Syrians see a future without Russia, but Moscow still hopes to stay

For years, Russia and Syria were key partners: Moscow gained access to air and sea bases in the Mediterranean, while Damascus received military support for its fight against rebel forces.

Now, after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, many Syrians want Russian forces to leave, but their interim government says it is open to greater cooperation.

“Russia’s crimes here were unspeakable,” says Ahmed Taha, a rebel commander in Douma, six miles northeast of the capital, Damascus.

The city was once a prosperous place in a region known as the “bread basket” of Damascus. And Ahmed Taha was once a civilian working as a merchant when he took up arms against the Assad regime following the brutal crackdown on protests in 2011.

Entire residential districts in Douma are now in ruins after some of the fiercest fighting in Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war.

Moscow entered this conflict in 2015 to support the regime when it was losing ground. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later stated that, at the time of the intervention, Damascus was only weeks away from being overrun by rebels.

The Syrian operation demonstrated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ambition to be taken more seriously following widespread international condemnation of his annexation of Crimea.

Moscow claimed to have tested 320 different weapons in Syria.

It also secured 49-year leases on two military bases on the Mediterranean coast: the Tartus naval base and the Hmeimim air base. This allowed the Kremlin to rapidly expand its influence in Africa, serving as a springboard for Russian operations in Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso.

Despite support from Russia and Iran, Assad was unable to prevent the collapse of his regime. But Moscow offered him and his family refuge.

Now, many Syrian civilians and rebel fighters see Russia as complicit in the Assad regime that helped destroy their homeland.

“The Russians came to this country and helped the tyrants, oppressors and invaders,” says Abu Hisham, while celebrating the fall of the regime in Damascus.

The Kremlin has always denied this, saying that it only targeted jihadist groups such as IS or Al Qaeda.

But the United Nations and human rights groups accused the regime and Russia of committing war crimes.

In 2016, during an assault on densely populated eastern Aleppo, Syrian and Russian forces carried out relentless airstrikes, “claiming hundreds of lives and reducing hospitals, schools and markets to rubble,” according to a UN report.

In Aleppo, Douma and elsewhere, regime forces laid siege to rebel-held areas, cutting off food and medicine supplies and shelling them until armed opposition groups surrendered.

Russia also negotiated ceasefires and deals for the surrender of rebel-held towns and cities, such as Douma in 2018.

Ahmed Taha was one of the rebels who agreed to surrender in exchange for safe passage out of the city after a five-year siege by the Syrian army.

He returned to Douma in December as part of the rebel offensive led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

“We are back home despite Russia, despite the regime and all those who supported it,” says Taha.

He has no doubt that the Russians should leave: “For us, Russia is an enemy.”

It’s a sentiment shared by many people we speak to.

Even leaders of Syria’s Christian communities, whom Russia promised to protect, say they received little help from Moscow.

In Bab Touma, the ancient Christian neighborhood of Damascus, the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church says: “We did not have the experience of Russia or anyone from the outside world protecting us.”

“The Russians were here for their own benefits and objectives,” Ignatius Aphrem II tells the BBC.

Other Syrian Christians were less diplomatic.

“When they first arrived, they said, ‘We came here to help you,'” says a man named Assad. “But instead of helping us, they destroyed Syria even more.”

Sharaa, now Syria’s de facto leader, said in a BBC interview last month that he He does not rule out allowing the Russians to stay and described relations between both countries as “strategic.”

Moscow seized on his words and Foreign Minister Lavrov agreed that Russia “had a lot in common with our Syrian friends.”

But untangling the links in a post-Assad future may not be easy.

Rebuilding the Syrian army will require either a completely new start or continued dependence on Russian supplies, which would mean at least some kind of relationship between the two countries, says Turki al-Hassan, a defense analyst and retired Syrian army general.

Syria’s military cooperation with Moscow predates the Assad regime, Hassan says. Virtually all of the equipment he has was produced by the Soviet Union or Russia, he explains.

“Since its inception, the Syrian army has been armed with weapons from the Eastern Bloc.”

Between 1956 and 1991, Syria received from Moscow some 5,000 tanks, 1,200 combat aircraft, 70 ships and many other systems and weapons worth more than $26 billion, according to Russian estimates.

Much of this was in support of Syria’s wars with Israel, which have largely defined the nation’s foreign policy since independence from France in 1946.

More than half of that amount remained unpaid when the Soviet Union collapsed, but in 2005 President Putin canceled 73% of the debt.

For now, Russian officials have taken a conciliatory but cautious attitude toward the interim rulers who overthrew Russia’s former ally.

Vassily Nebenzia, Moscow’s envoy to the UN, said recent events had marked a new phase in the history of what he called the “brotherly Syrian people.” He said Russia would provide both humanitarian aid and reconstruction support to allow Syrian refugees to return to their homes.