All Change Syria

Well Syria has just ended the long phase 1 of the civil war. The rebels have captured Damascus and Bashar al-Assad has taken his family and fled to Moscow and claimed asylum.

Ahmed al-Sharaa - De-facto New Leader Of Syria?

The key to his fall, seems to be his ignoring Turkeys attempts to negotiate a peaceful power swap or arrangement with the rebels. They finally lost patience with his refusal to shed any power, and silently authorised the rebels offensive by not saying no. 

The Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said he hoped millions of Syrian refugees could now return home ... and that was the real point. Three million Syrians in Turkey has caused friction (they are Arabs not Turks), and Turkey wants them safely out of the country and back in Syria. Something that couldn't be guaranteed whilst Assad's regime was in power.

Assad will of course not be going to Moscow as a beggar, because his family and those cronies still with him will have stolen millions if not billions of dollars over the 24 years of his rule (a 2022 US State Department report to Congress said the extended Assad family's net worth was between $1bn (£790m) and $2bn (£1.6bn or more)), as well as those monies stolen in the three decades his father ruled. An investigation by the Financial Times in 2019, uncovered the purchase of at least 18 luxury apartments in Moscow, by Assad's extended family, in an apparent effort to keep tens of millions of dollars out of Syria. And indeed Assad's eldest son, Hafez is a PhD student in the city. Moscow is also now the residence of Asssad's father-in-law Dr Fawaz al-Akhras, a cardiologist who also fled Damascus with his wife Sahar, a retired diplomat, and rest of the extended family.

However I suspect that he and his extended family will not find Russia a very comfortable long-term berth ... Assad's wife Asma, and therefore their three children, have a dual British-Syrian nationality, but they can't flee here, and so sometime next year, after some quiet diplomacy, they will probably end up with asylum in the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait etc, where they can quietly disappear with their stolen loot, and of course there will be no returning to Syria.

In the short-term Syria will be ruled by a US/UK/EU/UN designated terrorist, Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani (now using his real name of Ahmed al-Sharaa) and his prescribed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) faction. Officially he still has a US bounty of $10 million on his head placed by the US State Department and his faction are designated as terrorists by most countries.

Whether more fighting will break out if the rebel alliance breaks-up, and it all turns into a Libya scenario, or if they bring in hard-line Islam, Taliban style, we shall have to see. Many experts have said that fighting the Assad regime was the only thing that they all had in common, and that kept this de-facto coalition together. Syria still has dozens of armed groups, many tribal or ethnic, and some of which are Islamic jihadists that have not converted and changed in the way HTS now says it has ...  so more fighting could erupt any time.

But what I can guarantee is that those secularists who marched against Assad back in 2011 and later, will not be entirely happy with this particular outcome if they don't get a pluralistic democracy. A theocratic style dictatorship is certainly not the change that they wanted.

As for Russia, well it wants to keep its bases (with long leases of 49 yrs) at Tartus and Latakia. Despite its past military support for Assad, the new regime may want to keep Russia in the region as a counter to both US and Turkish forces, so they may come to an 'understanding'. For Iran, this last 12 months has been a disaster ... the attack on Israel by Hamas that it had armed, has led to a set of events that saw its axis of resistance and its allies crumble to dust. Hamas and the Gazans brought to their knees by Israeli military might, Hizbollah savaged and $billions of Iranian arms in the form of missile and arms dumps destroyed in Lebanon, and its influence in Syria wiped out along with the regime .. it now only has influence in Iraq (where its prestige will have been knocked as its proved to ineffective elsewhere) and with the savage Houthi rebels in Yemen.

But although many people will be glad to see the back of a nasty and thuggish regime, they should recall that they thought much the same about Saddam Husayn's regime in Iraq. Since then, Iraq has had years of turmoil with ISIS jihadists (who still operate in rural areas with US forces bombing them just this week), and has an unstable government now. It is now led by strongly Islamic regime, with a weak adherence to democracy, and a lot of political economic and social corruption. Unemployment remains a problem throughout the country despite a bloated public sector.

Then there was the fall of another nasty little regime, Libya. The death of Col. Muammar al-QADHAFI has resulted in a civil war with the country largely split between factions and warlords, and with at least two rival governments. Finally of course there was the Taliban in Afghanistan, who also promised a lot when they swept in to Kabul, but then reneged and attacked all civil rights, especially for women, as it went back to the 7th century on which to base its governance, leaving it described by one UN diplomat as 'a prison for women.'

So the fall of Assad and his regime to a Jihadist controlled rebel force, is just as likely to lead to another Iran or Hamas/Hizbollah style regime in the region, as it does to a true democracy. The Middle East is in many respects, getting to be a progressively nastier place, with Hizbollah in Lebanon and now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria, even if Hamas are neutralised or at least castrated in Gaza. This despite the attempts of the Saudis and Emirates to portray themselves and the region as 'progressive' regimes.

Human Rights are often minimal in the best of these regimes, and in many, they are non-existent in any meaningful sense. So, while I understand the belief that it's good riddance to a despicable family and their cronies, I also fear that something worse (for us and the Syrians) will emerge from the chaos.

In a region where war is going on right now, the addition of yet another anti-Israeli government on Israel's borders, is likely to be sowing the seeds of yet another far bloodier wider conflict.