How Assad Weathered Storm In Arab Spring Aftermath
 |
| Sameer Arshad Khatlani Follow on Facebook |
Deposed Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had been on the run for two months after the fall of Tripoli when rebels found him in a stormwater pipe near Sirte on October 20, 2011. He cowered as they held him by his arms, curly hair and frog-marched him out of the stinky pipe soaked in blood. Gaddafi, 69, was tortured before he was summarily executed. The ignominious end of the dictator, who had ruled Libya since 1969 and given himself lofty titles like “King of Kings of Africa’’, came months after Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s fall encouraged pro-democracy protests (Arab Spring) in the region. The protests threatened to uproot autocrats across the region as Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced to quit while Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was toppled.
In Syria, the challenge to Bashir al-Assad’s rule coincided with that of Gaddafi’s when protests erupted after 13-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb was tortured to death in March 2011. Khateeb was among 15 boys detained and tortured for writing graffiti supporting the Arab Spring. Assad responded with a heavy hand to the protests that followed and killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters. The protests degenerated into a civil war in July 2011 when military defectors formed the Free Syrian Army to overthrow Assad. The so-called Islamic State (IS) terror group and groups like the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces soon joined the campaign to dislodge Assad.
The war left around half a million dead and displaced half the population – 12 million. But Assad survived. Assad’s opponents captured large swathes of territory before the tide began to turn in his favour when Russia threw the weight of its military might behind him in 2015. A year later, Assad’s forces achieved their biggest victory in December 2016 with the recapture of Aleppo, where chemical weapons were used. They made steady progress that prompted Assad’s Lebanese ally, Hezbollah, to declare victory on September 12, 2017.
Assad’s survival dashed the hopes of many Syrians, who believed the uprising would end their decades of political exclusion. For exiled Syrian author Yassin al-Haj Saleh, it meant “denying any meaning to our suffering, our losses, and our struggle for freedom.’’ He told Carnegie Middle East Center’s Diwan blog that it means that half a million victims “are nothing and their killing will not lead to political change.” He added the survivors “are not protected’’ and might also be killed “without expecting any protest from those who assigned themselves a role as protectors of international laws.’’ For him, he added, the opportunity for a more democratic Syria “is lost for good.” Saleh warned the world’s future unsafe in the “hands of those renewing the mandate of an unspeakable criminal” like Assad.
Saleh blamed “uncontrollable dynamics of radicalisation, Islamisation, and sectarianisation, for the failure. “In the course of this Herculean effort for freedom, Syrians were confronted with brute force… Bashar al-Assad resorted to war, using the army, his extensive security apparatus, and the shabbiha [militias] against his own people to crush their will to resist,” he said. “This led to the militarisation of the uprising. Those protesting found themselves having to break the thuggish sectarian junta’s monopoly over the means of violence in order to own politics themselves.” Saleh said this justified reaction triggered the uncontrollable dynamics and led to a breakdown in “the national framework of the struggle and the influx of wandering global jihadis, as well as inviting regional and international interventions.”
Assad’s minority Alawite sect accounts for just 11 per cent while the majority Sunnis comprise 68 per cent of the Syrian population. He could get around the demographic disadvantage thanks to the disarray in a fragmented rebel camp working at cross purposes. Even the countries backing the rebels were driven by varied ends. The transnational terrorist agenda of groups like the IS worked to Assad’s advantage as it changed the focus of the US from removing Assad to countering them militarily as they began mounting attacks on European soil.
Soon most of the international community accepted Assad's victory as a fait accompli. For Delhi-based Syrian journalist Waiel Awwad, Assad’s survival was a victory of his war on terror and “a clear indication that American [regime change] projects in Syria and Iraq have failed”. “Before the end of the year, these terror groups will be eliminated from Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon,” he said. Awwad insisted that the international community now recognises this and should support the legitimate d] government and encourage dialogue for peace. He added that recruits from 83 countries fought in Syria and credited “determination of the Syrian people, army and allies” for defeating the “regime change project”.
The West’s approach and “an overdose of wishful thinking” was responsible for the change, according to former Dutch special envoy to Syria Nikolaos van Dam. In an excerpt from his book published in Foreign Policy, he wrote the West did not have a “long-term vision and result-oriented pragmatism’’ that was needed to defeat Assad. “Various ambassadors in Damascus expected Assad to have been gone by the summer of 2012.’’ Dam noted that the regime’s strength was completely underestimated, “partly out of ignorance and lack of knowledge of the Syrian regime, as well as because of misplaced optimism’’.
Dam noted that the West’s military support for the Syrian opposition never matched its rhetoric and was thus “dangerously inflating” the opposition’s expectations. “The opposition was never given sufficient military support… even when such military pressure would have been necessary to achieve the political solution the West claimed it wanted,’’ he wrote. “With this combination, the Syrian revolution was doomed to failure – certainly as long as the regime received military support from its allies Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah.’’ Dam highlighted the West’s declared aim of arming the opposition turned out to be rather restricted. “When the EU arms embargo against Syria was lifted at the insistence of the United Kingdom and France in 2013, there was – contrary to expectations – no great change as far as arms deliveries to the opposition were concerned.’’
The turnaround in the situation came as a major boost to Iran’s growing regional influence. This, for
former Israeli diplomat Itamar Rabinovich, is a “gloomy prospect” as Iran “appears to be sustaining its quest for a land corridor to the Mediterranean.” Rabinovich’s concerns echo those of regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Israel. President Donald Trump’s anti-Iranian rhetoric in early 2017 had given much hope to Tehran’s rivals. “…he ordered an aerial raid against Syria’s Air Force after yet another chemical attack on civilians, and the United States shot down a Syrian jet and a drone used by a pro-Iranian militia in Eastern Syria,’’ wrote Rabinovich. He added the policy was reversed and Trump focused on the war on IS. For Rabinovich, Trump seemed to have an understanding with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Syria and his decision to stop CIA aid to Syrian opposition groups was sen to follow the same line of thinking.
This is a slightly edited version of a piece published in The Indian Express, the author's former employer, in 2017
Sameer Arshad Khatlani is an author-journalist based in New Delhi. He has been a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, India’s second-biggest English newspaper. Khatlani worked in a similar capacity with The Indian Express, India's most influential newspaper known for its investigative journalism, until June 2018. Born and raised in Kashmir, he began his career with the now-defunct Bangalore-based Vijay Times in 2005 as its national affairs correspondent. He joined Times of India, one of the world's largest selling broadsheets, in 2007. Over the next nine years, he was a part of the paper's national and international newsgathering team as an Assistant Editor.
Khatlani has reported from Iraq and Pakistan and covered elections and national disasters. He received a master’s degree in History from the prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Khatlani is a fellow with Hawaii-based American East-West Center established by the US Congress in 1960 to promote better relations and understanding with Asian, and Pacific countries through cooperative study, research, and dialogue.
Penguin published Khatlani’s first book The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan in February 2020. Eminent academic and King’s college professor, Christophe Jaffrelot, has called the book ‘an erudite historical account... [that] offers a comprehensive portrait of Pakistan, including the role of the army and religion—not only Islam’.
Comments
Post a Comment
Post your comments