The Syrian tragedy continues Whoever wins this bloody battle between Assad and the jihadists, the Syrian people have already lost. Tim Black

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/12/03/the-syrian-tragedy-continues/

The terrible 13-years-long conflict in Syria has been mainly framed as a civil war between the government of Bashar al-Assad and domestic opponents. The sight of jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) capturing villages and towns in north-west Syria, before advancing on and taking the city of Aleppo on Friday, has largely been interpreted through this civil-war lens – as the reignition of a conflict between ‘rebel’ groups and ‘regime’ or ‘government’ forces.

This, though, is to tell only part of the story. Not just of the latest direct challenge to Assad’s hollow rule, but also of Syria’s long-standing descent into violent instability. (For one thing, ‘rebels’ seems like an oddly anodyne way to describe the vicious Islamists of HTS.)

Throughout this long conflict, there have certainly been domestic factors involved, chief among which is the illegitimacy and chronic lack of authority of Assad’s de facto, tin-pot dictatorship. This weakness gave rise to the initial popular uprisings against him in 2011. But since that initial eruption of anti-Assad protest during the Arab Spring, this has ceased to be a conflict determined by social, political forces internal to Syria itself.

In truth, the conflict in Syria has long since been shaped and fuelled by its internationalisation. Shortly after the moment in 2011 when the Arab Spring called the very viability of Assad’s government into question, global and regional hegemons crowded into the ensuing struggle, vying for influence and power. By 2012, NATO allies Turkey and America, with then secretary of state Hillary Clinton leading the charge, were simultaneously demanding Assad step down while backing various anti-government militias – some of which would turn out to be violent jihadists. On the other side, Russia and Iran attempted to shore up Assad’s crumbling regime, providing various forms of military support.

By the mid-2010s, Syria had been torn apart. To all intents and purposes, it had ceased to be a nation. It had become a patchwork of territories, each partially controlled by competing factions, which in turn were backed by competing international forces. There were the US-backed Kurdish fighters in the east, who were defending themselves against the insurgent jihadists while pursuing their own national ambitions. There were the Turkey-sponsored militias in the north. And there was the Russia-bolstered, Iran-aided government of Assad himself in the west. In the lawless chaos, Islamist militias, with backing from all around the region, flourished.

Their interests, ambitions and aims were all entirely at odds. Turkey was keen to suppress Kurdish forces in Syria so as to deal a blow to Turkish Kurds’ aspirations to statehood. Russia was keen to maintain some degree of stability in the Middle East, while retaining an influence there. The US and its Western allies initially seemed to see the fall of Assad as a righteous cause – regardless of the means or the consequences – before rallying behind the Kurds in the struggle with the Islamist menace. Iran saw a chance to gain another point on its ‘axis of resistance’ and encircle Israel.

It was only when ISIS cut a barbaric, Islamist swathe through Syria in the mid-2010s that the dynamic of the conflict appeared to shift. From that point on, internal and external players had a common enemy. And so while the US helped the Kurds and their allies fight ISIS in the east, Russia and Iran helped Assad crush the so-called caliphate in the west. In 2018, Russian forces helped the Syrian government shell Daraa, the last significant redoubt of Islamist anti-government opposition, into submission. A year later, the US helped the Kurds push ISIS out of Boghuz. After that, the conflict in Syria appeared, from the safety of the West at least, to have been brought to a close.

But appearances were deceptive. Turkey and its proxies continued to fight a brutal war against the Kurds, aided and abetted by the US, which blithely abandoned its erstwhile Kurdish allies. Iranian militias, including thousands of soldiers from Hezbollah, were engaged in the suppression of Sunni-jihadist militancy in the west. Russia continued to provide Assad with an often brutal military security blanket. And what was left of the violent, jihadist opposition was pushed into the borderlands of the north and north-west, where it has survived – and in HTS’s case, prospered – under the protection of Turkey.

For much of the past six years, the conflict in Syria has largely been held in abeyance by this complex geopolitical web. But precisely because of the internationalisation of the Syrian conflict, as soon as that web has started to unravel, so too has Syria’s stability.

It began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In the face of staunch Ukrainian resistance, Russia was forced to redeploy troops from Syria to the frontlines in Ukraine, alongside some significant hardware, including air-defence systems. Russia’s presence in Syria was further reduced in 2023, after the Kremlin curtailed the Syrian operations of the Wagner Group, following the attempted coup against the Kremlin staged by its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Then came Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October last year. Up until then, Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah had been expanding their military activities in Syria, shoring up Assad at the same time as they intensified their shadow war on Israel. Indeed, Iran had even helped establish a new proxy group in Syria, known as Syrian Hezbollah, comprising thousands of fighters from Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq. But from 7 October onwards, Hezbollah itself started to pull almost all of its troops back to fight Israel from Lebanon, while Israel itself staged attacks on Iranian militias on Syrian soil.

This withdrawal of Russian and Iranian support for the Assad government has removed one of the cornerstones for what stability there was in Syria. And in the process it has drawn other regional players further in and, most strikingly, empowered the Islamist militias seeking Assad’s downfall.

Indeed, ISIS activity in the south and largely deserted centre of Syria has been increasing in tempo for at least a year – in June and July alone, it staged attacks on government forces daily, killing nearly 70 Syrian soldiers. And now, of course, the sudden vulnerability of Assad has allowed HTS, a brutal, 30,000-strong jihadist militia, to stage its spectacular conquest of Aleppo.

HTS’s march on Aleppo is just one part of the broader, geopolitical shift now playing out in Syria. The retreat of Iran, its proxies and the Russian military has, above all, given Turkey greater rein to pursue its own regional ambitions. After all, it is no coincidence that HTS launched its offensive from Idlib, the Turkey-controlled Syrian province in the north. The Turkish state is denying any involvement in HTS’s assault, and Turkish forces have fought HTS in the past. But it seems unlikely given Turkey’s command of thousands in the anti-Assad, anti-Kurdish network that it wasn’t at least aware of what was being planned.

Turkey is certainly taking advantage of the instability. Since the HTS offensive last week, Turkish-aligned forces have now escalated their attacks against the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces, as part of their broader war on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey seems intent on securing as much power and influence over and in Syria as possible – not least because it’s very keen on returning the over three million Syrian refugees now encamped in Turkey.

The latest upsurge in the Syrian conflict is very far from a local affair. It is a product of geopolitical instability, and international and regional powers jostling for control and influence in pursuit of their very different aims. All of this is happening largely over the heads of Syrian civilians themselves.

First international actors turned Syrians into bystanders in their own uprising. Since then, they have been turned into spectators to a deadly ‘civil war’, waged by outside powers and their proxies. Over half a million are estimated to have been killed since the war began, and many millions more have been displaced. And for what? A future under the thumb of Assad and his Russian backers, or at the feet of barbaric Islamists? Whoever wins the latest battle, the people of Syria have already lost.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.

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