The systematic, yet also security violations committed by the Interim Government’s apparatus and its factions against Syrian civilians, particularly those from the Alawite and Druze components, continue unabated. Hardly a day passes without an incident of killing at checkpoints, kidnapping, robbery, or mass displacement targeting members of these two components. There is a policy of systematic persecution based on sectarian identity being practiced against Alawite and Druze Syrian citizens. This policy culminates in acts of killing at checkpoints and the confiscation of the right to life, and “de-escalates” to cases of “kidnapping/capture” that affect even married women, and does not end with verbal insult and humiliation, and the targeting of people’s livelihoods through measures of mass dismissal, or renewed racist decisions to arbitrarily “transfer” Alawite and Druze employees and workers from their areas to distant, remote regions, as part of a methodology of continuous tightening and fighting them in their sustenance. The authority usually claims that there is no political or sectarian motive behind these measures, and that they are merely technical steps related only to “work conditions”!
The experience of the past months under the Damascus authority (the Interim Government, or de facto authority) tells us of a wide range of massacres and violations committed by this authority and its factions against various Syrian segments, creating a dangerous division and rift within the Syrian national fabric that has become impossible to address or overcome its consequences. This is despite the continued efforts of this authority’s backers to cover up all those crimes and violations and attempt to bypass them through rehabilitation and empowerment campaigns. These campaigns aim to salvage this authority from its complete failure, grant it a new opportunity, and thereby cling to it, reject any proposed alternative, and forcibly impose it on the Syrian people. Perhaps this Arab and international embrace of the Damascus authority, despite all that has transpired, is what pushes it to adhere to a mentality of exclusion and betrayal, reject national dialogue and internal consensus, and insist on building a centralized totalitarian state controlled by the faction, with its pillars and all its joints resting upon the sheikhs and jurists of “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” (HTS). These figures secretly guide the ministers and officials, drawing on experiences in building and managing the “Islamic Emirate,”starting with the living model implemented in “Taliban’s Afghanistan” or according to the imagined model presented by Abu Bakr Naji in the “Management of Savagery” manifesto. The trusted sheikhs, considered to be the “backbone” of the “Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham” faction, supervise the implementation of its provisions in light of the “requirements of the stage,” starting with “Vexation and Exhaustion,” passing through “Management of Savagery,” and ending with the stage of “Achieving Power and Empowerment” and the completion of the Islamic Emirate’s construction!
The nucleus of the (Faction State) is clear in that it is based on Jihadi ideology, where the jurists strive to disable some “subsidiaries” of Sharia rulings according to the requirements of time and place, in favor of long-term empowerment, while adhering to the “constants” or “fundamentals” and obfuscating all of this as much as possible. Consequently, terms like “democracy,” “elections,” and “citizenship state” where everyone is equal regardless of religion or sect, are absent. A massive forgery, falsification, and circumvention of all these foundations and pillars of the modern civil state, which the Syrian people rose demanding and made immense sacrifices to achieve, occurs, naturally with the complicity of the Arab media. Because the stage is exceptional, and there is a lying in wait for the experiment, there is no harm in accepting the reality of the formation of several trends and “power axes” around the Jihadi nucleus of the state, which help in supporting and passing the message/project. These are the Turanist trends (following the path of the Grey Wolves) and the Ba’athist trends (the racist interpretation of Arab nationalism). Through these, many sectors and capabilities can be mobilized, providing the Jihadi (Faction State) with strength and immunity, in addition to attracting powers and states that openly adopt these two trends. From here, the Jihadi faction attempts to use primitive Arab nationalism and ethnic tribalism against its opponents who advocate for the national state (as well as against the Kurds and northeastern Syria and the Syrian Democratic Forces, on more than one level and on more than one front). Incitement, stirring up, and revolutionizing takes place, making the official media discourse carry a racist dimension, and calls for ethnic cleansing and threats of committing genocides and massacres become merely “points of view.” Meanwhile, “tribal calls to arms” (Faza’at ‘Asha’iriya) are promoted and sponsored to serve as a supportive base for the authority and “auxiliary forces” with which it suppresses dissenting Syrians, with an insistence on the Arab character and its prominence on every occasion, just as the former Ba’athist regime used to do when talking about the “Syrian Arab Republic,” the “Syrian Arab Army,” the “Syrian Arab Television,” and the “Arab majority” in this or that governorate. This is, of course, in addition to relying on vast numbers of “remnants” and “Shabiha” (thugs) from the cadres of the Al-Assad regimes and the creators of their cultural and media discourse, to benefit from their “Shabiha” expertise against the authority’s opponents. This is separate from the “recycling” of political and security figuresinvolved in violations and crimes against Syrians, and corrupt, plundering businessmen, and their rehabilitation to serve the authority and handle the administrative and “technocratic” issues that the faction’s cadres are still unable to comprehend and manage.
As for the Turanist trend, it enjoys direct sponsorship from the Turkish state. Through it, Ankara seeks to infiltrate the structure of the Syrian state, build its own state within the (Faction State), and influence it, so that it, and consequently all of Syria, becomes a subordinate state and a Turkish “sphere of influence.” Turkey continues to lead the factions known as the “Syrian National Army” (SNA), which it founded in 2017, and directly manages the areas it occupied in military operations in 2016, 2018, and 2019, through an administrative and educational system linked to Turkey’s interior. It insists on preventing the return of displaced Kurds to their areas and maintaining and consolidating the reality of demographic change, especially in Afrin and Ras al-Ayn. The Turkish role extends beyond the military and administrative aspects to the economic, military, and political sides. Ankara attempts to link the Syrian economy to the Turkish one, restructuring and overseeing this economy so that it becomes a rentier economy subordinate to and connected with the Turkish economy, in addition to ensuring that Syria remains an open market for Turkish goods and products, and that national industry remains stunted and weak, with no opportunity for revival and competition. On the military side, the Damascus authority appears completely submissive to the Turkish will in terms of accepting Turkish programs for the training, armament, and building of the fighting doctrine of the new Syrian army. Politically, one only needs to look at the visits/summonses of Syrian officials to Ankara after every internal or external step the government takes that shows a kind of “independence” or departure from the lines pre-drawn by Ankara.
Several “Syrias” are being formed under these circumstances. On the one hand, the HTS faction state, based on a Salafi-Jihadi ideology, which varies and “mutates” in the branches, according to need and circumstance, but tries to remain fixed on the methodology of “Empowerment” and adherence to the “Fundamentals.” On the other hand, a racist state, around which primitive nationalists and Ba’athist remnants, and the “Shabiha” of media, economy, and politics gather. This state is necessarily hostile to diversity, pluralism, and the values of citizenship, and goes to the glorification of race and the presentation of “clichés” of ethnic superiority, threatening the Kurds and others with massacres and ethnic cleansing. Finally, the state of the Turanist trend, under the supervision of Turkey, which includes warlords involved in committing crimes and violations against humanity against other Syrians, and brokers who have recruited Syrian mercenaries to fight for Turkish projects in Azerbaijan, Niger, and Libya. The loyalty of these individuals and their weapons are in Turkey’s service, and they are, in reality, a “heavy stick” that Ankara brandishes over the head of the Damascus authority. Through them, it attempts to obstruct the building of a decentralized Syrian state for all its citizens and prevent any national consensus outside the Turkish will and vision, which is based on considering Syria a “province” subordinate to Turkey, taking its orders from the Sultan’s seraglios at the Beshtepe Palace in Ankara!
