December 26, 2024
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Why Syria Remains Ungovernable
Assad’s ouster hasn’t erased the deep social and religious divides.
By: Hilal Khashan
Syria was for centuries a meeting place for disparate civilizations and cultures, turning it into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse countries in the Middle East today. This history of fragmentation resulted in deep-rooted social and regional divides, which stand as insurmountable obstacles to building a political society capable of decision-making on a national scale.
But the leader of the insurgent group that earlier this month toppled the regime of Bashar Assad has painted a different picture of the country’s past. Immediately after Hayat Tahrir al-Sham entered Damascus, Ahmad al-Sharaa began conducting interviews with Western officials and media outlets in which he repeatedly and falsely alleged that Syria’s history was an example of coexistence and commitment to institutional rule. These remarks are consistent with his attempts to reform the image of HTS itself, which he renamed in 2017 from al-Nusra Front, a jihadist movement he founded in 2012. He also recently abandoned his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, as he worked to secure the group’s removal from international terrorism lists, adopting a moderate political approach and reassuring Syria’s diverse opposition groups and various concerned international parties about his intentions. But the country’s history of disunity and fractiousness makes it doubtful that al-Golani will succeed in charting a peaceful path for Syria’s future.
History of Sectarianism
Syria’s current population is estimated to be roughly 24 million, though no official statistics have been collected since the outbreak of the 2011 uprising. Sunni Arabs constitute 60 percent of the population, while Alawites, Kurds and Turkmen each make up 10 percent. The remaining population is made up of various other religious and ethnic groups including Druze, Christians, Shiites, Armenians, Yazidis and Assyrians. After the civil war began, about one-third of the country’s population, mostly Sunnis and Christians, was displaced, as the Syrian regime sought to fundamentally alter the country’s demography to its favor.
Since its independence in 1943, Syria has had nine successful military coups (seven carried out by Sunnis and the last two by Alawites) and 22 failed ones (conducted mostly by Sunnis but also by Druze, Alawites, Shiites and others). This pattern eventually weakened the Sunnis’ domination of the military, paving the way for the Alawites (including the Assad family) to control the country’s political and military institutions. But even before the establishment of present-day Syria, it had a long history of rebellion against the ruling authority. Between the 1940s and the early 1960s, competing ideological, religious and ethnic groups shaped the political landscape in which the army played a decisive role. Public demonstrations and strikes were also key parts of Syrian politics.
In 1954, Syrian strongman Adib Shishakli, who grabbed power in a 1949 coup, launched a bloody campaign against the Druze – who had received weapons from the Hashemites in Iraq and Jordan – in the province of Sweida. Like the Hashemites, the Druze (who had strong ties to the British) supported a scheme to unite Syria with Iraq and Jordan to establish a pro-Western, pan-Arab political entity north of the Arabian Peninsula. The close-knit Druze community has distinct customs, traditions and culture. When it comes to Syria’s political dysfunction, Druze leaders have adopted a policy of neutrality, which has created an impression that they are unconcerned with the state of Syrian politics. Since the start of the Syrian war, opposition groups, especially Islamist ones, have paid little attention to groups like the Druze, but this wasn’t the case for the Syrian regime. Former President Hafez Assad did not trust them, shrinking the Druze-majority Sweida province from 11,000 square kilometers to 6,000 square kilometers and cutting it off from the outside world. And in the last year of Bashar Assad’s rule, the Druze initiated an uprising in which they raised the Druze flag.
Meanwhile, the Kurds have also faced oppression since the early 1960s. In 1962, Syrian authorities stripped 120,000 Kurds of their Syrian citizenship in a population census conducted in Hasakah province. However, when Assad pulled the Syrian army out of Kurdish areas in 2012 to deal with the uprising, the Kurds were able to establish the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. The Kurdish Democratic Union Party declared that Arabs and Assyrians could also live in the autonomous region and join the Syrian Democratic Forces, even though the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) dominated the SDF.
Arab Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, considered Kurdish civil and political society separate from their own project to Islamize the country. They concluded that total elimination of the Kurdish movement was unavoidable, as any space for Kurdish freedom and independence would harm their efforts to control Syria. On the Kurds, the views of the Islamic coalition that overthrew the Assad regime do not differ from those of the Islamic State, which was on the verge of defeating the Kurds in Kobani before the U.S. intervened in 2014.
Power and Prejudice
Many Syrians hold deep prejudices that drive their attitudes and behavior toward other Syrians. Their biases focus on regional, religious and sectarian differences, as well as skin tone and family origin. The gap between the city and the countryside fuels this disharmony between social classes. Urban residents do not know much about rural people, viewing them as crude and unrefined, driven by the impression that they are illiterate, backward people who live in tents. Many city-dwellers refuse to wed their daughters to young men from the countryside, whom they describe as violent and naive peasants.
Many Syrians hold other Syrians responsible for the state of the country, lodging accusations about their liability for the war in a way that reveals latent racism and prejudice. They often disagree over who has the legitimate right to represent the Syrian people.
The roots of this class struggle go back to the practices of the Baath Party in the 1960s, specifically during the rule of Hafez Assad, when the state was, at least in theory, biased toward workers, peasants and other low-income people. The Baath Party predicated its legitimacy on the rural population, which benefited from its rule due to the privileges it received from economic socialism.
After the Assad family rose to power in 1970, the Alawites tightened their grip on state institutions, imposed their hegemony on the armed forces and intelligence, and suppressed the opposition in a way that Syria had never experienced before. Hafez Assad used the Alawites to build his political system but did not seek to make them prosperous, knowing their loyalty to the regime was predicated on their economic dependency. His grandfather even asked French authorities not to grant Syria independence because the Alawites refused to be included in a country dominated by Sunnis, who consider Alawites infidels.
Following Bashar Assad’s accession to power, the Syrian regime’s economic policy shifted toward a social market economy and economic liberalism. Services were subsequently reduced in the countryside, which became marginalized and poorer than ever before, triggering a rural revolt against Assad’s regime. The Syrian civil war, which killed 800,000 people and destroyed the country’s infrastructure, was the culmination of these social divides. It aggravated the contradictions in Syrian society, intensifying the displacement, fanaticism, rejection and bullying of outsiders. The uprising’s failure rested on the widespread belief that rural Syrians Islamized and militarized the rebellion, making them alone responsible for its defeat.
The Syrian opposition that emerged after the uprising failed to form a comprehensive national project. It could not offer Syrians hope for security, freedom, dignity and social justice, and the subsequent fragmentation enabled the Islamists to take control of the areas captured by the Free Syrian Army. The opposition relied on external support as an alternative to a unifying national message. It did not live up to the aspirations of the uprising and failed to produce a national leadership. Instead, it became captive to foreign countries’ machinations and contradictory policy objectives.
Murky Future
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s record at the local level indicates it will have trouble building a national government that can accommodate Syria’s religious, ethnic and political diversity. In its rule of Idlib, the group did not show any real commitment to political pluralism. It had some success in establishing the so-called salvation government and holding a comprehensive constitutional conference. However, these democratic processes have never been open and participatory. Al-Golani claimed power even though he did not hold an official government position. A few months before entering Damascus and overthrowing Assad, the security services of HTS violently suppressed protests in Idlib that demanded the release of detainees held by the group and an end to al-Golani’s rule.
HTS managed to create a general sense of order and relative stability in Idlib. But it seems unlikely it can replicate this result across Syria. Consolidating its control over the province was a long, often violent process, as HTS crushed rival factions and eliminated dissidents. With fewer than 30,000 fighters, it seems impossible that HTS can expand its administrative and security apparatus over all of Syria. It mobilized other factions in a loose alliance, but al-Golani’s troops cannot control all the active armed groups across the country. Indeed, the groups that have remobilized in central and southern Syria (in the provinces of Deraa and Sweida) over the past few weeks are not under al-Golani’s authority. It’s possible now that the Alawites will choose to partition Syria and rebuild an Alawite state. When Damascus fell to the opposition, regime forces evacuated their positions, which the Druze then took over. Druze authorities then held secret meetings with Israeli Druze officials, who demanded that they join Israel and oust the Sunni leaders.
The new government will now face conditions inconducive to stability and recovery. Syria’s social and economic crises will likely deepen. According to the United Nations, more than half the country’s population suffers from food insecurity. Government services had already collapsed before Assad’s ouster. There are reasons to doubt the extent of the moderate position adopted by HTS. But the most pressing threat to Syria is not Islamic extremism; it is the chaos that an opposition victory could unleash. There is a real danger that the country will slide not only into open conflict between armed groups but also into countless individual acts of revenge and bloody score-settling. There is not much that would then stop the situation in post-Assad Syria from spiraling out of control.
