Syria, explained.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, ahead of a meeting with Druze officials from Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party in Damascus, 22 December 2024 (AFP via Getty Images)
The truth of an Islamist takeover cannot be lost amid a charm offensive and wishful thinking.
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Syrian boss Ahmed al-Sharaa: A leopard in a fixSyrian boss Ahmed al-Sharaa: A leopard in a fix
Hope conceals the reality of the future of Syria. Most international experts were wrong about the Arab Spring, projecting their aspirations into uprisings that couldn’t be democratising.
It is happening again. Western press coverage from mid-December’s fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime to the New York Times on 5 January focus on Syria’s post-Assad mix of euphoria and opportunism.
Reality in Syria is that the leaderships of armed groups now establishing control over formerly Syrian regime territory had their origins in extremist Islamist and globally listed terrorist organisations.
No country welcomes a territorial political vacuum, and Syria’s neighbours and countries such as the United States, United Kingdom and France, as well as UN agencies, are all taking steps to give the jihadist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militia its chance to fill it and influence it.
Syria cannot self-organise a new safe, stable and Western-looking polity. Incredibly, but typically, a US delegation visiting Damascus consulted civil society organisations about Syria’s future. The Assad government left only individuals as nodes of dialogue. Civil society organisations capable of state building do not exist. As in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, it is most unlikely that civil society organisations will have a real role in Syria’s future governance either, regardless of the power of Western media and governments’ press releases.
Meanwhile, HTS and other al-Qaeda affiliated militants live-stream their charm offensive. Now what happens due to a new Arab state run by radical Islamist militants is a challenge for many Syrians, the region and the West.
Expect Syria to be more of an Islamic state than at any time since at least the loss of the area by the Ottomans at the end of the First World War. Think of Iraq.
The trajectory of jihadist HTS combatants from not only Syria but Iraq, Uyghur China, Jordan and Türkiye, from the start of the false Arab Spring in 2011 and 2012 onwards, to the new administrators in Syria is being swept under the rug. The deluded West is leading this fallacious rebranding campaign.
Headline happiness of the defeat of Assad’s regime is being quickly suppressed by the unerasable leopard spots of the Salafis now in charge, in particular those of HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammed al-Jolani/al-Jawlani).
Syrian Kurds and Syrian women were likely unaware of the West’s optimism for Syria, and their failed concerns about Turkey-approved violence against the Kurds. Restrictions on basic freedoms for women are being confirmed.
For the next few years it will be almost impossible to reduce the influence of vengeful or ideologically hardline Islamists within HTS and its partners … Raiders struggle to turn into administrators.
The joyful tumult in recently liberated Assad-occupied Syria is a complex matter. Foreign observers should not rush to optimistic conclusions. Syrians need to make a down payment of compliance with the new overlords. Performative gratitude and optimistic tumult are traditional tools.
Can these not yet self-denied Islamist extremists really transform to meet basic requirements of a working, multi-confessional state able to maintain order, internally and along its frontiers and civil freedoms better than those available to Syrians until 8 December 2024?
For the rightly long-feared jihadists, with origins among Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State in Iraq and al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) ranks, who are now in control of state institutions across Syria, the answer for HTS’s optimistic future is “no”.
Ahmed al-Sharaa has declared that HTS will be dissolved at a national dialogue conference, the Syrian constitution re-written followed by elections in a hopelessly optimistic guess of four years. The same pathway was pressed upon Libya after 2011. It lost its way in civil war and de facto partition. A decade since it started its constitutional process, no resolution is in sight.
HTS declares respect for human rights and governs for all religious sects and ethnic groups. It will integrate armed fighters into a new defence ministry. But for the next few years it will be almost impossible to reduce the influence of vengeful or ideologically hardline Islamists within HTS and its partners. Attacks on Christian symbols at Christmas were a sign of indiscipline. Raiders struggle to turn into administrators.
This is a mere quibble for the national self-interest of the states lined up to turn seismic Syrian change to first-mover advantage. Islamist Qatar and Turkey, increasingly pro-Islamist and arguably soft on the Islamic State (ISIS), have re-opened embassies in Damascus.
The HTS is under foreign and domestic pressure to make concessions to non-Muslims and schismatic Muslim minorities, meeting Western expectations for so-called good behaviour in exchange for access to economic and humanitarian resources.
HTS’s collective extremist ideological history does not generate flexibility. It drives a self-protective, closed conformity.
Bashar al-Assad’s fall has placed Syria in the hands of the AQI-sourced and still affiliated HTS, much to the delight of those states whose Islamic character is discretely not dissimilar. It is in this context that the West’s embrace of purposeful self-delusion gives its enduring rival interests a significant advantage.
The lesson that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” rarely works out for the West when dealing with the Middle East. For Syria we should ask can the jungle of current HTS supporters and beneficiaries of Ahmed al-Sharaa, accept this leopard changing its spots to suit those outside their newly conquered forest? Most likely not.
About the authors
Philip Eliason
Philip Eliason worked in Egypt , Syria, Yemen, Libya and Tunisia and was Senior Adviser Middle East to Australian former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop.
David Livingstone
David Livingstone is a former Australian diplomat.
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