Walking through the burned-out shell of the British embassy in Libya in the autumn of 2011, I was asked by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen what I thought the future would hold for Muammar al-Gaddafi’s Syrian counterpart, Bashar al-Assad. I said I didn’t see how he could survive the upsurge of popular rage, sparked by the brutal torture and murder of civilian protesters – including 15 young boys – by his security forces in the southern Syrian town of Daraa. I was wrong about the timing. But it turns out I was right about the principle.
Of course, if you wait long enough, any prediction can come true. At the time, I genuinely thought that Gaddafi’s fall would act as a spur to others. And in a way it did. But it also acted as a salutary reminder for dictators of the costs of weakness – and of wishful thinking for Western policymakers. Gaddafi ended up being dragged out of a drainage pipe and viciously tortured before being dispatched by a bullet to the head. Bashar al-Assad clearly decided he wasn’t going to meet the same fate – especially as no one was offering him a choice. So he doubled down on violence against his own countrymen and women, calculating that this would provoke extreme violence in return, especially if he primed it by releasing the most extreme Islamists his regime had locked up. The world’s attention would then be diverted. And amid the wreckage of the Arab Spring his form of securitised brutality would come to seem like the lesser threat in the face of jihadi savagery, then being used as a tactic by al-Qaeda and later on steroids by the Islamic State.
It worked. Assad was also helped by the ways in which the Iraqi and Libyan adventures of 2003-11 came to be seen as hubristic disasters by publics and policymakers in the West, with neither being made safe for democracy but instead for a variety of Islamist groups – political and armed – who served the interests not of Washington, London or Paris, or indeed particularly of Tripoli or Baghdad, but of Russia, Tehran and their sectarian allies.
The culmination of this process of disenchantment with so-called liberal interventionism was the US and UK decision in August 2013 not to take action against Assad for using chemical weapons (CBW) against the civilian inhabitants of Ghouta – the old orchard suburbs of Damascus. Again, I had a ringside seat – as ambassador in Riyadh this time. The remarkable thing was that for the first time since the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the West had significant Arab support to take military action against another Arab country to compel it to desist from actions of which they also disapproved. Given that this was happening against the backdrop of turmoil in Egypt and general skittishness about anything that looked like Western-backed regime change in the region, this should have been an easy win. After all, the aim was not to put boots on the ground: it was to use stand-off missiles to destroy Assad’s fixed-wing and rotary air assets which were being used to barrel bomb defenceless civilians.
Domestic political miscalculations in both Washington and London meant we backed down. President Barack Obama implausibly claimed he had never meant to imply the regime’s use of CBW would inevitably be a “red line” – and in any case had never specified what that would actually mean in practise. In the House of Commons opponents of military action pretended they were making a stand on principle. Maybe they were. But it always helps when principles cost you nothing. One result was that in the next year or so the Iranians, Russians and Hezbollah all mobilised in support of Assad, boosting both their presence and influence in Syria and Lebanon and more widely across the region. And Vladimir Putin was encouraged to believe he could get away with seizing Crimea.
That belief in the fecklessness of the West helped Assad survive another decade. Until it didn’t. And that happened because of the decision of one man – Yahya Sinwar – who believed the time was right on 7 October 2023 to launch an assault on Israel which would bring in the entire axis of resistance – as Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis and assorted Iraqi Shia militias had come to style themselves – to strike a devastating and perhaps fatal blow to Israel.
We all know how that turned out. One unintended consequence was the collapse of Assad’s regional support system. So what I and others thought would happen in or around 2011 has actually happened 13 years later, a reckoning postponed partly because of Assad’s own intransigence, but more importantly because of Western weakness and the incentives this gave to Iran and Russia to overextend themselves.
Perhaps the whirligig of time really does bring in its revenges. But – as many others are pointing out – it’s far too soon to celebrate. First, it is not at all clear that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the spearhead of the rebel drive towards Damascus, will be able to deliver stability. We have, after all, been here before. Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani – the nom de guerre of HTS’s leader – remains committed, as far as anyone can see, to an austere vision of the authentic Islamic state not that far removed from the organisation out of which he emerged, al-Qaeda. There are other groups absorbed into the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), which is currently fighting alongside HTS. These include Jaysh al-Islam and Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zengi, which committed atrocities – as HTS also did – against civilians, prisoners and non-Muslim communities during the worst days of the Syrian Civil War. They also fought against HTS itself from time to time.
They are now clashing with Kurdish formations – the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – in north-eastern Syria. The SDF themselves have US support but are loathed by Turkey, which sees them as a front for the PKK, the Kurdish nationalist paramilitaries who have been carrying out terror attacks against Turkish targets for decades. The Turks want to clear them from the border. That risks pitting the Turkish army against the US, which still has a presence there, as indeed do (or certainly did) the Russians. Meanwhile, it is still not clear what is happening in the Alawite-dominated coastal areas to the west of the Aleppo-Hama-Homs line. And the US and Israel – which has advanced forces into Syrian territory – are both striking weapons stores inside Syria as I write.
Al-Jolani has sought over the past few years to moderate his image – even wearing Western clothes for interviews. He has made reassuring noises about his commitment to a state for all Syrians – Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Druze, Christian, Yazidi and so forth. He has imposed curfews and forbidden looting or revenge killings. He has also offered terms to senior members of Assad’s regime – who are now coordinating with his representatives – in return for a peaceful transition. Does he mean all these fine words? No one really knows – or whether, if he does mean them, he can deliver.
Nor is it clear how external powers will respond. From 2013 onwards, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia and Lebanese Hezbollah all backed different factions. Turkey clearly exercises significant influence with HTS and the SNA, though it is unlikely this gives it a veto over their actions. Iran, which has been hit hardest by the Israeli response to 7 October, has every incentive to regain some ground by making life difficult for anyone who wishes to constitute a Sunni-dominated regime in Damascus to replace the Assads. And it will wish to protect its remaining assets in Lebanon, by preventing Hezbollah’s enemies there re-engineering the political system to undermine Shia dominance.
[See also: John Bew: The rise of machinepolitik]
From one perspective, this might simply reflect the enduring political realities of the region. Persia had links with southern Lebanon going back to the 17th century. From the early 19th-century onwards, even the Ottomans had problems in managing tensions between Muslims, Alawis, Christians and Druze. And those fissures remained when the modern Syrian state was born out of violence in the 1920s, with the French imposing their own often different sectarian taxonomies. Hafez al-Assad put an end to the rapid succession of coups between 1949 and 1970. But the price paid by ordinary Syrians was huge. And it became even greater when his vain and inadequate second son, after the death of Bashar’s elder brother Basil in a car crash, inherited the presidency in 2000. Both father and son ruled a state in which Alawites held the key positions in government, the security forces and the intelligence agencies, and economic patronage was distributed to Alawites and selected members of the old Sunni business elites as a reward for loyalty and complicity.
But the past is not inevitably prologue. The prize of a better Syria, wrenched from the suffocating embrace of Iran, would be a huge gain for those who want the Middle East as a whole to emerge from the shadow of endemic conflict. It would give the Lebanese too a chance at last to reorder their own state free of the threat of murderous Syrian subversion and Hezbollah intimidation. It would enable the millions of Syrian refugees currently living in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon (not to mention Europe) to return home. It would help deal with the socially destructive Syrian trade in Captagon, a methamphetamine smuggled across the region under the direction of Maher al-Assad, Bashar’s unstable younger brother, as a quick and easy source of foreign exchange.
It would also be one building block in a new regional order which the states of the region, particularly Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Cooperation Council partners, could help construct and guarantee. Such an order would thwart Iran’s ambitions to rebuild the axis of resistance. It would undermine Russia’s regional influence. It would give the Iraqi government a better chance of integrating the country’s own Shia Islamist militias into a more normal state structure. And all this would represent not just a large gain for regional peace and stability but make it possible to imagine once again what real economic integration would look like and the gains in prosperity this might offer for ordinary people everywhere.
And finally it would open the way for a new discussion with Israel about how we can collectively meet Palestinian demands for self-determination. Diminishing – even if not entirely removing – the direct Iranian threat has always been a precondition for this. Israel has done much of the heavy lifting itself over the past year, as even HTS seems to have recognised in some of its recent reported statements.
But Syria is now in the hands of Syrians who want to determine their own future. That is not something anyone could have imagined a year ago. Nor does it make Israel the master of its own destiny, as some Israelis might now imagine. Instead, it illustrates how complex and interconnected are all the challenges of the region. Crafting a strategic response has to be a collective endeavour. That will impose a huge burden on policymakers – who generally hate complexity. But if ever there were a moment to develop such a response with like-minded colleagues – and on Syria that now means the US, the French, Germans, Turks, Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis and other Gulf colleagues – it is now. It would be suitably caveated regarding the chances of success. But it would also say that this is a historic moment that we need to seize before it passes. Regional actors need to be in the lead. But the West should offer its support.
Can this be done? It was fascinating at the Doha Forum last weekend to see – for example – the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey, Iran and Iraq in their interviews and huddles trying to come to terms with the speed of what was happening on the ground. Events – to adapt Harold Macmillan’s famous observation – sometimes outpace thought.
The need for a diplomatic response is urgent, crucially taking into account everything we know about the likely posture of the new US administration. We may not be able to see the end clearly. But we may wait a long time for another such opportunity decisively to rebalance the Middle East in favour of stability and reform, and away from Iranian-backed subversion. We need to be clear about what we want, be prepared to recognise our own limitations but ambitious in seeking to harness the power of the collective. As far as the UK is concerned, this is going to be the first real test of David Lammy’s “progressive realism”. If the phrase means anything at all, it means this. It will also be a test of our capacity for real diplomacy – which is not show-boating on social media but the hard grind of meetings behind closed doors, the application of real expertise on the ground and the acceptance of risk. Are we still capable of this? We’re going to find out. Above all, this is no time to be working from home.
[See also: Could Trump secure a peace deal with Iran?]
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