March 2021 will mark the tenth anniversary of the Syrian war. The bulk of the fighting ended in 2017, but Syria continues to suffer.

The people, those outside Damascus and Latakia especially, live on the edge of famine, and the country is completely devastated. No reconstruction has occurred, and half the population has been displaced. Russians, Hezbollah and Iranians intervene to police the stabilized rural areas while Turks and Americans help keep Damascus’ authority in check, by continuing to occupy areas of the country.
President Bashar al-Assad has managed to maintain his position, but he controls a devastated country where half of its citizens are displaced, refugees or exiled. What passes for a negotiation process at United Nations is deadlocked: Russia and China insist on protecting the Ba’athist government in Damascus while western powers refuse to lift sanctions to facilitate reconciliation and reconstruction until President al-Assad resigns.
Meanwhile, small wars, small conflicts continue in the last remaining areas still held by the opposition in the northern region of Idlib. Russians, Americans and some Islamist militias are also targeting Islamic State remnants in the east. The main part of the war ended in 2017 with the pushback of various rebels and Islamists from Aleppo and the gradual collapse of the Islamic State core. Yet, all the protagonists, weak or strong, remain in Syria.

Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan. UN Photo/Mark Garten

The Ba’ath Party and President al-Assad have certainly survived. They may even have beaten enormous forces pitted against them against all odds. But the country of Syria and the Syrian people have lost.
The various estimates which generally speak of about 500,000 killed and some 12 million refugees (over half of the 2011 population of 21.8 million) are credible. While the fighting has become limited to areas in the north – near the Turkish border and around Idlib, the devastation of towns and villages, not to mention the infrastructure from hospitals to water supply and power generation facilities, has been widespread.
The majority of those Syrians who have remained have endured conditions of extreme poverty. Given the extent of disruption of daily life, the economy has collapsed while the black market thrives. Syria is confronting a situation of such entropy that the Covid-19 pandemic has had little impact: what fragments are left of the healthcare system cannot cope with managing the spread of the virus, let alone enforce social-distancing or mask-wearing. The coronavirus aside, Syria has continued to endure a virus of a different kind throughout the entire duration of its internal war, as Israel has continued launching almost daily air attacks over Syria to target Iranian and Hezbollah positions.

The Protests
The Syrian riots of 2011 had more economic than political goals in mind. And this makes the resulting war all the more tragic; because at the heart of the protest were demands of reform rather than regime change and inter-sectarian intolerance. Bashar al-Assad partially opened the economy to ‘free markets’ early in his presidency. But inequality grew sharply: five per cent of the population controlled some 50% of Syria’s wealth. High unemployment and favouritism stifled economic opportunities for the youth and the middle classes.

Syrian Girl. Five percent of the population controlled some 50% of Syria’s wealth. (UN Photo/Mark Garten)

Moreover, by 2011, Bashar al-Assad had lost legitimacy in the rural areas, one of the main areas of non-sectarian support for the Baathist government which engaged in an intense land redistribution program during the years of Hafez al-Assad.
The failure of the regime in the economic, political and national spheres determined the conditions for the revolt.
The protests that flared up in every corner of the country were unprecedented and took Assad himself by surprise; he reacted both with force (repression and arrests) and with some concessions such as the repeal of the emergency law. Rather than the poor majority, Bashir al-Assad seemed more interested in nepotism, appointing close family and fellow Alawites to Syria’s top posts. His father, in contrast, was a more astute manager, who promoted the co-optation of other the Sunni bourgeoisie throughout the country. Nonetheless, the Ba’ath had suppressed political discourse for decades, deploying pervasive political repression through the secret police, the Mukhabarat, which had effectively silenced any alternative political movement.

The image of President Bashar Assad is riddled with bullets. (AP)

The Syrian Ba’ath party, moreover, served a combination of political and ethnic interests, revolving around Assad’s own Alawite minority, which represents only 10% of the country’s population. Few outsiders (i.e., Sunnis or Christians) have been permitted to reach key positions.
Bashir had tried to reform Syria early in his presidency only to run into the Alawi-Ba’ath elite wall. Some analysts believe that in many ways, Bashir al- Assad is himself a prisoner of the Ba’ath and the Alawi minority. He could not resign in 2011. And he cannot resign in 2021. Thus, even after ten years of war, Assad remains a hostage to the threat of dissent, from his own Alawite sect (who would replace him with a more ‘determined’ figure) as well as from the Sunni majority and the young rebels who have fought for change, even though this change did not necessarily imply progress.(A.B.)

The definition of civil war has never quite applied in the case of Syria. Ever since the armed insurrection against the Assad government began in 2011, it has never been a clear case of insurgents fighting against the ‘regime’.

Rather, the war quickly degenerated into a series of ethnic, confessional and national conflicts of which the ‘Sunni vs. Shiite’ was but one. There were also the Kurd vs. Turkey, the Saudi and UAE backed rebels against the Syrian Army, the various offshoots of so-called ‘al-Qaida’ obstructing ISIS, the Turks against the Syrians, Sunni ‘radicals’ against Hezbollah, and a myriad of overlapping combinations thereof. More significantly, the objectives of much of the fighting that has occurred rarely concerned Syria itself.

Turkish soldiers in Syria.

Turkey and Qatar backed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) economically and militarily. But elements of the FSA then split to join other fundamentalist formations such as the Syrian ‘branch’ of ‘al-Qaida’, the al-Nusra Front and the like (Jund-al-Islam, Ahrar al-Sham) backed by Saudi Arabia. The latter, while sharing much of the underlying ideology of ISIS, funded al-Nusra which fought against it, triggering wars within wars, reflecting the interests by proxy of those who were funding the conflict. There was no apparent care about achieving military victory as long as the war continued. The Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, the Americans and the Israelis would have succeeded in their chaotic goals if not for the intervention of Russia and Iran in 2015.
Unlike Libya, where the ‘Arab Spring’ produced a formal political division splitting the country in two, Syria in 2021 remains officially led by the Baathist government in Damascus headed by President Bashar al-Assad. Yet, in many ways, Syria is more divided than Libya. The use of the term chessboard is not a cliché in describing it. It is a multidimensional chessboard where several powers are playing geopolitical games.

To Achieve a Compromise
It’s unclear what political solutions Washington might propose for Damascus, but no doubt American companies will be itching for lucrative reconstruction contracts, which are now slated to favour Russian, Iranian and Chinese firms. That said, Washington may also manage to achieve a compromise, allowing the Assad government to continue but intensifying its activity with the excuse of fighting what’s left of ISIS. The so-called ‘caliphate’ has been reorganizing in areas of Deir ez-Zor and the Anbar Desert near the Iraqi border.

Russian Tu 22M3 group airstrike in Syria.

The targeted assassinations of high-ranking Ba’ath Party officials, and particularly that of General Firas Al-Nasaan, director of the Syrian Air Force Secret Service (reputed to be the highest level of Syrian military intelligence) suggests that ISIS, or other rebels, have been able to penetrate Damascus’ most powerful circles. Russia and Iran certainly contained the onslaught from the various rebel forces, but they failed to eliminate them. Nevertheless, it would not be cynical to suspect that ISIS, as did the mujahedin in Afghanistan in the 1980s, is encouraging the Russians’ failure and the Syrian government they have kept afloat. A stronger Iranian and Hezbollah presence would benefit the Russians tactically, but it’s unclear just how much of Tehran Moscow might be willing to tolerate in Damascus. Still, given the considerable economic considerations, from sanctions to low oil prices, generating tensions in the Islamic Republic (complicating its efforts to support key regional allies), it would be unrealistic to expect more forces to help al-Assad’s forces. That is, unless, China were to help finance a wider Iranian military operation.

US troops convoy in Syria.

As of 2021, the wider war between the Syrian government and the various rebel forces has ended. Or, mostly ended, as there are ongoing skirmishes in the north-western region affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the areas east of the Euphrates, where US forces are supporting the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in their fight against the Islamic State/ISIS.
While the direct military confrontation between the various rebels and the regular Syrian army may have subsided, Syria itself is not at peace. There has been no direct accounting for the war, and the conditions for a resumption of violence remain. There has been no reconciliation process, and the economy remains in a shambles. Most significantly, Damascus does not have full sovereignty over its territory. (A.B.)