It’s a bit rich, you have to admit.
The 21st century’s bloodiest dictatorship came to an abrupt and almost entirely non-violent end last weekend when Bashar Assad’s torture state was overthrown in Damascus, and what are the big questions under consideration in the foreign-policy parlours of the NATO capitals?
These are the questions vexing us.
Should Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), the revolutionary militia that forced the regime’s surrender, be struck from everybody’s terrorist lists? Will HTS be as bad or worse than the sadistic criminal oligarchy that devoured the lives of 500,000 people over the past decade?
Here’s the question the Americans, particularly, should be asking themselves.
How did it come to pass, exactly, that the work of shutting down Assad’s vast human abattoir ended up falling to a hydra-headed Islamist coalition formerly identified with al-Qaida and ISIS?
Here’s the answer.
“In the Syrian reality, people know who is against us and who is for us. The United States says they are terrorists, but the truth is different. Everybody knows that the western world will do nothing to help us. The people of Syria are sure now that the western world is of no use to them at all.”
Those were the words of a young volunteer with the Free Syrian Army I’d arranged to meet in Amman, Jordan, in October, 2013. His name was Oways Eshami. He was 24. He was talking about the al-Qaida affiliate Jabhat al Nusra, the armed front that went on to become HTS. When we spoke, almost all of Eshami’s comrades were defecting to the Nusra Front.
Eshami hadn’t always been that bitter about the United States and “the West.” Of all the Arab Spring disturbances underway at the time, the Syrian uprising was perhaps the most pro-American.
The United States had agreed to arm and train the FSA, but then came Aug. 21, 2013, the day Assad ordered the deployment of sarin gas in the troublesome Damascus suburb of Ghouta, murdering more than 1,400 civilians.
A year earlier, U.S. president Barack Obama had pledged that Assad would not be allowed to get away with using chemical weapons on his own people. It was Obama’s “red line” in Syria. But after the Ghouta atrocity, Obama reneged, inviting Vladimir Putin to hold Assad to his commitments to surrender his chemical weapons stockpile under the terms of the Sept. 27, 2013 UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2118.
Assad could stay, Obama decreed, Russia began its long campaign of bombing Syrian hospitals, schools and entire towns into rubble, and Assad dabbled in poison gas from time to time, just because he could. Obama confined the FSA to training camps in Turkey, allowing them back into Syria to fight ISIS so long as they left Assad and his forces undisturbed. That was to dissuade Iran from scuttling Obama’s foreign policy “legacy” project — a nuclear-arms agreement with the mullahs in Iran. For good measure, Iran dispatched regiments of Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon to fight alongside Assad.
Within a year, ISIS marauders had swept in from Iraq. In Istanbul, George Sabra, president of the Syrian National Council, told me that Obama should have listened. He should have listened to the Syrian Opposition Coalition, and to the Free Syrian Army: Hobbling the Syrian revolutionaries would mean the momentum would go to al-Qaida and ISIS, and jihadists would fill the vacuum Assad’s brutality and the “war weary” White House had opened up all over Syria.
Obama should have listened. Sabra had warned him, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta warned him, and his own ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, warned him too. CIA chief David Petraeus and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Obama that appeasing Iran at the cost of the Syrian revolution would be disastrous. White House Syria adviser Frederic C. Hof said the same thing. The senior U.S. Baghdad embassy adviser Ali Khedery warned Obama, too.
But Obama wouldn’t listen, and the ISIS ranks swelled with fighters from Europe, North America, Central Asia and the Arab emirates. Hezbollah and Assad’s barrel bombers and Vladimir Putin’s air force pummelled one Syrian governorate after another. The FSA was routed in almost all the ground it had managed to take and hold.
“Syrians have ended with the idea that we are victims of the whole world, that the whole world is against us,” Sabra told me. “Assad has friends in Tehran, a little bit in China, and in Moscow. The Syrian people have no friends.”
ISIS and the Islamic Front and Ahrar ash-Sham and other jihadist militias could see very well what was happening. “There are no bullets in our guns,” Sabra said, “no money in our pockets, no food, no hope for the future, and we have nothing, just promises.”
By 2018, Sabra had resigned from the Opposition Forces Coalition, and a young jihadist who would go on to lead Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was undergoing his own political evolution. Nicknamed Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, Ahmed al-Sharaa got caught up in the anti-American jihad in Iraq. He cycled through ISIS, al-Qaida, Jabhat al Nusra and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, always playing a leading role.
A Syrian born in Saudi Arabia, Sharaa has gone out of his way in recent years to project an image of moderation and tolerance of religious and ethnic differences. He’s still an Islamist — although perhaps no more hardline than Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who runs his own powerful proxy militia in the country, the Syrian National Army.
In its first decree on Monday, the HTS-led provisional government in Damascus issued a directive prohibiting the mistreatment of journalists, and warning of jail terms for any Taliban-like enforcement of religious dress codes for women. State employees have been told to return to work, the Central Bank is back open, and Syrian military recruits have been offered amnesty. Said Sharaa: “Our message to all the sects of Syria, is that we tell them that Syria is for everyone.”
The Free Syrian Army persist in pockets — in Palmyra, and in the south around Dera’a — but the main U.S.-backed forces in Syria are the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF spent the early hours of the last week’s revolution engaged in combat with Erdogan’s SNA, in the northern town of Manbij — one NATO member’s proxy versus another NATO member’s proxy.
Britain’s Syrian Observatory for Human Rights counted 250 Israeli airstrikes since Saturday, targeting airports, warehouses, radar installations, and a variety of weapons and ammunition depots. The United States, which still maintains an ISIS-watch garrison of 900 troops in Syria’s northeast, conducted dozens or airstrikes on ISIS targets as a “stabilization” measure.
So while speculation persists about whether the Americans might take HTS and Sharaa off their terrorist list, there’s also much speculation about whether president-elect Donald Trump will succeed in convincing lawmakers to confirm his nominee for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. Among Syrians, Gabbard has long been regarded as a NATO politician almost uniquely sympathetic to the now-defunct Assad regime. But it doesn’t really matter now.
And that’s one of the most astonishing things about everything that has happened in Syria over the past week or so. These are world-changing, historic events, and after everything that’s happened since 2011, it doesn’t matter what any American thinks.
National Post