Free Syria and the Return of People’s History
What the Fall of the Assad Regime Says About the West’s Strategic Blinkers
Syrian American Rally for Intervention, s. l., September 7, 2013. Photo: Steve Rhodes
The fall of the Assad regime in twelve days and Syria’s liberation from a totalitarian regime that had lasted 54 years are among the exceptional historical events of our time. The reality is that the Syrian people liberated themselves. Turkey may have given the green light to the operation, but it was not the driving force behind it. This reconquest seemed to echo a famous Kafranbel banner from 2014 aimed at the Ukrainian people: “Never rely on the international community!” In other words, “Act on your own, because otherwise you won’t achieve anything!” Every time I go back to Ukraine, I realize the raw truth of this statement. The Ukrainians have understood this by now—as have the Georgians. In any case, in Syria, the various movements that dethroned Assad owe nothing to anyone.
Nobody had foreseen the launch of this vast action, or its success, let alone its speed. But we did know two things.
The first, which was apparent from the information we had already gathered six months ago, was that Russia had less of a presence in Syria, having withdrawn a significant part of its forces to deploy them in Ukraine. However, this has not prevented it from continuing to target the Idlib region with strikes over the past three years, still claiming the lives of many Syrian civilians whose last refuge it was. Most of the Western media didn’t even mention it. For the past two months, everyone knew that Hezbollah had been considerably weakened and disorganized by Israel’s attacks on its bases and the targeting of its leaders. Everyone was also aware of the weakness of the Syrian army, which could only hold out with the support of Russia and Iran. The Syrian security services, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, or even more, were no substitute for an army. Massive corruption and the transformation of the Syrian regime into a narco-state made the Damascus regime a failed state. The consequences of this collapse were bound to affect the army. The regime’s implosion, brutal and definitive, was the direct consequence.
The second reality stemmed from an analysis at the crossroads of sociology, politics and geostrategy. I was one of those who argued, again in an essay here in 2021, that Assad had not won the war. Numerous images from Syria showed that the Syrian revolution against the regime, though less visible because of the repression, was not over. The country was sinking into a chaos that the regime could not control. Islamic State jihadist groups continued to operate freely, with neither the regime, Russia nor Iran taking any action. The Idlib region was beyond government control. There comes a time when the most bloodthirsty repression of opponents does not guarantee its indefinite survival. Hatred of him was bound to overcome fear one day, as no one could predict.
It would be easy to ironize about the joy and emotion of an entire people, regardless of religion, community group or political orientation, who had supposedly voted Assad into power in the last election in May 2021, with more than 95.1% of the vote. That would certainly be easy. The Assads’ escape appears to be the first step out of an absolute hell where almost everyone could fear for their lives or those of their family members. This does not mean that there are no worries for the future. But there is liberation, because nothing could be worse than Assad. There is liberation, because as long as Assad was in power, the future was blocked and no change was possible.
So, for the first time in 54 years, hope is open, as are the strongholds of Syrian prisons, veritable slaughterhouses, where tens of thousands of people have been tortured to death, and from which, since yesterday, children, women and men have emerged, many of them destroyed in body and soul—but who, at last, are seeing the sunlight that some children, born of rape, had never seen. It will certainly take many more months to find out who came out of hell and who remained there forever—and perhaps many more years to know all the stories, including those of those whose shredded bodies were thrown into mass graves or burned in crematoria. The road from Auschwitz to Sednaya is excruciatingly short.
The West’s sin without redemption
In the beginning, there was the failure, a flaw for which there can be no excuse or forgiveness, a deadly sin in that it cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. For this fault was not, as we say, a mistake; it was not a lapse of judgment or, what we might call, an error of inattention. The fault was inattention as a deliberate and assumed will. The fault was a fault of the will, the will not to see, the will not to act, the will not to save. We thus learned that will is negative, and I wrote at the time about what I called the loss of common sense, a form of destruction assumed not so much of the international community in its usual sense, but of the very possibility of a community. Putin and his ilk had won the first round.
We could go on and on, naming places like Ghouta, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Idlib and so many others, not forgetting Sednaya. These places reeked of death and decomposed bodies under bombardment and in torture chambers. Civilians were being killed, sometimes almost live, before our very eyes. But the reality is that our political leaders and our pseudo-experts in international relations—and I’m not even talking here about the propagandists who are direct accomplices of the regime—simply refused, as I wrote elsewhere, to think. They didn’t want to know that, behind the non-intervention, the non-rescue, the dry rejection of the hands that were reaching out in total despair to ask for vital help, there was acquiescence to the crime, the prelude to its propagation, also the harbinger of its glorification by our radical enemies, in this case Assad, Russia and Iran.
So, like others, I reiterated the demand for action, in 2016, in 2017, in 2018, in 2019, in 2021; for all of us, it was in vain. Like others too, we at least warned, back in 2016, of the strategic consequences, in particular of Russian crimes in Syria as in Ukraine, with almost no one among the democratic governments showing the will to understand. We called in 2022, and often here and in many other articles and hundreds of TV and radio broadcasts, for us not to repeat the mortal sins of the democracies in Syria in Ukraine. This too was unsuccessful. Meanwhile, in 2018, we called for a boycott of the soccer World Cup in Russia, because it was implausible that the screams of the victims could be silenced by the clamor of the fans. No leader wanted to see the dismembered bodies of Aleppo’s children, pulverized by the regime’s explosive barrels or the missiles fired by Russian Migs, or those of babies suffocating to death in Ghouta would forever cover the grass of Russian stadiums—and they’re still there, joined by the exploded skulls of Ukrainian children. They fill all the space—and almost none of our presidents and Prime ministers seem to notice them. No one, in fact, has the will to contemplate them.
Photographs taken at the opening of Sednaya prison revealed an unheard-of pile of shoes that had once belonged to those tortured. We had already seen these shoes in Auschwitz—what I called the string of history, the one that will forever link Auschwitz to Sednaya, like another linking Sobibor or Maidanek or Oradour-sur-Glane or Babyn Yar to Izyum and Mariupol, via a long road that passes through Srebrenica, Grozny and Aleppo. From the Nazi death camps, information had circulated with increasing insistence, reaching the ears of leaders, notably British and American. They did nothing. Some information had also leaked to the press, but the general public in the Allied countries was not truly informed. In Syria, as in Ukraine, information was and is almost immediate. Western governments sometimes report them directly, but then, as now, they are at pains to emphasize the crimes on a daily basis. Everyone knows with even greater clarity and precision than in the case of the Holocaust; but the reality is one of willingness to let things happen.
What has not been understood is the mental destruction that this combination of knowledge and inaction causes, both internally in democratic societies and in the conduct of foreign policy. This continues unabated in Ukraine. A crime that is neither prevented nor punished will forever remain a crime that we have not only tolerated, but also allowed to happen. This is the deadly poison that is destroying our souls and our societies. It is not only a gift to mass criminals, but also the straightest path to the imprinting of their ideology.
The mirror of our strategic blinders
As ever, inaction was also produced by narratives dressed up in seemingly scholarly strategic argumentation. This was not only the work of Assad and Putin propagandists, but also of personalities who could not be suspected of sympathy for their regime. Strangely enough, as in the case of Ukraine, their rhetoric was aligned. Nor did any of the public authorities in question seem to be concerned by this disturbing convergence.
Chronologically speaking, one of the first narratives to forewarn action could be called the fear of chain-reaction. This is probably what marked Barack Obama’s refusal—France’s François Hollande was ready to go—, or rather refusals, to intervene. Like others, I have often analyzed his unwillingness to bomb decisive military and command sites after the Assad regime’s chemical attacks on Ghouta as an explanatory matrix for subsequent Russian aggression in Ukraine. This was all the more the case as the inaction came after the proclamation of supposed red lines that were never enforced. Obama took refuge behind a likely hostile vote in Congress, when he didn’t need one. Some reports suggest that he considered that he had no explicit mandate from the American people—as if such a mandate could ever have existed. It has also been written that this decision came against the backdrop of the trauma of the intervention in Iraq and the lack of control, beyond the reasons given for it, over the events that followed, even though action in Syria would have been of an entirely different nature. In any case, this decision, giving the signal that Washington would no longer take any risks, sounded like the end of American responsibility in the world—as was subsequently confirmed in Ukraine under Obama, Trump and Biden.
Obama’s second refusal, unsurprisingly, came during the siege then fall of Aleppo, where it would have been easy for Washington to decree a no-fly zone that many were calling for. Already, as in Ukraine, the fear of an alleged “escalation” and confrontation with Russia had dissuaded it, a godsend for Moscow. The priority given by the US administration to negotiating, then signing and implementing the nuclear deal (JCPOA) with Assad’s other sponsor, Iran, was also certainly a factor. At this point, as if by some macabre cynicism, the distinction between chemical weapons (prohibited by international conventions) and other weapons (barrels of explosives and missiles) suddenly appears, as if the former were less deadly than the latter, and as if we had been serious about the former.
The second narrative is, as such, fictional, as if diplomacy could function on the basis of fiction. We recall that, after the non-intervention in Ghouta, the United States and the other Western powers accepted Damascus ally Moscow’s claim that it would see to the identification, and then the destruction, of the regime’s chemical stocks. Unsurprisingly, this did not happen, and chemical attacks by the regime on civilians, at least authorized by the Kremlin, continued thereafter. All other things being equal, this fiction resembles the one endorsed by the West and written into the marble of the Minsk 2 agreements, that of the Ukrainian separatists, whereas in the Donbass it was already a Russian operation, decided by the Russians. We then saw it again, notably in Aleppo, when certain leaders of the Western democracies and the UN dared to ask Russia to “moderate” Assad, even though Moscow was committing its own mass crimes, killing more civilians than even IS. The democracies became entrenched in a desire for impotence.
The third narrative, no less classic, corresponds to an assumption of self-proclaimed realism. This presumption was based on the idea that Assad could not be defeated, that the war was over, that it was reasonable, in the words of a former French minister, to “take our losses on Syria”, that it was better to have relations with the regime because otherwise others would take its place, that there was no alternative to Assad, and so on. I have often shown that these ideas were all false, and that the underlying purpose of their advocates was to rehabilitate the worst criminal regime of the 21st century, along with that of Omar al-Bashir in Sudan and Putin in Russia. Nobody, including me, knew when or how the regime would fall, but objective factors showed that it could not survive. This temptation was frequent in the West, even if no one in the democratic countries gave in to it, except Giorgia Meloni’s Italy. But the EU and the US did nothing to prevent the readmission of Assad’s Syria to the Arab League on the initiative of the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Algeria. This pseudo-realism, which also makes light of the autonomous action of peoples, as if only governments mattered, has not passed the test of verification, either here or elsewhere.
The fourth, and no less common, narrative was that of the supposedly necessary sidelining of indignation. In short, we had to denounce the crimes of Assad, Russia and Iran, but not too much. It was necessary to pretend that their immensity did not radically change the world order unless they were stopped by every means possible. Particularly at the time of Aleppo, I remember those who thought I was going too far when I said that, by its actions, Russia in particular was our enemy. The democratic leaders spoke of Assad as a war criminal and a criminal against humanity, but refused to name as such Putin or the Iranian authorities. In short, here too they were making excuses for inaction, as if mass murder could be dismissed as a matter of democratic conscience. Nor did they want to understand that the very fight for democracy and, beyond that, its defense and legitimacy, are being undermined. The combat against mass crime is one of the vital interests of free nations. They are not external to our security.
Finally, a fifth narrative, no less classic than absurd, was that of stability. This discourse helps to give credence to Assad’s propaganda of a binary and false choice between him and jihadist extremism, as if Assad had not, at the start of the Revolution, freed IS jihadists from his prisons. We also know that 90% of the strikes carried out by Russia and the regime were aimed at the rebels, and no more than 10% at IS, as the French Minister of Defense noted at the time. Even in recent years, Moscow and Damascus have done nothing to eradicate the IS, devoting all their forces to repression and trafficking. In fact, some people are resurrecting this rhetoric today, given that the Syrian black hole during the regime era strengthened not only IS, but also Iran, the region’s main destabilizing power, and Russia, the focus of destabilization in Europe and Africa. “Stabilocracy” always plays into the hands of the worst destabilizers.
The promise of a Syrian Spring
So, to repeat, the fall of Assad was in itself indispensable. It was, quite simply, the condition for a free future. Whatever happens, there can never be any regrets. Not to rejoice today is to abdicate, for the past and for the future, all understanding of the Assad regime and its crimes, which the former Chief Rabbi of Israel Yisrael Meir Lau compared to the Holocaust.
Questions about the future are perfectly legitimate: no one can forget the criminal and jihadist past, however non-international, of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and certain other groups. HTS has the murders of democratic opponents of both Assad and this group on its conscience. Its declarations of appeasement, tolerance and inclusiveness, and its rejection of violence, will have to be verified over time. However, we also know that other groups have also joined the fight against Assad, including some Kurds, even if some had once accommodated themselves to the regime, and the Druze. Above all, the celebration of the liberation was unanimous. When it’s an entire people that makes the revolution, there are duties towards that entire people.
We know that the task of the future Syrian government will be Herculean in political, economic, social and security terms, and that it will have to extend over time. In particular, it will have to rebuild an economy ravaged by over thirteen years of war and the predatory actions of the regime and its allies. It will also have to secure the country, which means both completing the fight against the IS forces that still guard a few enclaves in the country and disarming the various militias. As was the case in Bosnia, a specific organization, probably an international one, will also have to organize the collection of weapons. This will be impossible unless, over time, the new authorities win the confidence of the local population. They will have to rebuild a regular army.
The new coalition will have to set up elections, organize peaceful relations between communities, find solutions for relative autonomy, prevent the return not only of Russia, which will do everything to recover its military bases, and Iran, but also of Turkey. It will also have to rigorously manage international aid, preventing it from being diverted as was the rule under Assad. The country will also have to rely on the return of many refugees, often highly qualified, who will be a considerable asset in rebuilding the country. Finally, as in any country that has been ravaged by war and repression, it will also have to take care of the victims, who have suffered in body and often in soul.
And, because there can be no peace or harmony without justice, Syria will have to accede to the Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court, which will be a key element in bringing Assad, the members of his clan and the regime’s hierarchs to trial. It will also be necessary to organize, domestically, a justice system worthy of the name and contradictory for the regime’s criminals, at all levels, by preventing expeditious and extra-judicial settling of personal scores. With this in mind, the regime must continue to gather evidence, beyond the already massive amounts sent to the West, and prevent the destruction of certain archives. The work of truth and justice is vital for the country’s future. Tomorrow, we will visit Sednaya as we pay tribute to the victims of Auschwitz. Tomorrow, Syria must have a Yad Vashem.
These are just some of the tasks ahead. Not all will be smooth, not all will be easy, and perhaps even a setback. It is, after all, exceptional to accomplish such a task after 54 years of a totalitarian regime that dismembered the country and its society. But the work accomplished by the free men and women of Syria, who have given a great deal of thought, as singular individuals, to what the Revolution is all about, and who have taken all the risks, also gives cause for optimism.
After the dark winter of Assad, there was the liberation of late autumn. Tomorrow, against all those in the West who watch for failure and sometimes hope for it, spring will bloom again.