Of all the Arab countries that fell easy prey to the false dawn of Arab Spring, which flickered late in 2010, the Syrian model uniquely stands out second to none not only in its gross fatalities, rather in the kind of atrocities committed by warring sides during the civil strife.
Right off the bat, the war against the regime of Bashar Assad (2011- 2024) presented so fertile a soil for the bestial mind to put into rigorous enforcement the most of abominable acts – including cannibalistic ones – against the human nature.
Yet with hindsight, that seems to have been just scratching the surface. When weapons assumedly fell silent, and the Islamist leaning opposition assumed power, all primitive instincts so explosively rocked the boat.
Suddenly, the image of the “nation” that used so bombastically to perceive itself as the most educated and a most civilized one has ceased to exist. It stands now at the center of medieval tyranny. Amid confusion; the country remains in a pitiable and deplorable state.
The escutcheon of victory against Assad has been tarnished with mayhem. The sole merit of Arab Spring – if merit it possesses – is that it has consigned to the grave a fascist regime. This has instead of answering previous questions, has given rise to new ones.
The frost had now broken and the sudden thaw has converted the much-awaited spring into a much- hated inferno. Sadly, the remains of Syria are consumed by unruly militias and rude gangs that have taken the place of the state.
Optimistically, when Assad fled, many voiced hopeful sentiments that the new era would be dedicated to healing wounds and rebuilding the country. Yet, the decaying Syria is in a state of habitual confusion, disorder and subversion.
Superficially, and for the first impression, Syria’s dilemma seems to be the legacy of the recent war, yet a closer scrutiny corrects the first impression. The uncomfortable truth is that the current situation in Syria is nothing of novelty. The roots of primitive doctrine of anarchy and rabble stretches back to earlier times.
By way of illustration, in November 1947, only one day after the United Nations vote to partition Palestine into two states, Jewish quarters in Aleppo were ravaged by an outbreak of fanatic fury of which the authorities were connived at.
Some 75 Jews were killed and ten synagogues were destroyed. In August of that year, rioters in Damascus killed 13 Jews, including eight children. Within years, the two-millennia old community would nearly disappear from both cities.
While the Syrian debacle poses itself as a mysterious puzzle, making a brief insight to Syria’s history would help understand its state of the affair.
It is true that every epoch of history is dependent on its predecessor, yet it can, however, bring progress in its wake if it abandons old methods and seeks to a new bright one. Yet it is true too that some events in history, whose profound impacts could last for generations, have the ripple effect on certain communities. This is, body and soul, typical of Syria.
To make a journey into Syria’s ancient history is exceedingly a tedious mission and irrelevant. Yet modern Syria is the outcome of World War I, which saw the demise in 1918 of the Ottoman Empire. Traditional Syria used to be a mere loose and largely vague and undefined geographical extension than a political entity.
Under the Ottomans, Syria was split into four – at some point five – neglected Eyalets (later vilayets), which sometimes were spoken of, though inaccurately, as Pashaliks, based essentially on a city or town of somewhat considerable importance.
Each eyalet was parceled into a liwa, which in turn was subdivided into a smaller unit called kaza. This last one was in turn divided into smaller units. At the head of each eyalet/vilayet perched a Pasha appointed solely from Constantinople. The Pasha was the sultan of his time and place. Corruption, it should be noted, was the master of situation.
With Aleppo and Damascus diametrically at odds, the latter had symbolic importance for being the spiritual center of the faithful for being the hub of the Pilgrimage Route. The rest was wretched, neglected, marginalized, and largely chaotic. This played into the hands of the pasha to tighten his grip on power.
The Druzes of Sweida, the Matawlas of Mount Lebanon, and the Alawites in Latakia and its periphery enjoyed practically a kind of non-territorial autonomy. Deir Ezzor, Raqqa, Ras al-Ain, and Hasaka were not part of Syria in those days.
In consequence, Deir Ezzor was attached to Syria in late 1919, Raqqa in 1921, Hasaka, Ras al-Ain, and Amuda in 1922. The salient extending from Nusaybin extending eastward across Stream Safan up to River Tigris, known as Duck’s Beak, including Derik and Ain Diwar, were finally annexed in 1930.
An abrupt convention dated 1920 pertaining to Syrian- Iraqi border that favorably suited wider French schemes, but would have partitioned Mount Sinjar, was superseded by a new one, much favoured by Sir Henry Dobbs, the British High Commissioner in Iraq, was signed in 1923.
However, it was not until 1932, when the border was finally fixed after the dispute had been referred to the League of Nations for arbitration. To know how politically the issue was motivated, the report of the border commission was presented to the League’s council in the same session that the admission of Iraq to the league was discussed.
In the north, the problem was more grievous since no border had ever existed between the north and the south. Arbitrarily, however, the Baghdad Railway was in the main given a considerable importance in separating localities which always represented compact socio-economic units.
The irony was that when the French and the Turkish sides signed the Ankara or the Franklin-Bouillon Agreement in October 1921, which laid the grounding for forging the border, French forces had not yet set feet on the Kurdish north which was now made de facto part of Syria.
Since fixing boundaries was mainly part of a territorial exchange elsewhere, the wishes of the local populations were put on the back burner. Chiefly, this justifies the arbitrary character of the border, which failed to convey any meaningful connotation.
Additionally, the vague phrasing and lack of precise geographical references that could help trace or erect monuments marking boundary line on the ground was another evil. Yet the story had another dimension, which further complicated the picture. Nationalist Turks made the reclamation of Kurdish localities – now in Syria – the driving force for the National Pact.
Ad hoc, the West offhandedly floated ideas and in the consequence devised schemes for the actual partition of the ailing and aging Ottoman Empire, but none of their schemes paid attention to the claims or rather grievances of the former inhabitants of the collapsed caliphate.
When the Ottomans quitted Syria, the Sultan’s former possessions were pell- mell hustled into a single high functionary of State, on top of which radical Arabism so obstreperously perched. Faisal ibn Hussein was enthroned a vassal of an Arab caliph centered in Hijaz. Mind-blowing, less than three years later, he would be crowned in Iraq.
To elicit the facts of the case, malice is the fact that lies at the core of the Syria’s main chronic illness. The most pronounced feature of Syria’s “sacred” borders is caprice, purely a prying one. The new situation looked strange, shabby and scruffy.
People were driven to forcibly changed their cultural, social, linguistical, historical, and environmental cynosures. These newly added fringes were of no importance to Damascus.
The unceasing problem that arose without any proper solution, is that within the body there existed incohesive groups that were not akin in creed, race, language, social customs, cultural traditions, or political aptitudes.
Presently, with nearly 17 different ethnicities, religions and sects, which hardly have shared values, Syria, failing to adopt a coherent policy, finds it hard to be a cohesive country. The clash of ideas, social and cultural habits adds evil to the problem. The French exploited these contradictions and divisions. They, therefore, established a kind of federated states.
The French mandatory authorities adamantly sought to nip in the bud any prospect of religious or ethnic friction that could rise among the new peoples settled on the Syrian soil. Success was not always the master of situation as the abrupt character of the border stirred anti-French feelings.
In stark contrast to Iraq where the three marked provinces of Basra (predominantly Shiite), Baghdad (predominantly Sunni), and Mosul (predominantly Kurdish), were glued together, Syria’s case was much more complicated than Iraq’s.
Quite conversely, Syrian peoples, who were driven into a corner, did not represent a distinct nation; a separate people. Each group rather represented a distinct community.
Strange it may seem, yet this is quite the logic that gives reason to the non-existence of an inclusive Syrian national identity. Lacking any sense of collective memory, Syria’s impromptu invention like a house of cards failed to give shape to any sense of converging theme.
Slight – if any – change brought with it the Arab Government in Syria. The case of Jafar Pasha al-Askari- a Turkish officer who was captured by the British in Libya, interned in Cairo, and released at his request to fight the Turks on the side of the British is significant case in point. In 1918, he was appointed governor of Aleppo.
Later, on the expulsion from Syria of King Faisal in 1920, al-Askari would go to Iraq where he was to assume a new role in the Iraqi politics. This highlights the elasticity of Syria’s identity, and the absurdity of its politics.
The short-lived Arab kingdom did not excite the interest of Syrians. This could be discerned from the fact that only some 300 people responded to the call to arms made by War Minister, Yusuf al-Azma, who called on people to put up symbolic resistance to the French troops in Maysaloun in July 1920.
Syria’s strategic position has been its poisoned chalice. It could arguably be said that Syria, since times immemorial has been a battle ground between different competing regional and global powers. Yet in modern times, Syria distinguishes itself as being the exporter of Jihadist ideology.
While it is thought that Syria brought the Muslim Brothers thoughts from Egypt in late 1930s, Syria precedes Egypt in the arena. Suffice to say that in 1911 certain Izzadine al-Qassam, a Sunni sheikh from the coastal city of Jableh, rallied hundreds of fighters to embark on a Jihadist adventure against the Italians in Libya, voluntarily pledging himself to the Ottoman cause.
While success did not come al-Qassam’s way from the start, the idea of holy war would shape the Middle eastern politics in the decades ahead. The murder of the harbinger of the Syrian Jihad in Palestine some 24 years later, would serve as a turning point in the field. The fabulous tales of his martyrdom would later inflame the religious zealot of Salafist Syrians against Israel.
Yet, the post- independence period was marked by the shattering struggle between the Sunni Muslim Brothers and the “atheist” Communists, from one hand, and later with more ferocity between the Muslim Brothers and the “Nusairian” Alawite Baathists, from another.
In both cases, the struggle gave rise to the notion of Takfir since both Alawites and Communists were deemed “enemies of God.” This gave in the end the license to mass murder. The diffusion of Pan-Islamic ideas had a most salutary effect on the Jihadist propaganda to this day. Soon, it would backfire.
The Muslim Brothers in the person of Marwan Hadid gave the global Jihad a Syrian perspective. The carnage against Alawite cadets in Aleppo’s artillery school in 1979, was a watershed in the history of the struggle, and a turning point in the that of the country as a whole. It bisected Syria into two battling fronts.
More broadly, not only in Iraq, Syrian Jihadists made the bulk of foreign fighters in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda’s main theorists and exponents were Syrians. Abu Khaled al-Suri could be cited as a case in point.
From the get- go, the duality of pan- Arabism and pan-Islamism precluded the formation of Pan-Syranism. Instead of giving it priority, it made it a triviality. The rift widened exponentially.
Since its foundation, Syria, owing to many reasons, never presented a compact unity. Upon dislodging the Ottomans from Aleppo in 1918, a major problem that encountered the British authorities in the city and elsewhere was to restore to Armenians their houses and properties, which had been taken during the war.
Relatedly, the desert pursuit by Bedouin mobs of Ibrahim Hanano – a prominent Kurdish leader who had unfurled the banner of revolt against the French in Idlib – who ended up being robbed and stripped of his personal belongings and clothes under the tent of a tribal chief in east Hama in July 1921, is quite telling and gives clue.
To serve justice, it was only the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), founded by the Lebanese politician, Antoun Saadeh, who, advocated for a distinct pan-Syrian character. Yet not unlimitedly, Saadeh’s notion appealed to certain Alawite, Druse, and Christian classes.
Temporarily though, it must be admitted, Hafez Assad arrested the decay of Syria. But the seeds of discord and dissension could not be contained and were always ready to bloom. The waning since 2012 of the central power, and its eventual demise in 2024, opened the pandora’s box.
Syria’s new identity under Ahmed al-Sharaa sets it in a medieval context. Unvarnished, this puts the “the cradle of civilizations” back to square one, just as the French did a century ago.
Needless to say, when decayed states collapse, new ones grow on their ashes. Quite like the unreformed Ottoman Empire, Syria’s decline arises not only from the loss of territory but from being indifferent to, and unperturbed by the suffering of its own subjects.
Paradoxically, Syria – a successor state to the crumbled Ottoman Empire – seems crumbling with all convenient speed and intent, into its own successor states. This is the bottom line.
