Syria (Taylor's Version) pt. 1

It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero

M. in Philadelphia wants a summary of the current situation in Syria.

At first I said I wasn’t going to answer this, because it’s too long and complex (there are 240+ distinct groups listed on the Wikipedia page “Armed factions in the Syrian civil war”), but I decided for a challenge I’m would sum up the whole thing in 2500 words or less, covering the essentials about the Syrian conflict from 2011 up until today. Not a word would be wasted on obscure literary references or rap lyrics.

When I was done, it was over 4000 words including the dumb jokes, which are essential to my craft, so we’re splitting this one over two weeks.

First off, Syria’s colonial history is similar to what I described in the Lebanon/Hezbollah post (cheat code for making this one shorter: linking to my other articles). Just like Lebanon, it’s a diverse place with many different religious and ethnic groups that fell under French control after WW1, then became independent after WW2. In Syria there are Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites (an esoteric Shia offshoot that believes in reincarnation and performs the Christian rite of communion), Ismaili Shiites (a minority of a minority), Druze (another esoteric religion that mixes Islam and Greek philosophy), Christians of all different types, and Yazidis (an obscure Kurdish sect often accused of being devil-worshippers). On the ethnic front there are Arabs, Turkmens, Kurds, Assyrians, Armenians, Circassians, and others. If all these unfamiliar names are a bit too much to handle: just keep in mind that it’s an ethnically and religiously diverse place, which will be important later. Like many other countries, those minorities that follow esoteric religions got chased up into the mountains long, long ago, and most of the lowland population are Arab Sunni Muslims.

A group of military men from the Ba’ath party took control of Syria in the 1960s. These guys were nationalist strongmen of the sort I wrote about in the Iran article, i.e. your standard-issue 1960s-2000s Arab rulers, keen on secularism, mustaches, “socialism” (meaning putting state-owned assets under the control of their cronies for purposes of enriching themselves), throwing people in prison, electroshock torture, and saluting endless parades of miserable 90-lb teenage conscripts wearing surplus Soviet uniforms. Hafez al-Assad took control of the leadership in 1970 and transformed the prior system of military rule into a regime focused on himself and his family. Daddy Hafez (as I’ll be calling him) did all sorts of nasty stuff including using secret police to torture dissidents, and in 1982 he sent the army to attack the city of Hama when a Muslim Brotherhood-inspired revolt took place there, killing some 10,000 civilians. So he was very much a Saddam Hussein type (Saddam’s secular/socialist party was also called the Ba’ath party and shared common roots with the Syrians), except Daddy Hafez didn’t invade his neighbours as much.

Eventually, Daddy Hafez (should I stop? No, I don’t want to) got old and decrepit and was preparing to hand off control to his eldest son Bassel, but the junior al-Assad died in 1994 after he crashed his Mercedes at 150 mph while en route to the airport for a ski trip. See personally, that’s why I like to get there minimum 2 hours early. No rush, no stress. The backup son, Bashar, was recalled from his quiet life as an eye surgeon in London to take up the reins. By all reports, Bashar was a nerdy computer guy (he does not exactly look fearsome) who didn’t want to be dictator, but was sort of guilt-tripped into it by Hafez. Typical family drama. Here’s the thing, boys and girls: race, religion, country, time period, none of it really matters. Human nature is always the same throughout time and space. That’s why Shakespeare plays are still relevant today, it’s just the same soap opera played out over and over again.

Hafez and Bashar al-Assad

Bashar took over in 2000, and kept things going as they had been under Daddy: secret prisons, meddling in Lebanon’s messy sectarian politics, military parades, and presidential elections with 99% victory margins. But then in 2011 the Arab Spring broke out (which I wrote about before in pt.3 of the Islamism series). People who didn’t benefit from cronyism and corruption were tired of the Assad family’s authoritarian rule, just as they were tired of similar rulers in other Arab lands. The regime reacted by shooting protestors, and pretty quickly the whole thing devolved into a civil war. Toyota pickup truck and AK-47 sales skyrocketed, as they tend to do in these situations.

Now this is where it gets complicated. Most civil wars, and this one is really an exemplary case, feature dozens of different factions that rise and fall, fight each other, then team up with each other against someone else, get killed off, re-emerge, and rename themselves. As such it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. A 1861-1865 Union vs. Confederacy situation with only two sides is pretty rare, actually. I'll try to keep it simple and use as few acronyms as possible.

One one side, you have the Assad regime, consisting of most of the police and the army. The Assad family are Alawites, one of those minority religions I mentioned at the top, so the Alawite regions along the Mediterranean coast stayed loyal to Assad. The family had stuffed the military and police apparatus with fellow Alawites, so these guys had the most to lose from Assad’s downfall. But also, a lot of other ethnic and religious minorities sided with Assad because they viewed the secular regime as their protector against Islamic extremists who wanted to butcher them. So you also have a fair number of Christians, Druze, and others siding with the regime.

The main rebel group was called the Free Syrian Army, and I’ll just refer to them as the opposition to avoid using an acronym. They comprised a wide array of different groups with different aims, and they got their weapons and such from army officers who defected. At the early stages, Western countries supported these opposition forces, thinking this was a Charles de Gaulle type of situation that could bring freedom and democracy to Syria. That did not work out, but during the early stages of the war, 2012-2013, it looked like these guys might actually win. I remember at one point when the opposition was fighting on the outskirts of Damascus, NPR was saying the fall of the regime was only days away. Turned out that NPR was off by 12 years, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

In the north and east of the country, the Kurds took advantage of the situation to carve out an autonomous zone for themselves. Oddly enough in 59 installments of Distilled History I have never mentioned the Kurds before, but they’re a majority-Muslim ethnic group spread across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. Unlike all the other countries who became independent after WW1, the Kurds got screwed at the Versailles conference and have been paying for it with their lives ever since. Pretty much every country where Kurds live has repressed them at great human cost over the years, although post-2003 they’ve managed to control an autonomous region in northern Iraq. In this new war they took control of their home region in Syria as well. The Kurds have retained that type of left-wing revolutionary ideology that went out of style elsewhere back in the 1970s, so the government in the areas they control has always been very secular and pro-women’s rights: pretty much the antithesis of Islamic State. The Kurds’ main problem is that throughout the decades Turkey’s opinion of them has always been slightly more negative than Heinrich Himmler’s attitude was towards Jews (if all Kurdish-majority areas ever became independent, they'd take half of Turkey with them), so when this Kurdish statelet emerged in northern Syria, Turkey bombed it and invaded the border region. The Turkish army is still there, and probably will be for a while, but the Kurds are holding out and haven’t had their main area taken over yet.

So this is how things looked during the first stage, around 2013:

A notable thing about this stage of the war is that Western countries almost intervened, but then backed off at the last minute. Barack Obama had been trying to extricate the US from Middle Eastern conflicts, but they kept popping off whether he wanted them or not, like that annoying-ass coworker who keeps IMing you when you’re ready to head to happy hour. The US supplied weapons to the opposition, nothing on the scale of Ukraine, but enough to keep them going for a while. Obama said in 2012 that the use of chemical weapons by the regime would be a “red line” that would warrant American intervention. Probably at this stage an air campaign would have pushed Assad past the breaking point, similar to the brief intervention that had toppled Muammar Gaddafi’s rule in Libya without a single American casualty. But when Assad used sarin gas to attack civilians, Obama didn’t do anything. He left them on read.

Why didn’t the Western countries attack? Well for one, people were tired of Middle Eastern wars. It’s hard to remember now with all this Greenland bullshit, but at that time the different US interventions in Muslim countries had killed a lot of American soldiers but had failed to produce a domino-effect of peace and democracy across the Arab world. They just spawned a bunch of crazy-ass jihadists and wasted tons of taxpayer money. The UK House of Commons voted against intervening in Syria, Russia started protecting Assad (Putin was seriously fucking pissed that NATO had gotten his friend Gaddafi killed) and made it clear that Russia would oppose any international action, so Obama decided not to move forward. He had judged (correctly) that the public didn’t want to bomb yet another Muslim country, and since there actually were weapons of mass destruction in Syria, someone would have to go there and dispose of them eventually, which is something drones and missiles can’t do. So at this stage the US backed off, and Assad knew the Western powers weren’t going to attack him. He had Russia and Iran giving him weapons, money, and support at the UN, and the US started reducing their delivery of aid to the opposition forces. As a result, the regime had a new lease on life and the opposition forces went into decline.

Then at this juncture, a new extremely nasty player emerged: ISIS, aka ISIL or IS. They were a product of the Iraq war, when Sunni jihadists formed a group called al-Qaeda in Iraq to fight the Americans. There were no al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq prior to the US invasion, but by 2006 or so they were the main Iraqi insurgent force. This organization was extremely bloodthirsty, especially to any fellow Muslims who didn’t adhere to their Qutbist beliefs (again, read the Islamism series to understand this ideology). They basically tried to ethnically cleanse Iraq (a Shia-majority country!) of Shias, which is pretty damn bold. In fact, they had to change their name to “Islamic State of Iraq” because they thought al-Qaeda were a bunch of lily-livered liberals who were too scared to genocide the majority of Iraq’s population. Bad hombres, as the current President would say. The Americans killed large numbers of them, but as the occupation of Iraq wound down in 2011, IS was still alive and well, ready to take advantage of the situation next door.

In 2014, IS took advantage of the chaos in Syria to launch a blitzkrieg invasion from their strongholds in western Iraq, totally demolishing anyone in their path: regime, opposition, Kurds, whoever. Simultaneously, they launched attacks on the Iraqi government, barreling down the roads towards Damascus and Baghdad without much to stop them. This, not the chemical weapons thing, is what prompted Western countries (along with Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah) to intervene in Syria. If they hadn’t done anything, IS would have taken everything between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. The US and the UK started bombing IS, the US sent troops back into Iraq, and Russia also deployed their forces to keep Assad from crumbling. This is the stage of the war most people know about, because of IS’s gruesome war crimes in the areas unfortunate enough to fall under their rule. IS was hellbent on exterminating all non-Sunnis and anyone who opposed them, with the ultimate goal of uniting all Muslim lands worldwide under their rule. Fortunately, the international intervention, along with major efforts by the Kurds, the opposition, and Iraqi government forces worked and IS was mostly destroyed. Something like 80,000 of them were unalived in a short span, and by 2017 they had lost control over all of their former territory.

Here’s where we’ll take a pause to preserve your attention span. Next week, we’ll cover the post-IS stalemate, the rapid fall of the regime in late 2024, and the current situation.

If you have a question or topic you want me to write about next, email distilledhistory@substack.com