None of this grew out of Syrian soil, or out of the Assad regime’s misdeeds. As US General Wesley Clark, a former commander of NATO forces in Europe, has documented, the George W Bush regime had decided, by November 2001, to ‘take out’ regimes in seven Muslim countries—Iraq on top of the list, followed by Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. Despite the change of Presidents and parties in power in the US, these objectives continue to underpin US foreign policy and appear, in fact, to have been enlarged. Clark noted that, even as the ‘war against terrorism’ was used as an excuse to target these states, the “real sources of terrorists” were “US allies in the region like Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia”.
Crucially, Syria is an ethnic and communal tinderbox that the secular Assad regime managed to keep a lid on by sheer force for nearly two and a half decades. While Sunnis are the dominant majority in the country, Alawites, Druze and Kurds (among other, smaller, communities) dominate significant regions of the country, and there are reports that the Druze settlements bordering Israel are already mulling a merger with Israel as the ‘lesser of two evils’. Once the euphoria of the present ‘liberation’ wears off, ancient hatreds—already reflected in conflict between various armed groups—are likely to surge dramatically.
While the HTS—backed by Turkiye and, implicitly, by the US and Israel, among others—now controls the bulk of Syria’s population and territory, other armed forces, including the US proxy, the Syrian Defence Force (SDF), an offshoot of the Kurdish Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), and the Syrian National Army (SNA), backed by Turkiye, also control substantial territories and populations, and are both opposed to HTS. Crucially, both HTS and Turkiye agree that any SDF control of territory is “intolerable”. HTS, moreover, is not a monolith.