Once again, after almost a decade of relative quiet in Syria, due to a mixed bag of war fatigue and imposed relative and artificial stability, the world awakened to the sights and sounds of war in Syria. No sooner had agreement on a ceasefire in neighboring Lebanon been the focus of world media attention when there, again, rose attention competition from Idlib and Aleppo in North-western Syria; rebel (or “terrorist”) forces, more or less jihadist, from inside the Idlib province, led by the anti-Assad jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), had made a surprise move, overrun the Aleppo countryside, entered into and overtaken Syria’s second biggest city Aleppo, and then continued south towards and into Hama, direction Damascus, apparent objective, to oust Bashar al-Assad’s ruling regime.
A significant volte face in the turbulent and tragic history of Syria ever since, in 2011, the Arab Spring had hit Syria and seen a broad-based civic protest movement turn into a bloody civil war, still today essentially unresolved.
Ever since 2016, when Assad’s forces with assistance from Russian air power and ground troops provided mainly by Shia-Muslim Hezbollah from neighboring Lebanon had finally managed conquer the big city Aleppo in the north, the general picture of Syria and its devastating civil war was that on the whole president Assad had emerged victorious and had survived the basically Sunni revolution against it, in fact so much so that in recent years the overall regional trend appeared to be one of normalization, between Assad’s Syria and both Sunni Arab neighbors and Turkey to the north, many caveats and hindrances notwithstanding.
And this was in sharp contrast to the year before, 2015, when rebel forces seemed to be unstoppably overrunning large parts of the country, and the Assad regime seemed to hang on the ropes, facing imminent defeat. And when world attention, including US attention, was focusing on simultaneous threat from ultra jihadist ISIS.
However, as we remember, the prevailing Assad-imposed “stability” far from represented a total victory in the civil war. Instead, the country had emerged strangely (and sadly) divided in a stalemate between foreign interests/actors and their various proxies dominating different parts of especially northern Syria, thus and there limiting the de facto authority of the Damascus regime. In addition, the Assad regime suffered from a significant lack of international legitimacy due to absence of recognition by large parts of the international community as a result of Assad’s refusal to comply with key UN resolutions for a peaceful resolution to the comprehensive and complex conflict. So instead of general international legitimacy/legality the Assad regime basically had to rely and lean on support rendered by Russia and Iran.
Hence, while being “victorious” in the original civil war, the Assad regime did not control the whole territory; significant parts of the country’s north were de facto controlled by other actors: The Idlib province in the north-west, in the vicinity of Turkish Hatay province and Lebanon, had since 2016 and as a result of coordination between Turkey and some of the rebel groups been able to stay out of Assad’s control, and as such had become the only remaining refuge for millions of Syrians fleeing Assad’s forces. And then, in the country’s north-east, there was the de facto territorial control by the Kurdish resistance, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), later renamed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who had been instrumental with the US in the struggle against ISIS and who resisted both reintegration under Damascus rule and military aggression by Turkey. And in the north and north-west there was, and is, in addition a strange mixture of Iranian, Russian, Syrian and US military presence, representing contradictory interests – in the case of the US some 900 troops with their presence – once famously and controversially questioned by then president Trump, and actively disliked by Turkey – justified in terms of a continued ISIS threat and of the threat from Iran, via Iraq.
In the 2016-2019 period, Turkey had, in addition to its restrained but still active support for several of the Sunni rebel groups, carried out three military incursions into Syria’s north and north-west, i.e. on both sides of the river Euphrates, with a view to pushing back Kurdish (YPG/SDF) militancy and in so doing seeking to navigate complex interaction with Russian and US (and Iranian) forces. With a significantly reduced role for the UN and its brave and patient envoys, efforts to seek a political solution to the Syrian crisis were largely managed by means of the so-called Astana process, oddly combining opposing sides in the Syrian civil war, Turkey (supporting the opposition) and Russia and Iran (as the guarantors of the survival of the Assad regime). Meanwhile, the link to wider regional tensions via a constant Israeli bombardment of targets inside Syria, notably suspected Iranian shipments of armaments to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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This, in brief, being the situation in the tormented country for years now, a low-intensity war and a very fragile and very complex status quo. Until now, when this latest crisis erupted, threatening to reopen all the non-healed wounds of the past, if there has indeed been any healing.
With the lightning-speed push by the combined rebel force, led by HTS, now exposing the Assad regime for the biggest survival challenge it has seen since 2016, a number of concerned questions are forced to the surface. What will become of Syria, and how will this crisis add to the region’s hefty load of problems and tensions? Can the regime regroup internally and mobilize external rescue quickly enough to stem the tide, in time, and what about the sustainability of the HTS-led offensive and what about external support for them, from whom?
A serious problem for the challenged Assad regime now is the dire fact that all its main supporting parties, Iran, Russia, Hezbollah, are busy elsewhere and have reasons, both political and military, in abundance to be reluctant when it comes to again rushing to Assad’s rescue, Iran with its sensitive terror duel with Israel, Russia occupied in and by Ukraine, and Hezbollah fighting for survival in Lebanon – i.e., a very different situation compared to 2016. The implication here is that, in one scenario, the Assad regime risks falling, as it risked in 2015, and herein of course lies a number of hard questions as to what this scenario means, in more detail, and what it would imply as regards regional – and global – strategic stability. Would – we need to ask – Iran and Russia, respectively, strategically allow the Assad regime to fall, given the lack of bearable alternatives, now as before? And what are they ready and able to do about it?
The other scenario is that they, Russia and Iran, separately or in coordination, decide that regime change in Syria, regardless of regime alternatives, is not tolerable and that a large-scale intervention, regardless of risks, is therefore necessary. Here of course the hard question is what Israel, and the US (the Biden and the Trump teams, depending on timing) and Turkey – with its separate agenda, geography and history – would have to say on this. As for other concerned actors, such as the UN and the EU, a Syria again flaring up as an arena of big power lethal conflict and/or one of domestic civil war and societal chaos should be alarming in terms both of brutally added humanitarian consequences and renewed risks of panic-ridden migration, from Idlib and elsewhere. In any case a huge potential de-stabilization risk affecting not just Syria itself but also the MENA region, and beyond, over and above the existing burdens of existing, simultaneous conflicts with global implications. Perhaps the gravest concerns at all this should be felt in Turkey, in view of its exposure, with a 900 kilometers border with Syria and bordering also Iraq and Iran, to the dynamics of the Syrian crisis, its proximity to Idlib and all the refugees talking refuge there, and its own sensitivities to the Kurdish aspects of the crisis.
By way of conclusion, what we are witnessing in Syria now has, in some scenarios, dangerous implications, in itself and in addition to the already burning crises in the region.
But it does not have to come to that. The fear of dangerous, unforeseeable consequences of chaos in Syria should have a restraining effect on all or most actors. In a more benign scenario, from the point of view of regional – and hence by extension global – peace, the current outbreak of armed hostilities is relatively quickly quelled by regrouped regime forces, assisted by Russian air power and some modest Iranian contribution, cautious enough not to provoke a comprehensive Israeli response, and a shaky status quo ante is restored, for what it is worth, from other points of view.
Still, even so, it is hard to see, in such a more benign scenario, how Idlib’s “de-escalation” status as under the Astana arrangement could be restored or maintained, assuming an HTS-led rebel force’s surrender, retreat and/or defeat. And, hence, it is hard not to see what would be the reaction of the millions of anti-Assad refugees huddling in Idlib, near the Turkish border wall, should their protection by armed rebel force be seen to be wasted, and they would stand at the mercy of the enemy-in-chief, Bashar al-Assad.
But perhaps, in the benign scenario, universal fear of all these hazards and challenges will be sufficient to – finally – provoke a net outcome in an emerging international consensus concerning the necessity to seriously address the Syrian tragedy. People there have suffered enough.
