When I arrived in Damascus 35 years ago, on my first visit as a foreign correspondent, I was expecting a grey swamp of dictatorial repression.
After all, this was a country under the iron grip of despot Hafez al-Assad, who, just seven years earlier, had massacred 20,000 of his people while crushing an Islamist uprising in the city of Hama.
Instead I found a capital city that – at first glance – seemed colourful and rather relaxed. Restaurants and coffee shops were full, and the customers cheery.
Mosques and Christian churches stood side by side, and the antique shops in the old city were mostly owned by Jews – an echo of the country’s long phases of religious co-existence.
True, the hatchet face of Assad glared down from billboards everywhere. But the rule seemed to be that citizens who didn’t raise their voice against the leader – the so-called ‘Lion of Damascus’ – would be allowed a measure of personal freedom.
When his son Bashar succeeded him in 2000, there were hopes that the timid, soft-spoken, London-trained ophthalmologist might usher in a measure of liberalisation. And so it seemed for a while, with cautious signals from the regime that reform was in the wind.
But the Damascus Spring was short-lived. In 2011, Bashar’s forces acted with unrestrained brutality to put down demonstrators calling for an end to the Assad clan’s tyranny, killing at least 5,000 protesters and dissidents in one year.
It was the start of a civil war in which Bashar proved himself every bit as ruthless and bloodthirsty as his father. Murder, torture, rape, mass incarcerations and military raids showing bloody disregard for civilian life kept him in power – aided and abetted by his fellow despots in Moscow and Tehran.
Opposition fighters celebrate as they burn down a military court in Damascus
The damage done to the country is indescribable. Cities and villages lie in ruins; 600,000 Syrians are dead – half of them civilians; more than 13 million people have fled their homes. It’s no wonder, then, that the flight of the loathsome Bashar has been welcomed with wild joy.
Commentators have been quick to pour cold water on naive assumptions that the country’s nightmare is over.
They point to similar ecstatic scenes following the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya eight years later. Both countries swiftly collapsed into faction-fighting, violence and anarchy.
The former head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, yesterday warned that what comes next is likely ‘a reignition of the civil war and the conflict in all its dimensions’.
We should rightly be very cautious. Half a century of dictatorship has brutalised significant sections of the population and splintered social cohesion. Black pessimism is rarely unfounded when considering events in the Middle East.
Yet as the dust settles, I feel we may just glimpse some signs of hope. Syria is not Iraq. There, regime change was imposed by the US, with no nation-building plan in place nor internal opposition capable of implementing it.
The Syrian insurgency is home grown. It may have been sustained by outside powers and contain elements that are rightly alarming to the West. However, its basic agenda – to boot out Assad – was simple and difficult to disagree with.
The rebels may be Islamists but they are also nationalists who say they want to heal Syria and make it work.
Following the fall of Assad (right), Donald Trump might do well to reconsider his thoughts that ‘this is not our fight’, writes PATRICK BISHOP
What happens when the euphoria wears off is the big question – and here, again, there are reasons to allow ourselves a little optimism.
So far, the main rebel group Hayat Tahrir-al Sham (HTS) has shown itself disciplined, effective and politically adroit. So far, there has been nothing on the scale of the wild looting we saw after the fall of the Iraqi cities Basra and Baghdad in 2003.The group has, however, sparked alarm in some quarters – not least given the support it has garnered from Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
But HTS’s leader and, for now at least, Syria’s de facto ruler, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, seems determined not to frighten the horses. He’s gone to great lengths to soften the image both of himself and HTS, abandoning his jihadi duds for a blazer and open-necked shirt for some media encounters.
He’s a casting director’s dream of an Arab rebel sheikh: handsome, noble of bearing and with the hint of a twinkle in his brown eyes.
His script for the future, as delivered in a CNN interview last week, could have come from the lips of Nelson Mandela. He owned up to his firebrand past as ‘emir’ of Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch but claimed time had mellowed him.
‘A person in their 20s will have a different personality than someone in their 30s or 40s,’ the 45-year-old opined.
The emphasis is on building strong state institutions and reuniting the country with equal rights for every citizen, regardless of sect or clan.
In a bid for Western support, Jolani has cleverly argued that Assad’s downfall is a win for everyone – apart from Russia and Iran. He emphasises that a peaceful Syria might reverse immigration flows and bring refugees back from Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe – including Britain.
It’s one of several powerful arguments that should impel the West to move quickly to stabilise the situation. Donald Trump, in particular, might do well to reconsider his thoughts that ‘this is not our fight’ and ‘the United States should have nothing to do with it’.
It’s unlikely to be the President-elect’s last word on the matter for, during his last term in office, his policy towards Syria swung sharply from withdrawal to engagement and back again. The truth is that the US – and the rest of us – have a whole pack of dogs in this fight.
For one thing, the jihadis of Islamic State, who once plunged swathes of the region into medieval barbarity, are in check for the moment – many of them caged in detention camps run by Syrian Kurds with the support of about 1,000 US troops.
But, were Trump to order the Americans home, the IS diehards could well break loose to regroup and resume their campaign of terror.
But there is something even bigger at stake. The power vacuum left by Assad’s flight has presented Trump and the West with a golden opportunity.
A stable Syria is in the interest of every well-intentioned power. With Iran deflated and Russia weak from repeated humiliations in both Syria and Ukraine, here is a chance to replace their malign meddling with positive support.
With the help of practical aid from the US and Europe, homes can be rebuilt and refugees repatriated. This could be the start of a positive partnership with Damascus, which could begin to heal the deep wounds of the past.
Trump’s ‘America First’ doctrine jostles with his desire to see his name etched in history. In time, Syria might just become a cornerstone of a broader Middle East peace, based on the 2020 Abraham Accords launched in Trump’s first presidency. This began the process of normalising relations between two of the Gulf States with Israel, only to be derailed by the October 7 massacre last year.
Although recent history might suggest otherwise, Syria is not doomed to endure endless inter-community strife. The Damascus of mingled mosques and churches that I saw in 1989 was not a mirage but an echo of a long, if intermittent, past of harmonious co-existence.
Events have now conspired to offer the hope that Syrians might just live it again.
- Patrick Bishop is a former Middle East correspondent and co-hosts the Battleground podcast with historian Saul David.
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