Syria:
The Fall of a Dictator

Dec 16, 2024

This article is translated from the December 13 issue, #2941 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

In less than ten days, the coalition led by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia, heir to the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, backed by Turkey, took Damascus and brought down the bloody dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, who took refuge in Russia. The speed with which the regime collapsed shows that it had lost all support. From outside, it was the weakening of its regional allies, the Lebanese Hezbollah and the Iranian Pasdaran, who have been under Israeli attack for a year. From within, the population is exhausted by deprivation, while the regime’s military and cadres have given up on it.

Despite the many uncertainties it raises, the coalition led by Ahmed al-Shara, alias Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of HTS, who repeats everywhere that he is no longer a jihadist, has appeared to liberate a large part of the population. In a matter of hours, electricity and telephone networks were restored and food distributed in the towns.

Most poignant of all are the images of thousands of families making their way to the regime’s sinister prisons in the hope of finding their missing loved ones. A symbol of the regime’s barbarity, Sednaya prison near Damascus, was nicknamed the “human slaughterhouse” because tens of thousands of opponents were tortured there, walled up alive and, for the most part, executed. Some survivors were released after 20 or 30 years of imprisonment.

The fall of the tyrant was celebrated by the millions of Syrian refugees living in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and other European countries. Among those surviving in refugee camps, suffering from unemployment in exile, and xenophobia orchestrated by politicians, many seem to be considering returning home. But what will they find?

HTS’s leader, al-Jolani, who has overthrown the Assads, has been preparing for this role for a long time, presenting himself as a reasonable Islamist, and, why not, a democrat? However, he cut his teeth in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion, where he made friends with all the jihadist leaders, particularly in the American army’s prison camps. He gradually distanced himself from Islamic State, then Al Qaeda, over the years as his HTS militia was able to establish itself in the region around the city of Idlib, in northwestern Syria. In this region, where the various rebel factions were grouped together under Turkish protection, al-Jolani succeeded in imposing his authority. He set up a civilian government that restored trade and the infrastructure essential to daily life, including hospitals, taking advantage of the region’s proximity to Turkey. This relative stability is to his credit, even though his “government of salvation” suppressed demonstrators, imprisoned opponents and set up a religious police force. But he is also said to have tried to moderate the repressive zeal of jihadist militiamen, and to have succeeded in integrating secular opposition members into his ranks. He benefited from Turkey’s benevolence but certainly also cultivated contacts with Saudi Arabia, the United States and even Israel.

Al-Jolani is still classified as a “terrorist” by U.S. officials, who are certainly keen to warn him that he remains under surveillance. But having trimmed his beard and dropped his nom de guerre, he is now seeking to appear as a champion of a united Syria that respects its minorities. He organized the transfer of power between the Prime Minister of the fallen regime and Mohammed al-Bashir, the head of the Idlib government. He promises a transitional government with former ministers from Assad’s Baathist party and claims a liberal economic model in the image of Qatar. But the Syrian population would be wrong to trust al-Jolani’s promises.

The country has been ravaged by thirteen years of civil war. It remains divided into territories administered by competing politico-military apparatuses, sponsored by rival regional powers; maneuvering rages to determine who will prevail. Since the fall of Damascus, Turkey has intervened in the north against the Kurds, the United States is bombing the remnants of Islamic State, while Israel is destroying as many Syrian military bases as possible and moving its tanks across the border to reinforce its domination of the region.

There is every reason for civil war and wars of influence to resume, with the risk of Assad’s dictatorship giving way to that of reactionary Islamists rapidly resorting to the same means.