Syria after Assad, scarred by authoritarian rule
In 2015, a decade before the Assad family’s fifty-three-year rule over Syria ended, the Obama administration was spooked by the advances of a rebel alliance from Idlib, which seemed poised to topple the government in Damascus. The administration reviled Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but since the rise of ISIS in 2014, it had treated Syria as a front in the War on Terror, and it was loath to see Damascus fall to Islamists, some with links to Al Qaeda. When Russia intervened in September 2015 to shore up Assad, the White House was privately relieved. Then Secretary of State John Kerry spent the waning days of the Obama administration negotiating a counter-terror alliance with Russia. Not long after, Russia’s savage methods in Syria triggered the world’s largest mass exodus in half a century.
The West has viewed Syria through the lenses of terror and migration ever since. Syrians suffered at home, with their survival subordinated to security concerns, and in exile, with their presence seen as a burden to be offloaded. In 2020, when the Syrian regime, supported by Iranian-funded sectarian militias and the Russian air force, initiated a major military operation to seize Idlib, triggering the largest displacement of the war, the European Union rushed €700 million to Greece to erect a wall. In the end, Turkish military intervention halted the rampage, but Turkey also went no further than securing its interests, confining itself to northwest Syria, which served as a security buffer and a refugee sanctuary.
While Western leaders focused on terrorism, defined narrowly as political violence perpetrated by nonstate actors, they ignored the more consequential effects of state terror. In Syria, 90 percent of civilian deaths during the war came at the hands of the regime and its allies. State violence was also the main reason Syrians were fleeing the country. But even as the backlash against refugees caused a surge in authoritarian populism in much of the West, most Syrians never left Syria—and of those who did, the majority were dispersed in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.
Ceding control of Syria to Assad had brought considerable misery to Syrians. Hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced. And the impunity enjoyed by Vladimir Putin in Syria encouraged him to invade Ukraine. Western governments’ decision to subordinate humanitarian concerns to the imperatives of “stability” ended up roiling much of the Northern Hemisphere. [Continue reading…]
The Assad regime made Syria an informant state, with surveillance that turned the country on itself. Neighbors and colleagues reported on each other in every district and workplace: what they said, where they went, who came for dinner.
After more than half a century, that suffocating regime melted away overnight in December, as rebel forces marched on the capital, Damascus. Left behind is a society divided by the suspicion and perfidy, shadowed by the question of who among them had quietly contributed to the Assads’ tyranny.
On a single alley, the grievances born of betrayal are playing out.
Hamdy Al Barbary was tending to a group of nesting pigeons on his roof in March when he heard the first bullet whip past his face. He ducked, another whizzed past, and he fell backward as he scrambled to the stairs, he recalled. He knew which house the shots had come from.
Neighbors reviled his father, Abu Ayman, a baker, labeling him an informant for the Assad regime during Syria’s long civil war. Abu Ayman denies being an informer but acknowledged in a recent interview that he once led security forces from the notorious Palestine military intelligence branch to the homes of people he knew, who he said had threatened him. They died in custody, he and Hamdy said.
Several doors down the alleyway from the Barbary home lived the Moghrabi family, who said they had long been known in the area as government opponents. They recalled a tide of fear unleashed during the war by a local pro-Assad militia, which included Abu Ayman and his oldest son, Wassim. Ahmed Moghrabi and his cousin Moussa were detained by the force and later tortured, they said.
“The informant was Abu Ayman,” Ahmed said, referring to his own case. “He hurt our family so much.” Abu Ayman denied he was involved in Ahmed’s detention and said he had reported his fellow Syrians on only one occasion. Abu Ayman said he “was always in favor of my neighborhood people.”
In the months since President Bashar al-Assad’s fall, the unresolved tension between these two Sunni Muslim families has been replicated countless times across the country as those who were informed upon press their grievances against those who allegedly betrayed them. These fault lines pose a major challenge for the new Syrian government, which is also confronting sectarian divisions rooted in widespread resentment against the Alawite religious minority, where Assad found much of his support. The new authorities have been calling for healing and national unity but have offered little suggestion of how to achieve it. [Continue reading…]