After 13 years, it seems that the civil war in Syria might be over, with news of President Basher Al-Assad overthrown by a coalition of anti-government coalition and major Syrian cities in control of the coalition. However, this victory has another fallout, that of the rise of Islamists in Syria.
The so-called Islamic Coalition in Syria is led by a coalition consisting of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which is the most prominent and formidable of the group, the Syrian National Army (SNA), which incorporates dozens of factions with various ideologies that receive funding and arms from Turkey is another coalition partner. It also includes the National Liberation Front, comprising factions like Ahrar Al-Sham whose stated aims are to “overthrow the (Assad) regime” and “establish an Islamic state governed by Sharia law.”
What complicates matters further is the fact that some members of the rebel coalition are also fighting Kurdish forces. The Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army said last week it had seized control of the city of Tal Rifaat and other towns and villages in the northern part of the Aleppo governorate.
Those territories were previously held not by Assad’s government but by another faction involved in the multi-front civil war: the Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF are largely made up of Kurdish fighters from a group known as the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG), which is considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey.
In Syria’s south, fighters from the country’s Druze religious minority have also joined the fight, who are fighting in the southern city of As-Suwayda, which borders the Daraa province, where opposition forces claim to have taken control of Daraa city.
This complicated consolidation of rebel forces leads one to wonder what will happen now, when so many ideologically different factions are partners in power, will HTS be able to reign them or will it lead to another war of spoils?
The Syrian Saga
The Syrian tragedy dates back to 1970s, when Basher’s father Hafez Al-Assad owing roots to the Alawi minority, a heterodox Shia sect that had long been persecuted in Syria and was elevated to privileged positions under the post–World War I French mandate seized control from a Baathist military junta in 1970, centralising power in the presidency.
In February 1982, Hafez Al-Assad ordered the military to put down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama with brute force. Syrian forces killed more than twenty-five thousand people there, allegedly using chemical weapons. For the regime’s opponents, Hama became a rallying cry in 2011.
With rebel forces now inside the Syrian capital Damascus, and reports that President Bashar Al-Assad has fled the country, anti-government forces appear to have brought about the end of his regime less than a fortnight after their lightning offensive began.
Islamist fighters took control of the northern city of Aleppo in late November before swinging south through Hama and Homs – areas previously under government control. In southern Syria, close to the Jordanian border, local rebels have captured most of the Deraa region, the birthplace of the 2011 uprising against Assad.
In many instances, it is reported that the Syrian military either left their posts or defected to the opposition. The initial attack was led by the Islamist militant group HTS – which has a long and involved history in the Syrian conflict. HTS is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, US, Turkey and other countries.
Who are the rebels?
HTS was set up under a different name, Jabhat al-Nusra, in 2011 as a direct affiliate of Al Qaeda. The leader of the self-styled Islamic State (IS) group, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, was also involved in its formation. It was regarded as one of the most effective and deadly of the groups ranged against President Assad.
But its jihadist ideology appeared to be its driving force rather than revolutionary zeal – and it was seen at the time as at odds with the main rebel coalition under the banner of Free Syria.
In 2016, the HTS leader, Abu Mohammed Al-Jawlani, publicly broke ranks with Al Qaeda, dissolved Jabhat al-Nusra and set up a new organisation, which took the name Hayat Tahrir al-Sham when it merged with several other similar groups a year later.
For some time now, HTS has established its power base in the north-western province of Idlib where it is the de facto local administration, although its efforts towards legitimacy have been tarnished by alleged human rights abuses. It has also been involved in some bitter infighting with other groups.
Since breaking with Al Qaeda, its goal has been limited to trying to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule in Syria rather than a wider caliphate, as IS tried and failed to do. It had shown little sign of attempting to reignite the Syrian conflict on a major scale and renew its challenge to Assad’s rule over much of the country – until now.
The United States was at the forefront of a coalition conducting air strikes on the self-proclaimed Islamic State, but it abruptly pulled back some of its forces in 2019 ahead of an invasion of northern Syria by Turkey.
Since then, the Turkish military has pushed Kurdish forces, the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State, from border areas. Russia, too, has carried out air strikes in Syria, coming to the Assad regime’s defence. Iranian forces and their Hezbollah allies have done the same on the ground, inadvertently making themselves the targets of strikes by Iran’s enemy Israel.
Iran has been a close ally to the Assad government throughout the 13-year Syrian civil war. There are reports that Iran has ordered its forces to withdraw from Syria, after the latest offensive by the coalition, this comes in the background of Moscow showing its unwillingness to support Assad amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
President Bashar al-Assad’s rule had essentially been uncontested in the country’s major cities, while some other parts of Syria remained out of his direct control. These include Kurdish majority areas in the east, which have been more or less separate from Syrian state control since the early years of the conflict.
Meanwhile, the American president-elect Donald Trump has said that the US should avoid engaging militarily in Syria, according to AP. The president-elect’s first extensive comments on the dramatic rebel push came on Saturday via his social media website, when he wrote, “This is NOT our Fight”. But how long the US remains a mute spectator in view of the emerging clout of the coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, remains to be seen.
(Asad Mirza is a New Delhi-based senior commentator on national, international, defence & strategic affairs, an interfaith practitioner and a media consultant.)