Syria’s new political order is being presented as a clean break with dictatorship, while the history of Islamist armed groups, foreign intervention and the destruction of the Syrian state is pushed aside.
The rewriting of Syrian history needs to be stopped before it goes any further. Grotesquely, Bashar al Assad has just been sentenced to death by a regime born of Al Qaida and Islamic State clones committing the worst crimes on the planet before they exchanged their takfiri robes for suits and ties.
Until his elevation into the presidential palace in Damascus, Ahmad al Shara’a – then Abu Muhammad al Jolani – was a senior figure in Al Qaida. He then founded Jabhat al Nusra, followed by Haya’t Tahrir al Sham, a collective of takfiri groups welded together by force under Jolani’s command. They were all designated as terrorist groups by the UN and most governments.
The crimes of the takfiris include massacres, beheadings, the murder of Christian clerics and of imams in their mosques, the bombing of markets, the murder of homosexuals by throwing them off rooftops, the burning alive or drowning of captives in swimming pools, the abduction, sale and rape of women, the murder of children and the targeted slaughter of heterodox Muslims such as the Alawis.
Neither should the ‘false flag’ chemical weapons attacks be left out. The current rewriting of history throws these terrible atrocities into the memory hole, but the history was being distorted by the media even as it was happening. The ‘rebels’ could float any lie, no matter how unlikely, for the media to snap it up as truth.
Syria was a secular state. The takfiris wanted to replace it with an extreme shari’a state, and backed by the wealth of the Gulf states and the arms and logistical support of the US, the UK, European governments and regional allies, they finally succeeded.
Syria – the ‘beating heart’ of Arab nationalism – was occupied by France in 1920. After Britain forced France out in 1945, Syria tried to go its own way as an independent state, only to discover that real independence would not be allowed by the western imperial powers.
A CIA-instigated coup in 1949 replaced a democratically elected government with an army colonel, Husni al Zaim. Two more military coups just in 1949 and years of instability followed. Elections returned democracy in 1954, only for the CIA to launch two failed attempts to overthrow the government in 1956 and 1957 (Operations Straggle and Wappen).
Syria’s front-line opposition to Israel, its ties with Nasser’s Egypt and the Soviet Union and the combined socialism/Arab nationalism and sometimes Marxism of its governments meant it was permanently vulnerable to military attacks and destabilisation in one form or another.
The consolidation of a mukhabarat (intelligence) Baathist state under the iron rule of Hafez al Assad in 1970 helped to protect Syria, but at the cost of free speech and an open political party system – the weapons Syria’s enemies would use to penetrate Syrian society and destabilise it.
In the coming decades the pressure on Syria was unrelenting. After the rise of the Islamic state in Iran in 1979, it was added to the same US and UN sanctions as Iran, on the grounds that it was an Iranian ‘proxy’. This was never true, any more than it is true of Hizbullah or Hashd al Shaabi in Iraq. Syria was an Iranian strategic ally but it had a mind of its own and was never a proxy.
In March 2011 the UN Security Council authorised the imposition of a ‘no fly zone’ over Libya.
In practice this meant only no Libyan planes but not the US and NATO planes that destroyed the Libyan government.
The ‘success’ of the Libyan air war encouraged the US and the UK to back a UNSC resolution authorising a ‘no fly zone’ over Syria as well. When it came to the vote in February 2012, it was vetoed by Russia and China.
The US and its allies then came up with plan B, which was to destroy the Syrian government by armed proxies – real proxies – thus bringing down the central arch in the ‘axis of resistance’ stretching from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon.
This was a franchised operation involving European governments, regional allies (the Gulf states and Turkiye) as well as the US and the UK. Even Australia was involved, joining the US in bombing runs.
Billions of dollars were poured into this project. Arms flowed in the direction of the armed groups. So did many thousands of men crossing the Syrian border to join them. They came from across the Muslim world.
There is no evidence that these armed groups had anything like widespread support. Whatever their criticism of the government, Syrians in general did not want their secular state replaced by a violent, women- and human rights-abusing takfiri regime.
Whatever the propaganda abuse in the ‘west’, Bashar al Assad and his wife Asma remained popular. They were young, clearly liberal in their outlook and were seen as hope that a deeply entrenched authoritarian system could be reformed.
Bashar managed some changes, such as removing the Ba’ath party as the central pillar in the political system and opening the way to multi-party elections, but they could hardly be effected overnight, and not at all in a state of war.
The Syrian government’s collisions with Islamist groups go back to Muslim Brotherhood provocations in the 1960s. The brotherhood’s uprising in Hama in 1982 was a fight to the death, with no quarter granted by either side. It was the same after 2011. This was an extremely brutal conflict, with massive destruction across the country as the state and the armed groups fought it out.
Branding these groups as terrorists, the US actually welcomed them as the bludgeon it could use to destroy the Syrian government and weaken Iran. The initial fighting force, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), had proven to be a dud on the battlefield. Something nastier was needed and found in the cloned offshoots of Al Qaida and the Islamic State. As US national security adviser Jake Sullivan wrote to Hillary Clinton in February 2012, “AQ [Al Qaida] is on our side in Syria.”
With the government in Damascus finally destroyed in December 2024, everything that had been denied to Syria for decades – recognition, money, food and medical aid – began to pour in.
For all those in the Arab world who support the Palestinians and Arab causes, yet hated the Assads and the Ba’ath, this is what they got from the war on Syria: a Syria stripped of the capacity to defend itself, a Syria in which women are abused and Alawi and Druze minorities are massacred, a Syria which has lost even more territory to Israel and a Syria that is now in the enemy camp.
The betrayal of Arab and Muslim interests could hardly be more complete, but only the blind could not see this coming a long time ago. Success in the long struggle for Syria was one of the greatest achievements of the imperial ‘west’ since 1918. The greatest beneficiary is the genocidal Israeli regime.
Jeremy Salt
Jeremy Salt taught modern Middle East history at the University of Melbourne, Bogazici (Bosporus) university in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara. he is the author of ‘The Unmaking of the Middle East. A history of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press, 2008) and ‘The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923’ (University of Utah Press, 2019). He is now an independent researcher.