MARK ALMOND
By the end, the psychopathic dictator Bashar al-Assad was everybody’s enemy. His hardcore supporters who haven’t managed to flee the country will be doing all they can to distance themselves from his toppled regime and the rest of Syria will be partying riotously.
Rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has tried to keep things calm, ordering his fighters not to celebrate by loosing bursts of automatic fire into the air. But as Assad’s palaces, the properties of cronies and the Iranian embassy were looted, that command has been frequently disregarded.
Once the party is over, though, Syria will suffer a hangover that could well last for years. All too often, the fall of a Middle Eastern strongman is followed not by stability but anarchy. The lawlessness and infighting that came in the wake of the 2011 overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, for instance, is a terrible warning from history.
Jolani heads a small army of no more than 20,000 soldiers. They are heavily armed, fanatically motivated and highly experienced, the veterans of battles against many foes, from Assad’s army to the Islamic State, Russia and the US. What they have achieved in a very short space of time – dislodging a deep-rooted regime and taking control of all Syria’s major cities, including now Damascus – is testimony to their remarkable discipline and organisation.
But it is one thing to oust a dictator, quite another to maintain a grip on power. Even after waves of civil war and an exodus of refugees, Syria’s population is close to 20 million – a thousand times larger than Jolani’s army. And it has one of the world’s biggest stockpiles of weapons, amassed not only by Assad but by many rebel factions and even civilians. It’s no exaggeration to say that guns in Syria are more commonplace than umbrellas in England.
More worrying still are the arsenals of artillery, mortars, rockets and even chemical weapons. Israel carried out numerous air strikes on ammunition and weapons depots in Syria over the weekend in a bid to stop them falling into enemy hands, but it will not have destroyed them all. Jolani has sought to present himself as a moderate, courting Western governments and media, and even speaking to the Israeli press.
As far as the outside world is concerned, his brand is anti-Iran, anti-Hezbollah and anti-terrorism. But having laid his hands on power, at the cost of so much blood, he will find it hard to become a conventional politician. He might want peace, but the warriors who back him do not. They have fought in extreme conditions against the heaviest odds for many years. After all the sacrifices they have made, they do not think in terms of truces and tolerance.
So many factions will be competing for influence in Syria’s future, many of them from opposing ideologies and religions, that prolonged internal unrest looks inevitable. Jolani commands Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant, which grew out of the Al Qaeda-linked Front for the Conquest of the Levant.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is backing the Syrian National Army – which used to be called the Free Syrian Army – to repress the Syrian Democratic Forces, drawn from the Kurdish people straddling the border. Then there is, of course, Islamic State and various Druze militias, including the Men Of Dignity Movement and Mountain Brigade Gathering.
All this may have grim echoes of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian and the endless variations on the People’s Front Of Judea, but infighting among these groups can make life a misery for locals. For Western Europe, the immediate fear is two-fold: terrorism and organised crime. No one knows how many foreign jihadis are in Syria, mercenaries driven by fanatical Islamism rather than money.
Some come from former Soviet republics such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, others from China and Afghanistan, but most are from Muslim areas of Russia: Chechnya and Dagestan. Unlike Then there is, of course, Islamic State and various Druze militias, including the Men Of Dignity Movement and Mountain Brigade Gathering.
All this may have grim echoes of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian and the endless variations on the People’s Front Of Judea, but infighting among these groups can make life a misery for locals. For Western Europe, the immediate fear is two-fold: terrorism and organised crime. No one knows how many foreign jihadis are in Syria, mercenaries driven by fanatical Islamism rather than money.
Some come from former Soviet republics such as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, others from China and Afghanistan, but most are from Muslim areas of Russia: Chechnya and Dagestan. Unlike Jolani, their ambitions go beyond deposing Assad. Indeed, some are already talking about taking the fight eastward to China.
As Jolani may be looking for powers such as China to support his government at international forums like the UN in the months and years to come, he may well want to get rid of his lunatic fringe. If they are expelled, some are likely to head for Britain and the EU, where they will try to continue their war against Western civilisation.
Jolani, their ambitions go beyond deposing Assad. Indeed, some are already talking about taking the fight eastward to China. As Jolani may be looking for powers such as China to support his government at international forums like the UN in the months and years to come, he may well want to get rid of his lunatic fringe.
If they are expelled, some are likely to head for Britain and the EU, where they will try to continue their war against Western civilisation. Syria is also a major source of drugs to the Middle East and increasingly to the West, and whoever gains control of the trade in narcotics – a business once run by Assad’s younger brother Maher – will have a major stake in Europe’s illegal drugs market, which is often supplied via refugee routes. The combination of several-sided power struggle and organised crime means that Syria’s chaos will soon spread beyond its borders.
***
Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute in Oxford
_____________
