After Assad: A Q&A from Damascus

Edited by Sam Thielman

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BASHAR ASSAD HAS LOST SYRIA, but we don't know if the hybrid Syrian revolution/civil war is over. The foreign intervention that made Syria one of the most frightening conflicts on earth definitely is not. But those seem like the only certainties right now. 

Damascus fell on Saturday night to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which began life as the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front before breaking with the group. HTS is led by the 42-year old Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, AKA Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former detainee of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. No one knows yet what HTS will do with power, nor how long the group can hold on to it. But since al-Jolani and HTS took Aleppo something like 10 days ago, HTS has been attempting to convince Syria and the rest of the world that it is Very Much Not ISIS. 

HTS has put out statements calling Christians "an inseparable part of the Syrian national fabric" and pledging to cooperate with international organizations presently on the ground in the country. (Thanks to FOREVER WARS friends Suzanne Schneider and Asad Dandia for translations.) On Monday, HTS posted that it was "strictly forbidden to interfere with women’s dress or impose any request related to their clothing or appearance, including requests for modesty." The bishop of Aleppo said last week that the city's Christians have been able to prepare for Christmas as normal, indicating that so far, HTS has kept to its promises that Syria's non-Muslims will be unharmed. In case it needs to be said, if ISIS had taken Damascus, a bloodbath would have unfolded, targeting not only non-Muslims but Muslims ISIS deemed insufficiently pious. 

We have yet to see anything like a bloodbath in HTS' march to Damascus. Assad's Syrian Arab Army did not fight for Damascus and put up minimal opposition after the fall of Aleppo. I haven't seen reports of revenge killings or street-level coercion in the capitol in the first 48 hours after Assad fled. Assad's prime minister is cooperating with the transition and HTS has said it intends to permit ministries to continue normal business. Again, this is Very Much Not ISIS behavior. ISIS sought to replace Syria, not protect its national fabric. Many wonder if HTS represents a "post-jihadist" moment—something as-yet unseen from any entity with al-Qaeda heritage. But these are the very earliest days of HTS in Damascus. 

Whatever HTS reveals itself to be in the coming days, its victory has thrown open the infamous Saydnaya prison, as well as others in Homs and Hama. The images that have made it onto social media and into journalism of families reuniting—in some cases after decades—bear witness to the jubilation and catharsis felt by so many Syrians who are just beginning to emerge from the trauma of the past 13 years of war and a half-century of father-son Assadist rule. While Alawites (the minority the Assad family belongs to) reportedly fled from HTS in Homs and Hama, the roads have also been jammed with cars returning from Turkey and Lebanon, literally on the road to Damascus. A conflict defined by mass exodus is showing its first signs of giving way to ingathering. The politics of this moment are still coalescing, but we shouldn't ignore the profundity of these two developments. 

At the same time, the early calm amongst Syrians in Damascus does not extend everywhere. FOREVER WARS warned last week of an imminent fight for Manbij, held by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), from the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army. That happened on Sunday. I can't tell right now for certain, but Turkish media claims the SNA now controls the city. What happens next is ominously unsettled. I don't know what influence Hadi al-Bahra, an anti-Assad political figure in exile unaffiliated with HTS, will have, but he said on Sunday that the SDF should cut ties with the PKK, which the Turks consider their top terrorist threat, if it seeks to be included in the transitional government. That seems highly unlikely, given that the PKK's Syrian affiliate, the YPG, is the core of the SDF. Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary, spoke to his Turkish counterpart on Sunday "to prevent further escalation of an already volatile situation, as well as to avoid any risk to U.S. forces and partners, and the Defeat-ISIS Mission," per a Pentagon readout. But the U.S. has not come to the aid of the SDF in Manbij, and is signaling that it will not do so unless ISIS is involved. 

And that speaks to the unsettled posture of the many foreign forces in Syria. No sooner had Assad fallen than the Israelis launched an airstrike on Damascus and seized territory near Quneitra by the southern Golan Heights (occupied by Israel) as a "buffer zone"; and the U.S. conducted a major series of airstrikes on what it called 75 ISIS positions in eastern Syria. (And as we're talking now about foreign intervention, I should add that it's not clear to me if Turkish airstrikes were also a component of the Manbij offensive.) 

Both the Russians and the Iranians have suffered a serious loss. But the Russians might conceivably be able to deal with an HTS-led government to retain access to the Mediterranean port of Latakia. The Iranians are in no such position to salvage their freedom of action in Syria from the anti-Iranian HTS. Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu is exploiting the fall of Assad to the hilt, but when he says that the pummelling Israel inflicted on Hezbollah and Iran this summer and fall played a significant role in the fall of Assad, he has a point. Neither were in a position to save their ally in Damascus. 

Statements on Sunday by Biden administration officials made it clear that Assad's fall changes nothing about their intention to keep U.S. troops in eastern Syria. Asked if the U.S. was in communication with HTS, one senior U.S. official told a background briefing for reporters, "I think it's safe to say there's contact with all Syrian groups as we work to do whatever we can to support the Syrians through a transition." 

Looming over that is the question of whether the U.S. will delist HTS as a terrorist organization. Not that the U.S. has cared about this during the 10 years it's been on the ground in Syria, but its troop presence is illegal under international law—unless a post-Assad government permits it. Such permission would be a shocking thing for an entity that was once al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise to do, a War on Terror milestone so stunning that this whole train of thought seems absurd. But at some point, an HTS-led Syrian government is going to have to figure out what to do about the hundreds of U.S. troops on its eastern territory, where the oil fields are. 

THERE ARE OBVIOUS LIMITS to following the emergent contours of an intimidatingly complex conflict from more than 5,000 miles away. So I turned to Raya Jalabi, the Financial Times' Mideast bureau chief, who on Sunday went to Damascus from her base in Beirut. Raya is an excellent reporter whom I got to know when we worked together at The Guardian. She very generously agreed to field a few questions during a busy day of reporting history unfold.  

FOREVER WARS: What did you expect to find in post-Assad Damascus? Did what you encountered match your expectations?

RAYA JALABI: I don't think I had any expectations of what post-Assad Damascus would look like because I can't say I had any expectations that Damascus would ever be post-Assad—at least not in the foreseeable future. Over the past 13 years, we have watched Assad endure—slaughtering nearly half a million Syrians in the process, and parcelling off pieces of his fractured state to Russia, Iran and its network of proxies in the region, all in the name of survival. Almost no one saw the fall of the Assad regime coming—and certainly not within 10 days—it's hard to describe how monumental this is. Rym Momtaz, my friend at Carnegie Europe, said this was akin to the fall of the Berlin Wall for the Middle East. 

When the news broke that Damascus had fallen, I jumped in a car and headed across the border in a complete sense of shock, after a sleepless night spent watching the developments. Like most other journalists who work for western outlets, we've barely had access to government-controlled Syria since the early days of the war. The last time I saw the city was in 2010, when I spent a few days walking around the city with my cousins during a particularly bleak winter week. 

As soon as I crossed the border, the regime's complete collapse hit me—all of the checkpoints were empty, there was no one to stamp my passports. Driving into the city, all the checkpoints for various branches of state security forces were empty, their weapons and loot pilfered by roaming civilians. The streets were littered with armoured vehicles—most abandoned, but some crashed into ditches. In central Damascus, there were scenes of jubilation, people celebrating with each newly arrived rebel faction shooting rounds into the sky. It certainly exceeded my expectations.

Do Damascenes feel like they're on the verge of an end to the war, or have the people you spoke with still feel like too much is unsettled, socially and politically? 

Nothing feels settled at all—there's a lot of nervousness about what comes next. Those who survived the past 13 years are craving a return to normalcy, a return to a life before war and economic degradation left them on the brink of poverty and despair. While many are celebrating the end of a brutal regime, they're not exactly thrilled about the arrival of an Islamist leader. Syria has long been a secular state and just how those two ideologies will sit side by side in a new government is a massive unanswered question. But most people I've spoken to over the past 48 hours said they will be satisfied with the new government, if it gets to work ASAP. 

What has it been like to see Saydnaya and other infamous prisons liberated?

I spent most of today at Saydnaya—it was completely bewildering. Thousands of people scrambled to get to the prison on the vague hope that they'd be able to find their missing loved ones—some of whom disappeared into this notorious "human slaughterhouse" decades ago. I spoke to dozens of people who were desperately looking for a trace of their relatives. Saydnaya’s architecture was clearly intended to confuse, its maze of corridors littered with clues of the horrors meted out there. In one hall, there were cages tall enough to fit a row of men. On its lower levels were the solitary confinement cells, one former inmate said: cramped, windowless and fetid, not wide enough for a person to sleep outstretched on its hard floor. The prisoners who were freed overnight are being cared for in city hospitals—many have lingering physical and mental injuries that will take years to heal. While we can celebrate their release, it's important to remember that what they have suffered is unbearable and inhumane—and few have any thoughts that justice will ever be served.

What do you make of HTS' stated promises for a nonsectarian and decentralized Syria? Many outside observers are wondering about whether HTS is in a "post-jihadist" phase of its development.

Look, it's early days and hard to say. But the sources and experts I speak to say that HTS' transition away from the more radical elements of the jihadi spectrum is genuine. Jolani has spent the past few years focused on institution-building, setting up a civilian administration in Idlib province, and moderating the movement's Islamist doctrine. So there is certainly hope that he will not try and impose a harsh version of Sharia on the rest of the country—which is rich in religious and ethnic minorities and also broadly secular. We should watch out for his personal role here, too. He is known to run an authoritarian ship, exerting top-down control over Idlib's administration. So will he be able to soften that and allow a civilian government to rule? What about elections? It's far too early to say, but we have to keep a close eye for indications of his next moves. 

Are people you spoke with concerned about continued Israeli airstrikes like the one in Damascus yesterday and IDF land seizures near Quneitra? 

They've been relentless over the past 48 hours—Israel has clearly seen the opportunity to go after the remnants of Syria's air force and Iran-linked installations. But Damascenes have largely grown used to the occasional Israeli air strike over the past few years—which have picked up exponentially since the war in Gaza and Lebanon began. The land seizures are also of great concern to many—but they're too busy thinking about the end of Assad's rule and their day-to-day survival right now to think about the future.

NO FOREIGN COMBATANT in the Syrian Civil War has won as much as Turkey did this weekend. But. 

Turkey's two main objectives are to end the autonomous Kurdish quasi-state in the east and to stop the Syrian refugee flow into its country. The return of Syrian refugees to Damascus meets that second objective. The first depends a great deal on what HTS does with power. As Raya and I discussed, HTS is making noises about protecting the "Syrian national fabric," and that's included talk of bringing the Kurds into the fold. While we don't know what form that will take, the more autonomy a future HTS-led government recognizes for the Kurds in the east, the more Turkey will have to ask itself what it actually gained from the end of Assad. 

That said, HTS lived to take Damascus because Turkey, for its own reasons, came to its rescue in Idlib—first militarily, and then with the 2020 ceasefire Turkey negotiated with Russia, which permitted Idlib to become a final bastion of opposition to Assad. Over the next four years, HTS had to come to a modus vivendi with the Turks, because Turkish troops were on Idlib's border with Turkey. HTS may not have been a Turkish client like the SNA is, but would it thwart Turkish ambitions for the Kurds (who, recall, were willing to deal pragmatically with Assad)? 

I can't answer any of these questions because there aren't any answers to them yet. But FOREVER WARS friend Derek Davison of the American Prestige podcast had an excellent interview on Sunday with the translator and historian Aymann Jawad al-Timimi that goes deep into the context of all these emerging developments. 

I KNOW THIS EDITION IS LONG AND FOREIGN-FOCUSED but last week, Sam Biddle of The Intercept published a blockbuster piece about the post-9/11 journey of a counterterrorism researcher turned Facebook employee, Hannah Byrne, Byrne's experience as part of what I tend to call the Facebook Deep State has left her deeply disillusioned with how Security State veterans influence social-media company decisions about what shows up in your feed: 

[W]hile planning the Malicious Actor Framework, [Byrne's] feelings of futility gave way to something worse: “I’m actually going to be an active participant in harm,” she recalls thinking. The speech of people she’d met in her studies abroad were exactly the kind her job might suppress. Finally, Byrne had decided “it felt impossible to be a good actor within that system.”

Sam also had another great piece last week, one that caught Google in a lie about its Project Nimbus work with Israel.

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