Fears Syria is the next Mid-East humanitarian nightmare

To describe the current Syria situation as combustible is consequently an understatement.

No one mourns the wicked, says the song. But, while the end of Bashar al-Assad’s blood-soaked rule is undoubtedly welcome, his overthrow is not likely to solve Syria’s crippling problems.

That Syria’s descent into a murderous civil war was partly triggered by economic factors is clear. Far-reaching land reforms in 1958 and 1962-63 created a vast number of small to very small farms, which accounted for 60 per cent of all agricultural holdings but only 23 per cent of cultivated land. That structure was always precarious; what destroyed it was a trebling in Syria’s population.

With inheritance laws subdividing those holdings as more and more sons survived into adulthood, the marginal farms, which accounted for the bulk of agricultural employment, became completely unviable. Steadily worsening water shortages, culminating in a disastrous drought from 2005 to 2010, then delivered the final blow, precipitating a flight to the cities, particularly from the Sunni areas, that left many rural villages without young men.

But Syria’s heavily regulated, corruption-ridden economy could scarcely absorb the inflow, so more than half of those young men became unemployed, eking out tenuous livelihoods in illegally built complexes on the urban fringes.

People gather to celebrate in Umayyad Square on December 11, 2024 in Damascus, Syria.

None of that would have provoked the civil war had the rural collapse, and the subsequent rise in poverty, not aggravated deep-seated ethnic and religious conflicts. Exactly like Lebanon and Iraq, the country that gained independence in 1946 was a state without a nation. Nor were there any broadly shared goals or ideas that could shape a unifying national identity.

The extent of the differences became obvious in 1954, when a Sunni-dominated government enacted centralising laws that sparked a Druze revolt. The revolt was quickly suppressed but the inability to define a workable balance between the conflicting groups fuelled six military coups in rapid succession.

It was only in 1966, when the Baath (Resurrection) party seized power, and then in 1970, with the so-called Corrective Revolution, which vested undivided power in Hafez al-Assad, that a degree of stability prevailed. The Baath had secured just 15 per cent of the vote in 1963, the last more or less free election; but, at least initially, it managed to coalesce a viable, if never broad, base of support.

At the heart of that support was the army, whose officer corps, like the Baath, was dominated by Alawites, who replaced the Sunnis decimated in the military purges that followed the coups and countercoups of the previous decade. Complementing that core was a tidal wave of Baathist patronage as sweeping nationalisations in 1964-65 and a 20-fold increase in the size of the public service – enacted in the name of “the scientific Arab way to socialism” – politicised employment decisions.

There is, however, no doubt that the Sunnis, who derived few benefits from that patronage, were left behind, at a time when Islamic fundamentalism was gaining lavish funding from the newly wealthy petro-monarchies. Although a shadowy battle between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood had raged for some years, the Hama revolt in 1982 proved the key turning point.

Suppressed in a sea of blood, the revolt of Hama’s Sunnis induced Assad to rely even more heavily on a pervasive security apparatus manned by Alawites and controlled by members of his family: of the 12 key officers who ran the military-security complex between 1970 and 1997, seven were linked to Assad by blood or marriage.

That pattern persisted when Bashar al-Assad acceded to the presidency in 2000. By then, however, the transition from “Arab socialism” to an especially degenerate form of crony capitalism had made the cracks in the regime’s foundations ever more glaring.

To begin with, because the Sunni birthrate was much higher than that of the ethnic and religious minorities, the minorities’ share of the Syrian population was a third lower than in 1980, narrowing the regime’s power base, heightening its paranoia and increasing its dependence on outside support (which eventually came from Iran and Russia).

At the same time, the growing concentration of young, unemployed Sunni men in the major towns created an immensely receptive audience for radical imams, who – repeating the Al-Jazeera sermons of Hamas’s spiritual leader, Sheik Youssef al-Qaradawi – denounced the Alawites as “even more defiled than the Jews”.

It is therefore no accident that it was a broadcast by al-Qaradawi, calling, on March 25, 2011, for an uprising to root out the unbelievers, that transformed highly localised demonstrations into a national civil war.

Retracing that civil war’s history would take too long. What matters is that each of its many protagonists sought to create a safe base for its constituency by ruthless ethnic cleansing.

The regime readily accepted – when it did not force – the displacement of some eight million people, mainly Sunnis, out of its area of control. That not only removed potential adversaries; it also allowed the regime, through a special law passed in mid-2018, to expropriate the displaced, reselling their assets (at bargain basement prices) to its Alawite, Christian and Druze supporters. That those minorities, which effected much of the regime’s dirty work, feel threatened by the victims’ return is readily understandable.

Nor was the ethnic cleansing any less brutal in the areas controlled by the regime’s Islamist opponents. In Turkish-controlled Afrin, for example, where Kurds previously comprised 90 per cent of the population, there are virtually no Kurds left, as Turkey’s military has replicated the “demolish and expel” strategy it implemented in Turkish-occupied Cyprus. To make things worse, it has, in what were relatively secular regions, enforced conformity to Islamic precepts to an extent unthinkable in Turkey itself.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham chief Ahmed al-Sharaa

Equally, in Idlib, which is governed by HTS (the Movement for the Liberation of the Levant), Christians, who were treated as dhimmis, have fled, as have any surviving Alawite, Ismaili and Yazidi “heretics”. Ahmed al-Sharaa, who heads HTS, presents himself as a technocratic nation-builder; the reality is that he never abandoned his jihadi outlook, reined in the Islamist fanaticism of HTS’s followers or relaxed the sharia-inspired prohibitions that dominate Idlib’s daily life.

Far from being a model of modernity, Idlib under Sharaa (who has reverted from Abou Mohammed al-Jolani to his original name) closely resembles Gaza under Hamas – an authoritarian, Islamist enclave that survives by diverting humanitarian assistance to fund HTS’s operations. There is every reason to fear Sharaa will try to take Syria down that road, provoking (in a repeat of the Iraqi scenario) a renewed conflict with the former regime’s supporters, as well as with the US-backed Kurds.

To describe the current situation as combustible is consequently an understatement. And it is an understatement too to say that Israel’s precautionary measures, which include strengthening its grip on the Golan Heights, are eminently rational.

Of course, that won’t stop the UN, and Australia with it, condemning the Israeli moves, while staying mum about Turkey’s expansion of its so-called “self-protection zone” in Syria and its indiscriminate bombing of Kurdish villages. But if the Syrian tragedy has a lesson, it is this: in the Arab Middle East, with its deep hatreds, long memories and searing fractures, only sheer power counts. To believe anything else is just a childish fantasy.