Assad's Hollow Crown: A Journey through Regime-Held
Syria
by Jonathan Spyer
The Jerusalem Report
May 9, 2017
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Originally
published under the title "Assad's Hollow Crown." All photos by author.
A military
checkpoint, Damascus, Old City.
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The mortar shells
came early in the morning. At about 5. At regular intervals. Solemn and
sinister. They were a reminder of how close it all was. We were in the
old city of Damascus. There was still fighting in Jobar, about two
kilometers away. The rebels had also counter-attacked from the east, from
the suburbs in eastern Ghouta, in the previous week. A shell had landed
in the precinct of the Umayyad Mosque. This was not in accordance with
the line being promoted by the regime, according to which the rebellion
was on the verge of defeat. But there it was.
The old city was
tense, behind a veneer of strained normality. There were checkpoints
every hundred meters or so. These were maintained not by the army, but by
the National Defense Force (NDF), an Iranian-sponsored paramilitary force
created to fill the gap presented by the Assad regime's lack of loyal
manpower. Young men mostly, with a sprinkling of older types and a very
few girls. Supervised by Mukhabarat officers with pistols in their belts.
They were suspicious of foreigners. There had already been a number of
suicide attacks by members of the jihadi organizations in
regime-controlled areas.
The old city of Damascus has an
atmosphere of strained normality.
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For the most
part, though, the atmosphere of strained normality held. Undoubtedly,
fear of the regime played its part in the exaggerated professions of
loyalty and love for Bashar that one would hear. But there was also
justified fear of the Islamist rebels, and what their advance would mean.
And, of course, there was mainly fatigue, and the desire of people to
live in their own private circle, and willingness to cope with any
governing authority which appeared able to provide for that. The Syrian
pound had plummeted in value since the start of the war – from 48 pounds
to the US dollar in March 2011 to 625 to the dollar now. There were long
queues each morning to buy subsidized bread at the state bakeries. The
traffic was on the roads, the shops were open, pictures of the dictator
and his family were everywhere. But all was far flimsier and more brittle
than it initially appeared.
I should explain
first of all how I came to be in Damascus. I have been writing about
Syria now for over a decade. I have visited the country numerous times
since the outbreak of its civil war in mid-2011. My visits, though, were
always to the areas controlled by the Sunni Arab rebels or the Kurdish
separatist forces. This was a notable gap in my coverage. I wanted to
remedy it.
The Assad regime makes it hard for
journalists to acquire visas.
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The Assad regime
makes it hard for journalists to acquire visas. The authorities are keen
consumers of media, and keep track of the names of reporters who have
spent time among their enemies. The number of journalists who have
managed to report from both the government and rebel sides is very small.
I had tried on a number of occasions to acquire a visa, but made little
progress.
Finally, a
colleague suggested the idea of joining a delegation of foreign
supporters of the regime. With the war going its way since late 2015, the
Syrian government has begun to cautiously open up to visitors. But like
other authoritarian regimes, it prefers to welcome these in groups, and
under careful supervision.
I made contact
with the organizers of one of these delegations. The process was
surprisingly straightforward.
We met in Beirut
and then crossed the border. The tour was organized in cooperation with
the Syrian Ministry of Information, so a representative of the ministry
would be with us at all times. The participants were a varied bunch. Some
pro-Assad true believers, some younger travelers. Mainly from the West,
but a couple also from Jordan.
The Assad
supporters represented that strange axis in contemporary Western politics
where far left meets radical right. A British man on the delegation was
fulsome with praise for Assad's social welfare system. The West, he
declared, was fearful of Arab socialist regimes such as Assad's Syria and
Gaddafi's Libya coming to form an example for Western publics. And later,
"The Rothschilds control the banking system in all the world.
There's five countries where the banking system is not controlled by
them. Iran, Syria, China, Russia and North Korea."
"Syria
refused to make peace with Israel," another participant, a young
woman from Jordan, told me, "so they decided to start the war and
bring down the Syrian government. They will only allow puppet Arab
governments who do what they say – like Jordan and Saudi Arabia."
Both rebels and regime claim the war in
Syria is the result of an Israel-linked conspiracy.
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"There was
the Iraq war, of course. And then there was the war of 2006, which was
supposed to defeat the resistance. Then when this failed, they decided to
try the 'Arab Spring' instead."
This message –
that the war in Syria is the result of an Israel-inspired conspiracy
intended to foment internal unrest and split the country into enfeebled
cantons – is the central talking point of regime spokesmen. I would hear
it again and again in Syria. Ironically, I had heard a precise mirror image
of this theory from Syrian rebel commanders on the Turkish-Syrian border
a few months earlier. In their telling, the conspiracy involved a
nefarious alliance between the Iranians, the Assad regime and Israel.
In the case of
the rebels, such claims come in Islamic garb, giving them a more
contemporary feel. With the regime supporters, the justifications are
wrapped in the antique tones of the old secular Arab nationalism of the
1960s and '70s. Ironically, of course, behind the nationalist rhetoric of
Syria being the last defiant fortress of pan-Arab resistance and so on,
the Assad regime is today entirely dependent for its survival on non-Arab
forces – namely Russia and Iran.
Contrary to its Arab nationalist
rhetoric, the Assad regime is entirely dependent on non-Arab support.
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Indeed, perhaps
the most striking and immediately apparent element in regime-controlled
Syria is the yawning gap between the rhetoric of the regime, the
impression it wants to give, and the underlying reality. I'm not
referring to the gulf between the gaudy ideological proclamations and the
reality of a brutal police state. This should be obvious. What I mean is
the gap precisely between the attempt to convey the impression of a
powerful, consequential Arab nationalist regime and the fragmented,
enfeebled reality of a regime dependent on other forces both above and
below it, and controlling only a part of the territory over which it
claims sovereignty.
Syria today
remains effectively divided into six enclaves. The government controls Damascus,
the three major cities to its north – Homs, Hama and Aleppo, and the
western coastal area. There are two rebel held enclaves – Idleb province
in the north west, and parts of Dera'a and Quneitra in the south west.
The Kurds control a large area in the north east and an isolated canton
further west (Afrin). The Islamic State organization, meanwhile, holds a
diminishing area in the east and south. There is an additional
Turkish-supported rebel enclave between the towns of Azaz and Jarabulus
on the Syria-Turkey border.
The regime has
been advancing since the intervention of Russian air power on its behalf
in September, 2015. But the advance is slow, and it remains doubtful if
Assad will ever have sufficient strength to reunite the entire country
under his rule.
By itself, the
regime is very weak. The Russian contribution is decisive in the air.
Iran and its proxies are the key element on the ground. The Assad regime
from the outset has rested on a narrow base of available support. The
Iranians have trained the auxiliary forces that make up the numbers, like
the NDF that guards the Damascus old city. Teheran's proxies – Lebanese
Hizballah, the Iraqi Shia militias, the Afghan Fatemiyun and others –
play a vital role on the ground.
Without Russian
and Iranian assistance, a total regime victory is impossible. The
unanswered question at present is what the Russians want. They, above any
other force, control the direction of the war between Assad and the
rebellion against him. In the meantime, Russian paratroopers in uniform
stroll cheerfully through Damascus and Aleppo, and the regime-controlled
part of Syria has effectively become a proxy, or puppet of Moscow and
Teheran's interests.
Controlled from
above, the Assad regime is also subject to fragmentation from below.
There are over a hundred pro-regime militias active in the Syrian war.
They constitute around half of the available troop strength available to
the regime. These militias are not mere servants of Assad. Rather, they
are centers of power and resources for the men that control them. Some
are small local groups, numbering just a few dozen fighters. Others are
countrywide and make use of heavy weapons including armor and artillery.
So the
"regime" side in Syria today isn't really a single entity at
all. It is a coalition of interests, of which Assad and the power
structure around him constitute only a single part. But it is in the
interests of all these elements that the Assad regime present itself as a
single, united and sovereign force. The regime's antique Pan-Arab
nationalist rhetoric, and the echoes it finds among some elements in the
West and the Middle East are a part of this.
Aleppo
A house
destroyed by aerial bombing, Aleppo.
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We entered Aleppo
via the Sheikh Najjar industrial district in the east of the city. The
destruction wrought by Russian air power on formerly rebel-controlled
eastern Aleppo is chilling, awe-inspiring in its proportions. Whole
neighborhoods reduced to rubble and rendered uninhabitable. Moscow
employed the means of total war on the city. What remains is mostly
silence. Just a few families have returned and are living among the
ruins.
I have been in
Sheikh Najjar once before. That was in the summer of 2012, when the
rebellion had just broken into the city. I remembered it as we walked
among the desolation.
It had been
before the rebellion had taken on its definitively Sunni Islamist
character – though the signs had already been prominently there. I
remembered the constant noise, the government planes overhead, the
commanders of the long defunct Tawhid and Afhad al-Rasoul brigades in the
Shaar and Saif al-Dawli neighborhoods, the terrified civilians in the
basement of the Dar al-Shifa hospital, as the regime aircraft dropped
their bombs outside.
Dar Al-Shifa is
long since destroyed, of course. The civilians have gone too. Replaced by
silence, and ruins.
Bustan al-Qasr
neighborhood, Aleppo.
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A massive poster
of Bashar Assad and his brother Maher is mounted at the entrance to the
Aleppo Citadel. "Congratulations on your victory, O Aleppo." it
reads. Another, seen all over the western part of the city, depicts a
stern, helmeted member of the security forces and reads "Aleppo is
in our eyes. This has a double meaning in Arabic – "we are watching
Aleppo," but also "Aleppo is precious to us." This is the
way the Assad regime speaks to its subjects. A threat, lightly coated in
a sickly sweet rhetoric.
Western Aleppo,
nevertheless, appears superficially untouched by the war. The rebels,
entirely lacking in air power and with only primitive, improvised
artillery, were never able to make a serious impression on it. But the
regime's hold is narrower than it appears. Even now, the rebels are not
far from the city. They are located just north west of Aleppo in Kafr
Hamrah and Huraytan. The strained normality of the street scene in the
west of the city is punctuated every so often by deep, ominous booms of
artillery fire from somewhere not very far off. The war is not over. Nor
has it gone away.
Homs
A single highway
snakes its way south of Aleppo through regime-controlled territory, with
the rebels to the west and Islamic State to the east. At its narrowest
point, near the town of al-Sa'an, the government controlled area is just
a few kilometres wide. You must take this road to get from Aleppo to
Homs.
The devastation
in Homs is, as in Aleppo, breathtaking. Whole neighborhoods turned into
wasteland, rendered uninhabitable. Homs was one of the nerve-centers, the
heartlands of the revolt against Assad. Destroying the rebellion there
meant destroying much of the city itself. This the Russians have
undertaken and largely achieved.
Our guide in Homs
was an ebullient Alawi Syrian lady called Hayat Awad. Hayat was brimming
with vim and confidence and contempt for the 'terrorists', as she called
the rebels. But she wore a pendant around her neck, showing the face of
one of her sons who had died fighting the rebellion while serving in
Assad's army.
Destruction in
Homs city.
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Hayat trudged
with us through the endless dead streets where the rebellion had lived
and been destroyed, dispensing the official regime version of the
conflict as she did so. "They destroyed everything at the behest of
the Jews," she declared, "because the Zionists want to claim
that they have the oldest culture, but they were not able to do this because
Syria has a history 7,000 years old." We were in a Christian church
damaged in fighting between the rebels and regime in the Homs old city at
the time.
Casual
anti-Semitism of this kind is common and entirely mainstream in the Arab
world. No logic is required for it. Consider the claim: Sunni Arab jihadi
fighters in Homs had deliberately set about destroying the Christian
heritage in the area because the jihadis are in alliance with a broader
Jewish and Zionist plan to destroy non-Jewish cultural heritage in the
Middle East. This is part of a Jewish plan to pretend that theirs is the
oldest culture in the area, or the world. Such an idea is obviously
insane. It is also to be found among the mainstream of discussion in
regime-controlled Syria.
Hayat Awad
declared this in front of a small audience consisting for the most part
of people who would declare themselves progressives, leftists and
liberals in their own Western homes. Not a word of protest.
While we were in
Homs, a "reconciliation" deal was under way. The rebels were
set to leave the last neighborhood of the city under their control,
al-Waer. These agreements are part of the regime strategy to reduce the
area of the country under the control of the rebellion. They involve
laying siege to the area in question and then offering the rebels and
their supporters the option of leaving for Idleb, which is under the
control of rebel organizations. In the case of al-Waer, the rebels and
their supporters were being permitted to leave in exchange for the
lifting of the rebels' own siege on two isolated Shia villages in Idleb
province – Fu'a and Kafriya. The deal was delayed after a rebel group
attacked a convoy of civilians coming from these villages in Rashidin, at
the entrance to Aleppo, but has since been implemented.
Acres of ruined and empty houses stand
as a warning of the strength and tactics of pro-regime forces.
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Some observers of
the Syrian war consider that these deals amount to a form of ethnic
cleansing or depopulation, whereby Sunni Arab populations are being systematically
induced to leave the government-controlled area. No evidence of a clear
and consistent plan on the part of the regime or its backers has yet
emerged in this regard. Indeed, the regime continues to accept refugees
seeking to enter its zones of control from rebel areas, so claims of a
general strategy of sectarian expulsion are unproven. In Daraya,
Moadamiya, Zabadani, and Aleppo City, the evidence shows that residents
were given the choice of evacuation to Idleb or residence in nearby
regime controlled areas. But in Homs city, specifically, it is clear that
only very small numbers of civilians have been permitted to return. Some
accounts suggest that only people who actively sought to reach regime
territory have been allowed to return to their neighborhoods. Hence the
acres of ruined and empty houses stand as a warning of the strength
available to the regime and its backers and the tactics they are prepared
to employ.
In one of the
ruined houses we found remnants left by the retreating rebel fighters.
Some shell casings, and a Saudi-produced theological book about Ramadan,
entitled "Spirit of the Fast." A sort of testimony or warning
to those who might celebrate the destruction as a victory – that this
other, Sunni Arab, Islamist Syria, despite it all, is not yet destroyed.
Damascus
In a meeting with
a serving general of the Syrian Arab Army, I asked what the regime's
strategy was for re-uniting the country. The general, seated behind a
picture of his younger self with Rifaat Assad, and puffing on an enormous
cigar, responded that "No conclusion of the war can come without the
decision of 'official Syria'." This vague reply was revealing of the
large gap between the regime's proud rhetoric, and the diminished extent
of its power.
I received
similar replies to the same question from ministers in Bashar Assad's
government with whom we met in the course of our time in Damascus.
Mohammed Tourjman, information minister, said that the
"reconciliation" process and the "liberation" of occupied
areas would continue. Only "ISIS and Nusra," in his telling,
refuse to be part of the reconciliation, and these are regarded
internationally as terrorist organizations (with the implication that
they could be dealt with by purely military means). And with regard to
the de facto division of Syria, "We have absolute faith that this is
a temporary situation." All this after an introduction in which the
minister too spoke of "a plan to divide Syria into cantons, and keep
us weak, to the benefit of the Zionist entity." Again, this is a
clear declaration of intent, but the reconciliation process at least as
of now is mainly trimming the edges of the regime-controlled zone, not
fundamentally altering the balance of forces between the sides.
A poster
commemorating the death of SSNP member Naim Salim Hadad, killed
fighting Syrian rebels, Homs.
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Ali Haidar,
Minister of Reconciliation Affairs, who handles much of the practical
aspect covering the transport of rebels from "reconciled" towns
was equally vague in response to this question. Reunification will only
come, he suggested, when "foreign powers stop supporting the Syrian
organizations." No plan for how to achieve this. Haidar,
incidentally, is not a Ba'athist. He is the leader of the Syrian Social
Nationalist Party (SSNP). This party, founded in 1932, is a fascist-style
group, even down to its swastika-style emblem, which he was wearing in
his lapel during our meeting. The party's literature refers to Syrian
rebels as "internal Jews."
It is tempting
but probably superfluous to dwell on these grotesque aspects of the
Syrian government. The regime in its self-presentation openly resembles
the European totalitarian governments of mid-20th century Europe. This
holds an ugly fascination for some Europeans and other Westerners. But
the posturing and the rhetoric is mostly without weight, like a cheap tin
pendant that only from a distance resembles solid metal. Holding up this
fragile structure are a variety of other forces more deserving of
attention.
The author at
Hamidiyeh Market, Damascus.
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On our last night
in the city, a member of the delegation was threatened at gunpoint by a
drunken Russian journalist. The authorities in the area said they could
do nothing, because the man was Russian. This small episode says more
about the true state of affairs in government-controlled Syria than all
the regime's verbiage. The Assad regime's servants do not enjoy
unquestioned sovereignty even in their own capital. The regime is today
largely a hollow structure. The vigorous regional ambitions of Iran and
Russia, and the smaller but no less notable intentions of a vast variety
of pro-regime militia commanders must be factored into any assessment of
regime capabilities and intentions.
The closeness of
the Sunni Arab rebels to the regime's urban centers, and the absence of
Assad's power from almost the entirety of the country's east are further
testimony to the erosion of the regime. It is a very long way from the
days when Hafez Assad ran Syria as his "private farm," as a
Syrian Kurdish friend of mine once put it. The Assad regime cannot be
destroyed for as long as Moscow and Teheran find a reason to underwrite
its existence. But the mortar shells landing in Damascus in close
succession are an unmistakable testimony to its reduced and truncated
state. The anachronistic rhetoric of its officials and its supporters
does not succeed in disguising this reality. Assad is wearing a hollow
crown.
Jonathan Spyer, a fellow at the Middle
East Forum, is director of the Rubin Center for Research in International
Affairs and author of The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the
Israel-Islamist Conflict (Continuum, 2011).
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