The Syrian jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) surprised the world and probably itself with its almost unimpeded conquest of Aleppo at the weekend, conquering in hours territory that had been bloodily fought over for many years. And like an ancient bacterium released from melting permafrost, the sudden unfreezing of Syria’s assumed frozen conflict has released noxious old strains of geopolitical discourse into a very different world. One of the things that made the Syrian war, at its height, so hard for casual observers to understand was that it was a series of rapidly-shifting, amoral and pragmatic alliances and betrayals. Yet these convoluted dynamics were filtered for external observers through a moralising internet war, aimed at mobilising foreign intervention: the results were disastrous for Syria’s people, on all sides.
This time around, we may still hope that things turn out differently. Rather than a reversion to the great crisis of a decade ago, the dramatic events of the weekend, and the international reactions, highlight how far the region, and the wider world, have changed since the war’s bloody height.
Now locked in dangerous rivalry over Ukraine, the United States and Russia had, over the past decade, come to a workable modus vivendi over Syria. The assumption was that Russian intervention had more or less won the war for Assad, with only the details of a final durable peace to be settled. Indeed, Moscow’s 2015 intervention was itself a response to just such a sudden jihadist-led offensive — led by the same actors breaking out of their Idlib confinement, with what is now HTS then the Syrian al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra. Rhetoric aside, the Russian intervention came as a welcome opportunity for Washington to wash its hands of the long-derailed Syrian revolution, focusing instead on the campaign to dismantle the Islamic State, the war’s most dramatic unintended consequence, using the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as its most reliable and least problematic proxy.
This time around, the United States, which in 2015 was still officially committed to Assad’s overthrow, but in practice focused on arming Syrian rebels enough to force him to the negotiating table, is happy to take a back seat. The State Department’s communique emphasising that Washington has no hand in the matter, that HTS is still on America’s list of proscribed terrorist groups, and that the ultimate cause of the renewed fighting is Assad’s intransigent refusal to come to a durable peace settlement, is a masterpiece of the genre. The United States is, in 2024, physically present but for the most part genuinely uninvolved in a conflict in which strategic defeat at Russia’s hands had come to seem the most stable and manageable outcome. Aloofly urging all sides to respect human rights and come to a quick and lasting peace settlement, as the US statement does, is probably the optimum American attitude to the current crisis.
For European powers, whose ambivalent attitude to the Syrian revolution itself was rapidly overshadowed by the consequent refugee crisis, which upturned the continent’s politics, the only current strategic interest in Syria is in preventing a reprise of the same demographic tsunami. European diplomatic normalisation with Assad, with the aim of returning as many Syrian refugees as possible, is, we must assume, now on hold. Pragmatic normalisation with HTS itself, with the same motivation, is not out of the question. The overriding European fear will be that any attempted Damascus campaign to reconquer its newly lost territory will mean a resumption of the devastating aerial campaign of the 2010s, backed by Russia with all the additional innovations in the art of killing learned in Ukraine. Equally, any HTS persecution of the ethnic and religious minorities now under its rule will provoke its own new refugee flow. Either scenario, should those uprooted direct themselves to Europe’s shores, would represent another body blow to Europe’s wavering liberal order. Who rules Syria, and how, is now far less of a concern for European leaders than who will rule Europe, and how.
Instead it is regional actors, and Russia, that will determine the outcome of the war’s sudden reflorescence. During the 2010s, the Arab states dramatically prolonged and worsened the Syrian war through their backing of rival rebel groups for their own narrow ends. Qatar and Kuwait funded jihadist groups so lavishly that more or less secular rebels adopted increasingly fundamentalist rhetoric and aesthetics to procure weapons and influence. Saudi Arabia, contrary to the perception many Western observers held, favoured various broadly secular potential strongmen among the rebel leadership, as part of its general fear of jihadist militancy at home; Jordan reluctantly backed broadly secular rebel groups to keep the war as far from its borders as possible and satisfy the geopolitical whims of its American patron.
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SubscribeI just feel sorry for the Christians caught in the middle of these crazy Islamists arguing over whose Allah was or was not somebody’s son in law. Let us hope we don’t end up with any of the latter as “refugees”.
Yes – none of our enlightened and compassionate rulers have ever had much to say about the cleansing of Christianity from the ME by their allies in these endless wars.
How ironic that the only place in the Middle East where Christians are not just protected but thriving.
Yes we supported the rebels as part of the Arab spring, until we discovered they were mostly Sunni jihadists with a habit of decorating their tanks with the heads of the opposing soldiery. Another successful liberal intervention!
But wait! Didn’t William Hague tell us that democracy was coming to the Middle East? What went wrong?
Arabs don’t do democracy. All they respect and recognise us a strong hand.
An excellent summation – my compliments to the journalist who wrote this. Thank you, Aris.
Ahhhh… but according to BritGestaPlod ” Extreme right wingers” are far more of a ” threat” than Islamists in nubritn.
I didn’t realize that Syria had stopped being at war. Interesting how it is seldom news when one group of Muslims attacks another group of Muslims. No college campuses become centers of protest, no citizen groups march and chant, and no politicians bang their desks in self-righteous outrage.
That should not take away from what is a good article, but it should be part of the discussion. Our all too often selective interest in geopolitical events becomes hard to take seriously when things that deserve at least some attention go ignored.
Ah yes, depose of the strongman! That worked out so well in Iraq and Libya. What could possibly go wrong?
A very well informed article. Thank you.
Most percipiant article I have read since sabbatical study in Syria in late 2010. The West acted appallingly and shot itself in the foot by causing the immigration crisis in Europe. Tame poodle Haig followed the Yanks and the Saudis. Another black day in our international history. 90% of Syrians knew that the Assads were the ONLY bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism. Just look how we made those poor people suffer!
A lot of money and blood spent devoted to what exactly? We used to have a colonial administrator for this sort of thing who’d send a gunboat upriver armed with Lee Enfields and a Lewis gun. Hang the chief and his older sons, end of problem. I blame the liberals. Meh!
It should not be forgotten that the Syrian imbroglio was organised by the US/West in concert with their Middle Eastern subalterns to weaken, or preferably, upend Iran. That objective still remains in view. But now there is a hierarchy of objectives, and the primary one is Ukraine and how to help it. The hope is that were the Russians to get more actively involved in Syria again they may be more easily dealt with in Ukraine.
The very best thing would be to let these people murder each other as Allah intended. The civilized world should have nothing whatsoever to do with them.
Yes, perhaps we should listen to the chanting college students and let the oppressors simply remove themselves from the affairs of the oppressed. I’m sure they’ll work things out swimmingly on their own.