Syria’s new ruler is politically astute

When I left London almost two weeks ago after the rebel coalition captured Aleppo – a stunning victory overshadowed by what followed – I thought I would be reporting on a shooting war.

The group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, was rampaging through everything in front of it, but I assumed the regime would fight back, as it did as it lost ground in the years before the Russian intervention in 2015. to bomb. Syrian cities and towns reduced to rubble.

Nearly a decade later, it was clear that Bashar al-Assad’s Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies had other wars on their mind.

But while the regime struggled with reluctant recruits, it could always find Syrians willing to fight and die for it, even at the height of the war after 2011, when the rebels controlled much of Damascus outside the city center and the highway. to Beirut.

I visited those men on the front lines many times.

Many of the most effective units were led by officers from Assad’s own Alawite community.

In Aleppo, around 2015, an Alawite general handed out glasses of perfectly distilled arak, served in bottles that once held Jack Daniels.

He proudly said that arak, an anise-based liquor popular throughout the Middle East, comes from the Assad family’s hometown in the hills behind the port of Latakia. Outside, his unit was attacking the rebel-held east side of the city.

Not all were Alawites. In Jobar, a district outside central Damascus, a Christian officer loyal to Assad in the Syrian Arab Army took me to the tunnels they had dug beneath the ruins to attack the rebels.

He said that the rebels also had tunnels and that sometimes they broke into each other, killing each other in the dark.

The young man had a crucifix tattooed on his wrist and another around his neck, and spoke of how he had to fight to protect his community against jihadist extremists on the other side.

My instincts about the fighting spirit of the depleted group of Assad loyalists could not have been more wrong.

On Saturday, December 7, I went to sleep after hearing the news that Homs had fallen.

When I woke up, Bashar al-Assad was on his way to Russia and rebel fighters were beginning to celebrate in the streets of Damascus.

They fired more bullets into the air in celebration than they fired in anger at Assad loyalists, who were fleeing for their lives.

I saw hundreds of cars queuing to leave at the Lebanese border, filled with disgruntled, defeated men and frightened families.

The common soldiers discarded their uniforms and weapons without firing a single shot and went home.

The Assad regime collapsed, hollowed out by corruption, cruelty and brutal disregard for Syrian lives. Not even Assad’s own Alawite community fought for him.

So on Thursday afternoon this week, instead of taking shelter from shells and bullets on some icy street in Homs or Hama, as I expected, I walked through the marble halls of the presidential palace in Damascus with Ahmed al-Sharaa , the de facto leading Syrian representative.

He has given up his uniform and changed his wartime pseudonym, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, to his real name.

Many Syrians doubt his claim that he has also exchanged his old jihadist beliefs for a more tolerant form of Syrian religious nationalism.

It is true that he broke with Al Qaeda in 2016, after a long career as a jihadist fighter in Iraq and Syria. But as I discovered in Assad’s palace, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a tall, soft-spoken man in his early forties, is reluctant to be too specific about the Syria he wants.

He appears very intelligent and politically astute. Like many astute politicians, he often does not give a direct answer to a direct question.

He denied that he wanted Syria to become a Middle Eastern Afghanistan.

The Taliban, he said, ruled “a tribal society. Syria is completely different.” Syria’s new rulers would respect its culture and history.

When I asked her if women would have the freedoms they expect here, she said that 60 percent of students at Idlib universities, her power base, were women.

But she tried not to answer a question about making the hijab (Islamic clothing) mandatory for women.

Damascus has been rife with rumors that bearded HTS men ordered women to cover their hair.

I pointed out that there was a huge row on social media after a woman asked for a selfie with him and then pulled up her hood when taking the photo.

Conservatives criticized al-Sharaa for agreeing to pose with a woman who was not part of his family. Liberals saw his hood as a dark omen of Syria’s future.

If he was exasperated by the question, he didn’t show it.

“I didn’t force her. But it’s my personal freedom. I want my photos taken in the way that suits me best. I didn’t force her. That’s not the same as having a law about it that applies throughout the country. But there is a culture in this country that the law needs to recognize.”

Al Sharaa was referring to the fact that many Syrians, not just those in the majority Sunni Muslim community, are pious.

Many women wear hijab. The point, secular Syrians would say, is choice.

During a half-century of Assad rule, Syrians developed survival strategies that often included hiding their own feelings and doing what was expected of them.

Surprised and nervous secular Syrians showed me videos on their phones of mass prayers outside universities when students returned last Sunday.

Was it, they asked, true piety or young people doing what they were told because that’s how it has been here all their lives?

Everything, al-Sharaa said, will be a matter of a panel of legal experts deciding on a new constitution.

Al-Sharaa’s critics will point out that, as things stand, he chooses who sits on the committee he says will draft new laws and a new constitution.

Ahmed al-Sharaa wanted to talk more about the oppression of the people by the old regime.

“The Syrian problems are much bigger than the issues you ask about. Half the population was expelled from Syria or forcibly displaced from their homes.

“They were attacked with barrel bombs and unguided dummy bombs and more than 250 chemical attacks. Many Syrians drowned at sea trying to escape to Europe.”

He acknowledged that Syria has no chance of beginning to stabilize and rebuild if sanctions are not lifted.

The sanctions were originally aimed at the Assad regime. Maintaining them, he said, meant treating the victim the same as the oppressor.

He denied that the group he leads is a terrorist organization, which is currently the position of the UN and most of the strongest countries in the world.

Visits by foreign diplomats suggest that changing both sanctions and terrorist lists might be feasible.

He was dismissive when I pointed out that I knew diplomats had told him that changing that status would depend on proof that he was keeping his promise to respect minority rights and conduct an inclusive political process.

“What matters to me is that the Syrian people believe me. We promised the Syrian people to free them from this criminal regime and we did it. This is what matters to me first and last.

“I don’t care much what is said about us abroad. I am not obliged to prove to the world that we are seriously working to achieve the interests of our people in Syria.”

Over the past two weeks, I have heard many Syrians say that they want to be left alone to try to rebuild their country.

That sounds like a pipe dream.

The war destroyed much of the country, but also drained Syria’s sovereignty.

Bashar al-Assad became a client of Iran and Russia and fled the country when they stopped supporting him.

The United States is in the northeast, to hunt down remnants of the Islamic State and protect its Kurdish allies.

Türkiye controls much of the northwest and has its own Arab-led militia.

There are signs that the Turks, who have a close relationship with HTS, are preparing a new attack against the Syrian Kurds who have a close relationship with Kurdish separatists inside Turkey.

Israel, currently as aggressive as it has been for many years, has more openly exploited the power vacuum it saw in Syria.

It continues to bomb the remains of the state’s military infrastructure and take more Syrian territory to expand the Golan Heights that it has occupied since 1967.

The Israelis, as always, justify their actions as self-defense.

The UN special envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, told me that Israel’s actions were “irresponsible.” Israel, he said, should not act in a way that could “destabilize this very, very fragile transition process.”

Ahmed al-Sharaa knows he cannot stand up to the power of Israel backed by the United States.

“Syria is exhausted by the war, regardless of whether Israel is strong or not. Syria needs to become stronger and more developed. We have no plan of aggression against Israel. Syria will not be a threat to Israel or anyone.”

Ahmed al-Sharaa’s agenda is overflowing.

Syria is a broken country that claims to want to repair and revive, full of challenges that could make its task impossible.

HTS is not the only armed group in Syria and there are some who want to destroy its fledgling administration. HTS’s enemies in the Islamic State network could attempt destabilizing attacks.

Syrians’ desire for revenge against Assad’s killers (and against the former president himself) could explode into destructive public anger if HTS cannot demonstrate that it is bringing to justice the men who kept their boots on Syrian throats for so long.

Ahmed al-Sharaa rightly sees Syria as a foothold at the heart of the Middle East.

“Syria is an important country with a strategic location, very influential in the world. Look how the United States is present on the one hand, Russia on the other and also countries in the region such as Turkey, Iran and Israel.”

He says that’s why the outside world should help Syria recover.

It is also why powerful states might not allow that to happen.