The protracted ‘Civil war’ in Syria was a war of western choice
The western narrative dominates global perceptions of the recent and sweeping developments in Syria. Images of people celebrating the fall of the autocrat, Bashar al-Assad, in the streets, pulling down and destroying his statues and portraits, emphasise the victory of ‘freedom’ over ‘tyranny’. The focus is on the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa aka Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the ‘liberator of Syria’—a UN- and US-designated terrorist with past associations with both Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, who is now re-inventing himself, as one commentator notes, as the “Syrian Zelinski”.
We have seen this before, in country after country in West Asia, where ugly but stable dictatorships have been collapsed from the outside, and have then descended into a bloody chaos far worse than anything the preceding—no doubt authoritarian and oppressive—regime was doing. This has been the story of Iraq, Libya, and now Syria, with Yemen another, different, model of US interference gone horribly wrong.
While the current focus in Syria is on HTS, the reality is that this is little more than a proxy group. What is ignored is the long history of Western interference and destabilisation in the country—compounded by a steady demonisation of the Assad regime. Entirely forgotten, today, is the fact that Assad transformed a dilapidated nation into one that secured significant prosperity and order in the first decade of his regime. All this was to change only after the orchestrated Arab Spring protests swept across the country in 2011, and the externally supported civil war that followed.
None of this grew out of Syrian soil, or out of the Assad regime’s misdeeds. As US General Wesley Clark, a former commander of NATO forces in Europe, has documented, the George W Bush regime had decided, by November 2001, to ‘take out’ regimes in seven Muslim countries—Iraq on top of the list, followed by Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. Despite the change of Presidents and parties in power in the US, these objectives continue to underpin US foreign policy and appear, in fact, to have been enlarged. Clark noted that, even as the ‘war against terrorism’ was used as an excuse to target these states, the “real sources of terrorists” were “US allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia”.
Crucially, Syria is an ethnic and communal tinderbox that the secular Assad regime managed to keep a lid on by sheer force for nearly two and a half decades. While Sunnis are the dominant majority in the country, Alawites, Druze and Kurds (among other, smaller, communities) dominate significant regions of the country, and there are reports that the Druze settlements bordering Israel are already mulling a merger with Israel as the ‘lesser of two evils’. Once the euphoria of the present ‘liberation’ wears off, ancient hatreds—already reflected in conflict between various armed groups—are likely to surge dramatically.
While the HTS—backed by Turkiye and, implicitly, by the US and Israel, among others—now controls the bulk of Syria’s population and territory, other armed forces, including the US proxy, the Syrian Defence Force (SDF), an offshoot of the Kurdish Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), and the Syrian National Army (SNA), backed by Turkiye, also control substantial territories and populations, and are both opposed to HTS. Crucially, both HTS and Turkiye agree that any SDF control of territory is “intolerable”. HTS, moreover, is not a monolith.
The Southern territories are, in fact, under the control of the Syrian Free Army (SFA) and the Southern Operations Room (SOR, Ghurfah al Amaliyaat al Junoobia), who have conditional alliances with HTS. Significantly, all these groups and factions made a rush to expand territories under their control, as HTS focused on overturning the Assad regime. Further, thousands of soldiers of Assad’s Army have fled the country, a significant proportion into Shia-majority Iraq. While they are unlikely to constitute a present danger, future possibilities of reorganisation as an armed threat to the successor regime in Syria cannot be excluded. Western powers, moreover, fear that the chaos in the country could create conditions for the resurgence of the Islamic State. Absent a unifying centre, Syria now appears to be slated for endless bloodshed.
Donald Trump’s accession to the US presidency on January 20, 2025, will substantially complicate the situation on the ground in Syria. On December 7, 2024, Trump put out a Tweet, declaring, “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, and the United States has nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out.” Crucially, Trump is eager to work with the Russians to shut down the war in Ukraine, potentially restoring a Russian role in Syria. A US exit would see escalation of armed conflict between the Turkiye-backed SNA and HTS, and SDF.
As with Ukraine, the protracted ‘civil war’ in Syria was a war of Western choice. Its price, however, continues to be paid in blood and suffering by the people of Syria.
Ajai Sahni
Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management, South Asia Terrorism Portal
ajaisahni@gmail.com