The world watched with bated breath on December 8th, 2024, as rebel forces rolled into Damascus to oust then president Bashar Al-Assad. This ousting put an end to the reign of not only Bashar, but the Assad family, whose stranglehold on power in Syria began over five decades ago with Bashar’s father Hafez in 1971. Any serious account of the Assad regime is certain to mention its history of human rights abuses, political imprisonments, and extrajudicial killings, all of which have numbered in the thousands since the regime’s inception. These unsavory elements were thrust into the public consciousness in 2011, when protests erupted across Syria and throughout the surrounding region during the so-called Arab Spring.
Most scholars point to the self-immolation of Hasan Ali Akleh, in January 2011, as the principal catalyst for the Syrian Arab Spring. This powerful gesture, likely inspired by the actions of Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi (which kicked off the first Arab Spring protests), was similarly a call for reform in a country that was plagued by corruption and authoritarianism. In the following months, countless Syrians took to the streets to voice these concerns, often met with brutal repression or even imprisonment. Protests during this beginning period were largely secular and genuinely pro-democracy, with the primary calls being for unity and the toppling of the regime. Unfortunately, however, a stark shift in tone occurred towards the end of the protests’ first year, becoming increasingly radical and Islamist in nature.
There is no singular answer as to why exactly this shift transpired, though some widely recognized contributing factors include: frustration from the Sunni majority towards a government dominated by Alawites (an obscure sect that some consider to be an offshoot of Shi’ism, though many Sunnis contend is outright heretical), the well-established history of funding allocated towards Islamist group (often from wealthy gulf countries like Qatar), and a common notion among protesters that these militant groups were highly effective. Nevertheless, from this point onward, Islamist groups like Al-Qaeda affiliate Jahbat Al-Nusra began taking center-stage in the fight.
Against this backdrop, a slew of global and regional powers began muscling their way into what was now a full-blown civil war. The two primary coalitions in this conflict consisted of Russia and Iran, who supported the government; and Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the US, who supported rebel groups. The former group saw an ally in the Assad government due to its Nationalist, anti-western politics. Iran in particular sought to leverage its nominal Shi’a-ness against the dominance of Sunni countries in the region, while Russia was largely concerned with maintaining their large naval base in the coastal Syrian city of Tartus. Naturally, the latter opposed the Assad government, seeing it as impeding Western strategic interests. Saudi Arabia specifically viewed the Assad government as a proxy of their most bitter regional rival, Iran. Turkey, being a NATO member, sought similar strategic objectives, though it also vehemently opposed Kurdish separatism in the region (the US tended to support the Kurdish groups like the PKK in their fight against ISIS) for fear it would embolden the even larger Kurdish community in Turkey to pursue a similar goal. Such a backdrop led billions in foreign funding and thousands of foreign soldiers to pour into the region.
As is to be expected with such a messy and complicated conflict, said funding often fell into unintended hands. Though the US and its allies purported to maintain a policy of not funding Islamist groups, most of the arms that our nominal allies, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, smuggled into Syria went to groups with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, or sometimes to outright Jihadists. The US specifically undertook covert action programs in the region such as Timber Sycamore and Train and Equip, which together cost north of $1.5 billion. These programs were found, troublingly, through a later EU-commissioned study, to have “dramatically increased the quantity and quality of weapons held by the Islamic State”.
At this point, a keen observer would likely draw parallels between this situation and US support of anti-Soviet mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan (which led to the rise of the Taliban). This comparison became even more apt when a threat even more barbaric than the regime began to emerge, the Islamic State. What followed was one of the most horrific periods of violence, terror, and human rights abuses in modern memory.
While it would be inaccurate to assign all blame for this terror on the United States and our allies, it is demonstrably clear that our actions in the region—especially when considering past blunders like the dismantling of the Iraqi military post-Saddam—played a significant role. Though ISIS’s territorial holdings had all but vanished by 2019, Islamist groups still maintained power in certain areas of Syria, with their most notable stronghold being Idlib province in the Northwest. Here, HTS, whose leader once led the Al-Qaeda affiliated Jahbat Al-Nusra, reigned supreme, implementing a theocratic, sharia-based government. Despite recent attempts by their leader, Al-Jolani, to make the group appear more moderate to curry favor with the West, they have nonetheless continued to engage in persistent persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, human rights abuses, and detention of political opponents. In fact, in the three months following HTS’s rise, around one-thousand people, mostly Alawites, have been massacred, some even inside their own homes. Despite the troubling track-record of HTS, many Western-aligned media outlets and politicians cautiously celebrated their march into Damascus last December, with former-president Biden even heralding it as a “fundamental act of justice.”
Whether or not the new HTS-led government in Damascus will be better than Assad is difficult to definitively determine, though many Syrians seem to think so. Regardless, I cannot escape a sense of confused frustration towards the absurdity of it all. In the two decades following 9/11, I was constantly told the war on terror was a clash of right and wrong, western freedom vs. theocratic oppression. That its purpose was keeping Americans safe and ensuring vulnerable populations in the region would cease being brutalized. While it is clear now that there were motives for Middle East involvement beyond security and human rights, those altruistic, freedom-spreading narratives were nonetheless utilized extensively to leverage the anger and fear of a post 9/11 America. I remember being nine years old, sitting with my eyes glued to the TV in 2014, utterly terrified that ISIS and its ideology would find its way into America. Back then, I would have given assent to almost any military action which may have prevented this, and I was hardly alone in this feeling. Though I no longer hold such a hardline position, it is easy to understand why I did, and why many still may.
Religious extremism is abhorrent, it reminds us of the capacity for entities grounded in blind faith to inflict incredible suffering, with no possibility of recourse for the oppressed. It prescribes roles to people based not on what they prefer, or even what society demands. There is no room for advocacy, for dialectical truth-discovery, for impartial, evolving sets of laws. Rather, the truth, the law, one’s purpose and societal standing are all predetermined, from the moment of one’s birth, by the decrees of an arbitrarily chosen text. Though religious extremism itself is detestable, so too are the lengths we have gone to supposedly eradicate it. I am of course referring to the millions of war-related deaths in the region, its utterly decimated infrastructure and institutions, and the trillions in debt the US accrued to fight the supposed war on terror.
How callous can we be to claim victory here? To claim after all of the aforementioned consequences, that religious extremists having even more power than before is tantamount to anything other than a shameful failure. Though this toppling may have seemed, even to many within Syria, as a triumph of the people over dictatorship, it was in reality little more than the triumph of one multinational force over another. What was once a genuinely democratic movement had been seized upon and co-opted by powerful opportunists, who sought to cling on to whatever barely extant shred of continuity existed between that movement’s ideals, and those of the current HTS government. Whichever narrative may be spun, what we saw in December was ultimately nothing more than one oppressive regime toppling another, the only difference being which side’s strategic interests the regime serves.
Featured Image Source: BBC
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