Burnt cars in the middle of a street after a recent wave of violence between Syrian security forces and gunmen loyal to former president Bashar al-Assad, in the town of Jableh, Syria, on March 10.Omar Albam/The Associated Press
Syria’s new government signed a major peace deal with the country’s main Kurdish group, and separately saw the south of the country bombarded by Israeli warplanes. Meanwhile, sectarian violence continued to rage in the country’s coastal regions. And all that was on Monday alone.
The common thread is the role foreign powers play in the conflicts. The country’s 13-year civil war, which left hundreds of thousands of people dead, was driven as much by outside forces as it was by Syria’s own warring factions. So, it seems, will be the wobbly postwar peace.
Turkey emerged as the main winner when the Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham ousted Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime on Dec. 8, and has been working since then to consolidate interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s hold on power – and through him, Turkey’s influence over the country.
Mr. al-Sharaa and HTS, which is now the backbone of Syria’s national army, are deeply indebted to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who protected and powered the economy of the northwestern Idlib region while HTS was cornered there for a decade before its lightning march on Damascus three months ago.
But a Turkish-dominated Syria unsettles some of Ankara’s rivals in the Middle East. Both Iran and Israel, for very different reasons, have been accused of trying to destabilize the new Syria, which has bounced between breakthrough moments and days when it seems on the verge of sliding back into full-scale sectarian warfare.
One of those breakthroughs happened Monday when Mr. al-Sharaa signed a deal with Mazloum Abdi, leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces – a Kurdish-dominated militia that controls much of northeastern Syria – that will see the SDF merge “all civil and military institutions” with the state by the end of the year. The deal brings Mr. al-Sharaa one step closer to unifying the state under his control.
The pact was brokered under pressure from the United States, which has been the Kurds’ main ally since the joint effort to crush the Islamic State a decade ago. The Trump administration, seeking to bring home the 2,000 U.S. troops still stationed in Syria, pushed Mr. Abdi to sign the deal.
“The United States intervened in the last couple of hours. They’re the ones who pressed on the SDF,” said Moussa al-Omar, a former TV journalist who now serves as informal adviser to Mr. al-Sharaa.
The signing of the agreement was greeted with public celebrations on the streets of Damascus. But not everyone was pleased to see Mr. al-Sharaa and his Turkish patrons gaining ground.
Soon after the celebrations ended, the sounds of Israeli warplanes could be heard over the Syrian capital. Israel’s air force later announced that it had struck radar systems in the southern Daraa region, enforcing a recent declaration by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government that Israel will not tolerate any Syrian military presence south of Damascus. Israel has also expanded its decades-long occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights by seizing a new 15-kilometre “zone of control” in what used to be the United Nations-monitored buffer zone between the two countries.
“Israel wants to make sure that whatever happens, they don’t have another big Hezbollah on their border again, only now in Sunni form,” said Imad Salamey, associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, referring to the Lebanon-based Shia militia that has fought three wars with Israel. “They also want to make sure the Turks are not the absolute rulers in the country.”
In Syria’s Alawite heartland, fears mount after mass killings
Mr. al-Omar, meanwhile, said Iran had stoked the sectarian conflict in the coastal regions of Latakia and Tartus, which began last week with a series of ambushes carried out by remnants of Mr. al-Assad’s regime and devolved into revenge killings. Photo and video evidence suggests many of the hundreds of people who were killed were Alawite men, some of whom appear to have been captured before they were executed. The former Syrian regime was dominated by Alawites, who are followers of a sect of Shia Islam.
Mr. al-Omar acknowledged that violations were committed during the crackdown, including some by Sunni fighters that he said were not under government control. He blamed Iran for provoking the violence by providing “weapons, ammunition and even planning” to the former regime fighters who launched the initial attacks.
Esmaeil Baqaei, a spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said Monday that it was “ridiculous” to blame Iran for the bloodshed, adding “there is no justification for the attacks on the Alawite, Christian, Druze and other minorities” in Syria.
The fall of the al-Assad regime deprived Iran of not just a major ally; it cut off its route for supplying Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia with weapons, weakening Tehran’s entire “resistance front” against Israel and the U.S.
Another country that lost an ally when Mr. al-Assad was toppled was Russia, which deployed parts of its air force to Syria in 2015 to prop up his regime. Remembering that, some Alawites fled to the Russian air base in Latakia this week, looking for protection.
But while the Russian troops allowed those who arrived at the Hmeimim base to shelter there, its warplanes did nothing to halt the bloodshed. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s main interest in Syria always was and is preserving the base at Hmeimim, as well as a Soviet-era naval facility at the nearby port of Tartus. It’s Mr. al-Sharaa’s favour, rather than Mr. al-Assad’s, that the Kremlin now seeks.
Hadi al-Bahra, the president of the Syrian National Coalition, an umbrella group of forces opposed to Mr. al-Assad, said he believed Syria would eventually make a deal with Russia to allow it to keep its bases in exchange for promises to help the country rebuild.
“We’re not looking to make more enemies,” he said in an interview in Damascus. “We need help from all different countries, all different international organizations.”
Syria’s main national interest, Mr. al-Bahra said, was persuading the international community – including Canada – to lift the crippling sanctions that have been imposed on Syria since the 2011 outbreak of the civil war, as well as the personal sanctions targeting Mr. al-Sharaa as the former head of HTS, which the United Nations designates as a “terrorist” organization.
While the European Union and Britain have recently lifted some sanctions, Mr. al-Bahra said many foreign companies and NGOs remained hesitant to get involved in the rebuilding of Syria for fear of falling afoul of the U.S. sanctions that remain in place.
So far, there’s no sign of what Mr. Trump’s Syria policy will be, other than the expected withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Kurdish areas. “They don’t have a Syria policy,” Mr. al-Bahra said. “Until now, they don’t even have their Syria team in place.”
An ambush on a Syrian security patrol by gunmen loyal to ousted leader Bashar al-Assad escalated into clashes that a war monitor estimates have killed more than 1,000 people over four days. The attack Thursday near the port city of Latakia reopened the wounds of the country’s 13-year civil war and sparked the worst violence Syria has seen since December, when insurgents led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, overthrew al-Assad.
The Associated Press