\u201cLook, Shi\u2019a,\u201d man in the grainy video declaims smugly, \u201cthis is how you will end up, you dogs.\u201d Eleven years ago, jihadists from the ranks of al-Nusra, al-Qaeda\u2019s branch in Syria, stormed the small village of Hatla, on the banks of the Euphrates and proceeded to slaughter dozens of children, women and elderly residents. The local mosque was levelled. \u201cLook at the fighters of the jihad celebrating their entry into the Shi\u2019a infidels\u2019 houses,\u201d the narrator of another video documenting the massacre recorded, \u201cAll the Shi\u2019a houses have been burned down.\u201d
Fifty people\u2014Alawi, Christian, Druze and Shi\u2019a\u2014were picked out of workers\u2019 barracks in the industrial town Adra on the basis, then shot or beheaded, their blood running in the snow. Twelve nuns were kidnapped from the ancient citadel of Maaloula, as jihadists battled for control of what the British adventurer and spy T.E. Lawrence described as the \u201cmost wholly admirable castle in the world.\u201d
Sixty-one years after the Arab Socialist Ba\u2019ath Party seizes control of Syria in a military coup, dictator Bashar al-Assad has now been forced to flee to Moscow, ahead of an offensive spearheaded by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the successor to al-Nusra.
The Ba\u2019ath Party ran a savage despotism, not the national resurrection its name proclaimed\u2014but many fear that the dawn of Tahrir could bring even more darkness.
Although some accounts have cast the collapse of the regime as an Imperialist-Zionist plot, Bashar knew the real problem faced him in the mirror. For two generations, the al-Assad family used cold cash and raw terror to hold together a complex ethnic-religious mosaic. Today, Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Armenian, Christian, and Kurd could fracture into warring communal-based emirates.
Thicker than blood
Less than eight weeks before the beginning of the long rebellion that would bring down his regime, one-time ophthalmologist Bashar gazed out on the storms sweeping his region: \u201cSyria is stable,\u201d he assured The Wall Street Journal. \u201cToo late,\u201d he said of efforts at economic reform by the rulers in Egypt and Tunisia. \u201cWhen there is divergence between your policy and the people\u2019s beliefs and interests, you will have this vacuum that creates disturbance.\u201d
In early 2011, authorities in the town of Dara\u2019a arrested a group of children, on charges of painting anti-regime graffiti on a wall. \u201cYour turn is coming, Doctor,\u201d it read. \u201cForget your children,\u201d their parents were told. There were protest marches; then bullets were fired.
Less than a decade after it took power in 1963, the Ba\u2019ath regime came under armed assault from an insurgency led by radicals in the Muslim Brotherhood.
The underlying reasons weren\u2019t opaque. From the early 1970s, historian Raphael Lefevre writes, massive spending on handouts gutted the economy. Efforts at collectivising key agricultural sectors, like cotton, hurt both peasants and small traders.
The Ba\u2019ath regime stamped out the Islamists, killing tens of thousands in a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. To secure his regime against future threats, Bashar\u2019s father, Hafez al-Assad staffed key positions in his regime with loyalists picked from his own sect, the Alawi.
Large-scale development projects and revenues from oil, geographer Fabrice Balanche records, allowed Hafez \u201cto rent\u2014not buy\u2014the local tribes.\u201d
The communal demographics of Syria explain how this happened. In 2010, the last year for which figures are available, some 65 per cent of the population was Sunni Arab, 15 per cent Kurdish, 10 per cent Alawi, 5 per cent Christian, 3 per cent Druze, 1 per cent Ismaili, and 1 per cent Shia.
Each community also had distinct geographical bases: Latakia and Tartus on the coast, for example, were dominated by Alawi, while Christians were concentrated in the western Wadi al-Nasara region, in Homs.
Even in cosmopolitan Damascus, non-\u00e9lite neighbourhoods were often communal enclaves.
After succeeding his father in 2000, Bashar tried to create more durable foundations for the Syrian patronage economy. He cut subsidies and created space for entrepreneurship. Economic liberalisation, though, created its own strains. Even as a new \u00e9lite rose, the incomes of workers and peasants stagnated. A drought that began in 2006 aggravated the crisis. In regions like Dara\u2019a, and the suburbs of Aleppo and Damascus, the urban poor were drawn to the Islamist radicalism of al-Qaeda.
For a generation, it had seemed that cash could indeed be thicker than ties of blood\u2014but the regime was running out of both resources and time.
The curtain falls
Each night, young residents of the Christian enclave of Mhardeh would gather in the town\u2019s caf\u00e9s to sip beer, journalist Tom Westcott reported, \u201cshyly eyeing up attractive passersby and posing for group selfies.\u201d Then, as people retreated into their homes, mortar fire from behind Tahrir lines would begin to pour in, peppering the streets with shrapnel. Even though the intervention of Iran and Russia seemed to have saved Bashar, it failed to crush the jihadists\u2014and the regime began to haemorrhage resources. The curtain had begun to fall.
Facing its own crisis in Ukraine, Russia slashed the salaries of the Fifth Corps, key to the recapture of Aleppo, from $200 per month to $100. Many soldiers defected, while others simply returned to their homes.
Large numbers of Syrian military commanders began creating so-called ghost soldiers to compensate for the funding crisis\u2014men notionally on the rolls, but never physically present. A similar phenomenon, interestingly, steadily degraded the Afghan National Army as the United States withdrew support.
Even though Bashar\u2019s regime continued to battle jihadists in northern Syria\u2014attacking the Tahrir bastion in Idlib in 2020\u2014it became clear the regime lacked the resources needed to completely destroy its Turkish-backed adversaries.
Economist Elizabeth Tsurkov observed in 2023 that the urban middle-class\u2014suspicious of the jihadists and supportive of the regime\u2014began collapsing as the war wound on. \u201cTen years ago,\u201d, she noted, \u201cthe majority of Syrians were hardly rich, but a large middle class enjoyed a relatively comfortable level of subsistence.\u201d \u201cNow, about 90% of its residents live below the poverty line, and hunger is becoming increasingly prevalent.\u201d
Long before the withdrawal of support by its foreign allies led to its final collapse, the Syrian pound fell from less than 100 to the dollar in 2014 to almost 1,000, in 2016, scholar Aaron Lund records. Living standards plummeted.
By early October, the signs of an impending jihadist offensive were evident, with artillery exchanges and air strikes escalating across the frontlines in Idlib. The soldiers and civil servants who held up Bashar\u2019s regime began to dissolve into the darkness.
An uncertain future
Exactly what comes next is impossible to predict. Even though Tahrir al-Sham has promised to protect minorities, and to crush transnational jihadist groups like the Islamic State, journalist Wassim Nasr notes \u201cthey far from espouse democratic values or those of a liberal free society.\u201d Last year, following a rare visit to a Tahrir-held territory, Nasr noted that women are allowed to attend schools and visit marketplaces, but the hijab is mandatory. Local churches are protected, but their bells cannot be rung, and Christian-owned lands seized by al-Nusra have not been returned.
\u201cEach step they take towards treating minorities better is very costly for them in terms of creating internal criticism,\u201d Nasr observed.
Local Sunni tribes could also find themselves in confrontation with jihadists, if Tahrir leaders encroach on their privileges as al-Nusra and the Islamic State did in the past. The Sheitat tribe, for example, turned on the Islamic State in 2014, after a dispute over lands led to the killing of hundreds of its members.
The impacts of the regime\u2019s collapse will be felt far beyond the region, too. Turkey backed the Tahrir, hoping its rule would allow the 3.6 million refugees the country now hosts to return home. Turkish and Russian diplomats sought to persuade Bashar to accept a political deal, which would have created an autonomous enclave for the refugees to return to, without success. The collapse of a unitary Syrian state, though, could unleash new conflicts, which could profoundly destabilise Turkey.
The US, for its part, tolerated the Tahrir\u2019s rule over Idlib, ending its targeting of the group\u2019s leadership in exchange for counter-terrorism cooperation against groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. There\u2019s no telling, though, if foreign jihadists inside the Tahrir will see their emirate as a safe haven for launching attacks.
Meanwhile, Israel has watched from the sidelines, with anxiety. Even though the country regularly clashed with Iran\u2019s forces in Syria, the Ba\u2019ath regime had crushed Palestinian insurgents, and restrained terror attacks across the border. Tahrir al-Shams leaders would evict Iran\u2014but many have been sympathetic to Hamas.
Eleven years ago, al-Qaeda jihadists pulled up before a statue of a turbaned man with glowering eyes, knotted eyebrows, and a robust beard, standing outside the museum at Maarat al-Numan.
Then, they sprayed the statue with bullets, before cutting off the bronze head. The man it commemorated, the 10th-century atheist philosopher and poet Abul Ala Marri, had written:
\u201cThe inhabitants of the earth are two sorts,
Those with brains but no religion,
And those with religion but no brains.\u201d
Likely, many Syrians are wondering if he was right.
Praveen Swami
The writer is contributing editor at ThePrint. Views are personal.
Courtesy: The Print<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cLook, Shi\u2019a,\u201d man in the grainy video declaims smugly, \u201cthis is how you will end up, you dogs.\u201d Eleven years ago, jihadists from the ranks of al-Nusra, al-Qaeda\u2019s branch in Syria, stormed the small village of Hatla, on the banks of the Euphrates and proceeded to slaughter dozens of children, women and elderly residents. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[395],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}