Category Archives: Op-eds

Although they cannot be condoned, public executions of former Syrian secret police in Damascus, Latakia and elsewhere in Syria, following the new HTS-led government, are not exactly unexpected.

When Hafez Assad came to power with the support of the Soviet Union in the 1960s, Moscow helped the new regime set up the brutal, hated Mukhabarat secret police. The Mukhabarat , led mostly by Alawites, were known not only for mass torture and ‘disappearances’ to keep Hafez Assad in power, they also had their tentacles all over the Syrian military and economy, deploying widespread ‘confiscations’. His son Bashar Assad, reportedly considered reigning in the Mukhabarat for economic reasons, but had little chance to succeed. He became dependent on the Mukhabarat to stay in power, who increased their murderous, torturing spree under his rule, and further alienated the population.

Saddam’s equally murderous and hated Mukhabarat in Iraq was also developed with Soviet assistance, as were the internal terror institutions of Algeria, set up under Chairman Boumédiène.

I am intimately acquainted with these three Soviet-initiated security institutions myself, having been arrested and imprisoned pending execution in the Algerian garrison town of Blida at the age of 19, having been dragged from my car and cuffed by the Syrian Mukhabarat on the Jordanian border for no apparent reason in the 1990s, and having shockingly located the hidden Iraqi Mukhabarat torture HQ in Basra, after giving chase with my Close Protection Team, in 2003.

Hatred of the Mukhabarat helped fuel the genuine ‘Arab Spring’ Syrian uprising from 2011, but as with the Tahir Square uprising in Egypt, and revolts in Tunisia and Libya, the young, sometimes EU-facing pro-democracy ‘moderns’ were soon swept away by the more grounded Islamists. In Egypt the Brotherhood were appreciated amongst the poor for their social support.

As in many parts of the world, history is very much a political weapon in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is difficult to assess conflicts in Syria (and the British/Western interest) for this reason, especially for politicians unversed in the labyrinthine machinations of post-Sykes-Picot Syria and the Levant. Every phrase uttered is ‘controversial’.

There is much to be understood about the ancient past of the area, especially in relation to territorial claims and counter-claims made by different ethnic and religious factions today (..of widely-varying historical or archaeological solidity). These claims fog up the search for ‘academic’ historical understanding. The Eastern Med is identity politics on steroids.

However, relevant modern Syrian history begins not so much with the much-touted 1916 Sykes Picot agreement per se,  but with a series of related international agreements established between 1915 and 1923, initiated primarily after the start of WW1 due to the anticipated fall of the Ottoman Empire. These involved the UK, France, Russia, Turkiye, Armenia … and Arab & Kurdish groups who had opposed the ruling Ottoman Empire.

Syria’s borders today do reflect these international negotiations. Local ethnically Arab, Kurd and other populations had limited influence. There was a reluctance in the major-power negotiations to establish  countries or administrative regions based on ethnicity or religion, and a key result of that was the absence of a ‘Kurdish’ state, and the consolidation of several Arab states of mixed ethnic make up, and of varying denominations of the mostly Abrahamic religions.

These divisions were utilised after WW2 by the Soviets, with their anti-colonial narratives in the Cold War period. Recognising the history, they sought a ‘strong leader’ (in the colonial tradition) to hold all the Syrian groups together, by force or otherwise, who was not a member of one of the major dominant groups. In the early 1960s they cultivated a notable Alawite family, conveniently based in a Northern coastal area. By 1963 the brutal Ba’athist Hafez al-Assad, the future president, was already the primary power behind the scenes. He had received pilot training in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.