Syria: the Arab Spring closes its final chapter. But what next for the Middle East?

Fourteen years ago, the world was taken by surprise by the emergence out of the blue of a popular revolt in Tunisia. The trigger was the self-immolation of a roadside fruit vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, whose wares were confiscated by a local inspector. The images of his suicide went viral on social media in Tunisia and across North Africa and the Middle East, leading to a wave of mass protests spreading rapidly from one Arab autocracy to the next. Within months, entrenched dictators were toppled. Some, like Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, were able to flee into exile; others, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, were imprisoned by the military, and the ruler of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, was tracked down in a sewer and executed by an opposition militia. Not all the Arab regimes were besieged. Those that had more popular legitimacy and more democratic participation, such as the monarchies of Morocco and Jordan, survived, as did the Gulf petro-monarchies with their much smaller, and massively more prosperous, populations. The autocrat of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had already left the scene eight years earlier, deposed by the United States in its invasion of the country. For a while, the tidal wave of the Arab Spring seemed to be inexorable. It reminded many Europeans of the Spring Time of the Nations when a number of European dynasties were swept from power in the revolutions of 1848. Or more recently the Velvet Revolutions of 1989-90 which saw the collapse of communism in central and eastern Europe and ultimately the former Soviet Union. Revolutions often come at unexpected moments and topple regimes which a day before had appeared stable and in control. Looking backwards, the signs of decay and imminent collapse appear more visibly, which led the famous 19th century historian of the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle, to proclaim that “no one had predicted it but afterwards everyone came to see it as inevitable”.

Yet revolutions provoke reactions and even counter-revolutions. Revolutionary fervour eventually peters out, and some regimes prove more adept at riding the revolutionary wave and regaining control than others. This certainly was the case with the European counter-revolutions of 1849 during which the besieged governments of the Habsburgs in Vienna, the Hohenzollerns in Berlin and the Bourbons in Naples crushed the liberal opposition. Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Bonaparte, took over with his military dictatorship in Paris. And so similarly the Arab Spring of 2011 eventually led to new dictatorships in the form of General Abdel Fattah El Sisi in Egypt and Kais Saied in Tunisia.

They have emulated their pre-Arab Spring predecessors in stifling the institutions of democracy, such as the free media and an independent judiciary, and cracking down hard on the political opposition. Yet the most brutal pushback against the popular uprisings took place in Syria where the regime of Bashar al-Assad used the army to encircle and shell cities such as Daraa, Palmyra and Homs that were the epicentre of the opposition. Sometimes the shelling went on for 18 hours a day, killing thousands and reducing these cities, and later others such as Aleppo in the north, to rubble. Assad, like his father Hafez al-Assad, who notoriously conducted a massacre in the rebel city of Hama in February 1982 killing an estimated 20,000 Sunni Muslims, eschewed no action or atrocity to set an example of what would happen to Syrians who opposed his rule. Hospitals and residential districts were blown up with barrel bombs, civilians poisoned with Sarin gas or tortured in Assad’s prisons, including children. Nearly 600,000 Syrians are estimated to have been killed in the civil war that followed Assad’s repression of peaceful protests, 170,000 were imprisoned and 14mn were displaced, including 5mn Syrian refugees fleeing to Turkey, Lebanon and beyond. Whole swathes of the country and its critical infrastructure, transport links and housing were destroyed. Despite Assad’s brutal tactics, calling all his opponents “terrorists”, the opposition kept fighting. It consisted of Kurds in the east and Sunni and Shia Muslim and Druze communities elsewhere. Only the Alawites on the western coast from where the Assad dynasty originated remained broadly loyal to him, although some Christian Syrians fought on his side because they feared a radical jihadist alternative. Assad clearly considered Syria as his private family company, putting his British-born wife, Asma, and siblings and cousins in positions of power. A former British ambassador compared the Assads to a mafia criminal enterprise like the Godfather or the Sopranos. As a result, Assad repeatedly torpedoed talks between the government and the rebel groups to negotiate a ceasefire and a transition plan leading to national elections and a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for the country. Kazakhstan offered to mediate and the “Astana Process” convened a number of meetings involving the regime, opposition groups and the major powers. But all to no avail. Assad’s departure was the sine qua non of an agreement but the Assads, in control of Syria since 1970 and Bashar himself since 2000, refused to budge.

Yet the opposition refused to be cowed and kept on fighting. Given Assad’s past involvement in terrorism and his support for anti-Israel and anti-Western groups throughout the Middle East (particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon), the western powers had an interest in his demise. The US was also concerned at Bashar turning a blind eye to the jihadists using Damascus airport as a transit route to reach Iraq to fight Americans occupying Iraq after the 2003 invasion. But western support for the anti-Assad opposition groups was always half hearted. Turkey would not support the Kurdish militias like the People’s Defence Units (YPG), worried that they were hand-in-glove with the separatists in the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and feared the creation of a Kurdish mini-state in eastern Syria along the Turkish border. To prevent this, Ankara sent the Turkish army over the border to occupy a buffer zone, keeping the Syrian Kurds at bay. Meanwhile the West was worried about the links between many opposition militias and terrorist networks, notably the Jabat Al-Nusra group that was affiliated with Al-Qaeda. Others were linked with ISIL, which established its short-lived Caliphate at Raqqa in eastern Syria in June 2014. So these opposition groups received some weapons and training, but not enough to drive Assad’s troops out of regime-controlled areas. The US and France deployed special forces to northern Syria in the Kurdish-controlled areas, but they were there to keep an eye on a resurgent ISIL after the fall of the Caliphate in 2017, and not to get involved in the fight against Assad. The main focus of the US and its allies was Assad’s possession of chemical weapons which, as said, he was willing to use repeatedly against his alleged opponents (often innocent civilians). Under western diplomatic pressure, Assad agreed to join the UN Convention on Chemical Weapons and dismantle his chemical weapons stockpiles, although western intelligence agencies remained convinced that he retained a production capability. The lack of western resolve had its corollary in the strong support that Assad received from Moscow and Tehran. From 2015 onwards, the poorly led and ill-disciplined Syrian army was kept in the field by the Russian air force which repeatedly bombarded the rebel militias and their strongholds, pushing them away from key regime controlled cities like Homs, Hama and the capital. But the Syrian civil war was also a valuable opportunity for Russia to regain a foothold in the Middle East and rebuild Russian bases on the Mediterranean coast: a naval base for refuelling and resupply at Tartus and an airfield for fighter jets and helicopters at Latakia. These bases facilitated the deployment of Wagner mercenaries to Africa and allowed Moscow to challenge NATO in the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the Russian bases and its role in Syria allowed Putin to showcase his new Russia as a global power with influence on multiple continents, pushing back against Obama’s jibe that post-Soviet Russia was merely a regional power. Alongside Russia, Iran sent its revolutionary guards into Syria and established a large military headquarters just outside Damascus to coordinate advice and assistance to Assad’s army (it was bombed by the Israelis earlier this year). Tehran also funded the presence of Hezbollah fighters in Syria where they were instrumental in helping Assad to keep control of his territory along the Lebanese border, and to enable Iran to send missiles and military equipment across Syria to supply Hezbollah in Beirut and southern Lebanon. Yet despite Iranian support, Assad was careful not to provoke Israel which had repeatedly demonstrated its ability to destroy military targets across Syria with impunity. The most notable Israeli action was destroying a nuclear reactor in 2007 that North Korea had been building for Assad at Al Kibar in eastern Syria. For this airstrike, Israel showed its capacity to paralyse Syria’s air defence. Assad did not respond when Israel intervened in Syria to strike Iranian weapons convoys bound for Hezbollah. Nor did he try to regain the Golan Heights, captured by Israel during the Six Day War of June 1967. Israelis had no love for Assad, but he represented a certain kind of restraint and predictability, especially when compared to the jihadist radicals that could replace him. After the destruction of the ISIL caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2017, international attention moved away from Syria and towards North Africa and the Sahel where ISIL tried to relocate. With neither side able to fully defeat the other, the fighting between Assad and the various rebel groups subsided, although it never stopped completely. Syria became effectively partitioned as each group hung on to its portion of territory. The Kurds in the YPG and the Syrian Free Army in the east, the Turkish-sponsored Syrian National Army in the northwest and the Islamists mainly grouped under the increasing domination of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS ) in the self-governing Idlib pocket. Assad controlled the rest of the country, although some smaller jihadist groups in the south working with Hamas and Hezbollah posed a threat to Israel along the Golan Heights. With financial- as well as military- support from both Russia and Iran, Assad also looked for other forms of revenue, notably by producing the illegal drug, Captagon. He had an opportunity to introduce reforms and to start a dialogue with the more moderate opposition but didn’t take it. The already dire economic situation worsened further and the regime, rotten and corrupt, stopped paying its own civil servants. According to the World Bank, between 2010 and 2021, Syrian GDP went down by 54%; and this year, 90% of the population were living in poverty, with25% in extreme poverty. Jobs are scarce and the electricity works only for a few hours every day. But Assad counted on his own political longevity to induce the Arab states to resume diplomatic relations with his regime. Qatar was the first to do so in 2022, followed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. In 2023, Syria was readmitted to the Arab League, and Assad once more turned up at its summits. With the main rebel group holed up in the Idlib pocket and ISIL decimated by the US and its coalition allies, Assad, backed by Moscow and Tehran, Assad seemed secure in power for many years to come.

Yet a sudden advance by Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) out of Idlib succeeded in just two weeks in capturing Aleppo, and then a few days later Hama and Homs, and then last Sunday, swept into Damascus. According to the rebels, “only” 910 Syrians (138 of them civilians) were killed in this spectacular advance. The Assad regime collapsed like a pack of cards. This took everyone including the Syrians themselves by surprise. Yet it is a feature of brutal dictatorships that beyond a small inner circle of loyalists and beneficiaries, the corruption and nepotism that they foster ends up alienating everyone, even regime supporters and functionaries. The regime is held together by fear and the belief of certain groups that the regime can protect them; but as soon as this fear or belief is undermined, people desert in droves, as can be seen in the thousands of army uniforms of deserting Syrian soldiers lining the roads of the country. No one wants to die for a hated regime. At the same time, the geopolitical context that had propped up Assad’s regime had crumbled over the past year. Russia, under military stress in Ukraine and running out of resources, was no longer able to give full support to Assad beyond a few scattered airstrikes at the beginning of the HTS advance on Aleppo. The Russian air force and special forces were fully engaged in the Donbas. The most that Moscow could do for Assad and his family was to grant them asylum when they fled the country. Likewise Iran, with many of its airfields and military bases destroyed by Israel in two waves of strikes, its command structure inside Syria destroyed and its proxy Hezbollah decimated in Lebanon, was in no position to expend more finite resources in Syria either. Hezbollah, for long the bedrock of the Assad regime, tried to send one of its remaining operational units to help Assad, but it was immediately spotted and taken out by the Israelis. Clearly the manner in which Israel had moved to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah after the Hamas incursion into Israel on 7 October 2023 had weakened Iran and robbed it of the powerful proxies through which it once spread its influence in the region. The pro-Iranian Popular Mobilisation Forces in Iraq refused to move as well. Immediate defence at home took priority over foreign engagement and has terminated (at least for now) Iran’s fabled Axis of Resistance or Ring of Fire vis-à-vis Israel.

What will happen in Syria and to Syria now is anyone’s guess. The scenarios range from the very good to the very bad. Certainly, recent experience has led us to fear the worst. The TV pictures last Sunday of jubilant rebels entering Damascus, firing into the air, while vengeful citizens looted the presidential palace and government offices, opened the prisons, ransacked embassies and tore down the statues of once-feared dictators reminded us of Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, or of Gaddafi in Tripoli in 2011. Something similar was seen on the streets of Kabul in 2001 after the US brought down the Taliban regime. Hope was in the air for a new beginning, new constitutions, more democracy and economic prosperity and reconciliation among diverse ethnic, religious and political groups. Yet, although these groups were briefly united in their hatred of the deposed regime, they were soon at loggerheads on virtually everything else. Some groups were resentful at losing power to former underdogs (such as Sunnis vis-à-vis Shia in Iraq), or refused to accept the hegemony of a leading group (as with Kurds vis-à-vis Arabs in Syria and Iraq, or Tajiks and Hazaras vis-à-vis Pashtuns in Afghanistan). Soon, these countries descended into bloody civil war going on for years, killing untold numbers and displacing the majority of the population. Many of the ingredients of such a breakdown are present in Syria today, given the number of heavily armed rival groups, all with their specific territories to defend and economic and business interests to protect. Mutual suspicion runs deep. The Israelis always referred to the Arab Spring as the “Islamic Winter” and given the recent history of the Middle East and the enormous time that it has taken to stabilise post-dictatorship societies such as Iraq or Libya, the pessimists will generally have the more powerful arguments. It is easier to destabilise Syria than stabilise it, but there is no fatalism here. Syrians, having experienced over a decade of civil war that has left the country in ruins, have no desire to start the process all over again. They want to rebuild their country. Iraq and Libya are bad examples to be avoided, not emulated. Everything hinges on the actions of the most powerful group, directly responsible for Assad’s overthrow: HTS. It has its roots in jihadism and once proclaimed loyalty to ISIL and then Al-Qaeda. It broke with Al-Qaeda in 2016 and subsequently moved against this group. It has ruled Idlib in an authoritarian manner with little tolerance of dissent and according to Islamist principles (particularly when it comes to the role of women). But it has not inflicted the cruelty or abuses of minorities that were characteristic of the ISIL caliphate. Since arriving in Damascus, the HTS leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has made all the right noises about respecting minority rights, protecting public buildings and not carrying out a witch-hunt of all those who worked for the Assad regime, except for those who have been directly associated with the regime’s most heinous crimes, such as the torture and murder of 15,000 inmates at the notorious Saydnaya prison, including women and children, and using 72 different methods of torture. He has granted amnesty to the conscripts in Assad’s army. HTS has tried to play down its Islamist roots and rebrand itself as a nationalist movement aspiring to reunite the country and revive its moribund economy. It has cooperated with the Prime Minister, Ghazi al-Jalali, keeping his government on in a caretaker capacity to keep public administration (such as it still exists in Syria) running. HTS has not made the same lamentable mistake as the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in disbanding the Iraqi army and police and firing the civil servants, which caused lasting chaos and the total breakdown of law and order throughout the country. It is early days of course, and we do not yet know what will happen to those senior members of the ancien régime who could not flee the country, nor if and when there could be a round table to unite the various groups around a common vision for the country and draw up a roadmap of the next steps. Will HTS be able to enlarge its coalition beyond likeminded Islamist movements? Some groups, like the Kurds, who have enjoyed a relatively independence for a decade now and occupy 30% of the country, may be reluctant to accept a unified state. But until we see convincing signs of the contrary, we will need to give al-Jolani the benefit of the doubt while accepting that political Islam is bound to play a greater role in Syria and its society than in the past. There are no female faces in the so-called Salvation Front which is now running things in Damascus. Yet al-Jolani has protected Christians in both Idlib and Aleppo. It will be a massive task to put Syria back on its feet, resettle the millions of returning refugees and disarm the militias, but provided that HTS is willing to be the core of an inclusive government and work constructively, the West should support and help it. This said, many will remember similar pledges given by the Taliban when they returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021. They wanted sanctions against them to be lifted and promised to respect the rights of women and give women free access to higher education and the labour market- all pledges that they subsequently reneged upon while allowing Al Qaeda and ISIL-Khorisan to operate inside the country. Al-Jolani has a $10mn bounty on his head due to his past links to jihadist terrorism and is on a UN terrorism list – a listing that once made is difficult to remove. So western governments and their intelligence agencies now have the urgent task of determining who they can and cannot deal with in the new Syrian political scene- and under what conditions.

What about the international reaction thus far? Again, it is early days yet and for governments across the world, the sudden collapse of the Assad regime came as a shock. Everyone was waiting for the Assad counteroffensive against the rebels that never materialised. Given the lack of anticipation, the international reaction has been short term and defensive. The US and Israel have both claimed the credit for Assad’s downfall: the Biden administration has argued that its military support for Ukraine and arms supplies to Israel served to deprive both Russia and Iran of resources and put them under stress at home, reducing their latitude to help Assad at a critical moment and encouraging HTS to seize its golden opportunity. This has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel has made the same argument, using the fall of Assad to further justify his campaign against the Iranian proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen and Israel’s strikes against Iran. Not knowing what the future will bring, both the US and Israel have also carried out airstrikes against ISIL and Syrian military targets across the country to stop important capabilities, like missile storage sites and a research laboratory at Kair Sousa near Damascus associated with chemical weapons production, from falling into the wrong hands. Israel has upset Egypt and other Arab states by occupying the buffer zone along the border between Syria and the Golan Heights. Meanwhile, Moscow and Tehran have shown a high degree of pragmatism in moving on from the Assad era and suggesting that they want to establish relations with the new government in Damascus. Iran is pleased that Assad has gone to Moscow rather than Tehran as its chances to re-establish its influence in Syria would be compromised were it seen to be sheltering Assad and his entourage. Russia is concerned above all to keep hold of its bases at Tartus and Latakia and will probably link its future economic aid to Syria to the new government’s agreement to allow it to keep its operations there. But the major Russian role in bombing HTS in the past may make a Russian facelift difficult for the new government to swallow. The west is understandably happy at the major setbacks that Moscow and Tehran have experienced in Syria. Putin’s abandonment of Assad undermines his oft repeated claim to be more loyal to his allies than the “fickle Americans”. Many Russian sympathisers will take note that Moscow is more interested in real estate than the fate of friendly regimes.

Yet if the transition is to succeed the West will need to mobilise quickly behind a longer-term strategy to maximise the chances (admittedly beyond our control) that Syria can be stabilised. There will be dangers but we must not allow them to make us miss the opportunities. Immediate humanitarian aid will be key as 17mn Syrians are in need. Groups like the White Helmets in the north have long proven their ability to distribute aid as well as provide medical supplies to hospitals. Those Syrian refugees wishing to return home should be given assistance to do so. Assad is a war criminal and already brave Syrian opponents of the regime have gathered and sent to Europe and North America abundant evidence of his human rights abuses, executions and torture. The fall of Assad now gives ample opportunity with prisons opened and people able to speak freely to gather even more evidence. War crimes proceedings can soon be launched against Assad, implicated family members and his henchmen. Those occupying positions of responsibility in the Assad regime should be denied asylum in the western democracies. In order to report fairly and accurately on what is going on inside Syria and monitor efforts by Russia and Iran to regain their influence (and malign role), the EU and US need to establish their diplomatic missions in Damascus, even if formal diplomatic recognition of the new government may have to await indications of its performance and sincerity. The US and EU will also need to work with the Arab countries and Turkey to stop the illegal shipments of arms and contraband into Syria to put pressure on the militias to disarm. It would help if the EU, UK and US could adopt a common policy vis-à-vis Syria, stressing the need for a peaceful transition, the same conditionality for economic and financial support and the same consequences if HTS allows ISIL, or other radical jihadist groups, to reestablish themselves in Syria. Turkey and the Gulf States will have a major role to play in financing and contributing to reconstruction with their major contractors. There is an enormous Syrian diaspora with over one million Syrians living in Germany alone. Western governments need to encourage this diaspora to reinvest in Syria, particularly to fix immediate problems like generators and electricity supply, and then to establish philanthropic foundations to invest in health, education, a free media and civil society. The US, which controls a large amount of Syria’s oil and gas production through its presence in the east of the country and uses it to fund the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces will need to decide when and how to return ownership to the Syrian government, as it will need these resources for its budget. It would be wise for Washington to keep its 900 troops in eastern Syria as a factor of stability and a guard against a return of ISIL although Trump in his first term wanted to withdraw them. Trump greeted Assad’s departure but then suggested that the US had no further interest in Syria which henceforth should be left to its own devices. This attitude is as short-sighted as it is misguided. A democratic, pluralistic Syria would durably transform the Middle East, helping to stabilise Iraq and destabilise the regime of the Mullahs in Tehran. It would vastly curtail the potential of radical groups to cause mayhem in the region and help the government of Lebanon to regain control of the country against Hezbollah- the state within the state. So it is a key task of Trump’s Israeli and European allies to convince him to think again, avoid the isolationist instinct and involve the US fully in the transformation of Syria. Caution is a justifiable reflex at a moment of vacuum and uncertainty, but only imagination and boldness, and the readiness to take risks can build a better Middle East. This is a region which is miserly in offering us opportunities. We can’t afford to squander this one. In this way, future historians may well conclude that the Arab Spring had a happy ending after all.