THE collapse of the Baathist government of Syria in the north of the country, as the al-Qaeda affiliate HTS (Hay鈥檃t Tahrir al-Sham or the Levant Liberation Council) advanced into Aleppo and Hama, could reconfigure the Middle East. The rapidity of the advance and the Muslim fundamentalist leadership of the fighters remind me of the fall of the government of Ashraf Ghani before the Taliban advance in August-September 2021. If those events embarrassed Joe Biden, these developments embarrassed Russian President Vladimir Putin, the main backer of Damascus. The distraction of Ukraine clearly weakened Russia in the Middle East, and may cost Putin one of his few clients in the region.
The poor performance of the Syrian Arab Army troops at Aleppo shows again that for foreign patrons to stand up a friendly government and back a client army can often produce a Potemkin village, a facade with no reality behind it, which easily falls to pieces under some concerted pressure. This sort of disintegration afflicted the Iraqi National Army built by George W Bush, the Afghanistan National Army built by Bush, Obama and Trump, and now the Syrian Arab Army stood up by Vladimir Putin and Iran鈥檚 Revolutionary Guards.
Indeed, a commander of the Quds Force (the special operations overseas branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps) and senior adviser to Syria, Brig Gen Kioumars Pourhashemi, was killed in the course of the HTS attack in northern Syria. Most Iranian media is in denial about the fall of Aleppo.
The Syrian Baath government of Bashar al-Assad is as guilty as genocide as the Israeli government, having tortured to death some 10,000 people and having killed hundreds of thousands of innocents in its war to crush the Sunni rebel forces in the teens of the last decade. The rebel HTS also has innocent blood on its hands.
The regional meaning of these events differs according to the lens through which they are viewed.
If we view the victors as Sunni Muslim fundamentalist extremists, their ascendancy will be welcomed by President Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, who indeed may have a hand in the campaign, since he has been a patron of HTS. Erdogan has championed groups as diverse as the Muslim Brotherhood and the HTS, and while he is not himself a fundamentalist, he enjoys the soft power that accrues to Turkey from his support of groups such as Hamas, MB and others. The Turkish press is speculating that the four million Syrian Sunni refugees in Turkey might be able to return home if the Sunni rebels come to power. Likewise, Qatar, a regional champion of political pluralism that makes a place for political Islam, is a severe critic of the Baathist dictatorship, which wielded its secularism as a political cudgel. Most Sunni Muslims in Lebanon are anything but fundamentalists, but on the whole they will likely be happy about the collapse of the Baath, which they view as a totalitarian Stalinist knock-off in the hands of the Alawite Shiite sect, which discriminates against Sunnis. They are not wrong.
In contrast, the Christians both in Syria (5 per cent of the population) and Lebanon (about a fourth of the population) are terrified today, given HTS鈥檚 past harsh record regarding religious minorities.
From the point of view of the region鈥檚 nationalist, secular-leaning regimes, this movement is an unwelcome resurgence of radical political Islam. That is how it will be viewed by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in Egypt, who has spent a decade crushing the Muslim Brotherhood, by Qais Saied of Tunisia, by Khalifah Hiftar, the strongman of East Libya, by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune of Algeria, by Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestine Authority, by the Democratic Union Party of the Syrian Kurds, and by Mohammed Bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates. Bin Zayed has spent his oil money trying to put down Muslim fundamentalists around the region, including in Libya and Sudan, and he is generally on the same page as al-Sisi. Bin Zayed spent some of Saturday on the phone with Bashar al-Assad discussing the events. As noted above, outside the region these events will alarm Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had shored up the al-Assad regime beginning in 2015 with air support from the Russian Aerospace Forces.
From the point of view of those countries that feel threatened by Iran, the development will be greeted as a further sign of Tehran鈥檚 enfeeblement. Israel has humiliated Iran and its ally, Hezbollah, during the past four months, which may have emboldened the HTS to make this move. Bashar al-Assad鈥檚 Syria is one of Iran鈥檚 few firm allies in the Arab world, along with the Houthi government of Yemen, the Shiite-led government of Iraq, and the Hezbollah-influenced government of Lebanon. Syria is a key transit point for Iranian shipments of rockets and other munitions to Lebanon鈥檚 Hezbollah, and if it falls then Hezbollah 鈥� already on the ropes after Israel鈥檚 recent campaign against it 鈥� could face a bleak future.
These anti-Iran forces include Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Azerbaijan, and, outside the region, the United States. All are delighted at the news. In 2012鈥�2016 during the Syrian Civil War, the US CIA funnelled billions to 40 Sunni Muslim fundamentalist groups in Syria, using Saudi intelligence as the pass-through. These groups were mainly Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and were vetted as 鈥渘ot al-Qaeda.鈥� They were, however, close battlefield allies of the Succor Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), the leading organisation in the current HTS or Levant Liberation Council. So the CIA was again de facto allied with al-Qaeda in Syria, as it had been in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The prospect of the fall of Baathist Syria, however, is not without peril for these same countries, if al-Qaeda-adjacent forces come out on top. Would a wave of fundamentalist fervour in the region really benefit the bon vivant Mohammed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia? Will the 800 US troops at Tanf in southeast Syria be threatened by the victorious HTS, given that those troops are in part a support for the leftist Kurds of Syria鈥檚 northeast that have fought it on many occasions?
Indeed, if the Jabhat al-Nusra or Succor Front, an al-Qaeda offshoot, comes out on top in the new power struggle, even Turkey may come to regret these events. Erdogan has consistently underestimated the danger of groups such as HTS and ISIL, which have their origins in al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia and which split from one another in 2012. Despite its insouciance Turkey has been hit by ISIL bombings on several occasions.
And, will Sunni fundamentalist militias marching into Damascus really be a good thing for the current extremist government of Israel, engaged in a genocidal campaign against Gaza that it justifies as an attempt to exterminate Sunni fundamentalist militias? The far right Likud Party鈥檚 theory that chaos in its neighbours is good for Israel may be tested.
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InformedComment, December 1. Juan Cole is the Richard P Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam.
