Mick Hartley

Assad falls 1/1
It is impossible to watch the fall of the brutish brutal tyranny of the house of Assad without joy. Over in Qardaha in the Alawite lands of Latakia stands the sumptuous and pristine mausoleum worth of an Arab monarch: here the founder of the Assad dynasty, Hafez… pic.twitter.com/QM25bIg2DU

— S Sebag Montefiore (@simonmontefiore) December 8, 2024

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It is impossible to watch the fall of the brutish brutal tyranny of the house of Assad without joy. Over in Qardaha in the Alawite lands of Latakia stands the sumptuous and pristine mausoleum worth of an Arab monarch: here the founder of the Assad dynasty, Hafez al-Assad, is buried in magnificence alongside his swaggering eldest son and chosen heir, Bassel, always promoted as the ‘Arab knight’ depicted on horseback, who died young in a carcrash, leaving the succession to the gawky, chinless eye surgeon who turned out to be just as murderous as the father. I have seen no seen footage yet of the fate of this edifice and the bodies that lie there but even Alawites are unlikely to protect this now. In April 750 when the radical blackflagged Abbasids under the new Caliph al-Saffur took Damascus, they ransacked the tombs of the fallen Umayyad caliphs; the caliph personally beheaded the bodies of the monarchs, smashed the skulls and then had the bodies ‘scourged with whips then crucified.’ Since Bashar has probably escaped to Iran, Russia or UAE, the fate of the bodies of his father and brother are unlikely to be pretty…

For 53 years this dynasty ruled Syria with increasingly savagery until the barbaric nihilistic slaughter of the years since the Arab Spring, backed by a murderous alliance of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah made the country into an Iranian vassal state. Around 600,000 Syrians were killed as Assad and the Iranians, Russians and Hezbollah perpetrated by far the worst butchery in the Middle East in modern times, symbolized by the slogan: ‘Assad or the Country Burns!’ The fall of the Assad statues, the opening of the hellish and notorious prisons (in which some benighted prisoners had survived for 40 years), the fleeing of the many secret police and now the vanishing of the dictator himself are an astonishing development and a heartening and joyous one.

It is wise to leave the analysis and predictions of what is happening and will happen within Syria to Syrian experts or veteran experienced pundits like @charles_Lister and it would be wise for many of the omniscient TV regional generalists to let Syrians speak for themselves. One follows their lead but we share their exhilaration. May this lead to a free and tolerant Syria and Lebanon that are at peace with their neighbours including Israel and may this be a domino that leads to the fall of the menacing Iranian dictator Khamenei and his regime that has exported and imposed its empire, killing, misery on Syria and Lebanon for decades.

It is for the experts to tell us if the former al-Qaeda, al-Nusra group, now known as HTS and its chameleonesque leader al-Jolani are in earnest when they announced tolerance for all sects, including Christians, Alawites and Kurds, and whether they genuinely wish to create a democracy that is at peace with Israel – or whether this is simply the latest twist in their long history of rebranding, renaming and deception on the road to creating an Islamist state on which Turkiye may exert great influence. For decades, the fate of Syria has been governed and ruined by ruthless contenders far away, chiefly Iran tyrant Khamenei and his imperial generals Soleimani and others such as Hezbollah Sec-Gen Nasrallah but also President VV Putin whose airforce power enabled Assad to survive. They long used the Syrian people as puppets in their anti-American, anti-Israeli resistance front. It was exploited too by other actors, chiefly Turkish president Erdogan who has occupied his own buffer zone in the north and may yet exploit these encouraging developments to promote Turkish power in a former Ottoman vilayet.

The HTS who led this latest offensive had been planning it for over a year and preparing for much longer; the role of Turkiye is complex and inscrutable too; but it is worth recalling the other outside player here was the Hamas chieftain Sinwar whose reckless butchery on October 7 has been a disaster not just for the Palestinians and the Israelis whose civilians have suffered grievously but also his entire ‘Resistance’ Axis of Iran and Hezbollah that have been shattered by Israel, bringing down decades of Iranian empire – the Shia Crescent from Iran across Iraq Syria and Lebanon.

Even if the HTS offensive was long planned, Israeli defeat of Hezbollah and Iran hopelessly weakened the already flimsy and hollow Assadist regime; neither was strong enough to come to Assad’s aid. The curse of Sinwar has destroyed the entire Axis of his backers.

The history of the Assad tracks the history of Syria and I cover their dynasty in my World book. They were Alawites from Latakia province on the Mediterranean: Bashar’s grandfather was a powerful character known as Ali Sulayman al-Wahhish, the al-Wahhish meaing The Wild Beast) for his strength – he had eleven children. Hafez was his ninth son. His nickname was al-Assad – the Lion – and he adopted that his family name. As a local leader he backed the French Mandate plan for a partition of Great Syria and their promise of an Alawite homeland. When the French did not deliver, he opposed them but later cooperated. His son Hafez joined the airforce and the nationalist-socialist Baath party and emerged from its fissiparous feuds, coups and counter-coups as Defence Minister (during the Syrian defeat by Israel in 1967) and then as President from 1969, ruling ruthlessly with the aid of his brother Rifaat who himself aspired to the throne.

Assad allied Syria closely with the Soviet Union and in diehard opposition to Israel though in old age, he came close to a peace agreement with Israel that would have restored the Golan Heights. Faced in 1982 with a Moslem Brotherhood jihadist rebellion in Hama, Assad ordered his brother Rifaat to destroy the city and its civilian inhabitants, killing around 40,000 civilians in a few days – a massacre that still ranks as the greatest killing of civilians in modern times without parallel.

Assad and Saddam Hussein, Iraqi potentate from 1968 and president from 1978, were both Baathists and there were initial negotiations to unite Syria and Iraq in a single Baathist republic (as had been tried earlier in Nasser’s union of Egypt and Syria) but this was just one of many policies that led to a feud between the two Baathist regimes. The Lebanese civil war after 1976 opened Lebanon to direct Syrian military presence. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, Assad allied himself with the Iranian Imam Khomeini and successor Khamenei that ultimately dominated the country. Initially the Assads dominated Lebanon, promoting Iranian influence and the Iranian terror sect Hezbollah and assassinating anyone who resisted them. As the Assads weakened and were expelled by Lebanese people power, the Iranians expanded their informal empire across Syria and Lebanon.

Russia too is a big loser here. Ever since Catherine the Great, the Russian empire has aspired to Near Eastern power. Catherine sent a Russian fleet that bombarded Lebanon, backed Arab leaders to bring down the Ottomans. Her grandson Nicholas 1 fought the Crimean war in part to enforce Russian power on the Ottomans and greater Syria including the Holy Land esp Jerusalem. In 1947/8 Stalin initially backed the creation of Israel in the hope that the socialistic Jewish republic would be a Soviet ally. When Israeli became a French then US ally, the Soviets aggressively backed Arab dictators and were close to the Assads who gave them naval bases. Hence it was no surprise that Putin came to Bashar’s aid after the Arab Spring when he saw the fate of another Soviet-Russian ally Qadaffi as a threat to himself. Brutal Russian bombardment won the civil war for Assad and earned Putin continued possession of the Tartarus naval base that until now made Russia a regional arbiter. Russia’s easy and bloody success in Syria was one factor that gave Putin the confidence to invade Ukraine. A disastrous decision like that of Sinwar and his Iran Hezbollah backers. The aggression of both has led to the destruction of their power in Syria and the region. It is worth pointing out too the failure of US policy here: President Obama’s failure to enforce his own redlines when Assad used chemical weapons against his own people was a disaster for US power in the region and part of his administration’s abandonment of the region to Iranian hegemony. A shameful decision and worse a mistake.

The politics of the Assad dynasty resembled a cross between a Mafia family and the court intrigues of a medieval monarchy combined with a Stalinist cult of personality and Soviet secret police and rigidly-controlled economy: when Hafez had a heart attack, his brother Rifaat tried to seize power and was exiled; Hafez groomed his son Bassel as successor but his death opened the way for the succession on his death of Bashar who had gone to London to train as an eye surgeon. His medical background was not that exceptional: many doctors have become ruthless dictators – ‘the doctators- and terrorists (many of the leaders of PFLP and Hamas were doctors) and he turned out to be as ruthless as the rest of the family. Like his father with Rifaat, he promoted and struggled to control a wilder brother, Mahar, who became the murderous enforcer of the regime. The Mafia parallel became even more striking as the dynasty degraded into a organized crime family engaging in feuds and surviving as a drug cartel selling Captagon through Hezbollah and across the region.

It is worth recalling that for fifty years, a long time, Hafez al-Assad was lauded by Western particularly British and American ‘Arab experts’ as the wise Sphinx of Damascus as was his son Bashar after him, praised by illiberal progressives, anti-colonialists, anti-Israeli, anti-Western tankies, fake ‘human rights activists’ and foolish fashionistas (the famous Vogue Desert Rose piece on British-educated, fashion maven Mrs Assad remains a classic) as shrewd humanitarians, Arab modernizers and leaders of the resistance against wicked US and Israel. That sycophancy and praise continued right up to today – an astonishingly illiberal hypocrisy, spattered in the blood of 600,000 Syrians who did not count, and still embraced EVEN THIS WEEK by a certain discredited UN rapporteur…

The tragedy of Syria may be coming to an end in a wondrous flowering of tolerant democracy with the end of repression, Islamism and the closing of Syria’s recent history as the plaything of outside powers OR this may just be the latest act in a failure of the Syrian state and its tragedy as a battlefield of local contenders, Iran, Israel, Turkiye and great powers America and Russia.