Why Syria is back at war Assad's days could be numbered

The Syrian jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) surprised the world and probably itself with its almost unimpeded conquest of Aleppo at the weekend, conquering in hours territory that had been bloodily fought over for many years. And like an ancient bacterium released from melting permafrost, the sudden unfreezing of Syria’s assumed frozen conflict has released noxious old strains of geopolitical discourse into a very different world. One of the things that made the Syrian war, at its height, so hard for casual observers to understand was that it was a series of rapidly-shifting, amoral and pragmatic alliances and betrayals. Yet these convoluted dynamics were filtered for external observers through a moralising internet war, aimed at mobilising foreign intervention: the results were disastrous for Syria’s people, on all sides.

This time around, we may still hope that things turn out differently. Rather than a reversion to the great crisis of a decade ago, the dramatic events of the weekend, and the international reactions, highlight how far the region, and the wider world, have changed since the war’s bloody height.

Now locked in dangerous rivalry over Ukraine, the United States and Russia had, over the past decade, come to a workable modus vivendi over Syria. The assumption was that Russian intervention had more or less won the war for Assad, with only the details of a final durable peace to be settled. Indeed, Moscow’s 2015 intervention was itself a response to just such a sudden jihadist-led offensive — led by the same actors breaking out of their Idlib confinement, with what is now HTS then the Syrian al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra. Rhetoric aside, the Russian intervention came as a welcome opportunity for Washington to wash its hands of the long-derailed Syrian revolution, focusing instead on the campaign to dismantle the Islamic State, the war’s most dramatic unintended consequence, using the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as its most reliable and least problematic proxy.

This time around, the United States, which in 2015 was still officially committed to Assad’s overthrow, but in practice focused on arming Syrian rebels enough to force him to the negotiating table, is happy to take a back seat. The State Department’s communique emphasising that Washington has no hand in the matter, that HTS is still on America’s list of proscribed terrorist groups, and that the ultimate cause of the renewed fighting is Assad’s intransigent refusal to come to a durable peace settlement, is a masterpiece of the genre. The United States is, in 2024, physically present but for the most part genuinely uninvolved in a conflict in which strategic defeat at Russia’s hands had come to seem the most stable and manageable outcome. Aloofly urging all sides to respect human rights and come to a quick and lasting peace settlement, as the US statement does, is probably the optimum American attitude to the current crisis.

For European powers, whose ambivalent attitude to the Syrian revolution itself was rapidly overshadowed by the consequent refugee crisis, which upturned the continent’s politics, the only current strategic interest in Syria is in preventing a reprise of the same demographic tsunami. European diplomatic normalisation with Assad, with the aim of returning as many Syrian refugees as possible, is, we must assume, now on hold. Pragmatic normalisation with HTS itself, with the same motivation, is not out of the question. The overriding European fear will be that any attempted Damascus campaign to reconquer its newly lost territory will mean a resumption of the devastating aerial campaign of the 2010s, backed by Russia with all the additional innovations in the art of killing learned in Ukraine. Equally, any HTS persecution of the ethnic and religious minorities now under its rule will provoke its own new refugee flow. Either scenario, should those uprooted direct themselves to Europe’s shores, would represent another body blow to Europe’s wavering liberal order. Who rules Syria, and how, is now far less of a concern for European leaders than who will rule Europe, and how.

Instead it is regional actors, and Russia, that will determine the outcome of the war’s sudden reflorescence. During the 2010s, the Arab states dramatically prolonged and worsened the Syrian war through their backing of rival rebel groups for their own narrow ends. Qatar and Kuwait funded jihadist groups so lavishly that more or less secular rebels adopted increasingly fundamentalist rhetoric and aesthetics to procure weapons and influence. Saudi Arabia, contrary to the perception many Western observers held, favoured various broadly secular potential strongmen among the rebel leadership, as part of its general fear of jihadist militancy at home; Jordan reluctantly backed broadly secular rebel groups to keep the war as far from its borders as possible and satisfy the geopolitical whims of its American patron.

This dynamic is long gone: the Arab League, committed to normalisation with Damascus, now firmly backs Assad, removing one escalatory factor from the current equation. Working towards a stable relationship with Iran, today the Gulf states have no desire to involve themselves in a revival of the Syrian war. Only Iraq, an Iranian ally with a justifiable fear, after its bitter experience of the Islamic State expansion from Syria a decade ago, is likely to involve itself directly. The Shia Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), the Iraqi militias which fought Islamic State so effectively, are already streaming into Syria to defend Assad. Yet their arrival along the overland supply route to Damascus, through which Iran supplies Hezbollah with munitions, will also likely attract the attention of the Islamic State, still a menacing presence in Syria’s eastern desert. At the same time, a closer Iraqi PMF presence will unsettle Israel, for whom any disruption to Hezbollah’s logistics comes as a welcome development. It is in the world’s interest, as well as the region’s, for the Syrian war, if it must restart, to confine itself to Syrian territory: yet the unstable dynamics of today’s Middle East, centred on Israel’s current spiral of wars, may yet work against any desired quarantine.

Indeed, the timing of the HTS offensive, just as Israel concludes its truce with Hezbollah, highlights both the linkages between the differing theatres of regional instability, and the group’s own careful attention to wider diplomatic nuances. Focused on its own struggle for survival, Hezbollah will not be available to rush to Assad’s aid, as it did so effectively at the war’s beginning. Perhaps HTS held off mounting its offensive while the war with Israel was ongoing: to be seen as benefiting from Israel’s campaign, or worse, coordinating with it, would seem impolitic. In stark contrast with the fearsome reputation Jabhat al-Nusra won among Syrian minorities a decade ago, this time around HTS is making every effort to assuage both domestic and international audiences that they are now a more tolerant actor committed to serious state-building. As well as diplomatic outreach to Iraq, the initial, stunning capture of Aleppo was accompanied with a press release, in Russian, insisting that HTS was a mature and capable actor with which Moscow could come to a mutually profitable arrangement.

Had the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) collapsed over the weekend, it is not impossible that Putin, as pragmatic and cynical as any Syrian militia commander, would have been tempted. Assad’s stock as a local security provider had plummeted, and Moscow is known to be frustrated at his intransigence in negotiating a peace deal which would have secured its long-term role in the country. A successful HTS push through Hama towards Homs would have isolated Russia’s two most important strategic assets in the country, Khmeimim airbase and Tartus naval base — vital for power projection in the wider Mediterranean. But the Syrian Army’s last-minute staunching of its own headlong retreat on Saturday night, along with Russia and Iran’s reconfirmed support for Assad’s continued rule, have seemingly put paid to the HTS gambit. The SAA has held, for now, as a battle for Hama looms, and Assad remains in the game. The unfortunate result is that loyalist areas of Aleppo spared aerial bombardment at the war’s height will likely soon experience it a decade later, unless some grand regional diplomatic bargain can swiftly be produced.

On the domestic plane, a flurry of communiques have come from HTS Leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, urging his fighters to respect civilian lives and the rights of minorities, with specific outreach being made to Aleppo’s large, and overwhelmingly pro-government, Christian community. Equally, while demanding that the Syrian Kurds withdraw their forces from their autonomous stronghold in northern Aleppo, they are doing so as politely as possible, declaring that civilians will be protected and that Syria’s “diversity is our strength.” Both Christian and Kurdish communities have every reason, though, to be wary of rule by a former al-Qaeda faction at whose hands they have suffered before. At the same time, Aleppo’s Christians, abandoned by the Syrian army, appear to have no choice but to accept jihadist rule for now, while the Kurdish declarations that their forces will stay put, unless rescinded, will pit both HTS and the Kurdish-led SDF in Aleppo against each other in a war both factions, equivalently pragmatic actors, would rather avoid.

For the Kurds themselves, the greatest risk are the various rebel factions, including those once mooted by Western commentators as future rulers of Syria, who have evolved as Turkey’s anti-Kurdish proxy, the Syrian National Army (SNA). Long disinclined to fight Assad, the primary function of these militias, prone to ethnic cleansing, rape, banditry and infighting for the spoils of Turkish occupation, and now scorned as “pirates” by the US government, is to push autonomous Kurdish forces away from Turkey’s borders, while securing the Turkish semi-annexation of large parts of Northern Syria. When HTS launched its shock offensive against the Syrian government, the SNA launched its own offensive against the isolated surviving Kurdish pockets of northwest Syria, as the government forces whose deployment saved the local Kurds from total collapse during the 2019 Turkish invasion melted away.

Allied with the United States east of the Euphrates, as part of the anti-Islamic State campaign, the Kurds also rely on Russian patronage in northwest Syria, west of the river, for preservation from Turkish invasion. And they manage the support of the two rival sponsors as delicately as can be imagined. Until this new phase of the war, both the US and Russia were broadly aligned on the Kurdish question, both encouraging the SDF’s reabsorption into the SAA with some degree of autonomy for their northeastern region. Yet the unknown stance of the incoming Trump administration, whose last iteration was nearly fatal for Syria’s Kurds, is a complicating factor: he may still wish to pull American forces out entirely; yet, equally, the recent heightened focus on Israel’s security may make an American military presence in eastern Syria more desirable. Qamishli airport, an island of government-held territory in a Kurdish-held zone, directly abutting Turkey’s border, was until now a curious backwater in the Syrian war: with Aleppo airbases lost, and Russia and Iran preparing for a new campaign of reconquest and aerial bombardment, it may now assume new importance on the Syrian chessboard.

So far, the Russian air force has bombed SNA troop concentrations preparing to assault Kurdish positions, and Turkey has yet to actively join the fray: doing so would likely push Russia and the SDF closer together, as each seeks to preserve their gains with each other’s support. For the Kurds, who have reiterated their desire to stay out of the current fighting, the only option is to defend their areas as best possible and hedge against a total dependence on either the United States or Russia by maintaining relationships with both. It is an unenviable military-diplomatic position that may yet prove usefully flexible in negotiating Syria’s rapidly shifting tectonic plates.

Over the course of a weekend, HTS, long-penned into a corner of the country abandoned by world opinion as a doomed jihadist reservation, managed to wreck the narrative of the Syrian war, not only placing Assad’s eventual victory in doubt, but threatening even his short-term survival. Such a dramatic upturning of the chessboard is not necessarily a terrible result for Syria or the region: the Astana peace process between Russia, Turkey and Iran over the country’s future had become a dead end, primarily due to Assad’s disinclination to compromise. With his seat on the throne threatened, an alternative future for Syria, whereby the regional powers negotiate a sustainable settlement between themselves, with heightened urgency and without Western involvement, could plausibly deliver meaningful results. This offensive could, perhaps, have been the jolt necessary to finally bring the Syrian war to a decisive end.

The ongoing flurry of diplomacy between Russia, Iran and Turkey holds out the slender possibility of a hopeful outcome: neither Russia nor Iran, busy with other fronts, needs the Syrian war to spring back into full, bloody bloom. Equally, both Arab and Western states, tacitly or openly resigned to Assad’s survival, just want the whole thing to end. It would be pleasing to hope, now that so many of the external actors whose involvement in the war’s high period have removed themselves from the table, that the catastrophic errors of the previous decade could this time be sidestepped. But Syria has proved itself the graveyard of optimism many times before. For all HTS’s attempts at diplomatic outreach, Russia and Iran, locked in confrontation with the broader West, have no real incentive to tread gently in securing their greatest strategic victory of the last decade. Syria spent the 2010s as the harbinger and proving ground of today’s wider international crisis — and once again, the Syrian people, on all sides, look doomed to pay the price of the shifting world order.

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