Syria has spooked MBS Regime change is contagious

Jolani has signalled inclusiveness, ordering his fighters not to “instil fear” into people of different sects. The Shi’ite minorities, such as Alawites and Ismailis, will be feeling especially vulnerable, given the extent to which they relied on Assad’s Alawite-dominated Baathist regime for protection. Yet there is no guarantee that Jolani will succeed in asserting his authority over the mosaic of Syria’s different faith or ethnic communities, which tend to arm themselves in times of civil strife. While a majority of Syrians are Sunni, its society contains a large diversity of ethnic and religious communities including Alawis, Armenians, Assyrians, Chechens, Druzes, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Ismailis and Turkomans. Before the civil war erupted, in 2011, polarising religious forces between Salafist-oriented groups supported by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Syria had an impressive record of permitting pluralist religious spaces, though not political dissent.

Assad’s fall is sure to have unnerved Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), along with other wealthy Gulf rulers. While they may relish the Iranian setback — two of Iran’s “axis of resistance” allies, Assad and Hezbollah, have effectively been sent off the field — the deeper implications of Syrian regime change must seem threatening. After years of civil war, during which some half a million people were killed and 14 million displaced, and which saw cities such as Aleppo pulverised by Russian air power and Syrian air force barrel bombs, the situation appeared to have been stabilised. The mainly Sunni rebels were safely contained in the north-western enclave of Idlib. And in May 2023, Syria was readmitted to the Arab League, a mark of “normalisation” supported by Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Now, the region has fallen to chaos again. The kings and emirs of the Gulf have good reasons to fear that the recent scenes of jubilation in Damascus and other Syrian cities could become harbingers of a new Arab Spring. After all, popular feeling against repressive political structures often poses a threat to incumbent regimes, especially to dynastic rulers such as the Assads or Sauds. As the Israeli analyst Zvi Bar’el observes: “When militias take over a country, regardless of their ideology, it threatens traditional regimes that rely on authoritarian control. Such success as was seen in the Arab Spring, is contagious and encourages the revival of organisations and rebel movements.”

Saudi Arabia was relatively unaffected by the Arab Spring in 2011. A “Day of Rage” announced on Facebook aimed at imitating the massive street protests occurring in Cairo and other Arab capitals, but the movement fizzled out after would-be demonstrators received messages on their phones threatening fines or national expulsion. By contrast, in neighbouring Bahrain, where a Sunni dynasty presides over a restive Shi‘a majority, there were weeks of sit-ins and protests. The Saudis eventually sent troops across the causeway to assist the island’s government in restoring order.

The Assad regime may come to loom large in the annals of human torture and misery after a decade of civil war. But the Western-friendly Saudis, who are not currently facing the threat of internal conflict, can hardly be described as laggards in this area, with their high levels of political repression. Since MBS became the de facto ruler in 2015, around 1,400 people have been executed by the state, including minors.

The triumph of Jolani, and his Turkish backers, poses a dilemma for MBS. He and other Gulf rulers may be happy to see the anti-Western “axis of resistance” defanged, based as it is on a “Shi‘ite crescent” stretching from Iran to the Shi‘ite heartlands of southern Lebanon. The Saudi kingdom was founded on an alliance between the tribal power of the Al Saud family and the explicitly anti-Shi‘ite ideology of Wahhabism — and, for a long time, its strategy was to foster a disdain towards or even hatred of Shi’ism that persists to this day. When the Sunni minority in Iraq felt vulnerable after the US invasion that removed the (Sunni) Saddam Hussein, Saudi clerics spread fear of the Shi’ite danger, warning against the murder, torture and displacement of Sunni Iraqis. After the Arab Spring uprisings that lit the fuse of civil war in Syria, the Saudi government adopted a policy of “‘sectarianisation”. Madawi al-Rasheed, a historian and anthropologist, sees this as “a deliberate counter-revolutionary strategy…deployed to exaggerate religious differences and hatred and prevent the development of national non-sectarian politics”.

More than a decade ago, the emergence in Syria of a Sunni-dominated regime of neo-fundamentalist or “salafist” colouring would have suited the Saudi agenda perfectly. Over the years, the Saudi regime has spent billions of petrodollars promoting salafism (a neo-conservative type of religiosity, with emphasis on outward observance) throughout the Islamic world. According to several estimates, the sums spent by the Saudis on dawa (evangelism) prior to 2016 ranges from $70 billion to $100 billion. This dynamic dates back to the oil-boom years of King Faisal (r. 1964-75), who saw the Muslim Brotherhood and other salafist movements as necessary counterweights to the secular-oriented Arab nationalism promoted by Egypt’s charismatic leader Abd al-Nasser. Muslim Brotherhood exiles, such as Muhammad Qutb, brother of the movement’s leading intellectual Sayyid Qutb, were welcomed to teach in the Saudi kingdom, where Muhammad’s students included the young Osama bin Laden.

The Iranian revolution of 1979 and, more strongly, the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 (with 15 of the 19 hijackers hailing from Saudi Arabia) led to an eventual volte-face in Saudi religious orientation. The change was epitomised by a state-sanctioned sermon delivered by Shaikh Abdulrahman al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, hailing the vision of MBS as the “young, ambitious, and divinely-inspired” crown prince, comparable to the great Umar ibn-al-Khattab, second caliph of Islam or “deputy” to the Prophet Muhammad. The sermon, broadcast live on cable networks and social media, was delivered less than three weeks after the murder and physical dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. A former champion of the Saudi regime, Khashoggi was like Erdoğan a “soft” supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood — a movement that includes not only hardened jihadists such as Jolani, but constitutionally minded politicians such as Rachid al-Ghannouchi, leader of the Ennahda Party in Tunisia. The Brotherhood, once championed by King Faisal, is now anathematised in both the Gulf (with the exception of Qatar) and Washington as the primary threat to dynastic rule.

The Saudi volte-face was a necessary prerequisite to the Abraham Accords signed between Israel, Bahrain and the UAE in September 2020, (and later with Sudan and Morocco). It was negotiated in part by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a family friend and political supporter of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In September 2023, Saudi Arabia was on the point of “normalising” relations with Israel, with Riyadh allowing journalists to write op-eds in their favour, and MBS himself telling the US Fox News that “every day we get closer” to a deal. The October 7 attack by Hamas, killing more than 1,200 Israelis and taking several hundred hostages, put paid to these prospects, as Israel’s counter-attack on Gaza produced Dresden-like scenes of urban devastation and many thousands of civilian casualties. Last November, at a gathering of Islamic leaders in Riyadh, the Crown Prince even used the “G-word”, accusing Israel of carrying out “collective genocide” against the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Although the Gaza war may be coming to an end, “normalisation” between the Saudi kingdom and Israel now seems a distant prospect — even if Kushner returns as his father-in-law’s Middle East adviser next year. The international outrage caused by the Gaza counter-attack, along with genocidal statements by some Israeli leaders and the evident failure of the Biden administration to restrain its Israeli ally, has put the lid on normalisation for the foreseeable future. While Saudi Arabia, unlike Qatar, lacks a free press, polls are sometimes permitted. A rare poll published in December 1993 by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy found that 90% of Saudis think that Arab countries should sever all ties with Israel “in protest against its military action in Gaza”.

Thanks largely to the Gaza war, and to the failure of the Trump administration to retaliate in support of the Saudis after an Iranian attack on the oil refinery at Abqaiq in September 2019, Saudi Arabia has pivoted away from US dependency. The Saudi-Iran rapprochement in 2023 was brokered, not by Kushner or the White House, but by President Xi Jinping of China. When the Chinese president visited Riyadh in December 2022, he was given fulsome honours. Not only was he greeted with a purple carpet, but Saudi jets escorted his plane streaming the green and white colours of the national flag. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to visit, MBS kept him waiting for some 12 hours before granting him an audience.

Saudi Arabia’s orientation away from the West and towards the global south is heralded by its upcoming membership of Brics. It will join the existing acronymic members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa — alongside Iran, the UAE, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia. Though faced with declining oil revenues, MBS may be heartened by the fact that he is now able to trade oil products in the Chinese currency, avoiding the sanctions imposed on Russia by US dollar leverage. And despite the cutbacks on his ambitious plans for Vision 2030, aimed at weaning his economy off oil, a future in a world market dominated by China and the global south could be rosy indeed. That is provided he is clever enough, or lucky enough, to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi — or, indeed, of Bashar al-Assad.