(The Conversation) – The lightning-fast collapse of the Assad regime in Syria has sent shock waves across the Middle East. The disposal of the dictator whose family had ruled the country with an iron fist for more than half a century has triggered a potentially seismic shift in the balance of power in the region.

But there are also important repercussions beyond Syria and its neighbourhood – with Russia one of the more significantly affected powers.

Back in 2015, Assad’s regime had been on the brink of collapse. It was saved by a Russian intervention – with support from Iran and Hezbollah. Launched in the context of a growing threat from Islamic State, Russia enabled Assad’s regime to push back other rebel forces as well.

Over the years that followed, it enabled Assad to consolidate control over the capital, other key cities, and in particular the coastal region where Russia had two military bases.

The future of these bases is now uncertain. The Russian naval base in Tartus – which dates back to Soviet times – as well as an air base at Khmeimim, established south-east of Latakia in 2015, were vital assets for Russia to project military force in the Mediterranean sea and bolster the Kremlin’s claim to Russian great-power status.

Given the importance of the bases for Russia and the significant investments made over the years in propping the regime, Assad’s fall reflects badly on Russia’s capabilities to assert credible influence on the global stage.

Even if Russia somehow manages to negotiate a deal with Syria’s new rulers over the future of its military bases, the fact that Moscow was unable to save an important ally like Assad exposes critical weaknesses in Russia’s ability to act, rather than just talk, like a great power.

There are clear intelligence failures that either missed or misinterpreted the build-up of anti-Assad forces by Qatar, and Turkey’s tacit support of this. These failures were then compounded by diminished Russian military assets in Syria and an inability to reinforce them at short notice. This is, of course, due to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine.

The depletion of the military capabilities of two other Kremlin allies in the region — Iran and Hezbollah — further compounded the difficulties for Assad and exacerbated the effect of Russia’s overstretch. This also raises the question of whether Russia strategically misjudged the situation and underestimated its vulnerability in Syria.

But even more so, it highlights Russia’s own dependence on allies who do not simply acquiesce to Moscow’s demands — as Assad did when he provided Russia its military bases — but who actively support a wannabe great power that lacks some of the means to assert its claimed status – as Iran and Hezbollah did in 2015.

Where’s China?

Missing from this equation is China. While Beijing had sided with Assad after the start of the Syrian civil war, this support was mostly of the rhetorical kind. It was mainly aimed at preventing a UN-backed, western-led intervention akin to the one in Libya that led to the fall of Gaddafi and has plunged the country into chaos ever since.

A high-profile visit of Assad to China in September 2023 resulted in a strategic partnership agreement. This seemed to signal another step towards the rehabilitation of the Syrian regime, in Beijing’s eyes at least. But when push came to shove and Assad’s rule was under severe threat, China did nothing to save him.

This raises an important question about Chinese judgment of the Syrian regime and the evolving crisis. But there is also a broader point here regarding Russian great-power ambitions.

“Diminished,” Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

For all the talk of a limitless partnership between Moscow and Beijing, China ultimately did nothing to save Russia from an embarrassing defeat in Syria. Where Russia needed a military presence to bolster its claims to great-power status, Chinese interests in the Middle East are primarily about economic opportunity and the perceived threat of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

This has clearly limited Beijing’s appetite to become more involved, let alone to bail out Assad.

Putin diminished

Russia’s position in the Middle East now is in peril. Moscow has lost a key ally in Assad. Its other main allies, Iran and Hezbollah, are significantly weakened. Israel and Turkey, with whom the Kremlin has not had easy relations over the past few years, have been strengthened.

This exposes the hollowness of Russian claims to great-power status. It is also likely to further diminish Russian prestige and the standing that it has in the eyes of other partners – whether they are China or North Korea, members of the Brics, or countries in the global south that Russia has recently tried to woo.

The consequences of that for Ukraine – arguably the main source of Russia’s over-stretch – are likely to be ambivalent. On the one hand, the ease with which Assad was deposed demonstrates that Russia is not invincible and that its support of brutal dictatorships has limits. On the other hand, there should be no expectation of anything but Russia doubling down in Ukraine.

Putin needs a success that restores domestic and international confidence in him —and fast. After all, Donald Trump does not like losers.

Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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’s Revolutionary Guards.

Indeed, a commander of the Qods 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 of 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% of the population) and Lebanon (about a fourth of the population) are terrified today, given HTS’s past harsh record regarding religious minorities.

From the point of view of the region’s 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’s 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’s Syria is one of Iran’s 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’s Hezbollah, and if it falls then Hezbollah– already on the ropes after Israel’s recent campaign against it — 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 2012-2016 during the Syrian Civil War, the US CIA funneled 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 “not al-Qaeda.” They were, however, close battlefield allies of the Succor Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), the leading organization 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 fervor 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’s 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 is justified as an attempt to exterminate Sunni fundamentalist militias? The far right Likud Party’s theory that chaos in its neighbors is good for Israel may be tested.

——

Bonus Video:

Channel 4 News: “Syrian rebels capture most of Aleppo in sudden offensive”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s proposal to engage with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad marks a potential shift in a decade-long rift.

Istanbul (Special to Informed Comment; Featured) – Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently said “there is no reason” not to pursue normalization of diplomatic ties with Syria, and he said that he does not rule out a possible meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Erdoğan added that Turkey had no intention of interfering in Syria’s internal affairs.

Erdoğan was responding to a question about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s recent comments. In late June, Assad expressed openness to restoring ties between Turkey and Syria.

The United Arab Emirates took the lead in restoring diplomatic relations with Syria in 2018, and last year Syria was readmitted to the Arab League. Saudi Arabia has also announced steps to reopen its embassy in Damascus.

As a quid pro quo for rapprochement, Ankara wants Damascus to take action against Syrian Kurdish groups that Turkey alleges are affiliated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which the US also considers a terrorist group. Meanwhile, the Assad government has consistently demanded the withdrawal of Turkish forces from northern Syria and an end to Turkey’s support for rebel factions as a prerequisite for restoring relations.

Protests in Syria and Turkey

Just as Erdoğan signaled a possible rapprochement with Syria, protests erupted in rebel-held territory in northwestern Syria against the reopening of the Abu al-Zandin crossing near Al Bab city. The crossing connects rebel-held areas with Syrian government-held territories, and the protesters rejected the Turkish-Russian agreement to reopen the crossing.

Armed protesters, Turkish forces clash in north Syria • FRANCE 24 English Video

Then anti-Syrian protests broke out in Kayseri after a Syrian man was arrested for allegedly sexually abusing a minor. During the riots, angry mobs set vehicles and Syrian-run shops on fire. The riots spread to various cities in Turkey, with a 17-year-old Syrian boy being stabbed to death in Serik, Antalya.

Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced that the police had detained 474 people involved in attacks targeting the Syrian community.

The unrest occurred amidst a recent increase in criticism of the government’s migration policies. According to UNHCR, Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees worldwide, most of them from war-torn Syria, and a recent Ipsos survey found that 77% of respondents in Turkey support closing the country’s doors to refugees, compared to a global average of 44%.

The riots in Turkey, coupled with Erdoğan’s conciliatory statements about Assad, fueled anti-Turkish protests in rebel-held northern Syria. The BBC reported that in Afrin, at least four people were killed in an exchange of fire between Turkish troops and armed protesters.

Syrian protesters attacked Turkish military vehicles, government buildings controlled by Turkey, and burned Turkish flags. According to AFP, some armed protesters also targeted Turkish trucks and military posts. They attempted to storm crossing points, resulting in clashes with Turkish border guards.

A border official stated that the Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salam border crossings and other smaller crossings were “closed until further notice.” It was reported that seven people were killed in the protests, which escalated into clashes.

Similar protests had occurred in rebel-held territory in Northwestern Syria in August 2022, following Turkey’s then-Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu’s call for reconciliation between the Syrian opposition and the Assad government.

Will the reconciliation efforts continue despite the unrest?

Pro-government media in Turkey accused different sides of the violent anti-Turkish protests. While Yeni Şafak (New Dawn) accused the Syrian fundamentalist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Sabah (Morning) claimed the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) was responsible. Both HTS and PKK are designated as terrorist organizations by Turkey, the European Union, and the United States.

On Tuesday last week, President Erdoğan labeled the anti-Syrian protestors provocateurs. “Neither we nor our Syrian brothers will fall into this trap. I want to say that we will not bow to vandalism and racism. Just as we know how to break the filthy hands that reach for our flag, we also know how to break the hands that reach for the oppressed who have taken refuge in our country,” Erdoğan said.

He also signaled that the normalization attempts would continue, stating: “We don’t desire anybody’s land. The territorial integrity of Syria is a priority for Turkey, because we want a strong Syria, not one where terrorist organizations run rampant. To achieve this, we will not hesitate to meet with whomever it is necessary. Turkey is not a state that abandons its friends and will not become one.”

Erdoğan then traveled to Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit. During the SCO summit, Erdoğan met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, al-Asad’s main patron. After their meeting, Erdoğan emphasized the importance of ending instability, including the unresolved aftermath of the Syrian Civil War, and stated that Turkey is ready to cooperate in finding a solution.

Before the Syrian Civil War strained Turkish-Syrian relations, President Erdoğan of Turkey and President Bashar al-Assad of Syria had notably close personal ties. Their relationship extended beyond diplomatic meetings and included personal interactions such as joint family vacations or attending football matches.

After the outbreak of the civil war in 2011, Turkey began to support Syrian opposition groups seeking to overthrow al-Assad’s regime. Diplomatic relations between Ankara and Damascus were severed in 2012.

This article accompanies an episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast featuring an interview with the author, Ammar Azzouz.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes. At least 43% of all housing units in the Gaza Strip have been either destroyed or damaged since the start of the hostilities, according to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza.

Israel says that 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel and more than 220 taken hostage. Meanwhile, according to the health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, more than 6,500 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes and more than 17,400 injured.

There is a modern term for what’s happening in Gaza. Domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home, or the killing of the city or home. It comes from the Latin word domus which means home and cide, which is deliberate killing.

But, home here doesn’t only mean the physical, tangible built environment of people’s homes and properties, it also refers to people’s sense of belonging and identity. We are seeing in many conflicts and wars across the world that alongside the destruction of architecture, people’s sense of dignity and belonging is also being targeted.

There is a link between genocide and domicide: genocide refers to the killing of people and domicide to the erasure of their presence and their material culture. In 2022, a UN expert on housing argued that domicide should be recognised as an international crime.

When people are continuously displaced from their homes, sometimes for decades, or even a lifetime, there’s a sense of grief and sorrow that their history is being erased.

The destruction of Homs

My home city of Homs, Syria, which I focus on in my research, has been completely transformed since the 2011 uprising against the government of Bashar al Assad.

Over 50% of the neighbourhoods have been heavily destroyed, and over a quarter partially destroyed. Across the country, more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. Of these, 6.8 million people are displaced inside the country, and 5.4 million people live as refugees in neighbouring countries and beyond.

Domicidal campaigns like this also work to erase evidence that a community actually existed in a particular place and that it had a history and culture there. This is an attempt to write people out of history through destroying their homes and heritage in a way that’s systematic and deliberate. In Homs, for example, whole neighbourhoods that opposed the Assad regime were targeted and razed to the ground. In other cities, such as Damascus and Hama, entire neighbourhoods were wiped out through new land and property laws which designate these neighbourhoods as “informal”.

Listen to Ammar Azzouz talk about his research on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Domicide in Gaza

There is no need to compare Homs and Gaza, as each place has its own context and struggle. But I’ve been following the news continuously since the Hamas attack on Israel, and I can’t stop looking at the updates about the heavy Israeli bombing. The scale of destruction, the level of mass displacement is just so heartbreaking. Gaza has been described as an open prison and people in that open prison have been pushed away from their homes.

Israel says it has the right to defend itself, and is targeting Hamas positions, but the scale to which ordinary people’s homes, hospitals and “safe areas” have been hit means what’s happening in Gaza is absolutely domicidal. People living in the north of the Gaza Strip were told by Israeli authorities to move to the south of the territory to the supposed “safe areas”, but the southern areas continue to be bombed too. The bombardment is killing civilians, killing their everyday lives and causing the mass destruction of neighbourhoods. As we have seen in videos, entire buildings have been levelled.

NBC: “‘This is a massacre!’: Rescue workers fight to save children in Gaza airstrike rubble”

Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, an emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford, who was born in Baghdad, and is considered one of Israel’s critical “new historians”, called Israel’s actions “state-sponsored terrorism”. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, wrote: “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.” Others argue vehemently against any moral equivalence with the Hamas attacks.

Catastrophe for Palestinians

It’s not the first time that Palestinians in Gaza have had their homes destroyed. Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are people who have been displaced before. This is why many academics, activists, journalists and even Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, call for context, for situating the Palestinian struggle within a history of suffering, dispossession and forced displacement since the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948.

When one million people are ordered to leave their homes it’s important to understand that these people have attachment to their places, to their neighbourhoods, to their streets. The impact of displacement and loss of home can live with people for their lifetime.

In my interviews with people from the city of Homs, I’ve heard many people say that even if they are still living in Homs, they feel like strangers in their own city, or they feel exiled inside their own city. For people such as the Palestinian diaspora or the Iraqi diaspora or the Syrian diaspora who are unable to return to their home countries, that suffering and pain and trauma of displacement continues.

I imagine people have different mechanisms to cope with these traumatic events, but that’s why it’s so important to have memory projects where people at least can reflect on what happened to heal and grieve, even when, sadly, many are unable to return and some spend their lifetime in exile.

After researching conflicts, wars, dictatorships and occupations for several years, I always say that the pain of people start as a headline in the news media, and turns into a footnote in history. Let us resist that, let us remember the life of every human being and keep the struggle for a free and just world for everyone.

Ammar Azzouz, British Academy Research Fellow, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – In the carefully composed photograph released by their state news agencies at the beginning of May, Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad has his arms outstretched to welcome the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi. The two men are beaming.

Raisi’s visit was a sign of Tehran’s essential support for Assad, more than 12 years after the Syrian leader’s bloody repression of a popular uprising that called for reform and guarantees of human rights. The meeting was also an attempt to portray that both leaderships are stable and in control amid Assad’s quest for normalisation and re-entry into the regional community of nations.

But it’s a facade. The template agreements for “strategic cooperation” and declaration of Iranian support for Assad via “sovereignty” cannot knit together a Syria that is fractured, perhaps for the long term. They cannot provide relief for Syrians facing inflation and shortages of food, fuel and utilities, let alone the 11 million — almost half of the pre-conflict population — who are refugees or internally displaced.

Nor can they sweep aside ten months of Iran’s nationwide protests, sparked by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini after her detention and reporting beaten for “inappropriate attire”. They cannot end the standoff over Tehran’s nuclear programme or lift US and European sanctions. And despite Iran-backed attacks on American personnel in the region, they cannot break US support for the Kurdish administration in northeast Syria.

Seven weeks after the Assad-Raisi photo in Damascus, another international meeting in mid-June testified to the illusions of an Iran-Syria “Axis of Resistance”.

In Kazakhstan’s capital, the Assad regime was joining the six and a half-year “Astana process” – the UN-sponsored agreement between Iran, Russia, and Turkey to monitor its 2016 ceasefire for the first time in that part of Syria. This would be a sign of Damascus being actively involved in the supposed resolution of the March 2011 uprising.

But as soon as the session began, illusion met reality. The regime’s deputy foreign minister, Ayman Sousan, demanded Turkey withdraw its forces from opposition territory in northwest Syria. The Turks unsurprisingly refused. They wanted the gathering to put pressure on the Kurdish administration in northeast Syria, which Ankara sees as part of the Turkish Kurdish insurgency PKK.

But that raises the challenge of confronting the US, the backer of the Kurds and the Syrian Democratic Forces, who had helped evict the Islamic State from the country in 2019. Russia, embroiled in Vladimir Putin’s failing invasion of Ukraine, showed no appetite for a showdown with Washington.

So everyone went home with nothing beyond Moscow’s declaration: “This is a very crucial process.”

Moving pieces

The two days in Astana highlighted the difficulty for both the Assad regime and Iran. In a Middle East kaleidoscope of many moving pieces, it is daunting for either to line up all of them.

Assad’s headline ploy has been the restoration of relations with Arab states, hoping to break political isolation and his economic bind. There has been success: UAE and Bahrain reopening embassies; Assad’s visits to the Emirates and Oman; and re-entry into the Arab League in May, with Saudi Arabia — once the leading supporter of anti-Assad factions — welcoming Assad to the summit in Jeddah.

However, that process runs head-on into Assad’s reliance on Iran to maintain control over even part of Syria, given the longtime rivalry between Tehran and some Arab states — notably Saudi Arabia — throughout the region.

An Arabian pipedream?

The solution to the conundrum is a grand reconciliation, in which Iran would also repair its position in the region. In March, Iran and Saudi Arabia announced the resumption of diplomatic ties more than seven years after they were broken.

The China-brokered deal was accompanied by a high-level Iranian visit to the UAE. Tehran spoke loudly about the prospect of billions of dollars of Gulf investments in its battered economy.

The manoeuvres freed the Iranian leadership from an immediate crisis. Amid the nationwide protests, its currency had almost halved in value, sinking to 600,000:1 against the US dollar. The easing of tensions with the Arab states, as well as talk of an “interim deal” with the US over the nuclear programme, helped lift the rial to 500,000:1, relieving pressure on an official inflation rate of 50%, with increases for food about 75% per year.

But this is a tentative respite. Saudi Arabia and Iran remain on opposite sides in the Yemen civil war. They back different factions in Lebanon’s long-running political and economic turmoil. Gulf States are wary about the renewal of Iran-backed attacks on Iraqi bases which host US personnel, as well as any further moves by Tehran towards the capacity for a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, the International Crisis Group has highlighted the unending instability in the Assad-held part of Syria. No Gulf country is likely to want to spend significant sums in support of his regime. Syria is far from their top priority, and it offers poor returns on investment. They cannot realistically hope to compete with the influence that Tehran has built through years of military engagement.

Western sanctions limit potential economic gains – and US sanctions in particular impose major legal barriers and political costs. Also, investing large amounts in Syria with a devastated infrastructure, an impoverished population with little purchasing power, a predatory regime and dismal security in the areas it nominally controls would be like pouring money into a bottomless pit.

Assad can still pose before the cameras to claim legitimacy. But his Iranian backers are entangled in domestic difficulties, his Russian backers are being sapped of strength by Putin’s deadly folly in Ukraine, and his would-be Arab escape route is far from assured.

Scott Lucas, Professor, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The decision was a recognition that the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad had won the civil war, albeit with help from Iran, Hezbollah, Iraqi Shiite militias, and the Russian Aerospace Forces. Although al-Assad has a great deal of blood on his hands, so do many Arab League member governments, so squeamishness about a poor human rights situation was never the issue here.

The London-based Al-`Arab reports that the move was led by Saudi Arabia and garnered support from Egypt, Iraq and Jordan. Although this newspaper says that the decision was made possible by a softening of the US position against Syria, I don’t see any evidence of it. Rather, I would say this initiative was undertaken in defiance of Washington.

This newspaper is right to underline, however, that this development is one result of the March 10 agreement in Beijing by Saudi Arabia and Iran to restore diplomatic relations and turn down the level of tension between the two. Iran’s backing for al-Assad and Riyadh’s for the Salafi “Army of Islam” had helped polarize the region. Now, Saudi Arabia is seeking its own, new, relationship with Damascus and no longer insists that it break with Iran. It is no accident that pro-Iran Iraq was one of the brokers of this deal.

Al-Assad’s fragile victory has left the country a basket case, a situation exacerbated by Turkish military intervention both against Syria’s Kurds and in favor of its remaining fundamentalist forces (in Idlib Province).

The foreign ministers who readmitted Syria spoke specifically of wanting to forestall any threats to Syria’s national sovereignty.

They also spoke of an Arab League role in resolving the Syrian crisis, which has left the country split into three zones: The majority of the country, ruled by al-Assad; the Kurdish northeast, which is currently autonomous; and Idlib Province, where rebels of a fundamentalist cast have gathered as refugees (among hundreds of thousands of displaced noncombatants who perhaps are not so ideological despite having taken a stand against al-Assad).

The United States protested the move and rejected it. Washington has imposed strict Caesar Act sanctions on Syria, which critics maintain are interfering with rebuilding the country and harming ordinary people more than they do the government.

The decision will be formally ratified at the full Arab League summit in Riyadh at the end of May, which a Syrian delegation is expected to attend.

Algeria had stood by al-Assad all through the Civil War. Among states that broke off relations, the move to rehabilitate al-Assad was begun by the United Arab Emirates, led by Mohammad Bin Zayed, who restored diplomatic relations and opened an embassy in Damascus in 2018. Tunisia, under dictator Qais Saied, recently followed suit. Saudi Arabia is said to be on the verge of restoring diplomatic ties with Syria, as well.

Sunday’s decision had been opposed by Qatar, Kuwait and Morocco. They, however, were too few to block the League’s decision. Morocco has no love for the Syrian rebels, who gradually turned to forms of Muslim fundamentalism, some close to al-Qaeda but most rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood. Morocco does, however, entertain deep suspicions of Syria’s ally, Iran, and as a conservative Muslim monarchy does not think well of Baathist socialism. Kuwait and Qatar both supported the 2011 youth revolt and went on supporting the rebels once the revolution turned into a Civil War. Both countries are concerned about the fate of the four million people bottled up in Idlib Province, who had supported the overthrow of the government. Qatar says it will decline to restore diplomatic relations with Damascus until some key issues are resolved. This is likely a reference to the fate of the Qatar-backed groups in Idlib.

At the time of Damascus’ suspension, the Arab Spring governments were influential. Egypt, Tunisia and Libya all had interim governments after youth street protests had overthrown their dictators, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh was just three months from stepping down in favor of a national referendum on his vice president becoming president. These new governments sided with Syria’s protesters. There was an odd conjunction of these Arab Spring transitional states and some of the Gulf monarchies, which deeply disliked al-Assad’s strong alliance with Iran and his government’s intolerance of Sunni fundamentalism. Thus, Saudi Arabia wanted al-Assad gone as much as Tunisia or Egypt did.

Now, the Arab Spring is a dim memory. Dictatorships have returned in the countries that saw youth revolts. Al-Assad and his corrupt, genocidal government is not going away. Henry Kissinger said that diplomacy is a game that is played with the pieces on the board. Now it transpires that the Arab League states, too, are Realists.

( Middle East Monitor ) – As the death toll from the earthquakes which rocked Turkiye and Syria continues to rise, many are questioning whether sanctions on Syria are preventing aid from reaching the war-torn country.

After 12 years of civil war, most of Syria is once again under the control of the Assad regime, but a small enclave in the north is the last remaining territory held by Syrian opposition groups. Surrounded by Assad forces on three sides, the northern border with Turkiye was the only lifeline for the opposition-held territory to bring in aid and supplies.

In 2020, Bashar Al-Assad’s ally Russia used its veto power at the UN to force the closure of all crossings into Syria from Turkiye except the Bab Al-Hawa crossing. Moscow claimed the aid corridors into the opposition-held territory undermined the sovereignty of the Assad regime. The UN Security Council now also needed to vote every six months on whether to keep this one crossing open.

The closure of aid corridors resulted in a lack of essential items, building materials and specialist equipment making it impossible to rebuild the region which was devastated by war and bombed by Syrian and Russian forces.

However, damage from the 6 February 2023 earthquakes left the Bab Al-Hawa crossing impassable. For days Syria became impenetrable, but then two new crossings were opened with Al-Assad’s approval and aid began to trickle in once again.

The US, EU and UK placed sanctions on the Assad regime in 2011 and have tightened the noose around it since as a result of its systematic war crimes and human rights abuses over the course of the war.

The sanctions mostly blocked banking transactions, investments, flights and the import of oil, military equipment and technology. Many of these sanctions targeted individuals within the Syrian regime including President Bashar Al-Assad and his relatives.

Feeling the squeeze, the Assad regime has been benefitting from aid. A 2022 report has found ‘systemic’ corruption in humanitarian aid going into Syria through the United Nations with UN agencies giving procurement contracts to individuals with links to the Assad regime and tied to human rights violations.

Between 2019 and 2020 an estimated $63 million in UN funds was awarded to individuals sanctioned by the US and European states including close family members of President Bashar Al-Assad.

While aid has also started to enter northern Syria through the newly opened crossings, in the wake of the earthquakes, most are set to be administered by the Syrian regime. Damascus received aid from a number of countries including Iran, Iraq and Algeria, and is set to receive aid from the UN. The US has now also eased sanctions for six months to allow aid deliveries.

Trucks coming into northern Syria have mostly brought in food and tents but civil groups say they require specialist equipment to continue search and rescue efforts as well as construction materials to rebuild the homes that were destroyed in the tremors.

While the regime doesn’t patrol the crossing into northern Syria it can force its closure and stop aid being delivered to those in need. Syrians in the opposition-held territories – most of whom were displayed internally by Assad’s forces – find themselves once again at the mercy of their former leader.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

Jane Clinton and Harry Taylor at The Guardian report that 870,000 people are in desperate need of food.

Sanitation is a problem. In almost completely destroyed cities like Antakya, there are no remaining toilet facilities. Cholera outbreaks are a danger in such situations.

WHO has been able to send supplies to 400,000 people so far.

Some people whose cars were not destroyed are sleeping in them.

Tent cities are quickly being erected, but the lack of water is really worrisome. People can survive a lot, but if you don’t drink water for about three days, your kidneys give out and you die of renal failure.

Thousands of homeless Turks are already being accommodated in hotels and in government hostels. President Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkish universities would go to online teaching so that refugees from the earthquake could be put up in student dormitories.

Far more people were killed by the earthquake in Turkey than in Syria, with 3,500 dead in the latter. Over 5 million Syrians are without shelter now — according to the UN High Commission on Refugees. The Syrian government, though, is estimating about 300,000 homeless from the earthquake in government-held areas.

The Turkish figure for homelessness is not being reported but 13.5 million Turks were “affected” by the earthquake. The large number of Syrians affected came about because the country’s building stock was already badly damaged by the country’s civil war of c. 2012-2017. During 2015-2017 the Russian Air Force heavily bombed rebel-held areas such as East Aleppo and Idlib.

Some 6 million Syrians had been displaced inside the country by the war, before the earthquake. And tens of thousands of Syrians who have fled to Turkey from the war were struck by the earthquake. So this is misery on top of misery.

(The Conversation) – It didn’t take long for Syria’s Assad regime to seek political and economic benefit from the devastation of an earthquake. As emergency services were reaching victims of the 7.8-magnitude tremor on February 6, regime-linked organisations demanded governments “immediately end the siege and unilateral coercive economic sanctions imposed on Syria and its people for 12 years”.

Long-time supporters of the Assad line were just as prompt. Rania Khalek, a commentator on pro-Assad and Russian state-linked outlets, tweeted: “Syria has to deal with this horrific disaster while under US sanctions that have ruined its medical sector and capacity to respond, these sanctions are criminal.”

Meanwhile, the regime threatened to block any assistance to opposition-held areas of northwest Syria, with its UN ambassador, Bassam Sabbagh insisting that Damascus must oversee all deliveries into Syria.

The UN’s resident Syria coordinator, El-Mostafa Benlamlih, appealed: “Put politics aside and let us do our humanitarian work. We can’t afford to wait and negotiate. By the time we negotiate, it’s done, it’s finished.”

Assad’s sanctions manipulation

The sanctions over the regime’s deadly 12-year repression of its citizens date to April 29 2011, six weeks after authorities detained and abused teenage boys daubing graffiti in Daraa in southern Syria, sparking a popular uprising. Then US president, Barack Obama, ordered a block on the property of those involved in human rights violations.

The European Union and Canada followed in May, with travel bans and asset freezes on individuals and prohibition of the export of goods and technology that could be used by the regime’s armed forces. In August, Washington expanded sanctions to cover the oil sector and to prohibit any export of goods from the US to Syria.

The US blacklisted regime figures connected with Assad’s chemical weapons program after sarin and chlorine attacks that killed or wounded thousands of civilians. In 2019, Washington toughened the measures with the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act. Prompted by photographs of 6,785 detainees, most of them tortured to death in the regime’s prisons, the Act aimed at industries related to infrastructure, military maintenance, and energy production.

But the US, European, and international sanctions included exemptions for humanitarian aid. In November 2021, after reports from NGOs about obstacles to their operations, the US Treasury expanded its general license to “facilitate legitimate humanitarian activity while continuing to deny support to malicious actors”.

As the European Union extended its measures in May 2022, it reiterated that “the export of food, medicines or medical equipment are not subject to EU sanctions, and a number of specific exceptions are foreseen for humanitarian purposes”.

Aid has been delivered to Damascus throughout the uprising despite the ongoing repression, but much of it has wound up in the pockets of the Assad regime and its cronies. A review of 779 UN procurement entries for 2019-2020 found that, with manipulation of exchange rates, the regime diverted US$100 million (£83 million). Other funds were taken from NGOs operating in regime-controlled areas.

Human Rights Watch and the Syrian Legal Development Programme summarised that the Syria case showed how UN agencies were exposed “to significant reputational and actual risk of financing abusive actors and/or actors that operate in high-risk sectors without sufficient safeguards”.

Despite this, the European Union accepted the request of the regime for assistance under the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. An initial €3.5 million (£3.1 million) was allocated for access to “shelter, water and sanitation, and health various items” as well as support of search-and-rescue operations.

Germany followed with the announcement of an additional €26 million in humanitarian assistance, and the UK with £3 million.

On Thursday, the US Treasury announced an extension of the licence for humanitarian aid “to make very clear that US sanctions in Syria will not stand in the way of lifesaving efforts for the Syrian people”.

Cutting off opposition areas

The most daunting barrier to international aid has long been erected around the opposition-controlled areas in northwest Syria. In 2014, the UN authorised four cross-border posts for aid operations, two from Turkey into northwest Syria and two from Iraq into the northeast.

By 2022, Russia’s veto in the UN security council had reduced the four posts to one, the Bab al-Hawa crossing from Turkey into Idlib province. Had it not been for the politics around Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russians might have shut down that last post in January, cutting off 4 million people from any access to assistance.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the route from Turkey to Bab al-Hawa was badly damaged. Turkish authorities had to grant permission but were “completely overwhelmed with dealing and helping their own people”. The UN hesitated to use other crossings amid the past objections of the Assad regime and Russia.

As a result, the first movement of aid – six trucks with tents and hygiene products – only reached northwest Syria on Thursday morning, more than 72 hours after the earthquake.

With rescuers relying on old cranes, pickaxes, and shovels, the head of the White Helmets civil defence organisation, Raed al-Saleh, said: “The UN are not delivering the aid that we are in most need of to help us save lives, with time running out.”

Political economist Karam Shaar of the Middle East Institute summarised on Twitter: “The groaning of the thousands trapped under the rubble has ceased over the past few hours. Why didn’t the UN drop aid? Because they need permission from Damascus: the same Damascus that has been bombing them day and night.”

Meanwhile, as the death toll climbs in both Assad and opposition-controlled areas of Syria, the political drumbeat from Damascus goes on. The regime’s foreign minister, Feisal Mikdad, meeting a senior UN official on Thursday, proclaimed without any apparent irony: “The western politicisation of the humanitarian assistance is unacceptable.”

Scott Lucas, Professor, Clinton Institute, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.