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.
I recall being in Tahir Square during the revolution with my Egyptian activist friend and translator/adviser, when shouts echoed across the Square ‘the beards are coming, the beards are coming!’. The Islamists marched into the Square in formation. They were friendly one-to-one but proceeded to forcibly separate young men and women sitting together, and some violence broke out.
Western security institutions caught on to all this, and in Syria revived the 1980s Afghan strategy of secretly funding Islamists; Al Nusra/HTS in this case. Funding & arming Islamists that the US had previously branded ‘Al Qaeda’ or ‘ISIS’ was of course controversial, but considered necessary to finally oust Assad; hence the epithet ‘moderate armed Islamist militias’.
We shall see how the HTS-led government governs, but so far the omens are worrying. It is not really surprising that the West would want to put a bit of a shine on the new HTS-led government, however. At least for the time being.
Notwithstanding, an even bigger worry (for a wider war) relates to Turkiye-Israel relations. Apo Ocalan is still in prison and the Turkish government fears a unified Syrian-Iraqi Kurd-led uprising in Turkey, or at least a vulnerability to outside forces. The US and Israel support Kurdish militias in Rojava, Syria, (and in the neighbouring Kurdish administration in Iraq) and Israel has invaded southern Syria, moving north. Russia has reportedly taken over two ex-Syrian army bases in the north too.
Not all Kurds in Turkiye support the PKK or YPG, of course, but the historic dominance of Kurds in Eastern Turkiye is often glossed over. I recall sitting in an outside café by historic Van Lake in blistering heat, and watching Star Trek on TV dubbed in Kurdish. Diyarbakir, Kars, Van and Urfa are all significantly Kurdish-speaking cities. Minority rights have improved in recent years.
Concluding, one wonders if the security elites supporting HTS, in Turkey, the US and Israel (to name but a few), really have a grip on the dynamics. When the longer-term ‘cui bono’ question is asked, I can’t help thinking of other Western adventures; Afghanistan (China), Iraq (Iran), Somalia (Turkey & UAE), Yemen (Iran), Libya (Turkey and Russia), and the French Sahel (Russia). The parallels with Iraq are particularly moot, ‘Fool you once …
* Paul Reynolds works with multilateral organisations as an independent adviser on international relations, economics, and senior governance.
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2 Comments
This is the second recent article in which you’ve made this assertion: “Western security institutions … in Syria revived the 1980s Afghan strategy of secretly funding Islamists; Al Nusra/HTS in this case. Funding & arming Islamists that the US had previously branded ‘Al Qaeda’ or ‘ISIS’ was of course controversial, but considered necessary to finally oust Assad…”
Where is this coming from? Al-Jolani fought against the US in Iraq, and indeed was a prisoner of the Americans for some years. IS didn’t exist in 2011. Nusra didn’t exist. HTS certainly didn’t.
The US did fund and arm some armed opposition groups in Syria, focussing on the relatlively secular groups in the South. (Turkey and Qatar focussed more of their funding to more Islamist groups in the north.) The US kept reigning in the groups it was backing, which is one of the reasons they were gradually displaced by more hardline groups that didn’t need rely on the US for support.
In 2013 the US had the perfect opportunity to overthrow Assad, and they didn’t take it.
By the time IS became more powerful, or even Jabhat an-Nusra, the US had had many, many opportunities to back alternative groups (yes, some of them Islamist). Why on earth would you say they would choose to back the two with the most explicitly anti-American agendas?
Syria is seeing mass celebrations in the public squares of its major cities. Syrian rebel leader Abu Mohammed al Jolani says Western fears about future instability are unnecessary, while at the same time opposition fighters are seeking out and executing former Syrian secret police in Damascus, Latakia and elsewhere in Syria
Syria’s arab spring began in 2011 as a widespread popular uprising against the Assad regime. However, as with so many of the revolutions inspired by the earlier events in Tunisia , none of the countries calling for democratic change have been able to avoid a return to autocracy or instability Tunisia to Syria: Instability prevails in all Arab Spring countries
Tunisia and Egypt were almost exclusively internal affairs without the involvement of outside counties. Libya was subject to a UN ordered no-fly zone that ultimately led to bombing and the fall of Gaddafi. Yemen has been ravaged by civil war and Saudi bombing.
Syria’s democratic revolution was quickly overtaken by rival groups and their supporters from around the region. US President Obama announced in 2011 that Assad must go and imposed far reaching sanctions. Whether military intervention in 2013 would have made a positive difference we cannot know, but it was rejected by the UK parliament and Obama made a deal with the Russians for the destruction of chemical weapon stockpiles in Syria instead, that did little to stop the killing.
The best that can be done now is to give the Syrians space to figure out the best way forward with the help of UN humanitarian and governance advisors and minimal inteference from other countries beyond financial and economic assistance.