Oasis Plan's Historical Primer, (4/5)

The phenomenon of the Arab Spring caused regimes in the Middle East and North Africa to topple like so many dominoes. Between Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Algeria, 148 years’ worth of monocracy fell, and not always for the better. No regime fell harder than Syria, which makes its story a sharp admonishment about the horrors which can occasion regime change.

The Arab Spring unleased civil war in Syria which lasted thirteen years. Into the theatre of Syria’s civil war burst a number of foreign powers, including the regional neighbors of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Israel, as well as powers further afield. For this reason, Syria may serve as an example of why Lyndon LaRouche’s Oasis Plan is needed in the Middle East to disincentivize conflict by giving the regional players a stake in peace.

This is the fifth article in a septempartite series which presents LaRouche’s Oasis Plan. To contextualize the decisions now facing the statesmen as they evaluate the Plan, the pertinent regional history is recounted in five primers, of which this is the fourth. If you are already familiar with Middle Eastern history, then please feel free to jump to the final installment’s conclusion after reviewing the introduction.

From a Dungeon in Daraa

Syria’s defeat in the Six Day War of 1967 and Israel’s seizure of the Golan Heights led to soul searching in the Syrian military. (¶ 18-21) A cadre of disaffected officers organized a coup against the civilian government in 1970, installing the ringleader, Syrian Air Force Commander Hafez al-Asaad.

Al Asaad as president tolerated no dissent. This he proved in February 1982 when his regime suppressed an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, during which thousands of protesters were killed. He even opposed civilian access to the technologies of facsimile and internet, lest dissent be propagated. After thirty years of totalitarian rule, Hafez al-Asaad died in the year 2000, and the Syrian parliament – knowing what was expected of it – immediately amended the constitution to lower the minimum presidential age from forty to thirty-four so that Hafez’s eldest son Beshar al-Asaad could succeed to the presidency. (¶ 4)

Beshar consolidated his hold on power by appointing Alawites to key leadership positions within the military and government. The Alawites are a Shi’ite subsect to which the al-Asaads belong, based in the Latakia governorate in the northwest. The predominantly Sunni population considers the Alawites outliers in terms of Muslim doctrine, but Syria circa 2010 was mostly secular, so different sects and religions got along well enough (time stamp 05:23 - 06:39). Even Beshar’s appointment of his fellow Alawites was not unusual given that Arab society is organized around the tribe, such that nepotism of this sort is expected.

When the Arab Spring flared up in March 2011, several teenagers were arrested in the city of Daraa for allegedly drawing anti-governmental graffiti. They were imprisoned, tortured and at least one, thirteen-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb was killed, which unleashed in Daraa a massive protest. The regime’s security forces fired live into the crowd, but that only inflamed and spread the protests. It reached such a pitch that President al-Asaad began to dangle the prospects of reforms, pluralism and political prisoners’ release, yet the protesters distrusted him and demanded his resignation. President al-Asaad instead dispatched the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) to quell the protests in Daraa and Damascus. However, some of the soldiers sent to suppress the protesters, wound up defecting to them, bringing their armaments to the cause.

On June 4th, 2011, the SAA clashed with protesters in Jisr ash-Shugar (township wherein President Hafez al-Asaad had massacred hundreds of protesters in 1980), yet the newly armed protesters fought back and killed 100 soldiers. Former soldiers who had defected to the rebels then coalesced to form the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in July 2011. To exert some leadership on the opposition groups forming in Syria, purported leaders of such organizations convened in Istanbul, Turkey, to form the Syrian National Council (SNC). Turkey pledged support to the FSA by allowing it to operate along Turkey’s common border with Syria to its south, and Turkey called for no-fly zones over Syria.

Foreign Dramatis Personæ

Foreign intervention featured prominently in the Syrian Civil War, and it started from the very beginning. In addition to Turkey, the U.S. President Barack Obama at this time condemned al-Asaad’s violent suppression of the protests, demanded his resignation, and froze the Syrian leadership’s assets in the USA. The European Union (EU) followed suit. The Arab League – led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar – expelled Syria, imposed sanctions and arranged assistance to the Asaadist regime’s opposition. To counter Saudi influence, Shi’ite Iran mobilized Hezbollah fighters to Syria in defense of the regime.

Amongst the “foreigners” at play in the Syrian Civil War, the Kurds in the north seized the opportunity to assert themselves as the Asaadist regime was preoccupied. Kurds are an ethnicity inhabiting an area which spans the modern countries of Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Armenia. In Syria they accounted for the largest ethnic minority, comprising 5-10% of Syria’s 21 million inhabitants as of 2011. Their language of Kurdish is Indo-European and has been transliterated in Arabic script, Cyrillics and the Roman alphabet. Kurds are predominantly (>90%) Sunni Muslims, though some identify as Shi’ites, Christians, Zoroastrians and even Jewish.

In relation to the Syrian Civil War, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK its Kurdish acronym) was created as a militant organization. Its Syrian offshoot of the People’s Protection Units (YPG) began to control three discontinuous pockets of territory collectively called Rojava. Rojava’s western canton was based around the city of Afrin, its central canton around Kobani, and its eastern canton around Cizre, just over the border in Turkey. Oil fields in Rojava began to generate steady revenue for the Kurds as they became another crucial player in the Syrian Civil War.

Rebels without a Cause

By late 2011, the SAA was playing whack-a-mole with rebel flare-ups across the country. The SAA would attack a town, quell the protests, but lose soldiers to defections, and the defectors would re-take the town upon the SAA’s departure. Rebels established pockets of resistance in places like Idlib and al-Zabadani. In April 2012, the United Nations proposed a ceasefire supervised by former UN Secretary General Kofi Anan, but the parties never honored the terms. By May 2012, defections to the FSA had amounted to around 60,000.

The FSA gained control over the Deir-ez-Zor governorate in late 2012, and by November of that year, FSA captured Saraquib along the M5 highway, connecting the cities of Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus. FSA gained ground in the governorates of Aleppo, Idlib and Hama, seized the towns of Douma and Yarmuk outside Damascus, and even penetrated into President al-Asaad’s Alawite power base of the Latakia governorate.

With growing territory under its control, the FSA was spread thin to garrison it all, and that is when cracks appeared in the façade. The FSA knew that it wanted to depose al-Asaad, but it had no unified plan for what type of regime should follow. In a sense, the FSA were rebels without a cause… beyond the current president’s ouster.

The FSA was a patchwork of around twenty-two armed groups of varying ideologies, some secular and others religious. These were groups such as Liwa al-Islam (later rebranded to Jaish al-Islam) based in Damascus, Sugor al-Sham and Liwa al-Tawhid, both based in Aleppo. In December 2012, eleven Islamist groups (such as Ahrar al-Sham) coalesced into the Syrian Islamic Front and professed no allegiance to the FSA. Thus, sectarianism was on the rise in Syria.

The regime in 2012 was also organizing militias loyal to the Asaadist government. Some of these were supporters of al-Asaad’s Baath Party, such as the Kataeb al-Baath and Suqur al-Sahraa, whilst others were drawn up from coreligionists, such as Dareh al-Sahel and Dareh al-Areen. Collectively these pro-regime militias were called shabiha and became the National Defense Forces (NDF), which came to be commanded by Iran’s Major General Qasem Suleymani.

That December, the organization Friends of Syria convened in Antalya, Turkey, to coalesce 260 rebel militias into the Syrian Military Council (SMC). This coalition supported by the USA and EU intended to deliver outside aid and arms to the rebels, but no trust existed between the SMC and the coalesced rebel militias, such that the militias jealously competed with one another for supplies. The Islamists deftly exploited the internecine competition for a time.

Martyrs for Prophet and Caliph

Riding sectarianism’s trend, another entity which appeared in Syria around 2013 and quickly rose to the fore was the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). ISIS sprang out of al-Qaeda and formed in opposition to the USA-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Its objective was the establishment of a multinational theocracy ruled under sharia by a caliph. This caliphate would be averse to Western influences and involvement. It is believed that many of ISIS’ first proponents in Syria came from Iraq, but ISIS recruits worldwide from the Ummah (followers of Islam), including from Muslims in Western countries (pp. 6-10). In 2013, ISIS was led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (p. 88) The organization itself and the journalism about it have cycled through several names such as ISIS, ISIL, IS and Daesh, but all refer to the same entity, albeit at different times in its existence, or in different theatres of operation.

Another Islamist group was Jabhat al-Nusra, led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani. Al Nusra also desired a regime under fundamentalist sharia, but al-Nusra was focused just on Syria and did not share ISIS’ multinational perspective. On January 11th, 2013, al-Nusra stormed the Taftanaz air base in northern Idlib, seizing the tanks, helicopters and rocket-propelled grenades in storage. On March 4th, 2013, al-Nusra and Araz al-Sham conquered the city of Raqqa, which put rebels in control of a corridor running from Aleppo in the northwest to Al Bukamal in the far southeast, where the Euphrates River flows into Iraq.

On April 9th, 2013, ISIS leader al-Baghdadi divulged that al-Nusra was a branch of al-Qaeda in Syria and would be subsumed within ISIS. Al Julani rejected this declaration, yet many foreign fighters defected from al-Nusra to ISIS.

In May 2013, the NDF supported by Hezbollah fiercely besieged the FSA in the township of Al Qusayr nearby the Lebanese border to the west. The SMC – headquartered in distant Turkey – tried to coordinate a defense, but crucial information was not reaching the SMC in real-time, and the FSA’s component rebel groups outright refused the SMC’s orders. The NDF dislodged the FSA from Al Qusayr, thereby revealing the SMC’s ineffectiveness and the FSA’s disunity.

On August 21st, 2013, Damascus’ outskirts of Ghouta were subjected to a rocket-delivered gas attack which killed hundreds of residents. Despite Russian allegations that the rebels had organized this as a false-flagger, all evidence suggests that the rockets were those which had been in the SAA’s inventory. (p. 20)

On September 19th, 2013, ISIS ousted the FSA from the city of A’zaz, 5 miles (8.2km) south of the Turkish border. This defeat shattered any remaining semblance of unity in the FSA to such extent that the FSA began to disintegrate into various factions according to the fighters’ personal or ideological preferences.

In January 2014, ISIS routed al-Nusra and Araz al-Sham from Raqqa, followed by the towns of Manbij and Jarabulus in northern Syria. Between April 10th and July 13th, 2014, ISIS wrested the Deir ez-Zor governorate from the FSA, which opened the common border to Iraq for a steady stream of jihadists therefrom. ISIS also captured land from the YPG in the Hasakah governorate, which left ISIS in control of the largest stretch of territory in Syria, complete with vast reserves of petroleum and military materiel. On June 29th, 2014, ISIS proclaimed the caliphate a reality, with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as the caliph.

In the areas controlled by ISIS, brutality became a norm. Any grievous transgressions (hudud) observed by the al-Hisbah (morality police) could merit public execution, flogging or amputation, and al-Hisbah was always surveilling the populace. Captured fighters were beheaded on camera, as these video recordings served for deterrence of enemies and recruitment of sympathizers. Reports surfaced about ISIS even crucifying people. A number of churches were razed, and Christians were expelled if they did not convert at gunpoint to Islam or pay a jizrah or tax on infidels (pejoratively called kafirs).

On September 27th, 2014, ISIS assaulted the Kurdish-controlled city of Kobani which borders Turkey to the north. Around 150,000 Kurds escaped into Turkey in the coming weeks, which put that country in an awkward position. No love was lost between Turkey and the Kurds whom it had been fighting vigorously since 1984, so President Recep Erdogan was initially reluctant to intervene against ISIS as it cleared the Kurds from Kobani on Turkey’s figurative doorstep. At the same time, the flood of Kurds into Turkey was highly undesirable, so the Turkish parliament authorized military force against ISIS, yet Turkey dispatched no such force against ISIS at that time.

Instead, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) conducted airstrikes against ISIS in Kobani. On October 19th, the USAF air-dropped supplies and munitions to the YPG in Kobani fighting ISIS. As the USA wanted to counteract ISIS in Syria without sending its own troops, it founded the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a loose association of eight armed groups, which the USA would sponsor in their fight against ISIS. The YPG was the largest and best trained of the SDF’s groups. YPG also found a transient ally in ISIS’ main competitor Jabhat al-Nusra. Finally, on January 26th, 2015, four months after ISIS’ assault on Kobani, the YPG and its allies expelled ISIS from the city.

Despite losing Kobani, ISIS was still well entrenched in Syria. On May 15th, 2015, ISIS expelled the SAA from the ancient city of Palmyra in central Syria, whereupon it executed some 262 captives, mostly by public beheadings, and vandalized pre-Islamic antiquities such as Assyrian monuments and artifacts. On August 6th, 2015, ISIS expelled the SAA from al-Quryatayn, executing hundreds of townsfolk suspected of collaboration with the Asaadist regime, and imposing the jizya on Christians.

Lest this be confused with a story of good versus evil, the Syrian Civil War was more a case of bad versus worse. Parallel to ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra was gaining ground in Syria and consolidating its power by some of the same atrocities which ISIS was committing. In March 2015, al-Nusra vanquished the rebel group Harakat Hazm (HH), which the USA had been sponsoring. It is unclear whether al-Nusra eliminated all HH’s fighters, whether they fused into al-Nusra, or a combination of the two, but HH ceased to exist after the confrontation, and al-Nusra wound up with state-of-the-art armaments, courtesy of American taxpayers whom the CIA had bilked for $500 million just to train and arm 60 rebels in Syria. Around May 29th, 2015, al-Nusra (though fused into Ahrar al-Sham and re-branded as Jaish al-Fatah) seized the Idlib governorate from the SAA, and at gunpoint forced the Druze (a sect of Islam which many consider heretical) to convert to Sunni Islam and destroy their shrines and gravesites.

Al-Asaad Regains Ground

By September 2015, the Asaadist regime was corralled between al-Nusra in the west, ISIS in the east, the Kurds in the north, and the Southern Front (SF) – a moderate opposition group founded in 2014 and funded by the USA, UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan – to the south around the governorates of Daraa and as-Suwayda. At his nadir, President al-Asaad controlled only 26% of Syria’s territory.

Around this time, Russia had concluded its first phase of military strikes against Ukraine, in opposition to the new Russophobic government which ascended to power in 2014 during the Maidan Revolution. Russia thus had more wherewithal to assist its ally al-Asaad. Syria hosts Russia’s Tartus Naval Base on the Mediterranean, so Russia has a vested interest in Syria. Thus, on September 30th, 2015, Russia dispatched airstrikes to Syria against ISIS and other opposition groups, which reversed some of their territorial gains.

In conjunction with strikes from Russian warplanes as well as cruise missiles fired from four Russian battleships in the Caspian Sea, the SAA supported by Hezbollah advanced against the FSA north of Hama to secure the M5 highway on October 7th, 2015. Between October 15th – 25th, 2015, the SAA and Major General Suleymani’s NDF advanced against the FSA in the Aleppo governorate towards the M5, securing the objective through pyrrhic losses and severing the opposition’s supply lines from Turkey.

This was seen again on March 27th, 2016, when the SAA with Russian support ousted ISIS from Palmyra. On June 5th, 2016, the SAA, SAF and Russian warplanes commenced attacks on the FSA in Aleppo. After a prolonged siege and suffering several reversals, the Asaadist regime finally expelled the FSA from Aleppo on December 22nd, 2016. The city – believed to be the world’s oldest continually inhabited city – was left in ruins after six months of bombardment.

Kurdish Consolidation

As the regime in 2016 battled rebels to recover Hama, Palmyra and Aleppo, the Kurds in the north battled for their own interests. As explained earlier, the Kurdish territory of Rojava was split amongst three discontinuous cantons in the northwest (around Afrin), northcentral (Kobani) and northeast (Cirze, across the border in Turkey). In 2016 attempts were made to connect the cantons by the intervening territory’s seizure. On February 20th, 2016, the YPG ejected the FSA from the townships of Tall Rifaat and A’zaz, both due north from Aleppo. On August 22nd, 2016, in the northeast, the YPG evicted the SAA from al-Hasaka city, though not the whole eponymous governorate. On the same day in northcentral Syria, the YPG – with USAF support – expelled ISIS from the town of Manbij, along the Euphrates’ western banks.

The Kurdish territorial acquisitions consolidating Rojava greatly concerned the Kurds’ perennial adversary, Turkey. Additionally, ISIS was garrisoning strips of territory nearby the Turkish border. To neutralize these threats, the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) – some elements of which had staged a coup against President Ergodan on July 16th, 2016, which the citizenry foiled – launched two incursions into Syria. Between August 24th, 2016 – March 2017, Operation Euphrates Shield evicted ISIS from Jarabulus. (p. 28) From January 2018 – March 2018, Operation Olive Branch expelled the YPG from Afrin and Manbij. In summary, the Kurds experienced a string of victories, only for the Turks to divest them of some territories.

In all fairness, it is worthwhile to mention that on January 24th, 2017, diplomats from Turkey, Russia and Iran who had convened in Astana, Kazakhstan, issued a proposal for a limited ceasefire in Syria, by demarcating four demilitarized zones. These would freeze the major factions (i.e., SAA, SFA, ISIS and the SF) in time and territory until a more permanent solution could emerge. However, Turkey outright excluded any Kurdish representation at the conference, so the Kurds pursued their own interests via their campaign for consolidation, unbound by the proposed ceasefire.

ISIS into the sunset

On September 5th, 2017, the SAA finally dislodged ISIS from the Deir ez-Zor governorate. Russian airstrikes assisted the SAA, as did the Wagner Group, a private Russian company of elite military contractors. On October 18th, 2017, the SDF expelled ISIS from Raqqa.

On March 18th, 2018, the TAF and FSA captured Afrin from the YPG, displacing approximately 200,000 residents from the city and environs.

On April 6th and 7th, 2018, chemical attacks hit the city of Douma northeast of Damascus. The opposition group Jaish al-Islam had been controlling Douma at that time. The chemical attacks hospitalized around 100 people who presented symptoms of exposure to chlorine gas or even sarin. The SAA denied responsibility, though the independent watchdog Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and French intelligence assert that all evidence points to the chemical weapons having been delivered using ballistics within the SAA’s catalogued inventory. (p. 6) In any case, the SAA expelled Jaish al-Islam from Douma, though the SAA had to endure aerial bombardment from the USA, UK and France in reprisal for the SAA’s suspected use of chemical weapons.

Between July and August, 2018, the SAA seized the city of Daraa from the FSA. On August 2nd, 2018, the SAA ousted ISIS from the southern region bordering Jordan. With the war’s momentum in its favor, the SAA prepared an all-out offensive against the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, a derivative of Jaish al-Fatah, formed from a merger with Jabhat al-Nusra) in the governorates of Idlib, Aleppo, Latakia and Hama, but since TAF was embedded in some of these areas, President al-Asaad demurred lest he widen the war by antagonizing Turkey.

On December 20th, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 2000 troops from Syria, leaving only a skeletal force in place. The SDF’s predominant member, the YPG, worried about attacks from Turkey without the USA’s backing.

Independently, Turkey and Russia reached a deal to confine the anti-Asaadist rebels to the Idlib governorate and demilitarize this zone, enforcement of which would fall to these countries by way of joint ground patrols and fly-overs. HTS would be permitted to depart the area, and since HTS had established a technocratic civil government in Idlib back in November 2017, the area would have some governance besides that of the Asaadist regime. (¶ 15) Thus, the SAA would not assail this last stronghold of the opposition in exchange for HTS ceasing its activities and expansion. Instead, the HTS did the exact opposite by continuing its activities and expanding via acquisition of territory ceded by other rebel groups.

On March 23rd, 2019, the SDF flushed ISIS’ last hold-outs from the city of Baghuz along the Euphrates River bordering Iraq. On October 27th, 2019, ISIS’ self-proclaimed caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi supposedly killed himself as U.S. Commandos cornered him for apprehension at his compound in the Syrian township of Barisha.

Strange Bedfellows

President al-Asaad made strides in recovering control over Syria in 2019. One unexpected gain came from Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring, launched into Syria on October 9th, 2019. The TAF and SNA assailed the YPG in the cities of Tell Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, along Turkey’s southern border with Syria. The YPG surprisingly requested assistance from President al-Asaad against this incursion, which led to the SAA and its Russian allies occupying Manjib and Kobani.

On October 22nd, 2019, Russia and Turkey signed the Sochi Agreement whereby a buffer zone measuring 18 miles (30km) would stretch betwixt the Euphrates River and Iraq’s border to the east. Turkey would control most of the buffer zone, but Ruso-Syrian forces would patrol the border strip, except for Qamishli, which was the Kurdish Autonomous Area’s de facto capital. The agreement also demanded the YPG’s departure from the area.

Whatever the Sochi Agreement’s lofty intentions, compliance was more the exception than the rule. In practice, the arrangement mostly benefited the Asaadist regime by suspending the YPG’s activities as the SAA recouped lost territory. Amidst this suspension, the SAA recouped the M5 highway and most of Aleppo by February 17th, 2020.

On December 20th, 2019, President Trump ratified the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, which imposed sanctions and travel restrictions on the Asaadist regime. The legislation’s namesake was a photographer codenamed Caesar who had smuggled 55,000 digital photographs out of Syria which documented the regime’s practice of gruesomely torturing and killing prisoners, demonstrating that the ordeal which thirteen-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb suffered during incarceration in Daraa for alleged anti-governmental graffiti in March 2011 was more the rule than the exception.

If you can’t beat him, meet him

By July 2020, the Asaadist regime controlled around 65% of Syria’s territory, including the major urbanizations of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Latakia. HTS controlled Idlib and its environs in the northwest. The USA-backed rebelled were confined to the al-Tanf base, at the juncture of the borders for Syria, Jordan and Iraq, and the Kurds controlled Rojava in the north.

The worldwide pandemic of coronavirus surged in 2020, which may explain the lull in the Syrian Civil War. Syria was uniquely susceptible to contagion since the war had disrupted the distribution networks whereby testing kits would have circulated. Additionally, though the Asaadist regime discouraged public gatherings, it could not afford to impose lockdowns since the economy was too fragile after nine years of bitter civil war.

On May 27th, 2021, Beshar al-Asaad won a fourth term as President with 95.1% of the vote against two challengers. External observers derided the result as farcical.

On January 20th, 2022, limited fighting resumed as ISIS ambushed Ghwayran prison in the city of Hasakah under the SDF’s control. ISIS had hoped to liberate its fighters from captivity therein. The SDF finally regained control over Ghwayran prison after 332 casualties on all sides, with civilians included.

As if Syria had not endured enough misery during its extended Civil War, on February 6th, 2023, an earthquake of 7.8 magnitude struck northern Syria, centered just south of the Turkish city of Kahramanmaraş. Syria’s ongoing conflict rendered impossible any accurate documentation of casualties, but it was observed that many buildings in Syria easily crumbled during the earthquake since they had been compromised by repeated bombardment and detonations. The cost of repair was estimated at $5.2 billion.

On May 8th, 2023, the Arab League re-admitted President al-Asaad, since he had proven himself an implacable survivor. What the League may not have known was that al-Asaad was being propped up by foreign patrons, who soon enough would have less wherewithal to assist his regime since they were confronting problems closer to home.

End of Grace

On February 24th, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine and got bogged down in stiffer resistance than had been anticipated. This prevented Russia from allocating the same level of assistance to the Asaadist regime. Likewise, on October 8th, 2023, in support of its ally Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah became embroiled in a conflict with Israel. This conflict would elicit strikes by the Israeli Air Force (IAF) and drone attacks against Lebanon, and even a ground incursion into Lebanon by the IDF on October 1st, 2024. With life-or-death in the balance for Hezbollah, it had less assistance to lend to President al-Asaad.

President al-Asaad’s downfall began on December 5th, 2024, when the HTS ousted the SAA from Hama. Two days later, an organization called the Operations Room seized Damascus, forcing al-Asaad to flee to Russia. The Operations Room is believed to be composed of fighters from the SF which had disbanded in 2018. In total, over the course of ten days, the whole Asaadist regime disintegrated, and HTS emerged as the strongest entity remaining to govern war-ravaged Syria.

HTS’ leader abandoned his nom de guerre of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani for his given name of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa. He had kept the Salafist beard but swapped his camouflaged fatigues for an occidental suit and speaks now about rebuilding and reconciling Syria. This comes not a moment too soon, since this roiling civil war since 2011 is estimated to have killed 550,000 people and scattered 12 million.

Not that Syria is out of the woods yet. Al-Sharaa’s government has made progress in disarming former rebels or otherwise co-opting them into his regime, but there are pro-Asaad holdouts which harry the new regime through insurgency. Nor does it help that since December 2024 the IAF has conducted hundreds of airstrikes against Syria, purportedly to protect the Druze, though no evidence has surfaced to suggest that the new regime poses them any harm. Additionally, Israel has ramped up efforts to settle the Golan Heights since al-Asaad’s downfall, a strip of territory in Syria’s south which Israel had seized during the Six-Day War in 1967. In human terms, these actions are the functional equivalent of someone struggling to extinguish a blaze which is destroying his house, only for his onlooking neighbor to burn down his barn.