syrian regime. Iran’s presentation of the Syrian regime as a cog in its “axis of resistance” was disingenuous not only given Assad’s disinterest in the fight against Israel – who constantly bombed Syria without response – but also because protection of Assad diverted Iran-backed militia such as Hezbollah from the fight against Israel. When in 2023 Hamas launched an attack on Israel – which responded with a brutal genocide at Palestine – the escalation caught Iran entirely by surprise.

Assad ousted and a new era begins [PC: Al Majalla]

Though Hezbollah in Lebanon and the pro-Iran Houthi government in Yemen fought fiercely against Israel, Iran was loath to get drawn in and made the most muted response to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Assad’s total non-response did not go unnoticed in pro-Israel Arab capitals such as the United Arab Emirates. Revealingly, Abu Dhabi had taken the lead in Arab normalization with Israel but also maintained links with Assad, whose family largely resided there. The Emirati regime wanted to rehabilitate and support Assad in return for his discarding Iran. But much as the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel had preempted a Saudi-Israeli rapprochement, so the Syrian rebel assault of 2024 rendered this Emirati initiative useless. Assad was abroad when the Syrian insurgents swooped.

Thunderbolt and Threat

The first target was Aleppo, where Dalati and Issa surprised and quickly forced out regime commander Salman Safalti. A pincer attack by Abu-Qasra and Darwaish then seized their hometown Hama, site of the regime’s most infamous massacre, from the veteran regime commander Saleh Abdullah. In the south, meanwhile, militias suddenly defected and forced out Luai Ali, the regime spymaster who had bought them off. Even as the insurgents in the north thundered toward Homs, Damascus fell:  the notorious brother of Assad and enforcer, Mahir, fled along with most of the regime. Sharaa, who had embarked on a diplomatic offensive to match the military assault in the north, arrived in Damascus, where regime dungeons were opened and thousands were released to mass celebration.

This mood was darkened by attacks from Israel. Immediately after Assad’s ouster, Israel attacked militants in southern Syria and began bombarding the military and intelligence sites of the new Syrian rulers, unwilling to let them have the resources available to their much more predictable predecessor. The genocide cabinet of Benjamin Netanyahu-Mileikowski has meanwhile announced its intention to make Syria its newest military front. The Syrian “revolutionary government” thus has little scope to celebrate.

by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

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