Syria: How Did It Come to This?
If you’ve been alarmed by the recent news concerning Syria but haven’t fully understood the situation there, look no further. Tim Furnish explains all.
Syria is now the center of international attention, with the collapse last week of the long-ruling Assad regime. Years of armed stasis between the rump Damascus government, its minority (Shi’i and Christian) allies, Kurds, and various Sunni Arab opposition groups imploded, and the latter have now come to power.
Foremost among them is the Sunni fundamentalist Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, “Organization for the Liberation of Greater Syria” or what Westerners have long called “the Levant.” What does this mean for the region, the world, and the US in particular?
Brief History Lesson
Past is important prologue, especially in the Middle East, so bear with me.
In ancient and medieval times, there was no state of “Syria.” It was a region of three provinces under the Ottoman Empire: Aleppo, Damascus, and Dayr al-Zur. After World War I, the French under their United Nations Mandate took over and broke the area into five districts: Damascus, Aleppo, Lebanon, the Jabal al-Druze, and an Alawi state around Latakia. (This division will become important to understand later.)
By the end of World War II, the four regions (minus Lebanon) coalesced geographically and politically into modern Syria. Its leadership was anti-Israel, allied with the USSR, and even tried a brief merger with Egypt. In the early 1960s, the Arab socialist Ba`th Party took over. In 1970 the head of the Air Force, Hafiz al-Assad, staged a coup and subsequently put fellow Alawis into positions of power. He died in 2000 and his son, Bashar al-Assad, was installed as president.
Which is how we got to this situation in 2024. Alawis make up about 11% of Syria’s 22 million people. Three-quarters of Syrians are Sunni Muslim, and the rest mostly Christian (Orthodox, Maronite, Catholic), with a small percentage of Druze. (Druzism is a heterodox offshoot of Shi`i Islam, and developed into a separate religion.)
Alawism is the most important minority faith there, however. A millennium ago, they were known as Nusayris, after Ibn Nusayr, a “prophet” for the 10th Shi`i Imam, Ali al-Hadi. A syncretistic faith, they combine elements of Christianity and Islam with more esoteric ones, like reincarnation. In the twentieth century, they started calling themselves Alawis, after Ali (Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin and first Shi`i Imam) in order to appear more Islamic.
Heretics
But they have long been deemed heretics by mainstream Sunni scholars — notably Ibn Taymiyah, who in a fourteenth-century fatwa declared that Nusrayris were “worse infidels than Jews and Christians.” And Ibn Taymiyah is perhaps the most revered Muslim jurist among fundamentalist Muslim (not “Islamist”) groups, like HTS — which, after all, emerged from al-Qaeda. Such groups all believe it’s intolerable for Muslims to have non-Muslim rulers — and particularly impossible to live under the Alawis.
Unsurprisingly, then, Sunni fundamentalists tried to overthrow the Alawi Assad regime in 1982 via the Muslim Brotherhood. But the elder Assad crushed them militarily. After that, the MB and its allies went underground in Syria.
But the regime was always touchy about its precarious minority religious status, and an outlier among the other Arab states. After Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, Assad allied with the ayatollahs to the mutual benefit of each: Syria’s rulers got financial, military, and even sectarian support (Tehran pretended the Alawis were Shi`i), while the IRI got a conduit to Lebanon (enabling it to stand up Hezbollah), and proximity to the hated Zionist enemy.
In 2011, the so-called “Arab Spring” revolts started in various countries, Syria included. Many Syrian Muslims rose up against the Damascus government, and for a few years Islamic State even took over large swathes of east and central Syria. The US supported the so-called “moderate rebels” (some of whom were actually jihadists), while Iran and Russia helped the younger Assad and his clique — Tehran for the reasons previously stated, Moscow to secure its naval base on the Syrian coast and because Sunni fundamentalism has been a thorn in Russia’s side going back to the nineteenth century. And probably just to spite the Americans. Turkey tended to back the same side as the US, as those groups often fought the Kurdish groups causing problems for Ankara.
All sides were quite brutal: jihadists of all stripes, not just ISIS, beheaded their enemies; Damascus tortured prisoners and used chemical weapons. Eventually a status quo was achieved, but that utterly collapsed last week. Why? Mainly because the regime army had become a joke, Russia was focused on Ukraine, and Iran has been weakened by Israel in their ongoing conflict.
The Latest News
What’s the situation in Syria now that Bashar al-Assad is setting up an ophthalmology practice in Moscow? Let’s review the major players and their areas of control as of December 11.
- The aforementioned HTS is supported by Qatar, Ukraine, and several Russian jihadist groups. It controls the capital and most of the country.
- The self-proclaimed Syrian National Army, an Arab nationalist organization backed by Turkey, holds strips of northern Syria along the Turkish border.
- The Syrian Democratic Forces, largely Kurdish and US-supported, dominate the country’s far east and northeast.
- The Southern Operations Chamber, a Druze group, was believed to hold pockets in southern Syria, but seems to have been subsumed now under HTS’s aegis.
- ISIS still has a number of isolated camps as well, which the US Air Force bombed recently. The IDF also struck many Syrian arms bases and caches, avoiding the mistake the US made when bugging out of Afghanistan — allowing a fundamentalist Islamic government to get its hands on tons of modern military hardware (and, in Syria’s case, chemical weapons).
HTS’s actual (and Syria’s de facto) leader Abu Muhammad al-Julani (or Golani, his family being from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights), claimed to espouse “sectarian tolerance” in his victory speech. But he also said HTS’s takeover was “a victory for the entire Islamic nation.” Not for Syrians in general, note, but for Muslims.
A few years ago I was in Israel and allowed to visit a prison holding Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalist criminals. I spoke to one, who carried a Quran and prayer beads with him constantly. I asked him about his vision for “Palestine,” should they win. He replied, “Jews and Christians will be safe — as dhimmis.” That is, as second-class citizens under Islamic law. I expect al-Julani and his ilk will move in that direction as soon as they consolidate power.
Syria’s many Christians can expect persecution, as John Zmirak and Jason Jones have already pointed out on The Streams. Syria’s Alawis are in even greater danger, as they don’t fall under Islam’s “People of the Book” status, and in HTS’s view, as the rulers they oppressed Sunnis for decades. A genocide of Alawis might well ensue.
Syria may be “free” of its secular dictatorship, but a shariah one would be even worse — as the Iranians found out when they ditched the Shah for the ayatollahs.
Is there any hope, as Jones and Zmirak posit, for a Syrian confederation, where the various groups — Sunni Arabs, Kurds, Alawis, Christians, and Druze — could just get along in their respective areas? Perhaps. Such would have to be imposed by outside powers, however; and that’s not bloody likely. It would also be seen by Syrian (and many other Arabs) as a return to the French Mandate system, however, and thus would be rejected as colonialist. Even the Ottoman division of Syria was rife with conflict (here’s a book which covers that). If a legitimate Sunni caliph couldn’t get a handle on Syria, what hope would Western powers have in doing so? Just a fool’s hope.
Syria is extremely important to Muslim fundamentalists for another huge reason: In Islamic eschatology, the northern Syrian town of Dabiq will be the location for an epic battle between Muslims and Christians, which will then usher in the End Times and the coming of the Mahdi. A confederation would put Dabiq outside of HTS control. So for that reason, as well, I doubt any sort of federal system would work there.
So for the interim, the international community is relegated to imploring HTS to establish “credible, inclusive, and non-sectarian governance,” in the words of Secretary of State Antony Blinken. If history is any guide, that won’t happen. President-Elect Donald Trump has said that Syria is “not our fight.” But he might also remind al-Julani that should his jihadists start killing Christians and Alawis, there will be “hell to pay” for HTS as well as for Hamas.
Timothy Furnish has a PhD from Ohio State in Islamic, World & African history. He’s been an Arabic interrogator in the 101st Airborne, a US Special Operations Command analyst, an author and professor. Furnish is the military/security affairs writer for The Stream.