Bashar al-Assad’s fall
Rashed Rahman
The fall of Damascus the Syrian capital came on December 8, 2024 as the climax to the fall of city after city to the lightning offensive launched on November 27 by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamic fundamentalist group led by Abu Mohammed al-Golani, who has emerged as the putative leader of Syria in the new obtaining circumstances. Bashar al-Assad, the deposed president, has fled with his family to Moscow and been granted asylum by the government, Russia having been, along with Iran, one of al-Assad’s main bastions of support since the 2011 protest movement morphed into a bloody civil war. As often happens after such cataclysmic events, there have been reports of widespread looting, including al Assad’s home. The Iranian embassy in Damascus has been ransacked. Al-Golani has since issued orders to his forces to maintain order and not harass people or enter their homes. This is of a piece with his stance of projecting himself as representing all the Syrian people, thereby allaying fears of HTS enforcing strict Sunni sharia law. It is also a reflection of how HTS, hitherto called the Nusra Front, an al Qaeda ally, has transformed itself into the leading force of a broad coalition of anti-Assad fundamentalist groups. It is this unity of the fundamentalist opposition that has paved the way for HTS’ incredible victory.
That victory was also made possible by the hollowing out by corruption and lack of commitment of the Syrian army after Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah helped al-Assad prevail over the armed revolt against his regime. The hiatus that emerged from 2016 onwards in Syria’s civil war was not taken advantage of by the al-Assad regime to consolidate itself politically, the deprivations of forbidding sanctions imposed on it by the US-led west notwithstanding. Instead, in a demonstration of hubris, he continued to rely on the repressive measures that had become the hallmark of his rule. With his military disintegrating and the people fed up of his repressive rule with nothing positive to balance it, al-Assad became the ripe fruit for plucking once the Russian (because of the Ukraine war), Iranian and Hezbollah (owed to the Gaza and Lebanon-Israel wars) support had been weakened. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has boasted that it is the blows his country delivered on Hezbollah and Iran that made the downfall of al-Assad possible. Israel, in its inevitably alert exploitation of every opportunity, carried out air strikes on strategic sites and weapons depots in Damascus and south-west Syria after the fall of Assad. It has also deployed further troops in the Golan Heights, ostensibly to ‘protect’ the UN peacekeepers stationed there between Israeli-held territory (which it captured in the 1967 war and has since unilaterally annexed) but more probably with a view to taking advantage of the opportunity to annex more territory. Not to be left behind, the US, through CENTCOM, carried out 75 air strikes in central Syria, ostensibly against Islamic State (IS) assets.
While these startling developments since November 27, 2024, when HTS began its lightning offensive, represent a major strategic gain for the US, Israel and Turkiye and a major setback for Russia and Iran, its true import lies in the ‘completion’ of the task the US-led west (and Israel) set itself some years ago. This consisted of a concerted effort to weaken if not demolish the Axis of Resistance to Israel that emerged as the counter to the betrayal by successive Arab regimes (led first and foremost by Egypt) of recognising Israel and making peace with it. Three left-leaning Arab Nationalist (therefore anti-Israel, anti-imperialist) regimes became the foremost ‘take out’ targets. These were, Libya, Iraq and Syria. The first of these yielded the brutal death of Gaddafi and the subsequent civil war that continues to debilitate that country. The second, after two invasions, led to the hanging of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent state of civil war and destruction of that unfortunate country that has yet to completely subside. The third was Syria, besieged by a mass protest movement that emerged as part of the Arab Spring in 2011 but soon transmogrified into another bloody civil war, whose end we have now witnessed in the overthrow of Assad. Whatever one may think of Assad and his regime, there is some comfort in the fact that he and his family managed to flee safely to asylum in Moscow and did not suffer the fate of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. The three ‘hold-out’ Arab regimes having now been demolished, can one begin to sing the funeral dirge of left-leaning, anti-imperialist, anti-Israel Arab regimes?
The intriguing part of this mosaic is how after spending five years in a US prison in Iraq for fighting with al Qaeda, al-Golani ended up over time as nothing short of a US and Israeli satrap. That is a story still to be told. The last word on Syria, however, still remains out there in the void. It will depend very much on what sort of regime emerges from HTS’s victory, what policies it adopts, how it governs. In other words, will the placatory stance adopted by al-Golani continue or will it be overtaken in time by the deeply fundamentalist hue the HTS (and even more its previous avatar Nusra Front) have camouflaged for the moment in ‘reconciliatory’ rhetoric?
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