One more domino in the Middle East
Syria: Once again, a secular state falls into the hands of radical Muslims.
No sooner has Donald Trump won the presidential election in the USA than Bashar al-Assad is overthrown by Islamist “rebels” in Syria – after thirteen years of civil war. Who believes in a coincidence of timing? A solo effort by the militias? My thoughts on this and some personal memories.
Egypt
A long time ago, before I worked in my original profession as a social pedagogue in a so-called development aid project in Egypt, I lived in a cheap hotel in Cairo for two years. I had been on my way to Australia, but got stuck in Egypt due to a sprained ankle. Travelers from all over the world met at the hotel on 26 July Street in the city center. Some returned again and again after a few weeks, so that we grew into a small, close-knit group who spent their days and evenings and nights together and were happy when someone from our circle returned from a trip. During the summers, Sudaneses also stayed in the hotel because it got too hot for them in their home country. And less well-off men from the wealthy neighboring Arab states dumped their wives and children in the hotel while they enjoyed a few weeks free of appendages in a better hostel.
Our close-knit community was regularly reinforced by Hassan from Sudan and Abu Ahmad from Aleppo in Syria. Abu Ahmad, meaning “father of Ahmad”, was a fragile-looking, fair-skinned man with snow-white hair. He stayed in his regular room for months at a time - until homesickness drove him back to his city, which he described as the most beautiful in all of Syria. How often he invited me there: I never went. I was put off by reports from other travelers who had been to Syria and told me about a “police state” in which people spied on each other. Similar to the GDR, East Germany. And travelers were also said to be under surveillance. Looking back, I very much regret not having visited Abu Ahmad. For one thing, he is now long dead - and his beloved Aleppo has been reduced to rubble in the civil war.
Syria under Assad
At the time of Abu Ahmad, Syria was still ruled by Hafiz al-Assad, a brutal dictator by all accounts who took power in 1970. After his death in 2000, his son Bashar, who had previously lived as an ophthalmologist in London, took over. As a member of the Alawite religious minority, he was married to a Syrian Sunni woman from a wealthy family. The Sunnis form the religious majority in Syria with 70 percent. Under Bashar al-Assad's presidency, 2001 initially saw the “Damascus Spring”, in which hundreds of political prisoners were released and political and social issues were allowed to be discussed in “salons”. This period of intellectual openness was replaced by the “Damascus Winter” in the fall of 2001, when political repression took hold. The extent to which the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent US “war on terror” influenced al-Assad's political about-turn would be too much to go into here. In any case, Syria remained a secular state whose government regarded radical Muslims as oppositional enemies. The majority of Sunni Muslims in the country, who heretized the Alawites, had in turn long been opposed to al-Assad's autocratic rule.
“The regime in Damascus is an abominable dictatorship. But it is no worse than any other,” said Peter Scholl-Latour in an interview in 2012. The renowned German Middle East expert warned of a civil war that was still fermenting at the time. And he accused the West of having a one-sided view. “Is Saudi Arabia a democratic regime? -Who is talking about the bloody oppression of the Shiites in Bahrain? Who is talking about the fact that the Saudis crushed the freedom movement in Bahrain with tanks? Not a soul!” The “virtue-signaling” attitude towards Syria is therefore sheer hypocrisy, he claimed. And, warned Scholl-Latour, the al-Assad regime is “at least the last secular system in the Islamic world. It is not only the Syrians who should consider whether they would get something better after a possible overthrow.”
“Liberated” Syria
What Syrians are getting after the current overthrow is a loose alliance of various Islamist militias led by a group calling itself Hajat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS (Committee for the Liberation of the Levant). The USA, Great Britain and the European Union have classified the Al-Qaeda offshoot as a terrorist organization. The 42-year-old leader Abu Muhammad al-Jolani was ranked among the top 10 terrorists worldwide by the TV network CNN. Now the media are calling the terrorist a “rebel leader”. The scientist Thomas Pierret from France's national research institute CNRS calls al-Jolani a “pragmatic radical”. In interviews, he is eloquent and - instead of wearing an Islamic turban in a smart military uniform - appears “civilized” to Western eyes. Some media outlets are already comparing him to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Selensky. Abu Muhammad Al-Jolani has appealed to all foreign governments: The further development of the country is a matter between Syrians - they should stay out of it.
US President-elect Donald Trump apparently wants to do this. He posted on X:
In any event, Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!
Trump is thus indirectly confirming what Julian Assange revealed in an interview with Deutsche Welle in 2017: The CIA's biggest budget item, and therefore its top priority, would be to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Operation Timber Sycamore was the name of a billion-dollar covert CIA program with which the Obama administration wanted to achieve this goal by financing and training Islamist groups and supplying them with information. In 2014, the USA also bombed Syria, whereupon Bashar al-Assad asked Russia for help. Donald Trump, on the other hand, declared during his 2016 election campaign that he wanted to cooperate with the al-Assad regime and Russia to eliminate the Islamic State (IS). This strategic contradiction would have led to a “serious conflict” between Trump and the CIA, according to Julian Assange. The current Biden administration has now also signaled its goodwill to the new strongman in Syria and dropped the 10 million dollar bounty against al-Jolani. The reason given by the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Barbara A. Leaf was that if she was sitting with the HTS leader and discussing “a whole range of interests - the interests of the US, the interests of Syria, perhaps the interests of the region - then such a bounty would be somewhat incoherent.”
The militia leader
Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the man who, according to the official version, ended the “mess” in Syria, was born Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa in Saudi Arabia in 1982. In 2021, he told the US television network PBS that his battle name referred to his family's roots in the Golan Heights. His paternal grandfather was forced to flee after the Israeli annexation of the area in 1967. He himself grew up in Damascus after the family returned. His father is said to have been a secular opponent of the Assad regime and spent many years in Syrian prisons. It is unclear when al-Jolani adopted his fighting name. In the PBS Frontline documentary, he states that he was significantly influenced by the Palestinian Second Intifada, which began in September 2000. One year later: 9/11.
Shortly before the US invasion, al-Jolani joined Al-Qaeda of Iraq in 2003. He was arrested in 2006 and spent the next five years in various US military prisons in Iraq, where he met other jihadists. Back in his home country, al-Jolani founded the al-Nusra Front in 2011 as the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda. Five years later, he officially broke with al-Qaeda and fought with sl-Qaeda and IS for supremacy in Syria. Some political observers believe that he wanted to rename his al-Nusra Front because of al-Qaeda's poor image worldwide and that HTS, founded in 2017, was the product of this. Since then, al-Jolani has adopted a more moderate stance. However, his declared goal remains the establishment of a Sunni Islamic state.
A contemporary witness
US journalist Theo Padnos, who was held hostage by the HTS for 22 months, reports in a video interview on systematic torture, which was called a “welcome party” for new prisoners. In his dungeon in Aleppo - Abu Ahmad's beloved hometown - Padnos, who speaks fluent Arabic, said he was able to overhear that the rift between al-Jolani and al-Qaeda was not about strategic or religious differences, but about money. Padnos was released in August 2014, just one week after the beheading of US journalist James Foley by IS. He describes his experiences in his book Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture, and Enlightenment (2022). In the interview, Padnos says that he knows of a number of perpetrators who have been living in Paris or Munich for years as alleged refugees.
Wikipedia has a list of prisoners murdered by IS. By mid-November 2014, there are said to have been 1500 in Syria alone. They were shot, hanged, beheaded, drowned, stoned or burned alive.
Religious minorities and women
Currently in Syria, militia leader al-Jolani has assured religious minorities that they would not have to fear any attacks. Anyone who remembers his previous history and similar announcements of moderation by the Taliban after their takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 will at least doubt al-Jolani's assurances. The leaders of six villages belonging to the Druze minority on the Golan Heights clearly don't believe a word he says. They have applied to the Israeli army, which has invaded the area, to be incorporated into Israeli territory. In the western Syrian province of Hama, unknown persons set fire to a Christmas tree in a public square at Christmas. According to the German daily WELT, hundreds of Christians and Muslims then took to the streets together in protest.
The future status of women in “liberated” Syria is also uncertain. Militia leader al-Jolani gave his first speech after the overthrow on December 8 in Damascus in the Umayyad Mosque, where women are not allowed to enter. On December 19, hundreds demonstrated in the square in front of the mosque, demanding a secular state and equal participation for women. A spokesperson for the new administration had previously stated that the representation of women in ministries or parliament was “premature”.
Germany and Europe
The German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Green Party), who announced a “feminist foreign policy” when she took office, appears to be unconcerned about the new rulers in Syria. She has pledged eight million euros in emergency aid and the establishment of relations with the HTS. Many German media outlets express joy about a “free” Syria. “Today I am crying tears of happiness. Last night, the world witnessed the rebirth of my home country Syria,” writes a Kurdish author in the news magazine Der Spiegel, of all places. She seems to forget that Kurds were among the victims of IS in both Syria and Iraq and could also become a target in “liberated” Syria.
On X, the owner of a satirical account parodies militia leader al-Jolani, but ultimately makes fun of the supposedly gullible in politics, the media and society. The two short videos have English subtitles. In the first video, al-Jolani, wearing an Islamist turban, invites everyone to a summer party next year, including Donald Trump and the Pope. In the second video, he is dressed as al-Qaeda Santa Claus and wishes everyone a Merry Christmas. The sentences are aimed at German conditions and may therefore not be comprehensible to everyone, and the English translation is unfortunately poor in places, but the videos should still entertain. On YouTube without subtitles.
Germany has taken in around one million Syrians since the start of the civil war. Now, as in other EU countries, repatriations are being discussed. Since al-Assad is gone, the refugees should return and rebuild their homeland. Turkey, which had taken in three million Syrians, has already seen the first of them leave voluntarily after the mood there against the refugees deteriorated. Denmark wants to pay each adult Syrian returnee 27,000 euros. In view of the many pictures of jubilant Syrian migrants on German streets, the German Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser (Social Democratic Party), has warned of an “increased risk”. She is referring to the possibility that the success of the HTS offensive could motivate Islamists in Germany to travel to Syria to join the jihadists there. The German online medium Apollo News comments that this warning seems quite curious: wouldn't it be better for internal security if radical Muslims left Germany? Perhaps the “rebirth” of Syria that the author rejoiced about in Der Spiegel will actually happen - just in a different way than she had hoped. In any case, the fall of the al-Assad regime will not solve the problem for the Europeans. Experts are expecting fighting between rival Islamist militias that joined forces against the common enemy, which is now gone. So there could soon be new streams of refugees from Syria.
Comparable scenarios
The events in Syria are reminiscent of earlier overthrows of secular regimes in the Middle East and North Africa - and the developments that followed, when it was not democracy but jihad or chaos that took hold. All the countries listed below have large reserves of oil and/or natural gas.
IRAN: The CIA and the British secret service MI6 overthrew the democratically elected head of government Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 in order to prevent the nationalization of oil resources. The Shah Reza Pahlevi, whom they favored, established an authoritarian regime and suppressed all opposition. In 1979, there was an uprising and Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in what was to become the “Islamic Republic” of Iran. Since the Ukraine war, Israel's arch-enemy has become a close ally of Russia, making it a thorn in the flesh of both the current and the designated US administration. Tehran supported the Assad regime, which served as a bridge between the Shiite mullahs and the equally Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon.
IRAQ: Until the First Gulf War in 1990, Saddam Hussein was an ally of both the West and the Soviet Union. This changed with Iraq's invasion of the neighboring state of Kuwait. A Western war alliance led by the USA drove the Iraqi army out of the occupied territories (Second Gulf War in 1991). The catalyst was the so-called incubator lie. According to this, Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait were supposed to have torn babies out of incubators and left them to die. The story turned out to be the invention of a US public relations firm that also worked for the US government. Ten years later, when Iraq was the only UN member state not to condemn the attacks of 9/11, the Iraqi dictator was targeted by then US President George W. Bush Junior. In March 2003, a “Coalition of the willing” led by the USA invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein. The US government's justification that this was a necessary preemptive war to prevent an alleged imminent attack on the USA by Iraq with weapons of mass destruction is now also regarded as fictitious and the operation as a war of aggression in violation of international law. British Prime Minister Tony Blair admitted in 2015 that this Third Gulf War helped the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to rise.
I remember: On February 15, 2003, around nine million people worldwide demonstrated against the impending war in Iraq in the largest peace demonstration in history. I was one of 500,000 protesters in Berlin. I had been to Iraq before the first Gulf War. It was a stone's throw from Cairo, where I lived at the time. For once, I wasn't traveling alone, but accompanied by a traveler from Berlin. We arrived in Baghdad in the middle of Ramadan. Iraq was a secular state back then. The restaurants had their windows covered with newspaper. Inside, however, you could get something to eat all day long. Above all - and almost exclusively - chicken. I can't remember eating a single fresh vegetable or fruit in the three weeks of our stay. To our great surprise, there was plenty to drink: Arak. A milky aniseed schnapps. Called Ouzo in Greece. Despite Ramadan, people also smoked freely.
LIBYA: I only know Libya from transit. Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi was still in power. He had declared the country a Socialist Arab People's Republic in 1977 and had previously nationalized all oil companies. From then on, this oil revenue brought the population one of the highest per capita incomes on the African continent. Social security included free medical care as well as widows', orphans' and old-age pensions. Al-Qaddafi proclaimed pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism and criticized Israel and US imperialism. He allegedly had emigrated opposition members murdered and supported terrorist attacks by Arab extremists in Europe. This increasingly brought him into conflict with the U.S. government. During the civil war in 2011, an international Western military alliance led by the United States supported the rebels against al-Qaddafi and ensured his overthrow. Since then, rival militias, including IS, have been fighting for supremacy in the country. According to a report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) from 2023, all warring parties are committing serious human rights violations. In an interview with Fox News in 2016, US President Barack Obama called the fact that the United States and its allies had failed to ensure stable conditions and an orderly government after the fall of Gaddafi the “biggest mistake” of his eight years in office.
AFGHANISTAN: During the Cold War in the 1980s, the USA equipped the Islamist Mujaheddin with Stinger missiles in their fight against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul. After the withdrawal of the Soviet military, fighting broke out between the various Islamic militias, from which the fundamentalist Taliban emerged victorious and subsequently established an Islamic theocracy. After 9/11, the United States overthrew the Taliban as part of their “war on terror”. During the subsequent international stabilization mission (ISAF) under NATO leadership, the country constituted itself as a democratic, Islamic republic, but was ruled in an authoritarian manner. In February 2020, the USA and the Taliban signed a peace agreement. A year later the US and NATO troops withdrew - and the Taliban took over again. In the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which they proclaimed, they have systematically stripped women of all their rights. The USA, on the other hand, left behind a vast quantity of weapons and military equipment during its seemingly chaotic withdrawal. Will any of this turn up among the “rebels” in Syria any time soon?
To be continued.