Where is Syria headed?
Summary: comparisons of HTF’s sudden victory have drawn
comparisons to the Taliban’s rout of 2021 but a closer examination
reveals deep flaws in that assumption.
We thank Gilbert Achcar for permission to publish a version, edited
for length, of his article translated from the Arabic and originally
published by Al-Quds al-Arabi
on 10 December 2024. Professor Achcar lectures on Development Studies
and International Relations at London’s SOAS University. You can find
his blog here.
While observing the amazing historical events that unfolded on 6
December the first thing that came to mind was relief and joy at the
images of detainees being freed from the hell of the carceral society
that Syria had become under the Assad family’s regime. Our feelings were
also overwhelmed by delight at the sight of Syrian families suddenly
able to return from nearby exile, whether from another area within Syria
or from Jordan, Lebanon or Turkey, to visit the towns and homes they
were forced to flee from years ago. Add to this that the dream of
millions of Syrian refugees, in the countries surrounding Syria and in
Europe, of returning to their homeland, even if only for a visit, this
dream that looked impossible a few days ago, has begun to seem
achievable.
Now, as the Arabic saying goes, the time has come for meditation
after elation. The truth is that if it were not for the Iranian
intervention that started in 2013, especially through Lebanon’s
Hezbollah, and for the Russian intervention that started in 2015, and
also for the US veto that prevented the Syrian opposition from receiving
any type of anti-aircraft weapon for fear that it might be used against
the Israeli Air Force – if it were not for these three factors, the
Assad regime would have fallen more than a decade ago, as it was on the
brink of the abyss in 2013, and again in 2015 despite Iranian rescue.
The plain fact is that once external support dried up, the regime
collapsed like any “puppet regime” that is abandoned by the power that
used to hold its strings. The latest striking example of such a collapse
was what happened to the puppet regime in Kabul in the face of the
Taliban’s advance, after US forces gave up propping it in 2021.
Thus, after Russia had withdrawn most of its forces from Syria due to
getting bogged down in the quagmire of its invasion of Ukraine (Moscow
left only 15 military aircraft in Syria, according to Israeli sources),
and after the Lebanese Hezbollah had suffered a severe defeat, which its
new Secretary-General desperately tried to portray as a “great
victory... that surpasses the victory achieved in 2006” and which
prevented it from being able to rescue its Syrian ally this time, all
this while Iran carried on with its cautious approach terrified at the
prospect of an escalation of Israel’s aggression against it and the
possibility that the United States might join it directly, after Donald
Trump’s return to the White House – in the face of these facts combined,
when Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seized the opportunity thus created to
launch an offensive on the areas under the control of the regime and
its allies, starting with the city of Aleppo, the Syrian puppet regime
collapsed like its Afghan counterpart.
The big difference between the Afghan and Syrian cases, though, is
that HTS is much weaker than the Taliban were when they completed their
control of their country. The forces of the Assad family’s regime
collapsed not out of fear of a mighty enemy, but because they had no
incentive to defend the regime any longer. The army, constructed on a
sectarian basis through the Assad family’s exploitation of the Alawite
minority to which they belong, no longer had an incentive to fight for
the Assad family’s control over the entire country, especially in light
of the collapse of living conditions that led to the nosedive of the
purchasing power of soldiers’ incomes. The regime’s miserable
last-minute attempt to raise their salaries by fifty percent could not
change anything. As a result, the current situation in Syria is very
different from that of Afghanistan following the Taliban’s victory. HTS
only controls some of the Syrian territories, and its control is fragile
in part of them, especially the area surrounding the capital Damascus,
where the regime collapsed before HTS reached it, preceded by the forces
of the Southern Operations Room.
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