The Arab Spring In Syria Reignites
What a week for Syria!
[I’m spitballing some reactions to all the historic news here, so let me know in the comments if you think any of my assessments are off, or if you have any predictions about what might happen next! We’re watching history unfold and it’s quite fascinating!]
A surprisingly peaceful Syrian transfer of power.
It’s shocking how relatively calm this transfer of power in Syria has been so far. Assad fled the country to Moscow, his fighters threw off their gear and uniforms and ran away, and Syrian Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali is essentially handing off the central government to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its still developing governing coalition of rebel groups. Former Assad loyalists have quickly saluted their new overlords.
This is the Middle East, so violence could erupt at any moment, but the Assad regime has surrendered without forcing the destruction of Syria’s remaining big cities. After so many years of fighting, the civil war has, for a moment at least, petered out.
In recent days Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other various rebel groups have claimed commitment to democracy, religious tolerance, and multiculturalism in Syria, but there are still many disparate ways this power vacuum plinko can bounce. Hopefully the future Syrian government takes more of a Ukrainian approach to governance sticking with pan-Syrian democracy rather than a Taliban approach of forced conversion to Muslim fundamentalism.
The power balance in the Levant is still shaking out.
The Syrian revolution joins Israel’s ongoing wars in making big changes to the balance of power in the Levant. Without Assad having control of the Syrian interior, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards no longer have easy access to supplying Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been weakened and isolated after being smashed by Israel.
Israeli forces also quickly conquered the summit of Mount Hermon in southern Syria, which will help geographically fortify Israel’s northern border. Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the opportunistic land grab will be temporary, but who is going to come kick the Israeli Defense Forces off the mountain?
Ultimately Israel is happy to see Assad removed, along with his Iranian sympathies, and Israeli-Sunni Gulf states’ mutual security against Shia militia groups and terrorist organizations is continuing down the path toward normalized relations and peace accords.
However, Syria being governed by a rebel group with former al-Qaeda affiliation and previous jihad dreams might inspire a resurgence among the ideologically similar ISIS still operating in eastern Syrian pockets as well as next door in Iraq, though the US and Israel have been preemptively bombing dozens of targets across Syria to disrupt a cohesive ISIS response and destroy Syrian chemical weapon stashes.
Going forward, will this continuation of the Arab Spring reignite resistance efforts elsewhere in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, or Iran? The Arab Spring largely fizzled out after many of the involved dictators squashed the attempted democratic revolutions, but who knows what other regional tensions might start boiling again.
Kurdistan is looking more possible than ever.
With the Assad regime fallen, the de facto Kurdistan in Syria’s northeast is looking more independent and autonomous than ever. The Turkish government isn’t too happy about that, concerned always with Kurdish self-sovereignty igniting greater independence or separatist efforts from the millions of Kurds who make up much of the population in southeastern Turkey, but relative autonomy is a positive development for the Kurds, who have been a stalwart US ally for decades in Iraq as well as America’s boots on the ground in the fight against ISIS.
The Kurds are one of the largest stateless ethnic groups in the world, and have been discriminated against by the several countries whose borders were drawn carving up the traditional Kurdish lands. America owes the Kurds in Syria and Iraq much geopolitical support both for their loyalty and their idealism for freedom and self-governance.
Flashpoints between the Turks and the Kurds are coming.
The new Syrian government will likely continue welcoming patronage from Turkey, which has supported various rebel groups for many years. This will complicate affairs with the de facto Kurdistan in the northeastern third of Syria, but it remains to be seen how autonomous the eventual new Syrian government will allow the Kurds to remain.
Other things to monitor going forward:
- Can Hayat Tahrir al-Sham et al. competently administrate local and regional governments and keep the peace?
- Will Syria become a real country with a stable, multicultural federalism that keeps the disparate Alawites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, and many more smaller ethnic groups from erupting into violence or breakaway secession movements?
- Will compromise prove too intractable for a Syria accustomed now to a decade+ of civil war, and keep Syria fractured with competing radicalisms and turf wars?
- Hopefully Syrians have collectively learned lessons from watching Iraq’s instability and abhorrent ethnic cleansing.
A possible semi-autonomous southern Christian zone in Syria is an interesting dynamic that could develop.
But it also might turn into like a zionism 2.0 of Christians now taking — some contemporary activists might say colonizing — Arab land. A Christian zone might attract Christians from around the Middle East and the globe to help give the Christian world a stake near the Holy Land, and it’s hard to imagine a Syrian Christiana wouldn’t inflame regional tensions by fostering close relations and trade with Israel as well as the US, grow, and continue expanding settlements deeper and deeper into previously agreed Arab and Muslim land.
I’m not saying Syrian Christians don’t deserve some degree of autonomy or a Middle Eastern homeland, I’m just saying I believe we’ve seen this movie before.
A potential Israeli-Syrian deal for Gazans?
I’ve heard a few pundits mention a possibly compelling idea that Israel might be interested in some kind of deal to move Gazans to southern Syria in some kind of protected zone.
…Sounds like a heavy lift, as it would require Gazans to acquiesce to the loss of their homeland and territorial rights, but it would maybe be more beneficial for Gazans than sticking with the arguable cleansing they’re experiencing in refugee camps and leveled cities now. The status quo for them is pretty bleak, and trending bleaker with hunger, disease, and homelessness.
Perhaps if Gazans are tired of the catastrophically disproportionate misery Israel is capable of and willing to inflict upon them when Hamas uses them as political pawns, Gazans could finally find peace in a redrawn Syria, maybe with sympathetic Alawites who have now been dethroned and are potentially facing some degree of punishment of their own for their decades of inflicting the Assad family’s brutal oppression on the rest of the country.
Besides, it’s not like the southern Sunni Gulf States (Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt in particular) are doing much for Gazan independence. Sunnis are technically pro-Palestinian statehood, but after years of Iranian Shia influence and exported terrorism, Sunnis really want nothing to do with radicalized and destitute Gazans.
Unfortunately, things are likely to remain pretty bleak for Gazans, though long-term it’s probably a stabilizing development if Israel can finish dismantling Hamas and Hezbollah, and close the deal on normalized relations with the Sunni Gulf states. The pages of history are turning, and unfortunately Gazans don’t have a proverbial pen.
At least in the Middle East, it’s actually not terrible timing for an extreme isolationist US president to take over.
This reshuffling of politics in Syria may take a couple years for all the various sectarian militias to duke it out amongst themselves and wrestle for political power, but the American homeland is relatively safe from Islamic terror attacks when there is currently so much to be gained by radical Islamists fighting each other with competing caliphates in eastern Syria and western Iraq.
Some pundits opine that the Middle East has essentially been duking it out in a Muslim version of the Protestant-Catholic Thirty Years’ War, and, frankly, there remain many issues of cultural tolerance, sovereignty, and religions extremism that Muslim states have to work out amongst themselves. Thankfully, if the borders of the Middle East have to be redrawn and reinforced once again, it doesn’t have to include another 20-year, unilateral US occupation.
Assad’s downfall sure makes Tulsi Gabbard look dumb and a bad candidate for Director of National Intelligence.
Democratic senators, as well as national security minded Republicans, ought to have a field day asking Gabbard during her confirmation hearings how and why she got Syria so wrong cozying up with Assad. 🥃
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