Assad will fall

 In the summer of 2015, the Assad régime forces collapsed in the northwest province of Idlib, town after town falling to the rebels, culminating in the humiliating siege of the Tiger forces led by the star military officer Suheil al-Hassan, in the National Hospital in Jisr al-Shugour.

 You wouldn’t have read this in the media at the time. Taking the lead from régime apologists like Patrick Cockburn, the mainstream narrative was that Assad had defied predictions of his demise and was the strong and stable leadership Syria needed as the only alternative to al-Qaeda and ISIS taking over the country with the aid and acquiescence of the West and its allies. An analysis dishonest in a number of aspects, such as Assad fighting ISIS rather than cooperating with them, but significantly, he had only survived because of the massive foreign intervention in his favour and an equally significant indifference by those powers rhetorically opposed to him. Russia provided a billion dollars of weaponry a month and UN Security Council vetoes against censure for his crimes, Iran provided tens of thousands of troops from its proxy Shia jihadist militias, firstly Hezbollah from Lebanon, but moving on to recruit from as far away as Tajikistan. The US blocked any anti-aircraft weapons that could have stopped Assad’s barrel bombing, and refused to take action to bring him to account even when he blatantly crossed President Obama’s red line by using a whole bunch of chemical weapons in 2013.




 There had been indications already that the Assadist state had shifted the balance in ruling between force and consent dramatically in favour of force. In late 2012, looking at the reporting of an Assadist counter-offensive in Aleppo, I noticed that when the régime advanced, there was no return of the population to their homes. Clearly there was a large section of the population, predominantly Sunni Muslims but including anyone who might be suspected of opposition to Assad, that he intended to kill or induce to flee. As the head of Military Intelligence, Jamil al-Hassan, said this year, “A Syria with 10 million trustworthy people obedient to the leadership is better than a Syria with 30 million vandals.”

 In addition to the deliberate bombing of civilians, attacking schools and hospitals as well as homes, there was the mass torture of detainees, often to death, with the accompaniment of forcing them to declare there is no God but Bashar. The mass use of rape, both in the prisons and in Sunni villages across the country, where parents were raped in front of their children, children in front of the parents, often people forced to rape each other. All this was designed to force the entire population to practice absolute obedience or destroy it.

 But there was more. I discovered the core of it in an article in late 2015 by Ansar Jasim called “The Malice of Power: Arrests in Syria as Part of a Politico-Economic Rationale”:

 ‘ “By now, it is estimated that 90 % of those arrested by the regime or régime militias had nothing to do with the revolution,” says Amer, a former officer in the Syrian military. Free rein when it comes to arrests is one of the ways in which the régime renders it possible for various parts of its security apparatus to enrich themselves. That way, the régime secures support for its actions in times of economic demise. The ones who are left to suffer are the thousands of disappeared Syrians and their families.’

 Assad’s state is more than a sectarian military dictatorship. It is a torture-rape kleptocracy that profits from the destruction of the society it rests upon. As such it is the most unstable state in the world, a black hole that constantly destabilises the world around it as it fights to maintain its existence. There have been other states that resemble it in some ways. Only one government had ever bombed its own cities before - though it is time to stop calling a ruling party a government when it eschews government in favour of murder so blatantly – General Somoza’s in Nicaragua. The only state I can think of that so systematically murdered the professional classes of the population was Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Neither lasted for more than a few years after they began to destroy the foundations of their society.



 The torture-rape state did not come out of nowhere. Its lineage is traced in Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s chapter on the Neo-Sultanic State in The Impossible Revolution. A personality cult was set up around the person and position of the President from the time in power of Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad, and permission for all activity is given by connections to the security state that he heads. A culture of mass murder against threats to the state from the time of the Hama uprising in 1982, when tens of thousands were killed both in the city and in the prisons afterwards, with both an official silence about events, and a message to its enemies that the state would permit no dissent. Those with power, particularly the security branches, were able to derive income from the extortion and robbery of large sections of the population. A system of informing to the security branches kept the nation in fear of their neighbours. And from the accession of Bashar, large parts of the economy were handed over to a few cronies, most notably the President’s cousin Rami Makhlouf.

 Stephen Starr in Revolt in Syria records the result. A sclerotic economy, in which many jobs are only available to those with the money and connections to buy their way into them, with then little incentive to perform them properly. In modern capitalist societies there are two contradictory tendencies, towards authoritarianism so that property can be protected from threats from below and abroad, and towards liberalisation so that the economy can maintain efficiency and creativity. Usually when dictators have lost all consent, like Marcos or Duvalier, their exit is arranged. But the Assadist state was peculiarly set up to resist reform, and the international situation was aligned in such a way that it has prolonged its life.

 I think evidence for the extreme nature of the Assadist state can be seen in its relations with two other forces in Syria, ISIS and the PYD offshoot of the Turkish Kurdish separatist organisation the PKK. In the first case I’d highlight that they collaborated with ISIS in many ways, beyond buying oil, gas and wheat from them to deliberately abandoning Palmyra to them with the consequent massacre of many ostensible régime supporters, so that they could be seen to be fighting ISIS with Russian help. There is simply no depravity the régime won’t sink to, or limit to the violence it will unleash, as it has no concern for the people it rules. Something that could be borne in mind when looking at the supposed attacks on civilians by the opposition, whether in Damascus this year (attacks which couldn’t even be located to one area of the Eastern Ghouta), or against empty classrooms in West Aleppo in 2016, right back to the attacks on civilians by unknown gunmen Samar Yazbek records as false flag operations by the régime in 2011 in her diary Woman in the Crossfire, when the reason for thinking that this couldn’t have been done by Assad, nobody would do this to their own supporters, no longer applies. In the second case, I’d highlight that the PYD/YPG has consistently been prepared to offer Damascus a deal where it would retain autonomous rule over Kurdish areas in return for integrating those areas into the Assadist state. Assad’s ministers have consistently rejected it, because Assad’s rule depends on an image of an unchallengeable leader.



 The Assad cult was already a thin one. Lisa Wedeen wrote in Ambiguities of Domination in 1999:

 “The regime produces compliance through enforced participation in rituals of obeisance that are transparently phony both to those who orchestrate them and to those who consume them ... Assad’s cult operates as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens act as if they revere their leader.”

 It must now be much thinner. 20 years ago the Syrian population could be largely denied access to any other picture of their reality. The existence of a large part of liberated Syria for years has meant that must have broken down to the point where it is only a facade to fool foreigners and indicate compliance. I remember the BBC broadcast a film of a woman after the fall of East Aleppo in 2016 declaring, “We will lay down our lives for you Bashar.” Nobody can believe that someone who had been besieged and bombed by Assad for four years would declare such a thing unless it was the only alternative to torture and starvation. As it has taken surrendered areas with much of the population in place rather than simply pushed out, the lack of any real support for the régime can only be hidden partially by keeping many people in prison camps (“processing centres) until they buy their way out, and inviting régime officers and Iranian militiamen to operate as an internal occupying force in the “reconciled” areas.

 The régime is left with very immediate threats of violence as its governing strategy, and cannot step back to a more consensual method. Because those who carry it out the arrests, rape torture and extortion, those who profit from it, are the core of the state. Individual militias can sometimes be disbanded by the Russians, but the nature of the state relying on extreme violence for profit cannot be changed while the state remains. For another good reason: the threats of war crimes prosecution. Despite the help of an unprecedented level of genocide denial in the world’s media, particularly leftist and alternative media, the evidence against members of the Assadist state for war crimes and crimes against humanity is at a level never seen before in history.

 To prevent themselves being carted off the Hague, the state from Assad at the top to the torturers and looters at the bottom don’t just need to protect themselves against actual threats. They need an excuse to avoid facing up to justice. They need the war to continue so that they can claim to be stopping chaos. Even if all military activity against them ended, the claim that they were still fighting terrorism would never end. The arrest and torture to suppress all opposition and provide opportunities for profit would never end. Once all opposition eyes were removed from the country, it would likely increase. Because that’s what violently sadistic people do when their violent sadism seems to have produced results.

 And even with the massive aid they have received from Russia and Iran, the $21 billion the Iranians have sunk into Assad being a major cause of the bankruptcy and mass protests in Iran, Assad’s forces have shown themselves incapable of retaking any area without chemical weapons and international agreement to keep other fronts quiet while they concentrate on each opposition area.



 The Western indulgence for the Assad régime does not stem from their direct economic interests, as the support for Assad from Russia and Iran does (or at least the hope of recouping their investment by further impoverishing Syria). Rather it stems from their avoidance of a confrontation with an anti-interventionist public opinion (a point made by Alistair Burt to an All Party Parliamentary Group on Syria in the UK in 2016 when explaining why the government felt it couldn’t help those besieged in east Aleppo) fuelled by the left whether it openly supported Assad or not, and a belief that Assad represented some sort of stability, so the can of what to do could be kicked down the road as Assad returned normalcy once he defeated the rebels. In addition President Obama’s administration saw giving Iran a free hand in Syria to aid Assad’s repression a carrot to get it into a nuclear deal, and other powers lukewarm towards Assad found themselves unwilling to take decisive action without American leadership.

 It didn’t work out that way. Assad’s bombing caused millions to flee, threatening to destabilise the neighbouring countries and Europe too. His enabling of ISIS caused the retraumatisation of an Iraqi nation only just recovering from the US invasion in 2003, and fears of terrorism across the west. The false reporting of his war against Syria as a western plot echoed and reinforced Russian propaganda to justify its actions from the invasion of Ukraine to the chemical attack in Salisbury. Gradually the chickens of seeing Assad as the easy option were coming home to roost.

 A more immediate change of detriment to Assad has been in Turkish policy. Always anti-Assad, but hopeful that the trigger would be pulled by the United States, or at least a shield would be put in place to protect Northern Syria from the régime until late 2015, they decided then that their security required the abandonment of the policy of not fighting the war on the Syrian side of the border. First they cleared ISIS and the PKK/YPG from the northwest – the capture of Afrin making it far harder for the YPG to assist Assad in an Idlib offensive as they had helped him capture Aleppo – and then stopped the Idlib offensive in its tracks by moving the own troops in and threatening to aid the redeployment of tens of thousands of Free Syrian Army troops from North Aleppo.



 Until recently there seemed like one way for Assad to continue the horror while overcoming his inability to revert to a position of ruling with any consent from the people: get new people. The Iranians, along with their Shia sectarian militias from Iran, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond, have settled areas of Syria previously occupied by Sunni Muslims who have fled. They’ve taken over areas of Damascus, of towns in the west captured by Hezbollah like Qusayr, Madaya and Zabadani, and more recently in Deir Ezzor.

 But in their confidence of victory, the Iranians have over-reached. From keeping Hezbollah from any real conflict with Israel, with retaliation against attacks on Hezbollah weapons convoys purely against Syrians, they believed they had become strong enough to make their threats against Israel tangible. And Israel has responded by destroying hundreds of millions of dollars of Iranian equipment at bases in Aleppo, Homs and Damascus. Without the ability to project force on a national Syrian scale, their settlers are just another group with limited wasta (connections), and unable to determine the future state of Syria. This has been reinforced by the change of administration in Washington, with the US now seeing Iran as more of a hindrance than a help across the region.

 So, we are left with a situation in which 75% of the Syrian economy has been destroyed, and rather than rebuilding, the forces of the state are weighing in the copper piping. As Rafia Salameh writes in al-Jumhuriya of an economy that devours itself:

 “Returning entire neighbourhoods to a state before construction and infrastructure, and destroying what few walls remain standing to extract and pillage what inside them, is a systematic process of impoverishment of the country. It is a process replacing production with property recycling, undercutting its value, swapping its owners, like a rotting carcass devouring what little sign of life remains until it simply vanishes.”

 The statue of Bashar’s father recently erected in Deir Ezzor is a symbol of the Assadist state’s attitude to reconstruction, nothing is important other than its own glorification and consumption. There is no economic multiplier where wages go on goods that pay for further wages that lead to an increase in the circulation of wealth through the economy. Instead as much as can be is taken, and the exploitation is hardly limited to the walls of the lord’s stomach as they were in medieval times so much is never enough, is diverted into the consumption by Assad and the small circle of his relatives. Just as the UN aid for Syria has ended up as supplies for his soldiers or sold in régime areas for the same cronies’ profit, the same would happen to any reconstruction aid, which is why Russia demands the West provide it, and the West is very unlikely to make that mistake. Assad isn’t going to rebuild Syria, he won’t even stop the unbuilding of it.

 If my hypothesis that the Assadist state can be defined by its extreme criminality is correct, it won’t even be able to stop fighting a war. It has imported ISIS into Suwayda in order to drag the province into the militarisation process it had largely avoided (the narrative that the régime has almost won the war and is now safe is belied by its desperate manpower shortage, and a guide that the decentralisation of the violent chaos with a single arbiter of violence to many is likely to continue). It is still shelling Lattakia and Hama, has tried to infiltrate the Turkish backed FSA held area on the Tadef Front this week, organises agents and very probably aids ISIS to commit assassinations in Idlib. As I take a break in writing, the régime bombarded Kafr Hamra in Aleppo and has mobilised a thousand members of the Palestinian Quds force.

 At some point, destabilisation will not be enough. The régime will have to attack either Idlib or Eastern Syria. The latter might seem more attractive because it would hope to get the oil fields back, but the last time it tried it with the help of Russian mercenaries (giving the Kremlin deniability), it lost dozens if not hundreds of fighters to little effect. The régime’s preference is always the cowardly one of attacking the weakest, attacking civilians in the hope that the fighters can be made to surrender. But soon, given its impatience, the need to protect its image as the valiant destroyer of all opposition, the need to give its armed forces something to do and to keep the country unstable so war crimes prosecutions cannot begin, it will have to attack with force, and the indications are that the Turks and others will protect the opposition enough so that Assad exhausts his forces. And although it looks right now as if the conflict is far from his palace in Damascus, if Assad loses his remaining useful troops in a failed offensive, his time left will be short. The Russians will be tempted to back him to the hilt, as it finds such genocidal leaders are the easiest to guarantee will stay within its sphere of influence, but their policy has been to use bluff and the threat of general war to inhibit states from forcing Assad out. If it is faced with the determination to prevent Assad’s violations, they aren’t going to risk their all on a war with states when it can’t even maintain stability in Syria only fighting locals, and will likely scramble to avoid a scenario like the Americans fleeing their embassy in Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.


 Assad’s régime is a house of cards, glued together with such a system of repression that it cannot be pried apart, only blown over. As long as it stands, it will continue to look for internal and external enemies to butcher, mutilate and violate. If it is not overthrown, it will increasingly see fights between the various armed forces within it over control of resources, as there are no avenues for peaceful resolution of disputes.

 So the first message for the opposition and humanity is one of hope. Assad will fall. You cannot keep a sphere atop a spike indefinitely before it bursts. Patience, and remembering who the enemy is, would seem to be the key. Don't put your faith in foreign aid, but don't think they are all the same either. It is hard to know what better strategy the opposition could have come up with in the face of the international indulgence of Assad up to now, though hanging on to as much liberated territory as possible and refusing any transition that does not mean the downfall of the régime seem to have been the right moves, the first, despite the bombing and other violence they have endured, maintaining the option of the second without a wholly external assault on the régime. I would say also that the rebels need to keep their eyes on the prize and never again be distracted into fighting each other. It may be important to root out the frogs that have tricked other liberated areas into surrender, or to protest against violations of civil liberty by armed groups, but that really shouldn't extend to fighting against other anti-Assad Syrians because they are either too Islamist or too secularist. When rebel groups have fought each other, it has given Assad a new lease of life. When they have united, such as in Idlib in 2015, only the whole world standing against them could stop them advancing against the feeble power of a monster that knows only how to rape and loot.