Assad Collapsed: Knock-On Effects for the World
I knew I would be writing my next newsletter on Syria even as I was finishing last week’s. I have now rewritten this intro (and title) four or five times. It is actually incredible the speed at which everything changed. I blinked and something happened, and I blinked again and something happened again. I’ll be honest: Assad’s regime collapsing in more or less ten days was not on my 2024 bingo card. It feels somewhat like the collapse of the Afghan government after the US withdrawal, or Desert Storm on the flipside. There are years in which weeks happen…
I am not an expert on the Syrian civil war. My attention has been elsewhere. Take my opinions with even more salt than usual. And with the situation on the ground changing so fast it’s entirely possible that I will have to retract or clarify things in future newsletters. But this is too monumental of a moment to not write about.
It must first be said that Bashar al-Assad, the former dictatorial leader of the “official” Syrian government—is an absolute bastard. His regime killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, many with literal WMDs of the chemical variety. He was backed by the ‘Axis of Evil’, namely Putin’s Russia and Khamenei’s Islamic Republic and had ample help from Russia’s Wagner Group and official military and the terrorists of the IRGC and Hezbollah. With friends like these…
On the surface, there was no real ideological reason for either Khamenei or Putin to stand with Assad; it was pure realpolitik. As I touched on last week, the “revolutionary” Shia Islamist state of the Islamic Republic of Iran eventually seeks to overthrow history and establish a Shia caliphate to rival the Sunni empires of old. Backing a nominal constitutional republic with an Alawite in charge in the ancient land of Syria doesn’t really keep with that goal. But it does help with transporting weapons to a certain you-know-who in you-know-where. The real reasons for the larger powers backing Assad was as simple as quid pro quo. The Russian military’s only Mediterranean port is in Syria, though for how much longer it will be there is completely unknown at this point.
In return, they provided the support that kept Assad sustained in a status-quo civil war; or at least they used to. Now that both of his backing regimes are themselves undergoing crises at home, a balancing test left Assad out in the cold as rebel groups pushed ever-closer into his controlled territory. And, eventually, his entire rotten house of cards just simply collapsed. He is now in deserved exile and will likely remain Putin’s lapdog in Moscow until someone finally unseats that asshole too (or he throws himself out of a window, who knows in Russia).
Now, with the deplorable nature of the parties on the Assad regime’s side, you may be thinking that it is a great thing that the regime fell. And it is. However: despite the popular adage, “the enemy of your enemy” is not always your friend. There are many examples from history that prove this exception to the rule. The situation in Syria today is I believe a prime example, for reasons I will explain below. The problem isn’t that Assad lost; it’s that jihadis won. And jihadis that have had past ties to perhaps the most deplorable of all: Al-Qaeda. It would take a Herculean effort to write a comprehensive breakdown of every faction that has participated in the Syrian civil war tonight. Let me just focus on one: the “winners” (as of now), who happen to be a US-designated terror group.
The particular rebel splinter faction that achieved by far the most success in the past days—HTS or Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham—has a very complicated and tangled history with Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda’s former champion in Syria, Jabhat Al-Nusra. If I’m understanding correctly, Al-Nusra dissolved in early 2017 primarily because the leadership decided to cut official ties with Al-Qaeda, which caused members to defect and eventually the whole group collapsed. Some of those remnants joined to form HTS.
Though they claim to not be affiliated with Al-Qaeda (and I think have publicly disavowed them and ousted sympathetic members), the circumstances around their forming and their particular (Salafi?) jihadist radical beliefs suggest they are still in the same vein if not the same outright. Notably, the biggest difference right now appears that, whereas Al-Qaeda’s fight is for a global Islamic caliphate, HTS is much more nationalistic and focused on establishing fundamentalist Sharia law within the current general borders of Syria. We will see what happens if they manage to consolidate power.
Their recent success against Assad’s forces can be attributed to multiple things. For one, they seem to have broken with received wisdom in jihadi circles of massacring prisoners of war and other such savagery and in so doing convinced large numbers of Assad forces to simply surrender. I do not know how well their prisoners of war are being kept now, nor can I even guess at their ultimate fate.
Of course, the failure of Assad’s former allies to really do anything to stop them also contributed massively. Another big factor is that they have at least attempted to build a “rebel coalition” of a sort and hold it together with shared hatred for three particular faces: Assad’s, Khamenei’s, and Putin’s. You should watch some of the videos of their posters being ripped down. It does put a smile on my face, even given who exactly is doing the ripping.
And it seems—at least to me—that they have popular support among some of the civilian populations, who very possibly will fare better than under Assad at least for a bit. They may just be the “face” of new jihadi radicals, like the Taliban on Twitter. They have sent some amount of food and water to the needy, of course. I don’t know if it’s enough. But they’re also focused on infrastructure and basic services like firefighters. They have been installing ‘syriaphone’ cell towers in their newly-conquered territory. They apparently put QR codes up around Aleppo to get aid? It remains to be seen how well they treat the Kurds among other minorities and especially religious minorities.
Because they are ultimately an extremist Islamist faction. They will go about implementing Sharia law as quickly as they can—just as the Taliban did in 2021 Afghanistan. Their leadership has publicly praised Hamas and October 7th. Let me say that again: the leadership of the faction now controlling Syria—just across from the Golan Heights—praised Hamas and October 7th and also eulogized the monster Haniyeh when he got his just deserts in Tehran. Also, whatever weapons of the former Assad regime America and Israel missed on their very recent bombing runs are now in the hands of these insane radicals. Apparently they let more out that Assad was keeping locked away in recent prison breaks. I wasn’t joking about weapons of mass destruction—Assad had chemical weapons and the demonstrated ability to use them. It’s no wonder that Israel has reinforced the Golan Heights.
Now, I said I wouldn’t go into detail on any others, but the Kurds in the northeast above the Euphrates are “the good guys”—at least some of their groups. Out of all the factions in this war they are (were) the most aligned with liberal democracy, human rights, all the good things. And they deserve the right to self-determination in their home. Any freedom-loving person on the planet should be pushing for a free Kurdistan in some borders (I could elaborate on those borders, but I won’t…yet). We will see just exactly what happens in the coming days, weeks, months, and years. Everything could change by tomorrow, who knows.
Unrelated to the Syrian civil war, I want to clarify and expand on a comment I made in last week’s newsletter. When discussing the Israeli advance to the Litani river, I mentioned in passing the ancient Phoenician city of Tyre and how Alexander the Great literally turned the island city into a peninsula. He did this via his army constructing a land bridge half a mile out into the Mediterranean while laying siege to the city. What I did not mention is that once Alexander got there, he massacred and enslaved the inhabitants. Alexander did what no one else in the ancient world could have dreamed of—both good and bad. King Nebuchadnezzar II had laid siege to Tyre for over a decade and failed.
When I talk about the military genius and strategy of Alexander or Julius Caesar, I am not endorsing or justifying their actions. Alexander could be benevolent at times, and brutal at others. This is history. This is war. This is humanity. The farther back in time you go, the less respect for human rights you will find. Rousseau’s “noble savage” is a myth. Morality is not found in nature but in ourselves, and it is something that we must work at every single day.
This is a more philosophical note than I was planning to end a newsletter on the conclusion(?) of the Syrian civil war on, but: voila, qui je suis.