The year-end reviews will be showing up in all the newspapers any day now and the overthrow of Syrian mass murderer Bashar Assad will surely feature prominently. What is unlikely to make the news is any sudden realization among the enfeebled political classes of the NATO capitals that what has happened here goes well beyond the complete geopolitical re-ordering of the Greater Middle East.
In Washington, Berlin, Paris and London, the parochial and distracted governing elites have rendered themselves almost as irrelevant to events in Syria as their junior counterparts in Justin Trudeau’s Ottawa, who may be gone even before the federal election scheduled for next October.
Only a week before Syria’s revolutionaries rolled triumphantly into Damascus, the United States, Germany, France and the United Kingdom were calling for a “de-escalation of violence” in Syria. Fortunately for the Syrian people, the peace plea was ignored.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears to be the only European leader who was openly cheering on the Syrian rebels. While refusing to confirm reports in the Washington Post that he’d sent Ukrainian drone operators armed with 150 drones to rebel headquarters in Idlib, Zelenskyy was nonetheless explicit in expressing his relief that opposition fighters had finally defeated Assad’s Moscow-backed regime.
Responding to the ghastly images emerging from Assad’s secret prisons and torture chambers that took the lives of more than 100,000 Syrians — evidence for what former U.S. war crimes ambassador Stephen Rapp called a “machinery of death” on a scale not seen since the time of the Nazis — Zelenskyy said the revelations show “what all Putin-backed regimes look like.” It’s what you see wherever Russia goes.
“We have seen these types of prisons, torture chambers, unspeakable violence, humiliation, beating, torture, rape, and other crimes on our territory in every location occupied by Russian invaders,” Zelenskyy posted on X. “Russia is a prison state and it can only keep hold of someone else’s stolen land by putting its prisons and torture chambers there.”
In Kyiv, after years of President Joe Biden’s sluggish and parsimonious support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invaders and bombers, an atmosphere of gloom and dejection has set in. Donald Trump’s incoming administration is widely expected to cut a deal with Putin that will dash Ukraine’s hopes of joining NATO and leave Russia with much of the Ukrainian territory it has seized and occupied at the cost of perhaps 240,000 Ukrainian and Russian lives.
Following the loss of their shared Syrian satrapy and Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and his friends in Tehran are retrenching, making excuses for their humiliations, biding their time and smirking at the stupidities enveloping the liberal democracies.
In France, Emmanuel Macron’s shaky centrist government is poised between Russia-friendly parties on both the far left and the far right as his new prime minister — the fourth so far this year — is working with an emergency budget that won’t last beyond the next few months. In Germany, having lost a confidence vote last week, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is taking voters into elections in February that will be contested by a range of parties, including the leftist pro-Russia Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance and the right-wing Alternative for Germany, favoured by Putin and by Trump confidante Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
Meanwhile, at least 100 North Korean soldiers have been killed on Russia’s Ukrainian front and another 1,000 have been wounded, says South Korea’s spy agency, while in Beijing, Xi Jinping is taking advantage of the G7’s various bewilderments to conduct China’s largest naval exercises in the waters around Taiwan since the 1990s.
Everything is unsettled. Everything is in flux, and whoever comes out on top of all this will rule the world.
The NATO capitals appear to be sleepwalking through it all, with the exception of Ankara, capital of the Republic of Turkey, which shouldn’t even be a NATO member owing to its descent into truncheon-state excesses. With his command of the second-largest standing army in the NATO alliance after the United States, Turkey’s neo-Ottoman strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embarked on a duplicitous, reckless and bloody siege of Syria’s U.S.-backed Kurdish minority in their autonomous enclave of Rojava.
In Damascus, the revolutionary transitional government may well be led by a coalition of militants around the reformed jihadist Ahmed al-Sharaa, but here’s the paradox.
Sharaa still has a $10-million bounty on his head from 2018, during U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s first administration, and Sharaa’s victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) coalition is listed as a terrorist group by the U.S., the United Nations, the European Union, the U.K. and Canada. And yet Sharaa’s HTS is now one of the most stabilizing and broadly popular forces in that vast reach of the Earth between Cairo and New Delhi.
Even Erdogan, once Assad’s close friend and ally, and later Assad’s sworn enemy, had been more or less on the same side as Sharaa’s HTS since 2019, but still lists HTS as a terrorist entity. Owing to Erdogan’s military adventures in Syrian Kurdistan, pitting his “Syrian National Army” proxy against the Kurds’ Syrian Democratic Forces, Erdogan’s relationship with Sharaa is fraying.
Although Sharaa emerged as a charismatic young leader in Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al Qaida circles during the early years of the American occupation of Iraq, he was an introverted loner barely out of his teens when he decided to throw himself into the glamorous life of a mujahid. From Damascus, he jumped on a bus bound for Iraq, where he was later picked up and imprisoned at the notorious U.S. detention centre at Camp Bucca. The prison housed much of Iraq’s Al Qaida leadership and became a sort of incubation centre for jihadis, including Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, who would go on to become the emir of the genocidal Islamic State group.
Sharaa was imprisoned at Camp Bucca from 2005, while he was in his early 20s, and was kept there for the next five years.
While the Al Qaida spinoffs Sharaa led in Syria carried out well-documented atrocities against rival Islamist groups and Shiite and Druze targets considered allies of the Assad regime, Sharaa’s HTS renounced the global jihad in 2017 and turned straight away to cementing control of the Assad-free areas of Idlib and planning for Assad’s overthrow.
Syrians appear to be cautiously optimistic that the HTS administration is genuine in its consistent assurances about respecting the rights of women and minorities. The HTS transitional government is intended to stay in place for three months until a constitutional convention lays the groundwork for a new Syria.
Millions of people have been thronging the streets and squares of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Idlib in celebration of Sharaa’s overthrow of the hated Assad regime. The Arab states have been rushing their diplomats to Damascus to curry favour with him. So have envoys from the European capitals. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, unhelpfully, has ignored assurances from Syria’s transitional government that it means Israel no harm.
It isn’t HTS that has accumulated a trust deficit with the Syrian people. It’s the United States and Turkey.
It was former U.S. president Barack Obama who allowed Assad to cross an American chemical-weapons “red line” in 2015 in order to keep Tehran at his nuclear-talks table, and it was Obama who offered Putin the opportunity to handle Assad in 2015. Putin’s forces immediately waged war on the U.S.-backed Syrian revolutionaries, and Russia’s air force began its long and horrific bombing campaign targeting Syrian hospitals and civilian neighbourhoods.
Four years later, it was then-president Trump whose capricious decision to withdraw U.S. forces from the anti-ISIS front in northeastern Syria cleared the road for Turkey to attack the Kurdish-held northeastern region of Syria, forcing the Kurdish insurgents and their Arab partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces to cut deals with the Assad regime. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were displaced in the chaos before Trump changed his mind and sent American forces back in again, but “only for the oil.”
Now the Turks are at it again, and on Friday Erdogan warned that NATO countries like the U.S. and France that support Kurdish fighters in Syria should abandon them. He likened the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, the YPG, to ISIS — which should tell you something about Erdogan’s intentions. The YPG has lost hundreds of fighters in the NATO-backed war on ISIS. And the YPG has supporters among Republicans and Democrats in Washington.
But since Assad’s overthrow and the Dec. 8 “humanitarian” asylum Putin granted him in Moscow, where the Assad clan owns an estimated $20 million in real estate, Erdogan’s troops have been massing on the Turkish side of the border adjacent to the Kurdish city of Kobane, and attacking Kurdish forces in Manbij and Deir Ezzor.
Just last week, the Pentagon revealed for the first time that the 900-strong U.S. troop contingent backing the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the international anti-ISIS coalition in the twilight of the Biden government is in fact closer to 2,000 soldiers. It’s not at all clear whether a Trump presidency’s policies would clarify the intra-NATO fratricide in Syria.
It’s not even clear whether the America-first Trump intends to have anything resembling a “foreign policy” at all.
National Post