By Steve Bishop
As the former ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent, Charles Glass brings his vast knowledge of the Middle East in general, and Syria in particular, to this volume, composed of contemporaneous dispatches dating from 2011 through to 2023, tracing the progress of the war in Syria.
Glass charts the development of the initial protests of students in Dera’a, in March 2011; the outside intervention of the Gulf dictatorships, with their own agenda for Syria; the role of the United States in destabilising the Syrian state; the intervention of Turkey; the role of Russia; and the impact of Islamic State, and other jihadi Islamist factions, upon the break up of the secular balance which Syria had sustained for decades.
Glass, while describing the government of Bashar al-Assad as a “hereditary republic”, Bashar having succeeded his father, Hafez al-Assad, who came to power in 1970, also recognises the degree of stability which Syria enjoyed compared to its neighbours. Glass describes Syrians as “reconciled to a fate that was preferrable to the regime of terror they observed in Saddam’s Iraq to their east and the anarchy of Lebanon in the west.” (p.33)
After succeeding his father in 2000 Bashar al-Assad embarked upon a programme of reform aimed at loosening the iron grip of the regime established by Hafez al-Assad and introducing greater freedoms in education and communications. The security apparatus aimed at ensuring state control in a volatile region remained firmly in place however and, arguably, an over reaction to the 2011 protests fuelled further demonstrations and calls for greater freedoms.
The extent to which such protests constituted a civil war, in the usual sense however, is blurred significantly by the range and speed of external interventions aimed at taking advantage of any sign of dissent in the Syrian state. As Glass states,
“In 2012, a new armed force, calling itself the Free Syrian Army, seized many Syrian towns and parts of its main cities…its members were a mixture of idealists and opportunists…they received weapons training and command from outsiders; they had no idea what demands the foreign powers – among them the old imperialists Britain and France, as well as the United States, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar – would make of them if they did seize power in Damascus; and they did not know where their insurrection would lead the country.” (p.90)
This is at the heart of the Syrian tragedy as it unfolds in Glass’ reporting and continues to unfold today under the Hayat Tahrir al-Sharaa (HTS) regime. Whatever grievances the Syrian people may have had with the Assad government their expression and scope for negotiation was hijacked by a range of external forces, eager to restrict or dismember Syria for a variety of competing reasons.
Israel was determined to see the supply line of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, routed through Syria, cut off. Turkey was quick to take the opportunity to deliver a blow to any hopes of Kurdish autonomy. The United States and NATO powers, initially keen to see the end of Assad, became increasingly concerned about the threat of Islamic State forces, established across Iraq and Syria, and at times gravitated towards a ‘better the devil you know’ approach to the Assad regime.
For many Syrians on the ground any discontent they felt with the Assad government was quickly superseded by the prospect of a less tolerant approach to religious and ethnic minorities being displayed by the so called rebels, supported by outside forces and pursuing interests consistent with their backers, not those of the Syrian people.
For the United States, and its regional proxy Israel, the ultimate goal remained to restrain the power of Iran in the region. Glass quotes Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst and Bill Clinton’s director for Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council, as an advocate of using Syria to hurt Iran, proposing,
“…ramping up American covert assistance to the Syrian opposition to try to bleed the Assad regime and its Iranian backers over time, exactly the way that the United States backed the Afghan Mujahideen as they bled the Soviets in Afghanistan…” (p.235)
Any celebration of the end of the Assad regime in 2024 is clearly tempered by fears for the future under the Islamist rule of HTS and the influence of external players upon the formerly secular Syrian state. Competing interests continue to be at play in the struggle for the future of Syria, as Glass concludes, “the disappearance of the Assad regime may presage not so much the end of the war as the beginning of a new one.” (p.272)
The prospects for a united and peaceful Syria have certainly been destroyed by the wars of intervention waged since 2011. Any prospect of reconstruction under the Assad government, when Syria asked the UN to switch its programme of wartime humanitarian aid to one of development in 2018, was blocked by the United States.
This brake on rebuilding, combined with continued outside support for the Islamists in Idlib, bordering Turkey, helped keep discontent simmering and laid the groundwork for the HTS takeover in 2024, an outcome the West may yet come to regret.
Steve Bishop is a Liberation member.
Syria Civil War to Holy War? by Charles Glass is published by Or Books.
The views expressed in the articles published on this website do not necessarily represent those of Liberation
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