The likely fall of Assad – and what happens next

NEWSLETTER (GBP) The political and sectarian landscape of Syria and the Middle East will be transformed Syrian rebels are attacking towards the city of Homs in central Syria, the fall of which will open the road to Damascus and the overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad and his government after a 13-year civil war. The fall of the Assad regime, in power for half a century, would transform radically the political and sectarian landscape of Syria and the Middle East.

Regionally, it would be a success for the US, Israel and Turkey and a defeat for Russia, Iran and the Palestinians. Within Syria, the end of the regime will be a victory for the Sunni Arab majority over the Muslim and non-Muslim minorities and, more specifically, of the Sunni over Shia Muslims. A rebel victory, after an assault almost certainly approved by Turkey,[1] will be bad news for the Kurds, Syria's largest ethnic minority, who fear destruction of their giant enclave in the northeast of the country and the expulsion of the Kurdish population.

A military debacle

The fall of the regime would be a milestone in the history of the Middle East and has yet to occur, but is looking increasingly likely unless Assad and his foreign allies can reverse what has so far been, for them, a military debacle.

The spectacular advances of the rebel offensive led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), combined with the failure of the Syrian army backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to resist effectively, is astonishing and will change the political balance of power in the Middle East[2]. What at first appeared to be a well-organised raid by some 30,000 rebel fighters starting on 27 November has now captured Aleppo and Hama in a few days and is poised to take Homs, a crucial communications hub, the loss of which might well prove to be the death knell of the regime. An alternative scenario might be that Assad and his allies will succeed in stabilising the front north of Homs, dividing Syria in two while the civil war continues.

Russian bombing overnight destroyed a bridge in Rastan on the M5 motorway between Hama and Homs, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

Ramshackle and corrupt

Elite Hezbollah units have crossed the border from Lebanon and taken up positions in Homs. "Tehran will need to send military equipment, missiles and drones [and] increase the number of its military advisers in Syria and deploy forces," said an Iranian official. The swift and unexpected collapse of Assad's forces resembles that of the Afghan government during the Taliban's victorious offensive in 2021 and is explained by a combination of adverse factors. The Syrian army and pro-Assad militias have always been ramshackle and corrupt, their numerous checkpoints on the roads each operating their own money-making protection rackets.

They were over-confident that HTS, penned into Idlib province on the Turkish border, did not possess the military strength to launch a major onslaught.

A separate war

Despite denials by Ankara that it helped organise, or even greenlighted, the attack, this is unlikely since the Idlib enclave, with an impoverished population of some four million, has been sustained by Turkey. It may be, however, that Turkey was taken unawares by the sheer speed of the meltdown of Syrian government forces. International attention is focused largely on the HTS-led offensive down the north-south M5 motorway linking Syria's main cities.

But a separate war is being waged simultaneously by the Syrian National Army, a paramilitary grouping under Turkish control, directed against the Kurds living east and north of Aleppo. The Kurdish media report that hundreds of thousands of Kurds are being displaced, many of them refugees for the second time, after being ethnically cleansed by Turkish-backed Syrian Islamist militiamen from the formerly Kurdish province of Afrin in 2018. The loss of Homs, 30 miles to the south of Hama, would cut the government off from Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean coast.

These cities and the mountains behind them are inhabited by large numbers of Alawites, the Shia sect from which the Assad family and much of the Syrian political and military elite, is drawn.

A perplexed outside world

Areas now being taken over by the opposition around Hama and Homs contain Christians, Ismailis, Druze, Kurds and other minorities that traditionally support the Assad government. Roads going south and west from Homs are reported to be choked as these people try to flee the rebel advance. A complex mosaic of religious and sectarian allegiances has always shaped the communal loyalties of Syrians to a degree often underestimated by a perplexed outside world.

In reality, Syria somewhat resembles the former Yugoslavia after the death of Tito[3] and before the country split apart. The Arab Spring protests of 2011 began as a mass uprising against a dictatorship headed by the Assad family of exceptional brutality, but its decision-makers and senior officials were largely drawn from the two to three million-strong Alawite community, making up more than 10 per cent of the population. Sunni Arab protests against the political and social status quo were therefore unavoidably sectarian in nature.

The opposition accused the government of deliberately fostering sectarian hatreds in order to stay in power, which was true enough, but, as in Iraq and Lebanon, these communal animosities had existed for centuries. They have since been much exacerbated by a civil war of extreme savagery - and are not going to disappear, despite reassuring statements from the HTS leader Abu Mohmmed al-Golani, who is keen to tell the world that his movement, labelled "terrorist" in the West, has long severed its links to al-Qaeda and has no jihadi ambitions.

Too much of a humiliation for Moscow

Assad survived in the past in large measure thanks to military support from Russia, Hezbollah, Iran and Iraq. To a degree, he and his government are a casualty of Israel's war with Hezbollah[4], which seriously degraded the Lebanese guerrilla movement as a military force.

Russia withdrew much of its Syrian-based airpower to take part in the war in Ukraine and may not be keen to divert scarce military resources in order to prop up Assad, but to do nothing to save him would probably be too much of a humiliation for Moscow. For Iran, the loss of Syria, which, together with Iraq, was its closest ally in the Arab world, would be a strategic catastrophe, making it impossible for Tehran to supply, still less revive, a weakened Hezbollah in Lebanon. Yet the situation in Syria may be developing too fast for Iran to make a game-changing intervention - possibly through the use of Iraqi Shia paramilitary units - sizeable enough to turn the tide on the battlefield.

Golani warned against any such intervention, saying "we urge him [Iraq's prime minister] again to keep Iraq away from entering into the flames of a new war tied to what is happening in Syria". Many Syrians on the government side in the civil war will now seek to leave the country[5], while others will stay, hoping that an end to crushing US and international economic sanctions will at last be on the cards. On the other hand, many of the 5.5 millions Syrians who are refugees, mostly in Turkey and Lebanon, may seek to return home - but, if they do, they will find a country in ruins.

Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism by Patrick Cockburn, is published by Verso[6]

Further Thoughts

Reporting wars is easy to do because of the dramatic nature of military action, but it is very difficult to do well[7] because any extensive military action has many moving parts while combatants all have an incentive to lie about their successes and failures. Both points are summed up in the old saying about "truth being the first casualty of war", though it could also be argued that poor old truth does not do too well in peace time either. But it stands to reason that people trying hard to shoot or blow each other up will not hesitate to lie, if it hurts the other side or otherwise serves their interests.

All wars are necessarily information wars, but this is certainly the case in the Syrian civil war[8]. I reported on the conflict from soon after it broke out as part of the Arab Spring protests. I lived at first in large hotels in Damascus, before moving to a smaller boutique hotel in the Christian quarter of the Old City down a street that I hoped was too narrow for a car bomb to enter.

From there, I visited those parts of Syria controlled by the Assad government, which were dotted with rebel-held enclaves battered into a seascape of ruins by bombs and shells and looked much like Gaza today. Later, I would visit the vast Kurdish-held enclave in north-east Syria to reach which I had to make a giant detour through Iraqi Kurdistan. I have been thinking what useful lessons the first horrific phase of Syrian civil war might have for us in understanding what is happening today.

As always, there will be partisan reporting, but the problem is not really "fake facts", but the partial coverage of the crisis. For instance, the last time around, journalists focused on the war between Assad and the opposition, and largely ignored the complex, largely separate civil war between Turkey-backed Syrian Arabs and US-supported Syrian Kurds. This is now happening again with part of the rebel forces led by the Syrian National Army, a militia under Turkish control, advancing north and east against the Kurds, creating another wave of refugees.

Questions immediately arise as to whether or not President-elect Donald Trump will finally abandon the Syrian Kurdish minority, to whom the US was allied when fighting Islamic State[9], which once controlled much of eastern Syria. Another problem of war journalism is that civil conflicts - in which one part of a country's population takes up arms to fight another - are complex messy businesses. In order to explain these messes to the widest possible audience, news outlets - newspapers, television, radio - oversimplify and dilute the truth.

At the height of the last episode of the Syrian civil war, people would very occasionally ask me what I thought was going on in Syria - five or 10 minutes later, I would realise from the glazed look in their eye that they wished they had never asked the question. I would remember the joke by the humorist Stephen Potter about how to dumbfound an expert on some country - say, Argentina or Malaysia - about which one knows nothing. Potter suggests letting the expert talk on for some time, giving copious details about some country, and then interrupting him to say languidly, "but surely the situation is rather different in the south?"

It invariably is - so the expert will know that he or she have met their match.

Beneath the Radar

The most balanced and best-informed account I have seen about why Syrian government forces collapsed virtually without a fight and the rebels were so well organised, is in this impressively-detailed Q&A by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group entitled "Syria's North-western Front Erupts[10]".

Cockburn's Pick

Anybody who likes to see pompous politicians being brought low by unlikely opponents should enjoy this story about Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Irish-speaking rappers from Belfast[11].

References

1. ^ rebel victory, after an assault almost certainly approved by Turkey, (inews.co.uk)
2. ^ political balance of power in the Middle East (inews.co.uk)
3. ^ the death of Tito (www.britannica.com)
4. ^ casualty of Israel's war with Hezbollah (inews.co.uk)
5. ^ in the civil war will now seek to leave the country (www.bbc.com)
6. ^ Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism (eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com)
7. ^ very difficult to do well (inews.co.uk)
8. ^ in the Syrian civil war (inews.co.uk)
9. ^ to whom the US was allied when fighting Islamic State (www.theguardian.com)
10. ^ Syria's North-western Front Erupts (www.crisisgroup.org)
11. ^ this story about Tory leader Kemi Badenoch and Irish-speaking rappers from Belfast (www.theguardian.com)