Niall Mulholland, Committee for a Workers’ International
Jubilation among big sections of the population of Syria followed the quick demise of the Basha al-Assad regime in early December 2024. After twelve years of civil war that ebbed and flowed, the regime was finally ousted after a short military operation led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), from its base in Idlib province. Assad’s support base had dwindled to almost nothing and his impoverished army fled or refused to fight for a bankrupt regime.
Assad’s main outside backers, Iran and Russia, were not prepared to militarily try to save his collapsing regime, nor were they in a position to do so. Vladimir Putin is absorbed by war in Ukraine while the Iranian regime has been engaged in an exchange of missiles with Israel and undermined by the significant blows to its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, which had also previously intervened in Syria to prop up Assad.
Since the mass uprising against the Assad regime in 2012, which was part of the ‘Arab Spring’ across the Middle East and north Africa, the Damascus government survived largely by severe state oppression. New US sanctions, which came into effect in 2020 and reportedly doubled the number of Syrians without enough to eat, worsened already appalling living conditions, and further reduced Assad’s negligible support.
On assuming power, HTS quickly moved to impose a curfew and to bring in its fighters and police forces from Idlib province to the capital. HTS is mainly made up of former Al-Qaeda figures and veterans of the jihadist forces in the civil war in Syria. The leader of HTS, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, grew up in a well-off district of Damascus and turned to religious fundamentalism in his youth. In 2003, he travelled to fight US forces occupying Iraq. Sharaa joined Al-Qaeda and then was imprisoned by the US. He was released in 2011 and returned to Syria to create an Al-Qaeda affiliate, a forerunner to HTS.
In 2016, Sharaa announced he had broken with Al-Qaeda and was focusing on the domestic armed opposition to Assad rather than international jihad. Having conquered an area in Idlib, HTS reputedly provided basic services and collected taxes, while imposing reactionary Islamist social rules and violently dispatching any rivals. HTS has been condemned for carrying out massacres in Alawite and Druze villages.
Since HTS took Damascus it has been keen to appear to accommodate other religious and sectarian groupings. Alawites living on the coast have been allowed, so far, to retain their arms. But will this toleration and relative peace, at least in parts of Syria, last?
The vanquishing of Assad’s regime by HTS led to the killings of Alawite judges and also sectarian torching of Christmas trees that provoked demonstrations of thousands of Christians. Many Syrians’ fear that HTS could step by step revert to hardline Sunni rule, just as the Taliban moved to reintroduce theocratic rule in Afghanistan following the departure of Western troops. “Many Syrians are keeping their bags packed in anticipation of a hurried departure. The first boatload of secular Alawites is already washed up in Cyprus, according to an observer of theirs”, commented the Economist magazine.
As Al-Qaeda’s representative in Syria ten years ago, Sharaa expelled thousands of Christians from Idlib, seized their property and shut the city’s bars and clubs. No doubt keenly aware of the need to court the Western powers in order to economically stabilise Syria and to see off any outside threats to his fledgling regime, Sharaa now says that his rule in Idlib is “not suitable for all Syria”. This did not stop his new education ministry ordering the curriculum to be brought in line with conservative Sunni Islamist teachings – although it was subsequently forced to back down after protests erupted. Sharaa has yet to appoint any known Shias to senior ranks in his government. The top military and security posts are held by followers of a puritanical brand of Sunni Islam.
Yet Sharaa is under pressure from the West to create a more inclusive regime. Given their courting of the oil-rich Gulf states, it is clear that the Western powers have no problem dealing with puritanical Sunni regimes, as such, as long as they do not pose a threat to essential Western interests. The ‘optics’ for Western powers are important however, given that they have spent decades decrying ‘Islamist terror’.
Economy
The HTS regime faces enormous economic problems. Foreign reserves are estimated to have fallen to just $200 million; the central bank remains under Western sanctions, as does the largest commercial bank. Since the start of the civil war in 2011, the Syrian pound has lost 99% of its value.
The HTS regime aims to overcome sanctions and to boost remittances from its large diaspora to survive. State officials have been instructed to try to secure central bank deposits from friendly Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. Post-war reconstruction, after 14 years of conflict, will act as an impetus to parts of the economy. In the city of Aleppo alone, it is estimated by the World Bank that 137,000 of its 660,000 homes have been damaged, 35% of hospitals, and 25% of its bridges destroyed. The country’s largest power plant, also in Aleppo, is not functioning.
The labour involved in repairing all this damage could potentially provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of Syrians. Raw materials and expertise is expected to come from Turkey, which has relatively good relations with the new HTS regime. However, Turkey alone does not have the funds to pay for reconstruction, which is estimated could cost anything between $250 billion and $400 billion. This probably means that the HTS regime will seek financial assistance from the Gulf states. But this will be attached to Gulf states sending money to their favoured reconstruction projects and client sectarian factions.
The pro-capitalist policies of HTS are clearly spelt out by the new Syrian foreign minister, Asaad al-Shaibani who, speaking ahead of attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, said the HTS regime plans to privatise state-owned ports and factories, and oils, cotton and furniture factories. He reassured regional states, including the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which are fearful of the domestic growth of the Muslim Brotherhood on the back of HTS successes, that Syria was not intending to “export the revolution and start getting involved in other states’ affairs”.
Sanctions
Western powers are under pressure to remove sanctions now that they have a more amenable regime to deal with in Damascus. In 2019, the US Congress passed the Caesar Act that targeted energy and construction. Syria’s main mobile phone operator and its biggest airline have faced US sanctions since 2011. Reflecting the interests of big business, the Economist magazine declares, “Those measures made sense at the time. Today they may be a drag on needed investment”.
Now that the Western powers have discovered a potentially ‘friendly’ Islamist force, the White House and European officials said they are prepared to reconsider many of the sanctions, including a $10 million bounty on Sharaa. However, the Western powers are nonetheless treading carefully, concerned that HTS rule could still unleash sectarian and ethnic strife throughout the country. President Biden signed a military spending bill, two weeks after Assad fled the country, that extended the Caesar Act until 2029.
Sharaa indicates that he intends to create a new national army, which will involve merging many of the current militias. This will be a daunting task given the deep animosities involved and fears of the domination of HTS forces. Moreover, ongoing Turkish army attacks against Kurdish forces in Syria indicate the fragility of the situation.
HTS has had a complex relationship with the local regional power, Turkey. Its hardliners once referred to Turkey’s “infidel army”. However, since 2017, Turkey has provided protection for the HTS statelet in Idlib, regarding it as a useful, if somewhat unpredictable, ally.
President Erdogan in Turkey has taken advantage of the new situation in Syria to launch military attacks against Kurdish ‘Syrian Defence Forces’ (SDF) that control large parts of territory in the north-east. The Turkish government has long regarded the Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria as a threat to Turkey’s territorial status, given its large restive Kurdish population. The Syrian National Army (SNA), which battles Kurdish forces, is regarded as a Turkish proxy. Syria’s new foreign minister recently met President Erdogan and reassured him of Syria’s “territorial integrity”.
Since taking power, HTS has attempted to negotiate the SDF into disbanding and to integrate its fighters into the state, calling for “national unity”. The HTS regime claims that a new constitution will guarantee Kurdish rights and ensure Kurdish representation in government. The SDF leaders, no doubt mindful of many previous unkept promises from regional despots, notwithstanding their reliance on US imperialism, have so far not bended to HTS.
Turkey is only one of several regional countries taking an active interest in Syria and threatening to destabilise it to the point of tearing it apart. Following the fall of Assad, Israeli armed forces crossed into the demilitarised zone in the Golan Heights, destroying the greater part of Syria’s military infrastructure, and expanding its occupation of Syrian territory.
The Israeli government viewed the Assad regime as a relatively predictable enemy, but now fears the unpredictable Islamist HTS in power in Damascus. An ‘Iranian-Shiite axis’ has been replaced by a ‘Sunni-Turkish axis’, in the eyes of Israel’s Netanyahu government. In turn, Turkey is incensed at Israel grabbing territory in Syria. In recent months, Erdogan has warned of a possible war between Israel and Turkey.
The Israeli government has also raised the prospect of a future war between the two countries.
Turkish insistence on the ending of ‘autonomous’ Kurdish-run areas and the SDF subordinating itself to the new HTS regime on pain of a Turkish military intervention, is creating friction with other NATO allies, like France and the US. Both the US and France used the Kurdish forces of the SDF as allies against Assad and have forces stationed in the region (mainly an estimated 2,000 American troops).
While welcoming the overthrow of the Assad regime and the significant setbacks to Iranian and Russian influence, the Biden administration was also very concerned about the fallout. The US military carried out dozens of air strikes on Islamic State (IS) targets in Syria in the chaotic days after the HTS swept into Damascus. In a nod to US concerns, the HTS regime claims it is ready to take over the running of SDF-controlled prisons that hold thousands of IS fighters.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to an outright return to full civil war is the mood of the mass of people in Syria, who have suffered decades of dictatorship, poverty and bloody conflict. War-weary working people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds want peace and decent living standards. They will not achieve any of these goals under HTS or any ‘unity’ government of reactionary, pro-market economy forces. Outside powers’ interference only results in renewed rounds of bloodshed and division.
Building class organisations on an independent basis, such as trade unions and parties of the working class, and campaigning for democratic rights, is the starting point of ensuring real, lasting peace and prosperity for all. This needs to be linked up with socialist policies to contest the sectarian forces and bosses and to transform society.
History
Under Baathist party rule in the 1960s the majority of the Syrian economy was nationalised, which for a period allowed the regime to take measures that saw a rise in living standards. Nonetheless, this was nothing at all like genuine democratic socialism, or a move towards it, as the brutal, undemocratic character of the Assad family-dominated regime testified.
In November 1970, Hafez al-Assad seized power from rival factions of the ruling Baath Party in the so-called “corrective revolution”. Assad’s coup d’état was a big blow to the Baathist ‘leftist faction’. During the 1970s, the economy tentatively made steps towards the market economy. After the collapse of the Stalinist planned economy of the Soviet Union, the Syrian regime speeded up the opening up of the economy to global capitalism. This led to privatisations, welfare and subsidy cuts, mass joblessness and big inequalities, fuelling mass unrest and, along with the suppression of democratic rights, helped spark the March 2011 revolt.
Alongside the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and huge protests elsewhere in the region, the mass revolt against Assad opened up the possibility of a real alternative to imperialism and Arab despots. These events showed that it is the mass united movement of working people and youth that can remove tyrants, resist imperialism, and fight for real social and political change.
Unfortunately in the absence of a farsighted, socialist leadership of the masses in the Middle East and north Africa, the Arab Spring stalled and in many cases resulted in counter-revolution and the bloody suppression of mass movements.
The mass revolt against Assad’s rule in Syria degenerated into a civil war from 2011 onwards. This involved Assad playing a divide-and-rule policy, with Russian and Iranian military backing, and outside powers, like the US, backing various militias against Assad.
The years of civil war compounded the economic misery. The Economist magazine lists the grim statistics: Gross domestic product fell from $60 billion in 2010 to less than $9 billion today. It is estimated by the World Bank that 69% of Syrians live on less than $3.65 a day. Oil was once the biggest economic lifeline for Syria and until 2011 Syria produced around 400,000 barrels per day, exceeding domestic demand. However since the civil war began, production has dropped below 100,000 barrels per day. Moreover, the largest oil fields are controlled by Kurdish militias. Agriculture has also plummeted. Syria was once a net exporter of wheat but harvests have now shrunk by nearly half since 2010. The tourist sector, which brought in around $40 billion annually, has vanished.