The Runaway Dictator and prospects for resistance to foreign aggression

What follows is necessarily asynchronous with reality, considering there is still so much that we do not know at this moment. One crucial exception is that the Assad regime is no more, and neither is Bashar Assad and his strongmen. 

We should be happy for those who lived under the regime’s boot for decades. And I am, and so are most members of my family on the Syrian side, and my friends there, despite their concerns about the future and the lack of enthusiasm for Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) comprised primarily of Jabhat Al-Nusra (JAN), which for years since its inception viewed non-Muslims as second class citizens to be tolerated. That was until HTS had a public make-over after 2016 and “took back” some of their hardline positions. Despite all this, given the manner in which the regime’s leader abandoned his supporters and comrades, notably since 2020, even the self-respecting bonafide Syrian detractors of the militant opposition that ended up marching into Damascus are relieved Assad is gone. The takeaway that is likely to endure is the following: the sigh of relief we witness in Syria today does not contradict the profound concerns of many Syrians regarding the potential precarity of the coming months.

In the first intense days following December 8 when Bashar definitively left Syria, many observers correctly emphasized the Syrian people’s jubilation over a profound ambivalence towards prospects for the future. These concerns not only pertained to the forging of a new government but also to the challenges of development and Syria’s sovereignty, notably its relationship to the expansionism, belligerence, and military campaigns of Israel which continues to occupy and expand its presence around Syria’s Golan Heights. At this point, however, we are trying to analyze the news while we really still do not, and will not, know the full story for some time, especially regarding the trade-offs that took place before Turkey gave HTS the green light to mobilize. 

The collapse of the Assad regime has undeniably brought a sense of relief and even joy to a large portion of the Syrian population. This newfound respite, however, is tempered by the considerable challenges that lie ahead. The path towards genuine liberation and sovereignty is fraught with uncertainty, not least amid continued aggression and expansion into Syrian territory by Israel, a threat that is not receiving any serious attention from Syria’s current strongmen.

The miscalculations and hubris of the Assad regime

There is a belief that the Assad regime, up to the moment of its downfall, continued to be an active agent in the Axis of Resistance, thus prompting some to continue to champion the regime until the last minute. Here, it is important to note that Syria has historically contributed indirectly to the Axis of Resistance as an enabler, with notable variance in intensity—e.g., compare its important role in 2006 to the diminished role in 2023-24. It’s also important to note that with Israel’s bombing campaign and the deadly pagers operations against Hezbollah in the fall of 2024, as well as its massive bombing in Syria of Syrian/Iranian military assets, including transport routes, the utility of the Syrian “lynchpin” or “bridge” to the Axis had been considerably diminished. Against this backdrop, the calculations and strategic posture of all actors involved here were altered, as became evident in November and December.

Today, many among the supporters of the resistance axis, are lamenting that the timing and substance of the swift surge, advance, and take-over by Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham benefits Israel as it pursues its genocide in Gaza. The argument is that a disbanded resistance axis enables Israel to continue its genocidal campaign with even greater ease thus indicating that Assad’s removal could have been orchestrated, or signaled, by the United States and other allies, including Turkey, the party that has controlled HTS movements since 2018 in Idlib. 

While all this might be true, this functional thinking elides the role that the Syrian regime played in precipitating its own demise and the fact that it should have anticipated the opportune timing of the mobilization. In fact, the failures of the regime extend back much further than the past year, or even past decade, but all helped lead to this moment.

Over the course of four decades of essentially uncontested rule, the regime was by 2011 primarily responsible for creating the conditions of an uprising, long before Jabhat Al-Nusra emerged, and long before the direct and massive intervention by a host of states and non-state actors–i.e., Turkey, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and a plethora of totalitarian and other fighters, including ISIS. 

There were challenges facing Syria during this time, and not all were within the regime’s control. The Covid-19 pandemic was devastating on multiple registers followed by a cholera outbreak and a drug-use pandemic featuring a massive trade industry that the regime benefitted from. Perhaps most significantly were the crippling sanctions imposed by the United States which were felt even more by ordinary Syrians—always a criminal habit of the United States vis-a-vis its regional adversaries. Yet, despite even these extenuating circumstances, the regime was not willing to take action to keep itself where it could. In particular, it refused to respond to any calls for reconciliation even from those who risked everything for its survival as an important, if junior, partner and lynchpin in the axis of resistance.

The regime gained the upper hand in 2016, since ending major hostilities, which signaled the end of the rebels’ hopes to topple the regime at that time. Since 2018/19, Syria has been engaged in late and low-level attrition-like conflict with the rebels. Simultaneously, its economic conditions have been exacerbated by the debilitating U.S. sanctions, and together with ongoing intervention by regional and international actors during the past nearly 14 years and counting. The irony is telling: none of the intervening states cared for Syrians’ well-being, and most (i.e., Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) were either working with the regime, supporting it, establishing detente, or even chummy with it prior to the emergence of the Uprising. Only the United States was not supportive prior to the uprising, but its infinitely unprincipled record of propping up dictatorships and supporting the destruction or directly destroying Arab states/countries wholesale more than balances out the hypocrisy and unprincipled nature of the others.

The result of the uprising and international intervention has left Syria in a bleak condition featuring an unprecedented refugee crisis; more than six million refugees and an equal number of internally displaced persons have been unable to return. Yet, the Syrian regime has done nothing to alleviate these conditions, not even to rehabilitate its military defenses, despite the leadership’s possession of resources. Moreover, it did not ease its repression, allowed high levels of corruption, and refused any form of reconciliation with rebel forces despite entreaties from its closest ally, Iran, and of late, Turkey–though we know now that Turkey was buying time by letting the regime think all is well on the Idlib front.

If any ordinary observer can recognize Israel’s or the rebels’ opportunity to attack it, in light of the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran’s seeming restraint, surely the Syrian regime should have anticipated it, and been on guard. 

Now, as we increasingly learn, Syria’s allies and neighbors, had been urging it to establish some sort of detente or reconciliation with the opposition rebels both publicly and privately, for the sake of stability, self-preservation, and, for some, the avoidance of precisely what was possibly an opportune move to revive a rebellion. But the regime’s hubris, tyranny, and deep corruption prevented it from lifting a finger or engaging in even the most minimal compromises regarding its near-absolute dominance, to begin crafting a Syria for (let’s say) most Syrians. While this position seemed rational given the regime’s reading of the geostrategic context in 2011, in November 2024 it was a gross miscalculation.

This combination of hubris and obstinance was not a new attitude. It has been in the making ever since Bashar inherited and consolidated power in the early 2000s when he embarked on “modernizing Syria” with neoliberal reforms laced with nepotism and corruption. This produced a new image of a rising Syria while redistributing wealth from the bottom up to a circumspect circle of beneficiaries almost wholly determined by the ruling class. Thus, the five years before the emergence of the uprising in 2011 was critical in the regime consolidating further political and economic power, along with the continuing festering of state and bureaucratic institutions. 

By 2018-2020, after much bloodshed, destruction, and massive migration, and as de-escalation was underway, the embattled regime continued to exist along the same lines of command and authority it did directly prior to the uprising while being significantly weakened and isolated. The now uncontested family leader opted to neither save Syria from total collapse, nor rebuild state institutions, including the army, nor call for the repatriation of Syrians to rebuild anything, nor came out to address his people as a leader should in times of destitution, nor support measures for their improved livelihood, nor provide living wages for his defense forces (from family or state coffers), let alone state employees, all of whom stood by the regime for good or for ill.

Bashar just sat there. For a long, long time. He also sat there watching the Israeli and U.S. barbarian leaders administer a genocide in Gaza. He sat there like his Arab state counterparts, for the most part, save for administering a considerably decreased rate of armed munitions and supplies. Notably, the rapprochement starting in mid-2023 between Syria on the one hand and Saudi Arabia and the UAE raised the regime’s hopes of alternative anchors, which in turn raised eyebrows among friends and foes alike, including its natural allies, Iran and Hezbollah.

So, if anyone is upset about the timing of the fall of the Assad regime, and its impact on further undermining resistance to imperialism because it benefits the racist genocidal state of Israel and the repulsive hypocritical Western states, there is no one to blame but the always brutal and self-serving Syrian regime itself. 

Finally, those who support continued resistance to Israel’s expansionist settler colonialism and the destructive domination of the United States policy in the region, do not weep for the runaway regime. The regime’s utility to resistance was increasingly diminishing. Various reports and signals indicate its own partners, Iran and Hezbollah, grew frustrated with its leadership as an increasingly emerging burden and potential dead weight because of the foregoing. More will be uncovered with time, it seems, but their actions, or lack thereof on the eve of its collapse, spoke louder than words and speculation, then and now. The question is will Syria’s new leadership exhibit a resistance stance, with or without Iran or Hezbollah? 

Israel and the New Syria

I will hold my judgment or suspicion at the prospect of the new regime’s orientation toward Israel but I am not hopeful. Israel destroyed Syria’s entire military capabilities in 48 hours (continuing until the time of this writing), and Syria’s new strongmen issued a lukewarm statement of condemnation at the UN three days later. Moreover, it seems like everyone has an interest in what happens next–including the array of state and non-state actors who coordinated, supported, and helped with this cakewalk over Syrian cities (thanks to the run-away dictator), all of whom either support the colonial culprits, are eager to normalize with or avoid angering them, or are themselves the colonial culprits. What they do next will also matter.  

Beyond the very real relief that Syrians are enjoying at the moment, indicators suggest that the worst may still lie ahead regarding Syrian sovereignty and prospects of liberation from Western domination for the region. This threatens to make the relief from the brutality of dictatorial rule short-lived. 

These threats include subjugation to non-Syrian agendas (in the new “Democratic Syria”), further territorial divisions, further Israeli land grabs, continued Turkish control of parts of the north, resource theft on the Mediterranean, oil pipeline deals in exchange for Syrian compromises, and living under the boot of Arab capital, Western guns, and Israel’s whims.

So far, the writing is on the wall: even the right to respond to Israel’s debilitating strikes (which the fallen regime pathetically kept reserving) is not being invoked by the new Syrian leadership, even after one of the most blatant acts of war and erasure of sovereignty in modern times. In response, leader of HTS Ahmad Al-Sharaa states that Israel “clearly crossed the disengagement line in Syria, which threatens a new unjustified escalation in the region” but that “the general exhaustion in Syria after years of war and conflict does not allow us to enter new conflicts.” In addition to the equally delayed procedural statement of condemnation issued by Syria’s powers that be to the United Nations, this bizarrely delayed non-response does not bode well for both resistance to Israel’s actions or the independence of the new Syria so far, to put it mildly.