In his masterpiece Al-Muqaddima, the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun observed that, in a landscape of contending tribes, history is shaped by the use of force more than any other factor. Today, the Arabic-speaking Middle East is not a throng of some 300-million people united by a common ideology and shared interests; it is a diverse and dynamic region, seventy percent of which is Sunni Muslim with the remainder populated by dozens of minorities. Syria, with its own Sunni-Arab majority of seventy percent, may be representative of the region demographically, but it is distinguished by the rule of a minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shia Islam.
In recent days, a surprise rebel offensive has managed to capture Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, and now threatens to seize more territory. This swift Turkish-backed blitzkrieg has exposed the Ba’athist regime of Bashar al-Assad to its most serious challenge since the outbreak of the Syrian revolt more than a decade ago. The Assad family temporarily absconded to Moscow until the immediate danger of Damascus being sacked had passed. Syrian government warplanes have since responded by pounding Aleppo for the first time since 2016, and Russian military assets have been engaged in an effort to check the rebels’ advance.
The rapid rebel offensive represents the intense escalation of a civil war that had been mostly dormant for years, and it has resurfaced the country’s enormous ethnic and religious complexity and contending geopolitical interests. Loose talk of “liberated” cities is certainly premature given the Islamist cast of the militant groups responsible for the retreat of government forces. The rebel alliance that has taken Aleppo is led by HTS—Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (“Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant”)—with some 30,000 fighters. HTS was formerly affiliated with al Qaeda but has since renounced global jihad in favour of toppling Assad and resisting Iranian imperialism, but it remains a designated foreign terrorist group by the US State Department.
The other main contingent in the fighting is the Syrian National Army, a Turkish proxy seeking to overthrow Assad but primarily dedicated to impeding the rise of the separatist PKK-dominated Kurdish enclaves along Syria’s border with Turkey, especially north of Aleppo. Meanwhile, Kurdish-led forces—who still enjoy US backing and control large swathes of Syria’s northeast—took control of Aleppo’s airport. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces have called for general mobilisation. And these indigenous forces have been reinforced by a pack of foreign fighters, including a Turkistan brigade composed mainly of jihadists from Central Asia and Chinese Uyghurs.
The main question hanging over the trajectory of the battlefield concerns the staying power of the Syrian regime and its foreign backers. The timing of the rebel assault suggests an attempt to take advantage of the battering sustained by Assad’s regional allies in recent months. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Lebanese proxy militia, Hezbollah, have been the main props supporting Assad’s dictatorship, and both have now been dealt heavy blows by Israel in response to their coordinated aggression. Since Israel neutralised Hezbollah’s leadership and upper echelons while aggressively striking at Iranian targets inside Syria, the Assad regime has never looked more vulnerable. A little more than a year after 7 October, the Assad regime has been reduced from a formidable power to a weak horse.
This transformation seems to have persuaded the Turks to take advantage of a historic opportunity that has unsettled the established order. Past reports of the death of the Assad regime have been grossly exaggerated, and it would be rash to assume its inevitable demise now. But it will almost certainly be a further diminished force, without the monopoly on violence that is the essential precondition for a functioning state. The resulting power vacuum will leave Ankara with a potentially dominant role in Syria’s future, and Turkey will seek to exploit Syrian weakness by evicting Russian forces and wiping out the Kurdish opposition.
The American position in Syria will be harder to figure. At the time of this writing, US airstrikes are hitting Iran’s proxy militias in eastern Syria. The small US garrison, which has been gathering intelligence and conducting counterterrorism operations since the anti-ISIS campaign, will keep an eye on the spread of mayhem lest it lead to a revival of the Islamic State. Whether America’s presence will continue under a second Trump term is anyone’s guess, but those who have been calling on the US to shutter its forward-operating bases on the eastern bank of the Euphrates should consider the recent history and strategic landscape of this vital region.
Brian Stewart
The Assad regime has always gambled that its power would be best preserved, not by political or economic reform, but by fomenting armed resistance to America and Israel. This bellicose posture was based on the calculation that the Arab masses would tolerate oppression and cruelty, but that the regime could not survive if it gave up its permanent war with the Jews. In his first-rate book The Syrian Rebellion, the late scholar Fouad Ajami summarised this destructive attitude with the words: “Let them eat anti-Zionism.”
For years, this strategic hunch seemed to be paying dividends. In its long shadow war against the American-led regional order, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Syrian client burnished their anti-Zionist and anti-American reputations in the region by driving a wedge between America’s Arab allies and their peoples. After the liberation of Baghdad by the US in 2003, Tehran sought to defeat the American project by arming the Shi’ite militias killing US troops and their Iraqi allies. Syria’s role in that conflict was less well-known but just as pernicious. At one point, US military sources found that more than ninety percent of the foreign fighters in Iraq were entering through Syria. Damascus International Airport became a key transit hub for jihadists, who descended on the Syrian capital, from which Syrian intelligence ferried them to the Iraqi frontier. Neither Syria nor Iran ever suffered any serious repercussions for their war on Iraq’s nascent democracy.
But when the protests sweeping the Muslim Middle East reached Syria in 2011, the Assad dynasty was at last given good reasons to worry. Since the inception of the modern Syrian state, it had ruled through brute force, believing it had reduced a once-proud people to submission. For the ruling caste, any prospect of democracy would be a death knell, not only for the Alawite regime but also for the entire community in the historical Alawite homeland along the coastal mountain range. The fearful Druze and Christian minorities who threw in with the military despotism harboured similar fears about the harsh Islamist implications of popular rule. But the revolt against the old order suggested that the strategy of sating a restive population with Jew-hatred had run its course—Syrians no longer wanted to live in a prison-state.
The subsequent clash between Syria’s ruler and the Sunni majority rapidly became an internationalised civil war. Supported by its Iranian and Russian allies, the Syrian regime enjoyed a preponderance of power in that bloody struggle while the US administration hesitated. Assad’s forces resorted to undisguised sadism to crush the rebellion, and used every means at their disposal to do so, including torture and collective punishment. (It’s not for the faint of heart, but for an illustration of the regime’s extravagant cruelty, consider the fate of 13-year-old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb.)
The consequences of Assad’s campaign were unambiguously ghastly: a death toll of more than 500,000, nearly half of whom were civilians; more than thirteen million people driven from their homes, 6.6 million of whom now live outside Syria; and the incubation of a sectarian proxy war between Sunni and Shi’ite jihadists, with the Shi’ite Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force fighting on behalf of Assad while the Islamic State carved out a hellish caliphate in the vast desert along the Iraq–Syria frontier. The emergence of Russia as a global power helped save the regime on the diplomatic front as well as on the battlefield.
And all of this came to pass without the intercession of the United States, despite President Obama’s explicit warning against the use of chemical weapons a year after the unrest began. But when Assad defied America by violating that taboo almost exactly a year later, Obama flinched. In August 2013, regime forces fired rockets containing the nerve agent sarin into the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, killing some 1,100 civilians in one of the worst savageries of an already barbaric war. Obama’s promise of punitive military strikes was left unfulfilled, and Assad consolidated his apparatus of state terror.
Syria was a terrible casualty of President Obama’s grand strategy for the Middle East. During his second term, it became clear that his objective was to create a “geopolitical equilibrium” that would balance traditional American partners like Saudi Arabia and Israel with the Islamic Republic of Iran. This gambit, it was hoped, would bequeath a new regional security arrangement to alleviate the sectarian conflict then scorching the earth from Beirut to Baghdad. But its true purpose was to allow a scuttle, since the Obama administration was determined to draw down US forces as part of a larger desire to shrink America’s profile in the region. Accommodation with the clerical regime in Tehran and its only client in the Arab state-system was the price of that bargain.
So, when the Syrian dictatorship called the American president’s bluff, it was allowed to emerge unpunished and emboldened. The key Arab regime in the Iranian “resistance bloc” now appeared to be the strong horse in the struggle for mastery of the Fertile Crescent. Across several fronts—Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Israel—a Middle Eastern cold war was taking shape that, for all the violent rhetoric and martial slogans against foreign infidel powers, would inflict vastly more damage on the Arab-speaking peoples of the region than on anyone else. But from the perspective of the despots desperate to undermine the regional order, a great feat had been achieved: the Americans had been reduced to bystanders.
Since the uprising against Assad began, he has answered foreign and domestic critics with the self-satisfied assurances that coercion and repression are the currency of stability in his part of the world, and that his brutal rule is the lesser evil. Successive US administrations have accepted the proposition that, if he fell, Assad would either be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime or a failed state. In either scenario, the prevailing view in Washington was (and remains) that Syria would become an even more dangerous and tormented country, more likely to export violence abroad. The more prudent course of action was therefore to stick with the devil we know.
That analysis never withstood scrutiny, and it looks downright fanciful today. First, because Islamist terrorism depends heavily on the succour of autocratic regimes and their intelligence apparatus. It is not some marginal force in Arab life but the culture of tyranny that has spawned the pathologies of terror. Second, after a decade of war, even casual observers began to notice that the most powerful forces arrayed against the American-led order were not bands of Sunni holy warriors but rather a constellation of regimes and organisations directed by Iran. It is the latter that has launched historic aggressions against American interests and allies, and which has torn Syria to pieces.
For a generation, the United States has paid a steep price for misconstruing the Middle East. Many sins of commission flowed from its misunderstandings after the 11 September attacks, but these pale in comparison to its sins of omission. The greatest of these will always be its abdication in Syria, where ruthless predators were allowed to unleash horrifying carnage in a fight to the death. And it is where the diminishment of American power became palpable.
