The Decibel - Syria’s revolution and its impact on global power

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

After 13 years of civil war, the now-former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad fled the country, as his dictatorship unravelled in less than two weeks. Many Syrians celebrated as the rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, laid claim to the capital city of Damascus this week. But the future of the country remains uncertain as different factions inside the country – and global superpowers outside of it – consider what comes next.Mark MacKinnon, The Globe’s Senior International Correspondent, explains how the al-Assad regime fell apart suddenly and how the influence of Iran, Israel, Turkey, the U.S. and Russia are all in competition in a volatile region.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

This week, Syrians celebrated the end of 50 years of the Assad family's oppressive regime. President Bashar al-Assad was forced to flee the country after rebel forces took control of the capital. It's like tears of happiness like today. It's like we didn't imagine. I lost my family. I lost my father, mother, brother. I lost many of my friends in Syria. It's for this day.

It was an abrupt end to over 13 years of civil war, where more than 500,000 people were killed. There are more than 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide who left the country. But while the dictatorship has fallen, Syria's future isn't clear, as the rebels preside over an uneasy peace between the country's different factions. The Globe's senior international correspondent, Mark McKinnon, has been covering this. He'll tell us about what just happened, what could come next for Syria, and how this change in regime will have wide-reaching ramifications. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel

from The Globe and Mail. Mark, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Menaka. Let's go back to 2011. Can you remind us, how did the Syrian civil war start? The sort of spark, and you have to put it in the context of the series of revolutions that we called the Arab Spring that was going across North Africa and the Middle East and started in Tunisia, then Egypt and Libya. And then the spark was a bit of graffiti that was written on a wall in the southern Syrian city of Daraa. And the graffiti said, it's your turn, Dr. Bashar al-Assad. And then what really set things off is the regime's reaction to this bit of graffiti.

First, they arrested one kid and then they tortured him into giving the names of other kids until eventually 23 teens in prison being tortured. And that brought the parents, really, of Daraa onto the streets to demand the return of their kids. And while they're demand the return of their kids. And while they're demanding the return of their kids, the regime opens fire, the police in Dada'a open fire. They kill two people. And then people come out for the funerals of those two people. And there's more clashes, more violence.

And then this just expands and expands until something called the Free Syrian Army is formed. And that really is the start of the Syrian civil war, which took, as we now know, 13 years to reach where we are. And Mark, I know you actually got to talk to that kid, that initial kid that was arrested for that graffiti, both back then and recently, actually. Can you tell us what he told you? Yeah, so I first met Naif Abizid in 2016. And it was at the end of a long investigation. I'd started with a list of names that I'd found on the internet of the kids who had been jailed at the start of the revolution. Someone had just put them out and said, you know, everybody should remember these kids. They were at the start of it all. And so I took this list of names, and most of them had the last name Abazid.

So I started messaging people on LinkedIn and Facebook, trying to find anyone who sort of knew these kids. And I found one guy named Ahmed Abazid, who was in Sweden. And he said, I don't trust you. I don't know you. But if you come talk to me, maybe I can tell you some more about this. And a series of interviews like this led me to Naif in 2016, who was then a recently arrived refugee living in Vienna. And he told me then that, yeah, it was me. I had no idea what I was doing. There was a group of us kids outside of the Albanian school. And they were saying, oh, do it, do it, do it sort of thing. And I just wanted to make the older kids laugh. And so he said then that he wrote, it's your turn, Dr. Bashir Al-Basad, on the wall of the school.

And then, you know, he was pulled out of class, his grade seven class, his last day in school. He reminded me this week, brought into an interrogation center, hung from his wrist from the ceiling, beaten with cables, put inside a tire, if you could even imagine this, and rolled down a hallway and slammed into the wall until he basically gave up the names of his friends. Now, this week he messaged me, or we started messaging each other rather, as the events in Damascus were happening. And he said he wanted to be interviewed again. So I went back to Vienna. And, you know, the big news from his perspective was that he was ready to go back to this country where many see him as a hero, the person who started the revolution, even if accidentally. But he wanted to correct, he said, that it wasn't him who wrote that on the wall.

He'd only confessed to that under torture, and that he didn't know who wrote it on the wall. Okay. So now he says it wasn't, it wasn't him actually who did that. Wow. Yeah, that was, that was a shock for me, obviously. And it sort of, it took me a little while to digest, but I think we have to remember whatever version, you know, his version of the truth in 2016 was, was very compelling. I'll say that much. His version now also compelling. This is a boy. He was a boy, 14, who was tortured so long he doesn't remember how long. He's a victim. And whoever wrote those words on the wall, he was the first person arrested, the first person tortured as a result of them.

And it was this regime reaction to the graffiti that set events in motion. Okay, so as you say, the response really to that graffiti is what set it off then. And then this war went on for more than 13 years. And then suddenly, everything seemed to have changed very quickly in just over a week. Mark, what happened? What happened was, you know, for the last eight years, since 2016, since really the regime and its Russian and Iranian allies won the Battle of Aleppo, the front lines had effectively been frozen. Bashar Assad's regime controlled most of the country. There was a rebel pocket in the northwestern corner in a province called Idlib. The Kurds, with some American protection, controlled the east of the country,

east of the Euphrates River. So the country was sort of divided into three kind of four. There's another little pocket of rebel held pocket near the Jordanian border. And that was sort of negotiated between the outside powers, primarily Russia, Turkey and Iran. And then on November 27, there's an important date for a couple of reasons, that's the day that the ceasefire occurred in Lebanon. And the reason that matters is that one of the key players in the war for Syria had been Hezbollah. And so at this moment, they are badly, badly battered. Of course, their leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated. We had that memorable incident with the Pagers that killed so many other Hezbollah commanders. They had months of war against the Israeli army.

And so on the same day, the rebels in northern Syria, led by an Islamist group called Hayat Takhril al-Sham, begin an offensive. And that offensive at first, we now understand, was just aimed at taking away some artillery positions that had been hitting the edges of rebel held areas. The operation is called Operation Ending Aggression. They were basically trying to stop the Syrian army from hitting the edges of the rebel controlled area. But when they got there, there was almost no resistance. And so within two days, they're suddenly in Aleppo, a city that was fought over for six years, falls with hardly a fight. That was a huge moment.

And from there on, the rebels sort of were proceeding, almost not believing their luck, sort of going further down this north-south highway through the cities of first Hama, then Homs. And suddenly it looked like Damascus could fall. And then that happened almost before anyone could react. And so what started as an offensive with limited, limited aims turned into this, you know, end of war moment as the regime just crumbled in front of it, largely because its allies weren't able to help it. Wow, that's really fascinating to understand, I guess, how that played out then. You mentioned the allies not being there. Is that why they really encountered no resistance then? I think that's the most important factor. Not only, of course, we have this defeat of Hezbollah, and they won't call it a defeat, but they're badly, badly bruised. We also have the Russian army very, very distracted by the war in Ukraine. They've pulled military equipment, senior officers, senior generals throughout the last almost three years of war in Ukraine, moved military force away from Syria towards Ukraine, and they weren't able to help Bashar al-Assad when this offensive started. Okay. And so since then, the now former Syrian

president, Bashar al-Assad, left the country, and he and his family claimed asylum in Moscow, in Russia. Mark, what's happened since then? I'd say, you know, the sort of post-Assad moment has had three phases. The first hours and days were really just a, it was celebration. People at first didn't believe the regime was gone. Then they came outside. We've seen these scenes of people cheering in the streets of Damascus, the statues of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar being pulled down. And then we sort of had this moment of reckoning now that we're still in, which is Syrians going into the prisons, into the morgues, looking for their loved ones. We've seen tens of thousands of people just disappear over the last 13 years of this fight and even before that.

And unfortunately, a lot of them are finding out that their loved ones are dead, but at least they're getting that bit of closure. The third thing that's only really starting to begin is the getting on with the business of governing. And that's going to be really crucial to what happens next. We'll be back in a moment. So this rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HDS, is sort of in charge in Syria at the moment. Mark, what does that look like?

So the early signals from them are quite positive in that first they left Bashar Assad's last prime minister in power and sort of let him manage a transition. It seems like they learned a little bit, or at least were aware of the history in Iraq, where everybody associated with the Ba'ath Party was sort of fired in one day, and all of a sudden nothing worked. You know, in Aleppo, they apparently asked the entire city council if they would stay on, and apparently most or all of the city councillors have agreed. So that's all very positive. The new interim prime minister is Mohamed al-Bashir. He is the same gentleman who is running affairs sort of as the de facto prime minister in this Idlib governorate, which, you know, may give us an idea of where this was heading. Just a few months ago, there were protests in Idlib. People were complaining about this HTS government because of repression.

They were starting to jail those who were critical of the regime. And also, they were really, really struggling to deal with things like inflation. Prices were rising there in comparison to other parts of Syria. So they have some governing experience, but it hasn't all been good. It's probably positive that they're reaching out to members of the old regime rather than just firing them all wholesale, because a lot of people would have just been bureaucrats going along to get along. You know, there are people who committed horrible crimes, but there are other people who just went to work every day. And that's an important distinction that the Americans didn't make in Iraq and maybe we're seeing made here in Syria. And the leader of this group, HDS, his name is Ahmed Alshara, I believe.

What do we know about him? So Ahmed Alshara, who until a few days ago was known to most of the world as Abu Muhammad Al-Gholani, is now the de facto power, the most powerful person in Syria. One of the real signals that the Assad regime was gone was when Mr.Sharah was seen walking through the streets of Damascus surrounded by armed gunmen. He wasn't exactly feeling calm about the situation. And he went to the historic Umayyad Mosque in the center of Damascus and gave something like a victory speech, sort of saying, this is your victory to all Syrians and giving his first signals. What worries people is, of course, his past. This is someone who grew up in al-Qaeda in Iraq.

He was present at the sort of foundation of the Islamic State. So an associate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who Donald Trump proudly claimed to have killed a few years back. But since then, he sort of has moved to moderate himself. And since taking his, particularly since getting this governorship, shall we say, of this Idlib region in the northwest of Syria. And he has rebranded, his group was called Al-Nusra Front. They rebranded as Hayat al-Khayyam al-Sham, HTS. They have severed ties. They've actually fought against Islamic State in some parts of Syria, cut that Al-Qaeda connection extremism stuff that HTS is behind. And they largely cooperated, both in terms of administering that region and in terms of these offenses. What happens next? What happens now? He's given very, very few interviews, and those interviews

have been very, very vague. He is definitely the strongest person in Syria right now. He has the strongest military force anyways. What he intends to do with that, we only have sort of the hints that we have so far. And how is HDS viewed around the world? I guess we talked a little bit about how it's seen within Syria, but how do other countries view this organization? Yeah, this is very important. So Canada, the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, most of the West, Russia and Iran view HTS as a terrorist group. We've seen in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip how the terrorist branding of Hezbollah and Hamas has kept Western diplomats from having any interaction with or any influence over these groups and the power they eventually had in those places. So I have a big decision point here for the West, especially if HTS leads whatever government we see.

And it's probable at least that they'll lead until something like an election is held. And so the West really has to decide. Do we cut them off as we did with, for instance, Hamas after it won the parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006? Or do we try and influence this process by, you know, maybe engaging with them and setting out some markers? Like we will deal with you if those markers can obviously involve women's rights or minority rights, holding elections, having an inclusive government. I want to ask you also about kind of the response in the broader region here, Israel in particular. Let's start there. This week, Israel launched hundreds of airstrikes on Syria and actually seized a piece of land in the Golan Heights. What is Israel trying to do?

Yeah, I mean, most of the Golan Heights has been occupied by Israel since 1973. There was an area beyond that that was sort of almost like a no man's land before regime controlled Syria began it. And at first, the Israelis, their ground force just moved into this sort of buffer zone. They said just to prevent a hostile force, obviously pointing towards HTS and its roots. They didn't want that taking over some important firing positions that would be able to target Israel. They've now gone past that. They have hit, as you said, hundreds of targets around the country. They've hit the regime's main naval base. They've hit its airfields. They've hit its intelligence headquarters. They've hit its

scientific research centers that were accused of producing chemical weapons. It seems pretty clear, and I don't think Benjamin Netanyahu has been shy in saying this, they are destroying the military capacity of the Syrian army, which has always been considered a rival, a threat to Israel. They're taking advantage of the moment, frankly. They're not exactly building ties with the Syrian people here. They're viewing whatever comes next as a possible hostile state, and they are weakening that possible hostile state. And what about Russia and Iran?

These are Syria's allies. What are the wider implications of all this for them? I think Iran is the biggest loser in all this. They had backed the government of Bashar al-Assad not out of any belief but you know these were from a sect of Shiism seen as fellow co-religionists or close to being co-religionists and they completed a puzzle for Iran which was having an ally in control of central Syria and control of Damascus allowed them to move weapons, men, money, drugs in cases, from Tehran to Beirut, through Iraq, through Syria. Every government there was either pro-Iranian or under de facto control of pro-Iranian factions. So they had this sort of arc of pro-Iranian governments, a raid against Israel, a raid against the West. And particularly when it comes to Iran's confrontation with Israel, which is ongoing, being able to supply Hezbollah overland via Syria

was very, very important for them. And we saw after the fall of the Assad regime, one of the first places that the protesters, the Syrians who were now free to do what they wanted to do, one of the first places they went was to the Iranian embassy to tear down posters and to smash windows. So a lot of anger against Iran will be very hard for Iran to build ties with whatever government emerges post-Bashar Assad. Russia's in a slightly more nuanced position here, despite the role it played in the war and all the bombs it dropped on the rebels and on

rebel-held areas, despite the fact that it has bombs had dropped on the rebels and on rebel held areas, despite the fact that it has flown Bashar Assad to Moscow and granted him immunity. So far, the rebels haven't approached those two key Russian bases there. There's a Russian naval base at Tartus and this Russian air base just north of that. And there's probably some calculating going on here, especially as the Syrian army's equipment gets destroyed, that, you know, Russia may be a country that whatever government is formed next needs to turn to for protection. And the Russian government very quickly, within hours of Assad landing in Moscow, allowed the Syrian embassy in Moscow to flip and display the rebel flag, what was the rebel flag, what is now becoming the state

flag of Syria, from the embassy there. And the Russian state media went from calling HTS terrorists to calling them the armed opposition, again within hours. And so you can see Russia changing its positioning on the fly because their interest in Syria was never Bashar al-Assad. It was maintaining its air base and its naval base there. And we may, in the hours ahead, the hours after this is recorded, you may see the rebels turn and attack the Russian bases or the Russians may get involved in some other way. There are still some, you know, Assad figures, including the president, former president Bashar al-Assad's brother, Maher, is somewhere in Syria. There may be Russian operations that to come here, but you can also see that they're,

you know, opening up their options. And Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, you know, we're doing what we can to open channels with the new powers that be in Damascus. And are there any other countries, I guess, vying for influence in this situation now? Yeah, there are two countries that are NATO allies and have a lot of influence in the situation, but have drastically different ideas about what should happen from here. One of them is Turkey, which has effectively protected this rebel-held area of the northwest, this Idlib province, for the last eight years, and which was consulted, we now know, about the timing of this offensive. So if there's any country that's emerged as a winner that has influence over HTS, it's President Erdogan and Turkey.

And what they want, and they are obviously, President Erdogan's been looking to establish Turkish influence in the Middle East and the old Ottoman region for, you know, since he's come to power. We don't know yet, but they're going to be one of the key people or one of the key players in this as we go forward. The other one is the United States, and obviously a crucial moment with a change of power coming in Washington. The US for, again, for the last eight years during the sort of quieting of the civil war has provided protection to the Kurdish area. Part of that involves sort of keeping the Turks from invading because the Turks are very worried about

the establishment of anything like a Kurdish state on their borders because they view that as a threat to their own internal security with a large Kurdish population. And so there's 900 U.S. troops in eastern Syria. Their air force has been active, targeting the remnants of the Islamic State, which is still around. But when Donald Trump was in power last time, he abruptly called all U.S. forces home from Syria. He got talked down from that and to this sort of position that we're in now with a small force left in eastern Syria. But he's always been isolationist. He's always said we don't want to be involved in foreign wars. Will he pull support from the Kurds?

Will he leave the regional players to sort it out? That remains to be seen. Just lastly here, Mark, as a result of the civil war, there are over 5 million Syrian refugees worldwide who left the country, and actually over 100,000 of them in Canada. We have a lot of refugees here in this country as well. For those people who are looking to return home, how much closer are we to that possibility? There's always different types of refugees, different reasons for becoming refugees. And there's sort of different categories in this

moment. Now, you saw within hours of the events in Damascus people in Lebanon um you know lining up to try and get back home because you know Lebanon is a destroyed state it's still in this almost in a state of war itself and with an electricity grid that barely functions a terrible economy so people there are probably looking and going well you know let's go back home and and and try there it can't be much worse than living in a tent in the Lebanese mountains. Turkey has the biggest population of Syrian refugees, 3 million. And I think they're very likely to start trying to push those people back home too. I think that's one of the big outcomes that President Erdogan, who has supported the rebellion against Assad and has probably the

best ties with HTS of any foreign power, I think one of the outcomes he wants to send those 3 million people home. When I was in Europe, though, talking to Naif Abizid and his friends, it was, you know, very mixed. I mean, Naif himself wants to go back home, but that's in part because he's never really established himself in Austria. He doesn't feel comfortable there. He says he's happy there.

He doesn't have a job. He's sort of staying with friends, et cetera, et cetera. But after he finished talking and he gave this impassioned speech about it was time for everybody to go home, his friends were kind of, we'll see. One of them had a graphic design job, speaks perfect German, has an Austrian passport. Now, the pull of Syria, much less for him and other Syrian refugees I've spoken to around Europe, are similarly, if they've got the passport, if their kids are in school that sort of thing it's it's hard to want to go back and rebuild younger people those who've been kept in camps in Jordan, Lebanon,

Turkey you know the decision seems easy a lot of Syrians will go home we've also seen some Syrians fleeing those were sort of loyal to the Assad regime or felt protected, a lot of religious minorities, including his own, the Alawite group, aren't sure what's coming. We've seen Syrians leaving and going to Lebanon. Mark, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you, Monica. That's it for today. I'mika ramon welms our producers are madeline white michael stein and ali graham david crosby edits the show adrian chung is our senior producer and matt frainer

is our managing editor thanks so much for listening and i'll talk to you soon