Syrians are dancing within the streets of Damascus and different cities to have fun the collapse of the hideous regime of Bashar al-Assad, the person accountable for an estimated 600,000 lifeless in a 13-year-long civil conflict — together with tens of hundreds viciously tortured to dying in his dungeons.
These nonetheless alive have been staggering out of liberated prisons, limping and operating towards household and freedom.
“This is the moment of celebration,” I used to be instructed by the College of Oklahoma’s Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist with household within the nation. He instructed me the dispirited Syrian military had pale away and let rebels win as a result of they’d been receiving little or no pay and no additional assist from their Russian and Iranian backers.
That’s the excellent news.
The not so excellent news: Nobody is definite what sort of authorities will observe Assad within the weeks to come back — whether or not it’ll assist stabilize the area, together with Lebanon and presumably Gaza, or additional tear it aside.
The important information, which can save Syria from a relapse into violence: Assad’s flight to exile in Moscow is a physique blow to Iran’s ayatollahs and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, for whom Syria had important significance. It shows their growing weak spot and paints them as losers. It makes them extra weak to anybody who seeks negotiations with both.
President-elect Trump, take notice.
Syria’s many minorities
The rapid post-Assad risk is that Syria may collapse into separate militia fiefs or into one other civil conflict. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (often called HTS) — the primary insurgent group that toppled the federal government in a lightning advance from the north — was as soon as the Syrian department of al-Qaeda. Its chief, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, broke with the terrorist group a number of years in the past and is attempting to melt his picture. However Syria’s many minorities can have doubts.
“Jolani’s going to have to reach out to all these different Syrian communities,” mentioned Landis, hopefully.
I nonetheless recall my final go to inside Syria in 2012, through the Arab Spring simply earlier than the heightened civil conflict and Islamist kidnappings made journalistic entry virtually unattainable.
With a Syrian translator, I visited a headquarters of a gaggle referred to as Ahrar al-Sham, inside an deserted college, and the aggressive hostility of the fighters was solely contained when a Belgian volunteer intervened. I quickly left. I additionally interviewed reasonable, unbearded civilian fighters who had arrange militias as a result of they wished a democracy to exchange Assad’s vicious rule.
The best way to coalesce secular Syrians, reasonable Muslims, Kurds, and Christians right into a authorities with Islamists, and whether or not free elections can be doable is the massive problem Syria will face.
Iran and Russia out
But, what provides me hope is that the Iranians and Russians will now not have the ability to bend Syria to their will.
After a well-liked rebellion in 2011, Assad was solely capable of retain energy due to intervention by Tehran, and later by Moscow. Though Syria has a religiously and ethnically combined inhabitants, together with a plurality of Sunni Muslims together with Kurds, Christians and different minorities, Assad belongs to a minority Shiite sect, often called Alawites, who’ve managed the nation for many years. Thus he was near the Shiite regime in Tehran.
The Iranians despatched hundreds of fighters to Syria, comprised of their very own forces together with Iraqi Shiite militias and even Afghan refugees residing in Iran. Led by Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers, they have been rather more efficient combatants than the underpaid and corrupt Syrian military.
Iran’s quid professional quo was Assad’s permission to permit Iranian weapons and missiles to be trucked and flown from Tehran through Damascus to Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon to make use of in opposition to Israel.
Syria thus turned a important component of Tehran’s effort to encircle Israel with a “ring of fire” that included Lebanon’s Hezbollah militiamen (together with Hamas in Gaza and Houthis in Yemen).
Purpose to hope
With Assad gone and Sunni Syrian insurgent teams in cost, Iranians are fleeing the nation. No extra will they have the ability to transport weapons to Lebanon for use in opposition to Israel. Nor will they have the ability to assist the Alawite minority dominate the nation.
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Russia, for its half, despatched planes in 2015 to bomb Syrian civilians and cities into rubble, simply as they’ve performed to Ukraine. Moscow was rewarded with a important Mediterranean port in Tartus and a significant airfield which helped assist Putin’s expansionist ambitions.
Russia will almost certainly lose these bases, which gave them their solely entry to the Mediterranean and gave Putin an necessary Mideast position. His world entry is thus shrinking. And Syria, hopefully, can be free of his colonial video games.
Which means the Islamists, and Jolani, must look to the reasonable Sunni Arab world and to the West to assist rebuild their nation and resettle Syrian refugees who return. Which in flip provides these Arabs and Western leaders leverage to stop any try and impose an ultraconservative non secular state.
If this leverage just isn’t used correctly, Jolani may change into a risk, in a rustic the place ISIS nonetheless has cells which are in contact with their counterparts in Iraq. If used correctly, Syria may revive and rebuild its shattered society.
Nothing much less is owed to the hundreds who died underneath torture throughout Assad’s rule.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist for the The Philadelphia Inquirer. ©2024 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Tribune Content material Company.
