The Syrian omen

After fifty-four years, the rule of the Asad family in Syria is over.  After a lightning-like campaign of barely more than a week, the Sunni forces of the Hay'at Tahrîr ash-Shâm (Syria Liberation Organization) (HTS) captured the capital Damascus this morning.  Bashar al-Asad appears to have fled the country yesterday, heading for either Abu Dhabi or Moscow, or perhaps Tehran -- reports vary.  By all accounts, the pro-regime forces have not put up much of a fight, in some cases getting rid of their uniforms so they can blend in with the civilian population.

It remains to be seen what this revolution will mean for Syria.  The Asad regime has been brutal even by Middle Eastern standards, and the last fourteen years of civil war have laid much of the country in ruins and wrecked its economy.  On the other hand, the past track record of Sunni militant groups such as al-Qâ'idah, Dâ'ish, and the Taliban has been one of horrific and even murderous repression toward religious minorities, women, and gays.

Syria is one of the most heterogeneous countries in the Mideast.  Its 25,000,000 people include over 2,000,000 Kurds and smaller ethnic minorities such as the Turkmens (up to 1,500,000) and Assyrians (up to 1,200,000).  Most of the rest of the population is ethnically Arab, but the Arabs are diverse in religion.  The majority are Sunni Muslims, but there are over 2,500,000 Christians (the Assyrian minority is mainly Christian) and 500,000 to 700,000 Druze, adherents of a secretive religion which is derived from Islam and considered heretical by hard-line Islamists.  The Alawites, a sect of Shiite Islam numbering about 3,000,000, are also viewed as heretics by many Sunnis.  The Asad regime was Alawite-dominated, and the Alawite population generally supported it, out of fear that the Sunnis identify them with the regime and would persecute them if they ever gained the upper hand.

Any attempt to enforce a uniform Sunni-extremist regime like Taliban Afghanistan on a country as diverse as this could only mean a horrific bloodbath, to say nothing of the possibility of mass lust for revenge against the Alawite population for the atrocities of the fallen regime.  So far there have been some positive signs.  Abu Muhammad al-Golani, the leader of the HTS, belonged to al-Qâ'idah years ago, but in recent years he has re-positioned himself as a tolerant pluralist, promising to respect the rights of minorities and supporting a federal structure for a future Syrian government.  HTS forces have freed political prisoners in the cities they have taken, and given the Western media free access.  But only time will tell whether such moderation will remain HTS policy once they consolidate power.

There is no such ambiguity about the international implications of the regime's collapse.  Here is a map showing the locations of the various places that have been in the news:

Until just over a week ago, the HTS was confined to the north-central part of Syria.  Its sudden capture of Aleppo, the country's second-largest city, stunned observers.  In the week since then, it has stormed southward, capturing Hama and Homs (spelled Hamâh and Hims on the map), and entering Damascus this morning, while also pushing some ways west toward the coast.  This represents an astonishingly rapid victory.

Most of the northeast is controlled by another rebel group dominated by the Kurds, while most of the land along the southeastern border between the Euphrates and As-Suwaydâ' is almost uninhabited.  The only important area now still under the control of pro-regime forces is the coast, the homeland of the Alawite population.  This includes Tartûs, home of Russia's only naval base on the Mediterranean.  There is also a Russian land base at Hmeimim near Latakia, but there have been reports that the Russians are evacuating it.  Russia has already withdrawn its ships which had been based at Tartûs.  They now face a long journey around Europe to get home.  Given the rapid collapse of pro-regime forces elsewhere, it seems likely that the rebels will reach Latakia and Tartûs within days.

Russia and the Iranian theocracy have been propping up the Asad regime for years, but they were unable to do anything effective to help it stave off this collapse, even though the loss of Syria as a client state and the loss of its bases there is a strategic disaster for Russia.  This is the strongest evidence yet that both those regimes have been severely weakened by their recent clashes with Ukraine and Israel respectively (Iran itself has suffered little damage, but its proxies in Gaza and Lebanon have been devastated).  Whatever else now happens in Syria, those regimes are clearly losing the savage wars of choice they have launched against the West.

[Note on spelling:  The sound system of Arabic is very different from that of English, and there is great variation in pronunciation between different regions of the Arab world.  Because of this, Arabic names and words tend to be spelled inconsistently in English.  There is a standard system for transcribing words in standard Arabic pronunciation into our Roman alphabet, but few people other than scholars in the field know it.  I usually use the established English names of places, if any (Latakia rather than Arabic al-Lâdhiqiyyah, Damascus rather than Dimashq), and otherwise use either the standard transliteration or whatever best approximates the pronunciation.  The name "Asad" is often written with a double S in English, but there is no basis for this in the pronunciation or in the Arabic-alphabet spelling.  Both vowels are short and the name is stressed on the first syllable, not the second.  Al-Golani's name is often also spelled al-Jawlani, which actually better fits both Syrian dialect and standard pronunciation.]