EDITORIAL: Western and Middle Eastern capitals and commentators alike taking comfort in the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, predicting peace and tranquillity in the Levant now that the last Baathist dynastic dictatorship is history; but they might be in for some brutal surprises of their own not too far down the road.
Let’s not forget that the HTS (Hayat Tahrir al Sham), which appeared out of nowhere and took down a 50-plus year-old regime in a matter of days, is the latest reincarnation of the old, US-EU-GCC-Turkey funded and armed fundamentalist al-Nusra front.
Yet nobody’s taken time out from their celebrations so far to explain how Abu Mohammad al-Golani, a former al-Qaeda commander who spent years in a US prison in Iraq, came to command it and garner support from powerful, most likely western, intelligence agencies.
Everybody knows, of course, just where the meticulous planning and weapons used to decapitate the government came from; and how the sudden, final push coincided with US-backed Israeli gains against Iran and Hezbollah.
These questions will find answers in due course, no doubt, but for now it’s clear that Iran’s reach has been severely degraded. Its militias have been defanged and its only leverage in the Mediterranean is finished.
Surely, there’s a lot to cheer there for western capitals, Israel and, to a lesser extent, the GCC bloc and Turkey — the last one being the real new power broker in Syria. But that does not mean that the road ahead will be smooth.
Even when it was openly backed by the US and all its allies, the Nusra Front made no secret of its extremist sectarian tendencies, hunting down and killing religious minorities across the length and breadth of the land under its control. Golani’s past with al-Qaeda, too, can neither be forgotten nor easily written off.
And while the western media right now is all praise for his apparent transformation into a peacemaker who’s forbidden his soldiers from carrying out revenge and/or sectarian attacks, HTS’s rank and file comprises the same head-chopping mercenaries that were used across the region just a decade ago, from Iraq all the way to Libya; and neither turned out as the so-called liberators had hoped or promised.
In these circumstances, the announcement from Washington that the US will keep a close eye on things, especially the transition to a new government, comes as no surprise. Some outside authority will have to ensure order. But that will run into complications of its own. Other countries will want to have a say.
Turkey, for example, has been positioning for just such a moment since the original civil war broke out in 2011. The same can be said about GCC countries as well.
In the final analysis, though, it wasn’t just exogenous factors that led to Bashar al-Assad’s downfall. His military, just like his government, had been fragile and hollow since the civil war that was only won by outside help from Iran and Russia. This time, when both were distracted by different conflicts,
Damascus simply crumbled like a pack of cards. And while Bashar himself was quick and smart enough to avoid the fate that met Qadhafi and Saddam, whether or not his Alawite compatriots will be spared the kind of sectarian cleansing that the Middle East has already seen only too much of; remains to be seen.
Last but not least, when Bashar came to power in 2000 there was hope he would be less autocratic and brutal than his father, Hafez. But Bashar’s rule was strongly characterised by a reign of brutalities and atrocities that no one could have imagined or envisioned. Bashar, in fact, was found to be more unfair and unjust to majority of Syrians, including opposition, than Moammar Qadhafi of Libya, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt to their respective populations.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024
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