Syria’s future under al-Qaeda spin-off HTS will come in two flavours only. Either submit and collude like the West Bank, or end up wrecked like Gaza
There has been a flurry of “What next for Syria?” articles in the wake of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hurried exit from Syria and the takeover of much of the country by al-Qaeda’s rebranded local forces.
Western governments and media have been quick to celebrate the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), even though the group is designated a terrorist organisation in the United States, Britain and much of Europe.
Back in 2013, the US even placed a £10 million bounty on its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, for his involvement with al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) and for carrying out a series of brutal attacks on civilians.
Once upon a time, he might have expected to end up in an orange jumpsuit in the notorious, off-the-grid detention and torture facility run by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Now he is positioning himself as Syria’s heir apparent, seemingly with Washington’s blessing.
Surprisingly, before either HTS or al-Julani can be tested in their new roles overseeing Syria, the West is hurrying to rehabilitate them. The US and UK are both moving to overturn HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation.
To put the extraordinary speed of this absolution in perspective, recall that Nelson Mandela, feted internationally for helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule, was removed from Washington’s terrorist watch list only in 2008 – 18 years after his release from prison.
Similarly, western media are helping al-Julani to rebrand himself as a statesman-in-the-making, airbrushing his past atrocities, by transitioning from using his nom de guerre to his birth name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Piling on pressure
Stories of prisoners being freed from Assad’s dungeons and of families pouring on to the streets in celebration have helped to drive an upbeat news agenda and obscure a more likely dismal future for newly “liberated” Syria – as the US, UK, Israel, Turkey and Gulf states jostle for a share of the pie.
Syria’s status looks sealed as a permanently failed state.
Israel’s bombing raids – destroying hundreds of critical infrastructure sites across Syria – are designed precisely towards that end.
Within days, the Israeli military was boasting it had destroyed 80 per cent of Syria’s military installations. More have gone since.
On Monday, Israel unleashed 16 strikes on Tartus, a strategically important port where Russia has a naval fleet. The blasts were so powerful, they registered 3.5 on the Richter scale.
During Assad’s rule, Israel chiefly rationalised its attacks on Syria – coordinating them with Russian forces supporting Damascus – as necessary to prevent the flow of weapons overland from Iran to its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah.
But that is not the goal currently. HTS’s Sunni fighters have vowed to keep Iran and Hezbollah – the Shiite “axis of resistance” against Israel – out of Syrian territory.
Israel has prioritised instead targeting Syria’s already beleaguered military – its planes, naval ships, radars, anti-aircraft batteries and missile stockpiles – to strip the country of any offensive or defensive capability. Any hope of Syria maintaining a semblance of sovereignty is crumbling before our eyes.
These latest strikes come on top of years of western efforts to undermine Syria’s integrity and economy. The US military controls Syria’s oil and wheat production areas, plundering these key resources with the help of a Kurdish minority. More generally, the West has imposed punitive sanctions on Syria’s economy.
It was precisely these pressures that hollowed out Assad’s government and led to its collapse. Now Israel is piling on more pressure to make sure any newcomer faces an even harder task.
Maps of post-Assad Syria, like those during the latter part of his beleaguered presidency, are a patchwork of different colours, with Turkey and its local allies seizing territory in the north, the Kurds clinging on to the east, US forces in the south, and the Israeli military encroaching from the west.
This is the proper context for answering the question of what comes next.
Two possible fates
Syria is now the plaything of a complex of vaguely aligned state interests. None have Syria’s interests as a strong, unified state high on their list.
In such circumstances, Israel’s priority will be to promote sectarian divisions and stop a central authority from emerging to replace Assad.
This has been Israel’s plan stretching back decades, and has shaped the thinking of the dominant foreign policy elite in Washington since the rise of the so-called neoconservatives under President George W Bush in the early 2000s. The aim has been to Balkanise any state in the Middle East that refuses to submit to Israeli and US hegemony.
Israel cares only that Syria is riven by internal feuding and power-plays. Beginning in 2013, Israel ran a covert programme to arm and fund at least 12 different rebel factions, according to a 2018 article in Foreign Policy magazine.
In this regard, Syria’s fate is being modelled on that of the Palestinians.
There may be a choice but it will come in no more than two flavours. Syria can become the West Bank, or it can become Gaza.
So far, the indications are that Israel is gunning for the Gaza option. Washington and Europe appear to prefer the West Bank route, which is why they have been focusing on the rehabilitation of HTS.
In the Gaza scenario, Israel keeps pounding Syria, depriving the rebranded al-Qaeda faction or any other group of the ability to run the country’s affairs. Instability and chaos reign.
With Assad’s legacy of secular rule destroyed, bitter sectarian rivalries dominate, cementing Syria into separate regions. Feuding warlords, militias and crime families battle it out for local dominance.
Their attention is directed inwards, towards strengthening their rule against rivals, not outwards towards Israel.
‘Back to the Stone Age’
There would be nothing new about this outcome for Syria in the worldview shared by Israel and the neocons. It draws on lessons Israel believes it learnt in both Gaza and Lebanon.
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Israeli generals spoke of returning Gaza “to the Stone Age” long before they were in a position to realise that goal with the current genocide there. Those same generals first tested their ideas on a more limited scale in Lebanon, pummelling the country’s infrastructure under the so-called “Dahiya” doctrine.
Israel believed such indiscriminate wrecking sprees offered a double benefit. Overwhelming destruction forced the local population to concentrate on basic survival rather than organise resistance. And longer term, the targeted population would understand that, given the severity of the punishment, any future resistance to Israel should be avoided at all costs.
Back in 2007, four years before the uprising in Syria erupted, a leading articulator of the neocon agenda, Caroline Glick, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, set out Syria’s imminent fate.
She explained that any central authority in Damascus had to be destroyed. The reasoning: “Centralised governments throughout the Arab world are the primary fulminators of Arab hatred of Israel.”
She added: “How well would Syria contend with the IDF [Israeli military] if it were simultaneously trying to put down a popular rebellion?”
Or, better still, Syria could be turned into another failed state like Libya after Muammar Gaddafi’s ousting and killing in 2011 with the help of Nato. Libya has been run by warlords ever since.
Notably, both Syria and Libya – along with Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon and Iran – were on a hit list drawn up in Washington in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by US officials close to Israel.
All but Iran are now failed or failing states.
Security contractor
The other possible outcome is that Syria becomes a larger version of the West Bank.
In that scenario, HTS and al-Julani are able to convince the US and Europe that they are so supine, so ready to do whatever they are told, that Israel has nothing to fear from them.
Their rule would be modelled on that of Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the much-reviled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. His powers are little greater than those of the head of a municipal council, overseeing schools and collecting the rubbish.
His security forces are lightly armed – effectively a police force – used for internal repression and incapable of challenging Israel’s illegal occupation. Abbas has described as “sacred” his service to Israel in preventing Palestinians from resisting their decades-long oppression.
The Palestinian Authority’s active collusion was on show again at the weekend when its security forces killed a resistance leader in Jenin wanted by Israel.
Al-Julani could similarly be cultivated as a security contractor. Largely thanks to Israel, Syria now has no army, navy or air force. It has only lightly armed factions such as HTS, other rebel militias like the misnamed Syrian National Army, and Kurdish groups.
Under CIA and Turkish tutelage, HTS could be strengthened, but only enough to repress dissent in Syria.
HTS would have powers but on licence. Its survival would depend on keeping things quiet for Israel, both through a reign of intimidation against other Syrian groups, including the Palestinian refugee population, who threaten to fight Israel, and by keeping out other regional actors resisting Israel, such as Iran and Hezbollah.
And as with Abbas, al-Julani’s rule in Syria would be territorially limited.
The Palestinian leader has to contend with the fact that large swaths of the West Bank have been carved out as Jewish settlements under Israeli rule, and that he has no access to critical resources, including acquifers, agricultural land and quarries.
Off-limits to HTS would likely be Kurdish areas policed by Turkey and the US, where much of the country’s oil is located, as well as a swath of terrority in Syria’s south-west that Israel has invaded over the past two weeks.
It is widely assumed Israel will annex these Syrian lands to extend its illegal occupation of the Golan, which it took from Syria in 1967.
‘Love’ for Israel
Al-Julani understands only too well the options ahead of him. Perhaps not surprisingly, he appears far keener to become a Syrian Abbas than a Syrian Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader killed by Israel in October.
Given his clean-cut military makeover, al-Julani may imagine that he can eventually upgrade himself to the Syrian equivalent of the US-backed leader of Ukraine, Volodmyr Zelenskiy.
However, Zelenskiy’s role has been to fight a proxy war against Russia, on behalf of Nato. Israel would never countenance a leader of a country on its border being given that kind of military muscle.
Al-Julani’s commanders have lost no time explaining that they have no beef with Israel and do not want to provoke hostilities with it.
The heady first days of HTS’s rule were marked by its leaders thanking Israel for helping it to take Syria by neutralising Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon. There were even declarations of “love” for Israel.
Such sentiments have not been dented by the Israeli army invading the large demilitarised zone inside Syria next to the Golan, in violation of the 1974 armistice agreement.
Nor have they been damaged by Israel’s relentless bombing of Syria’s infrastructure – a violation of sovereignty that the Nuremberg tribunal at the end of the Second World War decried as the supreme international crime.
This week al-Julani meekly suggested that Israel had secured its interests in Syria through air strikes and invasion and could now leave the country in peace.
“We do not want any conflict, whether with Israel or anyone else, and we will not let Syria be used as a launchpad for attacks [against Israel],” he told the London Times.
A Channel 4 reporter who tried last week to press an HTS spokesman into addressing Israel’s attacks on Syria was startled by the response.
Obeida Arnaout sounded as though he was following a carefully rehearsed script, reassuring Washington and Israeli officials that HTS had no bigger ambitions than emptying the bins regularly.
HTS spokesman Obeida Arnaout is asked by Channel 4 News about Israel’s strikes on over 300 sites in Syria (latest update: 480 strikes). He refused to denounce Israel’s massive airstrikes and ground incursions. When pressed, he offered vague, general comments. pic.twitter.com/cetEisYXIs
— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) December 11, 2024
Asked how HTS viewed the attacks on its sovereignty by Israel, Arnaout would only reply: “Our priority is to restore security and services, revive civilian life and institutions and care for newly liberated cities. There are many urgent parts of day-to-day life to restore: bakeries, electricity, water, communications, so our priority is to provide those services to the people.”
It seems HTS is unwilling even to offer rhetorical opposition to Israeli war crimes on Syrian soil.
Wider ambitions
All of this leaves Israel in a strong position to entrench its gains and widen its regional ambitions.
Israel has announced plans to double the number of Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied Syrian territory in the Golan.
Meanwhile, Syrian communities newly under Israeli military rule – in areas Israel has invaded since Assad’s fall – have appealed to their nominal government in Damascus and other Arab states to persuade Israel to withdraw. With good reason, they fear they face permanent occupation.
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Predictably, the same western elites so incensed by Russia’s violations of Ukraine’s territorial integrity that they have spent three years arming Kyiv in a proxy war against Moscow – risking a potential nuclear confrontation – have raised not a peep of concern at Israel’s ever deepening violations of Syria’s territorial integrity.
Once again, it is one rule for Israel, another for anyone Washington views as an enemy.
With Syria’s air defences out of the way, Israel now has a free run to Iran – either by itself or with US assistance – to attack the last target on the neocons’ seven-country hit list from 2001.
The Israeli media have excitedly reported on preparations for a strike, while the transition team working for incoming US president Donald Trump are said to be seriously considering joining such an operation.
And to top it all, Israel looks like it may finally be in sight of signing off on “normal” relations with Washington’s other major client state in the region, Saudi Arabia – a drive that had to be put on hold following Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Renewed ties between Israel and Riyadh are possible again in large part because coverage of Syria has further disappeared the Gaza genocide from the West’s news agenda, despite Palestinians there – starved and bombed by Israel for 14 months – likely dying in larger numbers than ever.
The narrative of Syria’s “liberation” currently dominates western coverage. But so far the takeover of Damascus by HTS appears only to have liberated Israel, leaving it freer to bully and terrorise its neighbours into submission.
