Up until the moment he fled to Moscow this week, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad stubbornly refused to smooth the path to a new administration. His army, meanwhile, made no attempt to resist the main group of rebel forces as it entered the Syrian capital, and his remaining backers, Iran and Russia, conspicuously failed to reaffirm their support. More than fifty years of rule by the Assad family dissolved within hours.
The Baath Party, built on the core of a national army drawn from Syria’s Alawite heterodox community, came to power in 1970. More than two-thirds of the country’s population were Sunni Muslims, and a much smaller percentage, including the Alawite population of the coastal mountains, had historic links to Shi’ite offshoots of Islam. Baathism had sought to lift up an impoverished Alawite community that had advanced within the military under Ottoman and French Mandates favouring recruitment from coastal regions whose population followed a largely secular approach to Islam.
The scion of the Assad family, Hafez al-Assad, had risen to political power via his career in the airforce, and was using savage repression to tighten an increasingly tyrannical grip. When the largely Sunni population of Hama, on the eastern flank of the coastal mountains, rose up in 1982 in response to the regime’s failed economic policies, the army (under Hafez’s younger brother Rifaat) shelled the town into submission.
By the time I took up a diplomatic posting in Damascus in the post-Hama era, Syria’s state-dominated economy had stagnated and the system was being held together by repression, cronyism and corruption. Before he died in 2000, Hafez al-Assad had made clear that his successor should be drawn from his immediate family; in the event, power passed by default to option number three, his youngest son Bashar, who was hastily pulled out of his quiet life as an ophthalmologist in London. Bashar’s reserved, even awkward, demeanour contrasted not just with his father’s rock-like persona but also with his uncle Rifaat’s obvious relish for meeting dissent with massive firepower.
During his first decade as president Bashar tinkered with some of the absurdities of Baathist economics. Observers often assumed that these changes would eventually be accompanied by political reforms, but they had failed to realise that modernising the fringes of the economy would simply open paths for a new generation of cronies to practise corruption on a mammoth scale.
When the first embers of rebellion broke out in 2011 (often falsely attributed to the “Arab Spring”), it was difficult to predict how Bashar’s image-makers would rise to the challenge. Many assumed the young president would at least lend an ear to the public’s complaints about their worsening circumstances, but Bashar instead responded with ruthless, Hama-scale repression, this time deployed across the whole country.
After my retirement from the Australian foreign service in 2003, I had decided to further pursue my interest in the archaeology of the Middle East. The first edition of my book about Syria’s extraordinary heritage, Monuments of Syria had hit the shelves just as the initial wave of modest economic reforms was encouraging a new foreign exchange source for the country: tourism. I realised that the best way of combining writing with visiting the region was to lecture to the Australian and British tour groups whose interest had partly been awakened by my writings.
My last visit to Syria, with a group of English enthusiasts, was in April 2011. The embers of revolt were igniting, prompting worried calls to London to see what could be rescued of the program. On earlier tours I’d found that good-quality Syrian guides were an essential ingredient, and on this occasion we had the most outstanding local expert I’d encountered, Ahmad Yassin. His skills enabled me to confine my role to chats on the bus and discussion around the dinner table, where Ahmad also imparted his understanding of Syria’s mix of cultures.
I vividly remember how, on day five of the tour — 30 March 2011 — we set out from Palmyra to take the long motorway corridor up to Aleppo. Ahmad and our driver were naturally keen to listen to Bashar address the nation in response to rising casualties among largely unarmed demonstrators. The widespread hope was that Bashar would defuse the tension and offer something that would lead the nation back from the brink.
He did no such thing. He reeled off the usual Baathist lines interspersed with accusations (not entirely unwarranted) that the rebellion was being fuelled by outside fighters who had fled from the chaos across the Euphrates in Iraq. Ahmad and our driver were totally deflated, and the bus ride finished in silence. I left Syria four days later with my fears for Syria leavened only by happy memories of Ahmad’s commitment to the idea of his country as an assemblage of the numerous cultures and ethnicities we had seen on our tour.
Ahmad’s sense of Syria drew on the positive side of Baathist secular education, which he blended with his own Muslim upbringing while always carefully avoiding contentious claims. As the crisis descended into new levels of nightmare I received reports that his health had declined. He was still in his thirties when he suffered his first stroke; a second took him not long after.
After the tumultuous events of the intervening thirteen years, Bashar al-Assad’s lanky figure had acquired the rigidity of the statue of his father that dominated the motorway to Homs up until the day after Damascus fell. Long detested as a North Korean–style monstrosity, the patriarchal megalith was expertly hacked away at the ankles until it toppled backwards.
Hafez’s son had refused all suggestions (from Arab peers and even from the Russians and Iranians) that it might be time to go. He remained as obdurate as ever until the Russians provided a plane to take him to Moscow “in the most secure way possible,” to borrow the words of Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov.
Of course, the war isn’t over yet. One of the major complications is the relationship between the group that now controls Damascus, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the pro-Turkish “Syrian National Army” (formerly the “Free Syrian Army”), which formed the northern flank of the drive to take Aleppo a fortnight ago.
It may be too optimistic to hope that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham will be guided more by Nelson Mandela’s transition model in South Africa than by the chaotic US-led attempt to helicopter a totally new administration into Baghdad in 2003. So far, the installation of a governing structure in Damascus has avoided alienating most elements they had quietly succumbed to the rule of the Assads. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s leader has dropped his nom-de guerre, al-Julani, and reverted to his family name (al-Shaar); in interviews he has invited minority ethnic and confessional groups to believe they have a stake in the success of the new government. But will the former al Qaeda fighters in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s ranks expect more reward for the years spent isolated in Idlib after they were moved from Aleppo under the “deconfliction” agreement in 2017 sponsored by Russia and Turkey?
It could be quite some time before any “peace dividend” is evident in the eastern regions of Syria where other external players may linger, hoping to cash in their chips. On the central Syria steppe, the countryside between the north–south motorways and the Euphrates basin is peppered with “Islamic State” stay-behind elements whose attacks on oil and gas drilling teams or itinerant Syrian officials climbed to almost 500 this year. The US presence in northeast Syria and a smaller US enclave on the Syrian side of the borders with Jordan and Iraq have done little to tackle these problems. In the northeast sector, Turkish distrust of US collaboration with the largely Kurdish “Syrian Democratic Forces” is likely to complicate any dismantling of this foreign presence.
Finally, in an astonishing display of overkill, the Israel Defence Forces have mounted more than 500 attacks on bases, depots, anchorages and airfields of Syrian regular forces over the past week. They have also reserved their right to wipe out what remains of Syria’s conventional forces, including its entire naval resources, which might have played a part in creating a Syrian government with real authority. Israel’s wilful destruction of possible evidence of chemical weapons has also headed off any attempt to investigate the issue under recognised international mechanisms.
None of the players (internal and external) who have contributed to the tragic meltdown in Syria since 2011 can claim to be without fault, but some can still make amends. Nor can Baathism be assigned all blame for the actions of every group that streamed into the country over the years to end the Assads’ tyranny, some of them so determined to bring down Bashar that they brought even worse disasters. This risk was rarely perceived by outside commentators who publicised the brave battlers as another manifestation of an “Arab Spring” in the hope they would eventually nudge aside the murderous Salafists. It was the latter who soon dominated the ranks of the rebels.
Thirteen years of “civil war” — a term that glosses over the more dynamic contribution of outside players — have robbed Syria of most aspects of a viable state essential to restoring the economy, rebuilding infrastructure and rehousing the millions who have been displaced internally or abroad. An immediate end to the international community’s sanctions would incentivise, not hamper, this restoration process.
Syria sometimes surprises the world with its capacity to survive the worst natural and human-made disasters. As the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham forces took Aleppo this month, work was nearing completion on the minaret of the city’s Great Mosque, which had stood for eight centuries as the lighthouse of the city’s complex history. After it fell in a heap of rubble in April 2013 during the early battle for the old city, observers scoffed at the possibility it could be put back together. As the before and after photos below show, they were wrong. With luck, the minaret can serve again as a symbol of Syria’s regeneration. •
Minaret of the Great Mosque in Aleppo seen in 1984. Ross Burns
Work almost completed on the minaret’s restoration, as seen last month by the Aleppine photographer, Salah al-Maraashi (with his kind permission).
