The Syrian imbroglio

The fall of Damascus has led to an avalanche of different interpretations in the bourgeois and radical press. The aim of this article is to look behind the clamor and examine the fall of the Assad regime and the current situation.

Fall of the house of Assad

On Wednesday, November 27, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a military offensive in northern Syria. The HTS is one of the many armed organizations controlling territory in Syria. It comes out of al-Nusra, a long standing Islamic fundamentalist movement. The HTS controls the area around Idlib in northern Syria. Recently, the HTS has sought to present a modern, technocratic, and efficient image and attempted to distance itself from its Al-Qaeda past.

The HTS campaign took place simultaneously and in conjunction with a second military front. The Syrian National Army (SNA) began an operation against Kurdish areas in the northwest. The SNA is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Turkish government. It is Istanbul’s means of pursuing its historic war against the Kurdish people. There’s no doubt that Turkey played a key role in initiating the November offensive.

The HTS has been engaged in battles with the main Syrian army supporting the Bashar al-Assad government before. However, this time something extraordinary happened. The Syrian army wasn’t so much defeated on the battlefield as it was subject to internal disintegration and implosion. There was massive desertion. The army’s morale, structures, and organization just fell apart. Huge amounts of equipment and weapons were abandoned. Soldiers literally dropped their uniforms on the ground and fled.

In this situation, the HTS was able to rapidly move forward. By December 3, Aleppo had fallen. On December 5, the HTS took Hama. By the 7^th, their forces were in Homs. On Sunday, December 8, the capital city Damascus fell, and the dictator Assad flew to Moscow. The collapse of the old regime was now complete.

Why did the Assad government go down to defeat so quickly? What enabled the HTS to achieve such a blitzkrieg pace of military advance? These questions can be answered by looking at both the domestic and international factors involved. Domestically, the regime was a hated dictatorship with little social base. The government had been engaged in massive repression of all dissent since the March 2011 popular uprising. Its barbarity in the ensuing civil war is well known. The regime dropped barrel bombs on unarmed people and massacred its opponents. However, the regime was not just a police dictatorship. It couldn’t “make the trains run on time” either. The economy was in shambles and living standards tumbled. The regime was saturated with corruption, patronage, and inefficiency. It had almost no support outside of the Alawite community, the grouping which the Assads belonged to. Even there, the support was often motivated by fear of the alternatives and being blamed by guilt by association for Assad’s crimes.

So, the regime was like a tree branch permeated by termites. It was completely rotten from within. One sharp hit, in this case the HTS offensive, and the whole edifice just fell apart. If the regime was so unpopular and weak, why didn’t it fall earlier? Here we come to the international component of the situation. The regime had two very important backers giving it massive military assistance, the Russians and the Iranians. Russian and Iranian military support was what enabled the regime to stay in power as long as it did. But in the current situation, neither the Russians nor the Iranians were willing to continue that support.

The Russian military is completely focused on its imperialist invasion of the Ukraine. The army and air force have enough on their plate without also getting involved in a major war in Syria. It’s been reported that only fifteen military aircraft were available to be deployed in Syria. Iran has been badly hit by the Israeli degrading of its crucial ally, the Lebanese Hezbollah. It’s clear Israel was able to enact serious blows on the Hezbollah and weaken its military capacity. Furthermore, the Iranian government does not want to see increased conflagration in the Middle East, particularly a full war with Israel. Instead, Tehran wishes to see the sanctions lifted and its oil sold on the world market. These are the reasons why Khamenei and Putin both decided to cut their losses and not support the Assad regime as its end approached. Without its backers, the decayed government simply fell to pieces.

Current situation

The first point to be made is that there is no one government ruling over the whole country. The HTS controls a broad band from Aleppo to Damascus. The SNA controls two sectors by the northern border with Turkey. Thankfully, the Kurdish people control a large portion of their own territory in the northeast. The Southern Operations Room appears to control the area around Daraa. ISIS continues to operate in the country. The situation is extremely fluid. Fighting has not ceased following Assad’s departure, although there’s no evidence of Assadist hold-outs. Additionally, Israel has been seizing some advantageous positions in the Golan Heights. Russia will supposedly be allowed to maintain its two Mediterranean bases.

To understand the current situation, we have to identify the main forces involved.

The HTS The HTS has been carrying out a “charm offensive”. Its leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani has even changed his physical appearance from traditional clothing to military fatigues. He has spoken of tolerance for religious minorities and stressed effective governance and administration. Jolani has sat for interviews with the western media. Biden has even said, “they’re saying the right things now”. Jolani has taken a number of steps to continue the old Assad governmental apparatus. The HTS leader has stressed the need for effective civic administration. The national oil company has been instructed to resume production.

The big question is how serious is any of this? Is this just a maneuver to win over the Syrian masses and the Western powers? Time will tell, but it seems extremely unlikely that a real metamorphosis has taken place. There is every possibility that the HTS will resort to the same repressive measures that it has used in Idlib and the areas that it has controlled.

Popular mobilizations. This is obviously the central question for revolutionary socialists. The fall of the Assad dictatorship was joyously greeted, thousands poured on the streets. Flag waving, cheering, car horn honking, etc. was widespread. Assad icons and pictures were trampled and destroyed. People surged in large groups through the prisons liberating prisoners as they went and searching for loved ones. The December 13 Friday prayers saw huge outpouring in the street at the end of the services.

It appears that these popular mobilizations followed the collapse of the regime. They do not appear to have been the cause of the fall of the old order, but instead the results of jubilation at its fall. This does not minimize their importance. However, we should not overstate the situation and claim that strikes, demonstrations, and mass organization brought down the regime. It’s hard to tell from outside the country the extent of self-organization at the moment. Events are moving quickly, and we should be alert for the development of working class and popular self-organization.

The Kurdish people. The Kurdish people have the historic misfortune that imperialism divided their homeland between the Iraqi, Syrian, and Turkish states. They have waged a long and heroic struggle for independence. They are certainly an oppressed nation and have the right to full self-determination. Revolutionary socialists fully support their struggle.

The Erdogan regime in Istanbul will certainly continue their brutal campaign against the Kurds. Turkey now has wind in its sails in Syria. As the central backer of the November 27 offensive, Erdogan has probably surpassed even his own expectations. He now has the opportunity to be a real force inside of Syria and to escalate the war against the Kurds. There have been reports of fighting between the FSA and Kurdish forces in the days since Assad left.

Israel. Assad liked to make a big fuss over his pro-Palestinian credentials. However, this was just for show. His regime has a history of brutal repression against Palestinians inside Syria. The attack on the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp is infamous. Israeli leaders have often pointed out that not one shot has been fired by the Syrian army on the Golan Heights in decades. Assad has taken no action to support the Palestinians since the genocide in Gaza began. It’s important to remember that Hamas opposed the Assad government and supported the uprising against it.

Tel Aviv is now worried that either the HTS will return to its Islamic fundamentalist roots or that a more traditional Islamic organization will come to the fore. It has therefore taken over better strategic positions in the Golan Heights and has been bombing military installations that it wishes to take out of commission. They are taking advantage of the withdrawal of Iranian and Russian anti-aircraft forces to essentially bomb whatever they feel like.

Hezbollah is now placed in a potentially difficult situation. If an anti-Iranian regime comes to the fore, the land route through Syria by which they have received much of their supplies from Iran will now be closed.

The United States. The US has at least 900 soldiers in Syria. In recent days, the US has been on a bombing offensive against targets it has long wished to destroy in Syria, mainly fundamentalist installations. Like Israel, the United States is taking advantage of the military vacuum to destroy whatever it wishes to.

In the radical movement, pro-Assad “campists” have described the fall of Assad as a US-Israeli operation. The facts do not back up this assertion for one minute. The US played no role in the HTS/SNA military campaign. In fact, the US is not a determining factor in the Syrian situation at this time.

Popular self-organization is the only way forward

It’s impossible to predict how the situation is going to evolve. Three variants seem possible: the HTS actually implements its new rhetoric and something approaching a normal capitalist state is built, the HTS reverts to its fundamentalist and repressive past, or that no central power is able to run the country from Damascus and that Syria breaks down into regional civil war.

But there’s a fourth variant too. This is that the best traditions of the Syrian upsurge of a decade ago are reasserted. That the working class is able to take advantage of Assad’s downfall to rebuild class and union organization. That self-organization of the popular masses takes place and a revolutionary left rebuilt. Revolutionary socialists will be working towards this variant. It’s the only way toward a Syrian Revolution.