Patrick Costello on the unexpected downfall of Assad and the need for a cautious welcome to the new rulers
The dramatic collapse of Assad’s Syria caught the international community flat-footed. In the region, the Arab League had welcomed Assad back into their ranks only a year earlier as Arab embassies began to be reopened in Damascus. Following suit, a number of European countries re-opened their own missions, and in July last year, eight European Member States called for the reassessment of the EU policy of isolation of the Assad government in a bid to normalise relations, declare Syria a safe country and move towards returning the million or so Syrian refugees in Europe.
As a result, in the first days following the collapse, the EU was largely silent while many Member States immediately suspended Syrian asylum applications and Austria announced it was preparing a deportation plan for Syrian refugees. After the enormous efforts made over a decade of the Syrian war to isolate the Baathist regime, the muted response when it finally fell spoke volumes about how far Europe had moved since the declarations that Assad must go in 2011. The EU is now cautiously moving towards the temporary suspension of some of its sanctions while making it clear that major steps will be dependent on the new Syrian government maintaining its avowed commitment to an inclusive transition in the war-ravaged country.
To understand this lack of western triumphalism after the loss of a key regional ally of both Iran and Russia, it is necessary to recognise the deep complexity of the Syrian conflict which cannot be reduced to the simple formula of the West versus Russia, or Israel versus Iran. For example, Hezbollah played an important role in militarily defending Assad from the rebels, but Israel’s reaction to his fall in December was not one of celebration but instead, a move to grab even more land in the Golan Heights, and to systematically destroy Syria’s military resources through a series of bombing raids.
The Syrian war started from a series of local and peaceful protests against the regime, inspired by the uprisings across the region that had started in Tunisia and Egypt the year before. These were brutally repressed and resulted in rapid military escalation. The tragedy for Syria was that a series of international and regional actors intervened, either to support the arming of the opposition or to shore up the government. Each of these actors had a different set of interests, whether it was Turkey’s neo-Ottoman ambitions in the north, Iran maintaining its supply lines to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Russia keeping its Mediterranean naval base at Tartus, Israel, content to see a war developing between its biggest enemies, Gulf States supporting Salafist militias or the US seeking to give Russia a bloody nose in the region. Added to the mix was the spill-over from neighbouring Iraq, with ISIS setting up its caliphate capital in the desert town of Raqaa. Syrians used to wryly joke about the number of proxy wars their country was hosting.
Whatever the complexity, the result was one of the worst ever humanitarian disasters. Over half a million Syrians died and 11-12 million (over half the population) were displaced internally or made refugees. The end of this bloody conflict and the fall of the dictator should therefore be celebrated unequivocally. The international responsibilities in prolonging and exacerbating this tragedy mean that there is now an international obligation to do all possible to help the Syrians to get back on their feet. The EU, because it was not involved militarily, can play an important role in this exercise if it chooses to do so. Stabilisation, reconciliation and reconstruction in Syria are also in Europe’s narrow self-interest, because it is only under such conditions that the refugees in Europe, overwhelmingly from Syria’s professional and middle classes, will feel safe to return. After her visit to Damascus on 17 January, Hadja Lahbib, the new European Commissioner for humanitarian aid, stressed the need for the EU to suspend sanctions in order to play an active role in building Syria’s future.
None of this is going to be easy, not least because of the chequered past of Ahmed Al Shara’a, the rebel leader who coordinated the military operation that toppled Assad. Radicalised by the US invasion of Iraq, he became a leader of Al Qaida in Iraq and was tasked with opening a new front in Syria after the conflict erupted. Even if he left the organisation eight years ago, and for all his positive statements about building an inclusive non-sectarian Syria, questions remain. The rational international response should be to hold him to his words and get involved in building a peaceful transition in Syria. Isolating the new regime will only strengthen the role of sectarians and hardliners in the new government, leading inevitably to descent into a new cycle of conflict. Syria deserves better.