How the Assad regime survived from the 2011 civil war to final collapse. The mosaic of internal and external, regional and global forces that have changed the Levant. The rise of HTS and the challenges of the new Damascus government between Turkey’s influence and Israel’s intervention.
Bashar al-Asad (Assad) quietly left Damascus on Saturday, December 7. The survival and decline of his regime had been inextricably linked to the action and inaction of regional and international actors since the popular revolts of 2011, which followed the disruptive force of the Arab uprisings from North Africa to the Persian Gulf /Arab. However, its fate had been different because of the different international, regional, and local contexts in which the civil war developed.
The violent regime change in Libya, on the basis of a “loose” interpretation of UN Security Council resolution number 1973, had broken the consensus of the UNSC itself, paralysing its action ad infinitum. The Egyptian revolution had overthrown the 30-year regime of Hosni Mubarak, leading the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement to electoral victory and profoundly shaking the domestic and regional political status quo. The coup in 2013 quickly ended both the Islamist engagement with power as well as the democratic process in Egypt.
In such a backdrop, the U.S. decision not to intervene militarily against Assad following its use of chemical weapons spared him the fate of the Libyan dictator, paving the way for the Iran nuclear agreement and providing Russia with a diplomatic shield to protect its Syrian ally.
Nevertheless, United States and Russia ended up intervening militarily in Syria in a anti terrorism effort, but with opposing strategic objectives: the former in 2014 against the Islamic State (IS ) of the Levant and with the goal to protect the northeastern Kurdish area and its energy resources; the latter in 2015 against anti-Assad armed groups aiming to restore state control over 70 percent of the national territory. The Americans will remain mainly in the Northeast and to a small extent in Southeast Syria, in Tanf, along the border with Jordan.
In the north they could to rely on the Kurdish militias of the YPG, under the aegis of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who nevertheless, while expanding west of the Euphrates River, could not avoid clashing against the Turks. Russia for its part would establish two strategically important military assets in the Mediterranean, the naval base in Tartus and the Hmeimim air base near Latakia. Russia could thus consolidate its presence in the Mediterranean, a vital tool both for its projection as a world leader and for its interests in the region and in Africa.
Together with the growing competition among the great powers, the metamorphosis of public anti-regime demonstrations into civil war also attracted both indirect and belligerent interventions of other states in the region and the consequent fragmentation of the Syrian opposition, political and military, into a constellation of movements and groups of multiple secular and Islamist shades, often fighting among themselves and in the pay of the most influential regional master.
Turks, Qataris, Emiratis and Saudis ended up competing over time for areas of influence at the expense of the compactness of the anti-Assad front. The effort to unify the ranks of the opposition eventually resulted in the establishment of an umbrella organization, the Syrian National Council (SNC), which established itself over time as the sole interlocutor of the anti-Assad front to the United Nations and the Arab League in the admittedly desperate search for a dialogue with the regime to be overthrown.
The pro-Assad front led by Russia, on the other hand, was not slow in assembling an alternative opposition with, however, a short-lived reach. The anti-Assad and anti-YPG Turkish government and the pro-Assad Iranian government, flanked mainly by the Lebanese Hezbollah militias, eventually carved out their areas of influence, the first in the North and Northwest, the second along the South-North road axis with a strong concentration in the areas of Dar’a, Quneitra, Damascus and Aleppo. Moscow acted as a link between the two through the Astana process.
Despite the, mostly cosmetic, plea to Syria’s unity and territorial integrity, the country’s political and military fragmentation mirrored deep regional and international divisions. Divisions faithfully mirrored by the lengthy text of UNSC Resolution 2254, passed on December 18th, 2015, which also translated the contradictions of the international community, grappling with the disruptive waves of millions of refugees, the growing number of civilian casualties, the influx of foreign fighters – jihadists and non-jihadists – and the international war against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.
The resolution defined both the basic steps of a democratic political process through the formation of a transitional government with full executive powers and possibly without Assad, and the fight against terrorism. It was thanks to the latter that the Syrian dictator continued the war against his opponents, taking advantage of the absence of a shared definition of the various armed groups between terrorists and non-terrorists except for al-Qayda, IS and Jabhat al-Nusra (Jn).
Jordan, tasked with compiling such a list, failed to provide the slightest draft. As for the opposition in exile, Assad continued to deny its recognition lacking in his eyes incisive military action and conspicuous political clout at home. The time frames for cease-fire and the start of negotiations turned out to be as ephemeral as the Syrian government’s willingness to take an active part in them.
Nine years after the UN resolution and in spite of the war against terrorism, it would then be Jabhat al-Nusra to emerge victorious from the Syrian civil conflict. A victory linked to local, regional and international factors. Progressively confined along with other armed Islamist groups to Idlib province in Syria’s northwest, Jn was able to rid itself over time of any opposition to its authority under the watchful and benevolent eye of the Turkish armed forces, stationed at a dozen observation points in the province. Rescinding ties with al-Qayda and Is, it then took the name Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant) and simultaneously started fighting its former allies and the Syrian regime.
The ceasefire with the latter, mediated in 2020 by Russia and Turkey, enabled it both to strengthen its civil administration through the establishment and coordination of several local councils headed by notables and tribal leaders, and to harden and reorganize its ranks, refine and increase its military arsenal, and ultimately prepare for victory.
Its rapid conquest of territory along the Aleppo-Damascus-Dara’a axis was therefore less surprising than the sudden fall of the Syrian armed forces, which were poorly paid, poorly equipped and poorly coordinated and offered little resistance to its advance. The same goes for the Lebanese Hezbollah militias, which, decimated in men and means by the Israeli army in Lebanon following their intervention in the Gaza conflict, refrained from taking part.
Their Iranian partners have done no better or more. Weakened, too, by Israeli targeted killings and attacks on strategic military targets in Lebanon, Syria and Iran, they began withdrawing from Aleppo
province and negotiating with HTS. Also the Russians, increasingly distracted by the conflict in Ukraine, would then engage in close consultations with the Syrian group. If the pro-Assad armed front seems to be standing still, the anti-Assad front is definitely moving.
Syrian armed groups linked to Ankara have captured with the help of the Turkish air force the strategic site of Manbij in the north wresting it from the YPG, which they would like to push back east of the Euphrates. The Israelis for their part bombed military bases and depots around Damascus and then occupied the Golan Heights buffer zone, thus getting rid of both the UN peacekeeping mission (Undof) and the 1974 Syrian-Israeli agreement which that same mission had made possible. Undof had since July 2024 denounced Israeli military manoeuvres along the Alpha Line, which separates the Syrian Golan from the portion annexed by Israel. Unidentified groups have instead occupied areas around al-Tanf and in the south.
The Israeli territorial conquest, perpetrated under the pretext of national security, confirms the expansionist ambitions of the Netanyahu government and also casts a heavy shadow over the future of Gaza and the West Bank. Highly concerned about this is Jordan, which, caught between Israeli territorial appetites and the Syrian civil war, risks being swamped again by waves of refugees that could destabilize it.
Egypt, too, which joins the chorus of Arab voices against Israeli expansion, is exposed both to possible arrivals of Palestinian and Syrian refugees and to the impact that HTS seizure of power could have on the broader Islamist movement, dominated in the past by the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian government had harshly suppressed.
Violence, chaos, and ideological extremism also worry the UAE and Saudi Arabia. While not regretting the fate of the Syrian dictator, both countries look at any form of Islamic political activism with suspicion. And HTS has certainly not been one of the most moderate.
In Iraq, on the other hand, the fall of Syria’s Ba’athist regime does not seem to spark euphoria nor despondency. The same regime had welcomed the most radical elements of the Iraqi insurgency in the post-Saddam Hussein era, facilitating their terrorist activities over time. However, the fear is that the HTS seizure of power, Iranian weakening, and American disengagement could rekindle hotbeds of tension and awaken the Islamic State terrorists still present on the ground.
It remains to be seen how the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) that have been fighting in Syria within the pro-Iranian axis of resistance, so far in silence, will behave. The Iraqi army and the PMF have recently tightened security measures along the western border, through which weapons and militiamen will still have to pass if and when the government in Tehran decides on their withdrawal from Syria.
Further north, Iraqi Kurds, weakened politically and militarily, are watching with apprehension the fate of their Syrian cousins and the possible resurgence of Turkish military operations against PKK positions in the autonomous region. Finally, in Lebanon, the weakening of Hezbollah holds out the prospect of a rebalancing of internal forces with the strengthening of state institutions, but also possible inter-ethnic and confessional tensions in a context of severe socioeconomic difficulties, material destruction, Syrian refugees, and Israeli occupation of the South.
The Israeli war against Gaza, provoked by the Hamas massacre of more than a thousand Israeli civilians, has expanded despite sincere or disingenuous American diplomatic attempts to curb its momentum. American diplomacy will return to the region in the coming days with two objectives: to restrain the Turkish advance and to turn its umpteenth announcement of a truce between Hamas and Israel into facts. It will also be up to Washington to show the way to take HTS off the international terrorism list should it decide to support its new government in Damascus.
U.S. diplomatic failure has turned into success in outgoing President Joe Biden’s latest statements. The war has de facto dragged with it the pro-Iranian axis of resistance by weakening its main protagonists and has also dealt the death blow to the Assad regime, which had guaranteed them supply lines in men, funds and weapons. However, it strengthened and expanded Turkish influence in Syria at the expense of its Kurdish allies. While providing its Israeli partner with a military victory that, although incomplete due to the absence of peace prospects, undoubtedly consolidated it as a regional leader.
Nevertheless, Israel’s territorial expansion in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria exacerbates instability in the region, in addition to increasing its already robust anti-Zionist sentiments. Damascus’ new leader Ahmad al-Shar’a, formerly known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, has made no secret of his support for the October 7th, 2023 massacre of civilians by Hamas.
However, it is not his anti-Zionism that is of concern now, but his ability to keep the home front – the winning and non-winning front –united through inclusive governance and sincere reconciliation dialogue. The decision by al-Shar’a to appoint Muhammad al-Bashir, former head of the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) in Idlib, as prime minister of the transitional government does not seem to be going in the right direction. The choice was made without any consultation with other armed factions and the opposition in exile.
Also at stake is the game of reconstruction and financial aid, which HTS badly needs to consolidate its victory. Thus, Jolani’s next moves are awaited for the preservation of state institutions and the equality of all its citizens in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious context of Syrian’s society. If this does not happen, either through his inability or his will, the risk of a resumption of civil war would become real.
It remains to be said that HTS and its related factions control only part of the national territory and armed forces. Internal divisions and areas of influence of regional and international actors will persist in the absence of a common vision and action by all Syrians in support of the country’s unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity. As long as political and military fragmentation persists, we will then continue to talk about Syrias, but not Syria.
