The Syrian Fall

After twelve years of fighting and seemingly stabilization, the Ba’athist Assad government of Syria fell over the course of a week and a half. Depending on who you are, you may be celebrating or dreading this new development.

Who is happy? The Syrian rebels are happy. Israel is happy. The US is happy. The Kurds are probably happy too. Who isn’t? Iran, the Axis of Resistance, Syrian Christians, Ba’athist holdouts, and Hezbollah who is now cut off from the aerial supply bridge.

Personally, I am not very fond of what just happened. I don’t believe that we even should be involved in the Middle East in the first place, but since we are, the urgency at which our government displayed an insistence that Assad must fall is puzzling and makes nearly no sense from a strategic point of view.

Before the Civil War started in 2011-2012, Syria was one of the most stable Middle Eastern countries. The Assad government had kept the lid on radical Islamic terrorism since the beginning of the Syrian Arab Republic in the mid-20th century.

That changed with the onset of the Civil War. The Assad Government, weakened, had no way of stopping elements of these radicals from joining up with radical Islamists in already destabilized Iraq to form what came to be known as ISIS.

ISIS, which was considered to be our number one foe during the mid-2010s, ended up expanding to the point where it looked as if they would actually annex Iraq and Syria. This ended up changing from 2017 onwards when Trump allowed the military to destroy them by any means necessary.

During the ISIS onslaught, the Assad government was actively helping to fight the terrorist threat. After all, Syrian territory had been declared as part of the Caliphate. It was in his best interest to destroy the group.

Yet despite this, the United States didn’t miss any opportunity to screw the Assad government over. Instead of doing the logical thing and teaming up to combat terrorism, the US took every opportunity to cripple the Syrian state’s capabilities.

I understand why. The US already had given funds and weapons to the Syrian opposition. We Americans don’t like feeling like we wasted money. We had already invested in a side, even if we didn’t fully understand who was in the side we were invested in.

With the collapse of ISIS, the situation had looked like it stabilized despite the Civil War still ongoing. The SAR held the majority of territory and was, by all means, the internationally recognized government of Syria. This period of stalemate held until last week, when rebel forces took over Damascus.

It is important to understand that the Syrian opposition isn’t a monolith and that there is a variety of competing groups that will be trying to take the throne in the coming months. I would also argue that this is not the end of the Civil War but the beginning of a stage without the Assad government.

As of now, there is an interim government led by a transitional Prime Minister named Mohammad al-Bashir, a member of the Tahrir al-Sham group, a Sunni Islamist Paramilitary. Oh joy.

Their military leader, Abu Mohamad al-Julani, is the second Emir of this group. He had ties to Al-Qaeda and was arrested by American forces in 2006. In 2013, he was listed as a specially designated global terrorist by the US state department.

Julani has said that he has reformed himself, but gee, that is quite the background for someone who is apparently now a moderate rebel. That’s like putting a reformed bank robber as Secretary of the Treasury, like okay bro.

As I said, it is going to take a couple months before we fully understand the direction that the new Syrian state will take but given these interesting characters that have currently found themselves in power, I am not optimistic.

In the meantime, foreign nations have wasted no time in looting the corpse of the collapsed country. Israel has declared the Golan Heights as formally Israeli since all treaties with the Assad government are now void. On top of this, they have even launched a land grab beyond the Golan Heights, nearing the Damascus area.

Israel and the US have even been running aerial bombardment campaigns against military assets in Syria that aren’t Russian, astounding the rebels who had been under the impression that the US and Israel were partners in the efforts to depose Assad.

Long story short, aside from whatever weapons and manpower that the Syrian rebels hold, the country of Syria is pretty much defenseless from any form of attack from Israel and America. We can also assume that Ba’athism (secular pan-Arabic socialism espoused by the Assad government) is dead from now on.

The future is now uncertain for Syrian Christians, who had been protected under the Ba’athist government, and Alawites, a minority group which the Assad family comes from and elevated during their years in power.

While I have made it no secret that I would have preferred it had the Assad government stayed in power, all I can do now is hope that these supposedly reformed Jihadists are true to their word and govern the country in a way that provides stability.

However, this cannot happen if the American and Israeli bombardments and land grabs do not stop. Your supposed enemy is dead. Why are you beating a dead horse? Do you want the Syrian territories to be an anarchic wasteland forever? Wouldn’t it be better for our national security if it wasn’t?

This schizophrenic policy of deposing governments and then being surprised when an explosion of terror groups erupts from the ashes is quite annoying, to say the least. You would have thought that we would have learned our lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan, but nope.

Now it is on to the monitoring stage. I shall be keeping an eye on developments in Syria, whether good or bad.