Can the West afford for Syria’s dictator to be ousted?

The sudden eruption of Islamist militants fighting is more than just a unexpected twist in a civil war, says Mark Almond – if Bashar al-Assad is defeated, it could be the start of a geopolitical earthquake

Less than a week is a very long time in Syrian politics.

On Wednesday, after years of dormancy, a few thousand fighters from the last rebel stronghold in the country’s northwest erupted into action... and paralysed the Assad regime’s forces.

Just as the appearance of the Islamic State (Isis) group in Iraq and southeastern Syria a decade ago took local regimes and foreign observers by surprise, the reappearance of former al-Qaeda fighters, rebranded as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), came utterly out of the blue.

Unlike its earlier counterpart, Isis, the HTS group has so far limited its public ambitions to Syria. Gone is the grandiloquent intent to form a global caliphate, starting with abolishing the border between Syria and Iraq. But memories that the last Isis caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was based in Idlib before committing suicide when trapped by Donald Trump’s special forces in 2019, rankle with those who doubt the sincerity of the group’s change of heart.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the HTS leader, has trimmed his jihadist beard and even appeared in a suit in the past to court Western media. Most importantly, he has modified the threatening rhetoric that, five years ago, united the United States, Russia and Iran against the globalist jihadis.

No amount of public relations would have helped Jolani and co without the Assad regime’s failure to use the relative peace it has enjoyed since 2019 to rebuild its economy and shore up support among its subjects.

Even those who had good reason to fear an Islamist takeover, not least Syria’s Christian minorities, were passive until Wednesday, when they swarmed out of their safe haven in Idlib. Nobody, not even his local uniformed hoods, offered resistance in the first few days, when Bashir al-Assad scuttled off to Moscow to seek Vladimir Putin’s intervention.

In the years since 2015, when Russia launched its military intervention, Putin’s air force has been key to Assad’s survival, the Kremlin steering his regime to safety on the back of massive bombing and weapons supplies while the West backed off from Barack Obama’s “red lines”. Then, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and thousands of Hezbollah fighters operating under Putin’s air umbrella swarmed in to regain territory lost by Assad to the rebels in cities like Aleppo. At the same time, the United States and its allies, such as the UK, pummelled the Islamic State in its capital, Raqqa, in southeastern Syria.

Israel’s decapitation of Hezbollah and its undeclared air war with Iran over Syria has reshaped the dormant battlefield there. It has also let loose other external players.

Today, the HTS fighters aren’t the only anti-Assad Syrians in the frame. The remnant of the old Free Syrian Army, made up of insurgent ex-Assad soldiers and local volunteers, has been nurtured by Turkey for years now in an uneasy partnership with the jihadis. Ankara has also added anti-Russia volunteers from the Muslim fringe of Putin’s empire and central Asia – even Uyghur radicals from China’s Xinjiang province – to the anti-Assad coalition.

Turkey has supplied the smart Nato-style uniforms and, more importantly, the up-to-date Nato-standard weapons and communications kit, and even drones, to these forces. That transformed them from holdouts in Idlib into a striking force.

But Turkey’s interest was less in removing Assad than in weakening the Kurdish groups who straddle its borders with Syria and Iraq. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s domestic war against Kurds has been expanded into their “safe havens” in Syria under the guise of fighting the tyrant Assad – a campaign easier to sell to Ankara’s Nato partners.

In a sinister parody of how the temporarily victorious Assad used to ship out civilians “cleansed” to Idlib’s overcrowded sanctuary during the last decade, today the Kurds of Aleppo are being shipped out of their homes in the city to “safe” enclaves to the northeast. The peace of the grave, or the empty hearth, is not a monopoly of Assad’s forces.

Israel’s interest in weakening Assad as Iran’s ally, and as the linchpin of the supply chain to Hezbollah next door in Lebanon, is tempered by fears that if Syria’s Sunni jihadis triumph, their moderation might disappear and their old alliance with Hamas as fellow Sunni “brothers” might revive. Israeli intelligence suspects that Syria’s residual chemical weapons, or at least Assad’s WMD knowhow, could fall into the “wrong” hands.

Never forget Benjamin Netanyahu’s dictum: My enemy’s enemy is not my friend – at least, not in the Middle East. Certainly, all alliances there are provisional.

All these international interests and manoeuvrings leave little space for the interests of ordinary Syrians. Even if an all-out war of intervention – by Russia and Iran on the one side, and Turkey and its “frenemies”, the USA and Israel, on the other – can be avoided, the price of peace will be high. Syria’s de facto partition, and the subordination of the fractured country to other countries’ calculations and deals, will be a return to normality haunted by fears of another irruption of violence.

Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford