Afghanistan has almost always been in the news for several decades. When it started to make global headlines in the 1980s, it enriched the journalism vocabulary with the word Afghanistanism: the art of leaving behind what is happening in your country to report events in other countries. Which is exactly what I am going to do in this edition of REFLECTIONS! We will leave behind the T-Pains, the spat between our Vice President and Lady Kemi of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party as well as the tax bills conundrum; and go over to the Middle East to discuss happenings in Syria, a nation that is almost as old as history itself.
Recent events in Syria remind us again that, ultimately, power belongs to God. Immediately I saw the CNN news flash two weekends ago that the now former rebels were advancing towards Damascus, the capital of Syria, I satisfied myself that Bashar Al-Assad’s days were numbered.
The coward who supervised the killings of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens and caused even more to flee Syria over a span of thirteen years eventually fled with his tail between his thighs.
For many years, Al-Assad ruled Syria with an iron fist, and when the Arab Spring began in Tunisia and spread like wildfire across North Africa and the Middle East, his people found an opportunity to ask that he lessened his fist.
A lengthy throwback from the Arab Spring will suffice here. It was exactly fourteen years ago this week (December 17, 2010) that the first demonstrations against authoritarianism took place in Central Tunisia catalyzed by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street fruits and vegetables vendor protesting his ill treatment by the police.
A protest movement, dubbed the “Jasmine Revolution” in the media, instantly spread through the country. The Tunisian government of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who by then had ruled the country for twenty-three years, attempted to end the unrest by using violence against street demonstrations.
He misjudged the resolve of the protesters as the protests soon overwhelmed the country’s security forces, compelling him to step down and flee the country on January 14, 2011. He spent the rest of his life in exile in Saudi Arabia until his death in 2019.
Immediately Tunisia fell under one month of protests, and as if on cue, protesters in other countries governed by dictators, commenced their protests. The Tunisian train first arrived Egypt, where Hosni Mubarak, was even more brutal.
As to be expected, he applied force and violence against the protesters. When the demonstrators would not budge, the military, the most powerful institution in Egypt, did the unthinkable, siding with the protesters thus effectively ending the nearly three decades’ reign of Mubarak.
The former Egyptian strongman did not enjoy the blessing of fleeing the country as he was tried for killing the protesters and for corruption. Even on a stretcher, as he suffered heart attack, he was wheeled into court and prison. He eventually died in intensive care in 2020.
Encouraged by protesters’ fast successes in Tunisia and Egypt, protest movements erupted in Yemen (which is still raging till now and has made the poorest Arab country ungovernable), Bahrain (protests were brutally crushed following support from the armed forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), Libya (where it turned into an armed revolt and led to the ouster and death of the strongman of Tripoli, Muammar al-Qaddafi), and Syria (the subject matter of our discourse today) in late January, February, and March 2011 respectively.
So, when the train of the uprising got to Syria, Assad refused to learn from history as he responded with greater brutality, maiming, torturing and killing his people. At some points, he applied chemical weapons against his subjects. His surprised response provided an opportunity for the fierce resistance that followed, fueled by international condemnation of his poor handling of the crisis.
By the August of that year, a major opposition to the Assad regime was born in Istanbul, Turkey. This was rapidly followed by the militias which enlisted in the fights, and things degenerated into ethnic violence as he leaned more on his minority ethnic group Alawite to stay in power. He was propped up by Russia and China to stave off international interventions.
But situations worsened into a full blown civil war. For a while, it appeared as if he would have an upper hand and that the opponents would backdown. But the determination of the oppositions, the infiltration of protests by the jihadists, and the terrorists provided the fuel needed to prosecute a long drawn conflicts on all fronts.
When Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, fell into the hands of the rebels in 2013, Assad lost major control of the country. For many years, Damascus and a few other cities had become the only parts of the country under his rule. To prop up his dying empire, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah sent both overt and covert military forces to fight against the Islamists. Iran and Hezbollah had a secondary purpose: keep bombing Israel, their beloved perennial enemy, from a comfortable position.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar enlisted to fight against Iran’s interest, and the weakening of the government forces by defections, kept the war going for long. The ground had also been made fertile for Islamist militants to take centre stage in the country and conflict. The Nusrah Front (Jabhat al-Nuṣrah), an al-Qaeda affiliate was formed in Syria, and quickly became the most-effective fighting forces. Part of this was to counter the forces loyal to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Depending on whose side you were, Syria had become a military laboratory of sorts: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia, Israel, the United States, United Kingdom, ISIS, Nusrah Front, and other interests in the region fought to have control over the country. When the Nusrah Front, ISIS’ ideological enemy merged with other factions to form the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the balance of power tilted in their favour.
But two external factors led to the fall of Assad this December. One is the war in Ukraine which has started to take a toll on Russia and reduced Russian support to him. The second is the war in Gaza which has spread to Lebanon and threatened the existence of Hezbollah and weakened Iranian presence in Syria. As earlier mentioned, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah were the main supporters and defenders of the Assad regime.
In fact, by October this year, Hezbollah had pulled out its fighters from Syria to Lebanon to defend its frontlines against Israeli ground attacks in its headquarters. And following Israeli invasion of Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of Syrians in Lebanon fled back to Syria to join forces against Assad.
By the end of last month, HTS began advancing in the provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. On November 29 HTS fighters entered Aleppo’s city centre and forced government forces to withdraw from there. Next fell Hama, Daraa and Homs by 7 December 2024, effectively cutting supplies from government forces in Damascus. And Assad zipped up his luggage and fled the country he ruined terribly.
In far away Russia where he is exiled, he would be watching events in his country unfold from a distance. Initial investigations showed that he and his cohorts were on drugs as huge stockpiles of captagon, an illicit drug, were found in Damascus. You could possibly not cause so much pain, suffering, harm and death for so long and on such large scale without being high on something.
Even though the future of Syria is uncertain, gradual peace is beginning to emerge. Order is returning, schools are reopening and a semblance of normalcy returning to the once prosperous and peaceful nation. But will world leaders learn the lessons of history?
