The defeat of Syria’s 50-year Assad family autocracy considered a bitter enemy of the US and Israel should count as a huge victory for the United States. Syrian militias led by Hayat Tahrir Ash-Shams, a Turkish-supported jihadist group, swept the Assad regime away in a blink of an eye. Assad’s Army faded away in scenes reminiscent of the Iraqi Army’s defeat in 2014 and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021. The HTS further confounded Islamophobes by calling for national unity and appointing minority officials in newly liberated minority areas.
Rather than celebrate, American pundits and government officials are wringing their hands over the prospect that we might have to deal with a jihadist replacement for a murderer. To complicate matters, two of our “allies” look hell-bent on undermining any possibility that the newly liberated Syrian people might recover. Israel has launched over 500 air strikes destroying the Syrian Army ‘s equipment and bases and occupying a wide swathe of Syrian territory in the south. Turkey has sent another militia it controls, the SNA, to attack the SDF, an American-allied Kurdish militia fighting ISIS. The Turkish Air Force attacked and destroyed bridges across northeastern Syria to prevent SDF movement into the rest of the country. Not to be outdone, the US Air Force has attacked hundreds of ISIS targets across the country. The Turks and the Israelis are forcefully pursuing their interests in Syria, while the US government dithers over the legal technicalities of dealing with a terrorist-designated militia that freed Syria from a regime we hated. This will not end well.
The total collapse of the Syrian Army should not have surprised us. The collapse mimicked what happened to the Iraqi army in 2014 and the Afghan army in 2021 at the hands of home-grown jihadists. The reasons were all the same. All three armies depended on powerful foreign forces to help them whenever they got in trouble. That foreign supported dependency in turn corrupted them. Its command structure worked on the assumption that the foreign support would do all the heavy lifting. The foreign protectors inspired -- and occasionally funded -- corruption in the command structure of the Army. The lower part of the command structure joined in, mostly by padding the numbers of troops in their units and then collecting the excess pay. Oftentimes, they got greedier and withheld food and salaries from the troops that did show up. In Iraq and in Afghanistan, the United States government turned a blind eye. The Russians, Iranians and Hezbollah appear to have imitated our bad habits in Syria.
When the HTS attacked the Syrian Army, the Russians, Iranians and Hezbollah were no longer there. They had mostly withdrawn to deal with problems at home – as we did in Afghanistan. Syrian soldiers had no wish to die for their corrupt leaders; they took off their unforms and faded away, even the better treated elite units guarding the regime in Damascus decided they had no dog in this fight.
Turkey is the winner in this game, so far. It trained, advised and equipped the HTS, the team that brought down the Assad regime while its other proxy attacked the Kurds. Given Trump’s refusal to stop Turkey’s attacks against the Kurds in his first term, Ankara quite reasonably assumed Trump will now green light its actions in Syria. If history is prologue Trump's prior romance with Turkish president Erdogan and his announcement that he has no interest in getting involved, no doubt encouraged Erdogan to believe he has a free hand in doing what he wants in Syria.
Erdogan has publicly stated that Turkey's key interest is the preservation of Syria’s territorial sovereignty, putting it at odds with Israel’s territorial ambitions. Israeli troops have not only occupied all the UN-designated buffer zones with Syria but have pushed deeper into Syria. Some reporters have sighted Israeli tanks 20 kms from Damascus. Lending credence to these reports Israel’s foreign minister announced that Israel intends to create a “sterile buffer zone” in southern Syria (without defining either “sterile” or the zone’s size) to complement Israel’s “buffer zone” in south Lebanon. This is music to Bibi Netanyahu's core constituency, the expansionist religious nationalist Zionist parties. They believe these territories are part of Israel, the land God granted exclusively to one son of Abraham.
The post-Assad government in Syria, at this reading may have only one protector. Probably sooner rather than later, Erdogan’s announcement that Turkey will preserve Syria’s territorial integrity will soon run into Israel’s buffer zone; absent vigorous European and, especially, American diplomacy something will go south badly.
Early European reactions disappoint; their only policy option looks to exacerbate Syria’s internal instability if it follows through plans already on the airwaves to stop receiving Syrian asylum seekers and in fact prepare to send the Syrians now in Europe back to their homeland as quickly as it can. If there were ever a time for the EU to get its foreign policy coordination act together and prevent an ongoing sore in the eastern Mediterranean, one that threatens the security of Europe as much as it does that of the Middle East, it is now.
The downfall of the House of Assad should be cause for celebration; instead, we seem paralyzed by the jihadist credentials of the new leadership in Syria. We have limited our policy actions to sugar-coating both Israel’s destructive air raids and its occupation of Syrian territory. Instead of co-opting the new Syrian leadership with charm, Joe Biden, has dumped responsibility into Donald Trump’s lap who says he does not want to engage. Throwing hot potatoes around for six weeks is diplomatic malpractice of the highest order.