UNHERD Syria is doomed to instability Outside agents will stoke chaos Rajan Menon December 19, 2024

UNHERD

Syria is doomed to instability Outside agents will stoke chaos

Rajan Menon

December 19, 2024   5 mins

The House of Assad endured for over half a century, but crumbled in 10 days. Ba’athism is dead and Abu Mohammed al-Jolani now finds himself the de facto leader of a government in Damascus, led by his rebel coalition Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). It’s a denouement he may have dreamed of but likely never expected. For now, Jolani can bask in the euphoria and gratitude sweeping his country. But soon, he’ll have to meet Syrians’ pent-up desire for good governance and better lives. In a land as multicultural as Syria, perhaps the most urgent task involves proving his self-proclaimed tolerance. And many Syrians remain cautious, wondering whether his political conversion is little more than a tactical makeover.

In order to convince them, Jolani must create political stability while distancing himself from Assad-era repression. This means ending such practices as casting offenders into dungeons, common under both Bashar al-Assad and his father. It also means the disbanding of Assad’s security services. Nor will Jolani pardon any officials, civilian and military, who have committed egregious human rights violations. Syrians will want to see such offenders brought to justice: especially senior members of the military, the Ba’ath Party, and the mukhabarat (secret police). They will also want the hated shabiha (“ghosts”) to be held accountable. These citizens groups, armed and trained by the Assad regime, have been accused of kidnap, torture and murder on a vast scale. To deliver justice and accountability there must be new legal codes and a new judiciary with people who are both qualified and trusted by the public.

Jolani’s biggest long-term challenge, though, will be reviving Syria’s battered economy. For a time, perhaps, Syrians will blame their economic hardships on the Assad regime. But, in time, they will hold their new rulers responsible, and fulfilling economic expectations will prove a formidable task. Syria’s per capita GDP has plummeted from $3,000 in 2011 to a pitiable $421 in 2021: that’s 86%. At the same time, the World Bank reports that “consumer price inflation” increased by 93% in 2023, even as 69% of Syrians live in poverty.

It hardly helps that 13 years of civil war have killed 500,000 people, displaced more than seven million, and turned six million others into refugees, the majority in Turkey. Then there are the half a million people who’ve fled into Syria from Lebanon — escaping punishing Israeli airstrikes — and the million more displaced during the recent HTS offensive. With the economy in ruins, resettling returnees will be costly. Mohammad al-Bashir, the interim prime minister until elections next year, has urged Syrian refugees to return and rebuild their country. But even if only a small fraction of them heed his call, they will still need to be housed, fed, and provided with basic necessities to help them reintegrate into society.

Given Syria’s pervasive poverty, the new government won’t have much of a tax base to stimulate growth. In theory, income from oil sales could help: Syria produced 387,000 barrels of oil a day in 2010 and exported about a third. But the oil fields are largely in Syria’s east and northeast, the stronghold of Syria’s Kurds, now known as the Autonomous Administration for North and East Syria (AANES). Run by Farhad Abdi Shaheen (better known by the nom de guerre Mazloum Abdi), leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is backed by American troops as part of Washington’s fight against the Islamic State (IS).

“Given Syria’s pervasive poverty, the new government won’t have much of a tax base to stimulate growth.”

Jolani, who has called for a new Syrian settlement featuring regional autonomy, could strike a deal with Abdi to share oil revenue in return for Kurdish autonomy. Abdi, for his part, has sent positive signals in return. He ordered that the post-independence national flag adopted by HTS be flown by all administrate bodies within the AANES and declared that his enclave is part of Syria and will participate in a new political settlement encompassing the entire country.

Yet a deal between Jolani and Abdi could run into an obstacle, one that highlights the interplay between internal governance and external relations. Tayyip Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s leader, has now gained even greater influence in Syria, especially in its northeast, following Assad’s fall. And he could have an even freer hand if Donald Trump, who said recently that the United States “should have nothing to do” with Syria, withdraws American troops from the AANES, something said he’d do in 2018 but did not. Erdoğan may oppose any deal between Syria’s new government and Abdi’s SDF: he considers the latter a branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been waging a secessionist war against Turkey since 1984.

Since the start of Syria’s civil war, Turkey has invaded northern Syria repeatedly. In concert with the Syrian National Army (SNA), its local proxy, it has also occupied stretches of territory west of the Euphrates River deep inside Syria. After Assad’s fall, the SNA, backed by Turkish air and drone strikes, has pushed into several border towns, forcing local residents to flee. Erdoğan had also pressed Assad for the right to patrol Kurdish-populated areas across Turkey’s border with Syria. Jolani may therefore find himself forced to stand with Abdi to oppose Turkey’s increasingly extravagant demands.

Jolani is also under pressure from Israel, which has “temporarily” occupied the UN patrolled demilitarised area beyond the Golan Heights, created in 1974, as well as some territory beyond it. It also launched hundreds of airstrikes to destroy the Syrian army’s weapons stocks and chemical weapons sites, the latter strangely never discovered before despite Israel’s vaunted Intelligence capabilities. Israel also acted without first trying to engage HTS to see whether this zone could be preserved and an agreement reached to keep the Syrian army’s weapons out of the hands of terrorist groups and to secure and then destroy Syria’s chemical weapons stocks.

Jolani has called for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied lands, but Tel Aviv has refused: and there’s no reason to expect the United States will side with Jolani. The rebel leader knows, of course, that his efforts to improve Syria’s economy could be derailed if tensions between Syria and Israel boil over into violence. While he has called Israel’s attacks and incursion unjustified — and criticised its “unwarranted escalation” — he isn’t spoiling for a fight. Syria, Jolani conceded, is just too weak, and should focus on economic reconstruction and diplomacy with Israel instead.

As expected, Jolani has asked for the lifting of economic sanctions on Syria — imposed by the EU and far more broadly by the United States — which didn’t diminish the living standards of Assad and his cronies but did hit ordinary Syrians hard. The West, though, won’t provide sweeping sanctions relief anytime soon: it will first test HTS’s governance practices, especially its declared commitment to be inclusive and abandon terrorism. The West will also expect Jolani to battle IS, which has conducted close to 700 attacks in Syria this year alone. The problem is that Jolani won’t have many resources at his disposal: Israel’s airstrikes destroyed as much as 80% of the country’s military power.

Then there are the Russians and the Iranians. Both have suffered serious setbacks but will surely seek to regain the influence they enjoyed under Assad. The Russians have apparently already cut a deal with Syria’s new rulers to retain their airbase in Khmeimim and the naval base at Tartus. That stake may induce them to avoid stoking instability. But Iran has no comparable motivation, and has anyway suffered a much larger loss of influence following the triumph of HTS. If HTS fails the governance test, Iran may decide to back such opposition forces as emerge. As Naim Qassem, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s ally, noted recently, his group has lost its supply route from Iran — but could regain it if “a new regime” emerges in Syria.

Outsiders jostling for position, let alone arming local surrogates, could make the already-daunting governance challenges HTS faces even harder. Syria is too strategically important to be left alone, but meddling foreigners bent on shaping its political future should be careful. The upheavals resulting from their rivalries will affect them too, through another surge in refugee outflows or an increase in terrorism or narcotics trafficking. Sadly, based on the past, there isn’t much hope that they will act any differently.

Rajan Menon is the Director of the Grand Strategy programme at Defense Priorities and a senior research fellow at Columbia University. His latest book is The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention

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