A nation divided: Will Syria be better now that Assad is gone? - opinion

As the pressure was building against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, he gathered 30 of his most loyal generals to his defense ministry. As reported by the New York Post, according to a source who attended the meeting, Assad told them not to worry. He said they should continue fighting hard and that help was on the way… the Russians are coming.

Assad left his generals and flew to a Russian base in Syria on the Mediterranean coast. From there he was swiftly, safely, and secretly airlifted to Russia.

There is little doubt that the entire world, the region, and especially Syria, are better because the Assad dynasty has been toppled. But that does not mean that Syria has been transformed into Shangri-la and all is bliss. It means that nothing could be as bad as it was under the Assads.

What will happen next is not a mystery. There are only a few realistic scenarios, considering that the groups that toppled Assad are former ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists.

Certainly, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s vision for Syria, articulated when he was recently in Baghdad, is a pipe dream at best, and might be delusional. Blinken had made an unscheduled visit to Baghdad, where he met with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani. According to a State Department spokesperson, Blinken said that the US was looking forward to “a Syrian-led political process resulting in an inclusive and representative civilian government.”

But that will not come to fruition soon, if ever. It is nearly impossible.

ASSAD WAS a butcher, as was his father, Hafez. At the rate that they murdered and tortured, it is hard to distinguish who was more ruthless.

In the end, Iran ran away and Russia did not save Assad. They needed to escape to save themselves. Syrians stormed the Iranian embassy and its offices.

The violent power struggle in Syria

Syria is now in the throes of a violent power struggle between various groups. The only outside force active in the Syrian power struggle right now is Turkey. Turkey is currently using the mayhem to wreak as much damage as possible on the Kurds of Syria. Turkey firmly believes that the Kurds of Syria and the Kurds of Turkey are terrorists.

Blinken was actually in the region to intervene on behalf of the Kurds of Syria. He was blunt and asked Turkey to stand off. The reason for US diplomatic intervention is simple. The Kurds of Syria function as the major bulwark against reconstituting ISIS and al-Qaeda in the entire region.

The US supports the Kurds wholeheartedly and there are 900-plus US troops on the ground working in Syria with the Kurds. There are also thousands of soldiers and intelligence officers on US bases around the world who give support to those US soldiers and the Kurds in Syria.

There is little possibility that those who brought down Assad will be able to coalesce and unite. The common enemy was Assad, and that united them. The Kurdish fighters, known as the Syrian Democratic Force, took over the city of Deir Azzur in eastern Syria and handed it over to the largest terror group that ousted Assad – Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Because of their ruthlessness, over the decades both Assads sowed deep divisions in Syria. By fostering those divisions, they created tremendous hatred and deep-rooted yearning for vengeance toward the Assad regime and their cohorts.

The Russians, and especially the Iranians, fed into this leadership of torture and terror.

The Assad family is Alawite, a breakoff from Shi’ite Islam. They are officially only 11% of the population of about 22 million, though that number is probably exaggerated. Some 70% of Syrians are Sunni, and 9% are Kurds.

The tiny minority Alawite Assads, with the assistance of Shi’ite Iranians, used their family and tribe to wreak horror on the massive majority, the Sunnis. That explains why Sunni ISIS and Sunni al-Qaeda were so committed to ousting Assad.

As one official at the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps said: “This is the fall of the Axis’s Berlin Wall. In 11 days, we lost everything we fought for for 13 years.”

The death toll is still mounting. Here, too, the numbers are not reliable. The UN says that there have been 600,000 casualties since the civil war began in 2011. The UN reports that as of the beginning of 2024, 7.4 million Syrians remain internally displaced, with approximately 4.9 million seeking refuge in neighboring countries. An additional 1.3 million found refuge in Europe. If correct, about two-thirds of the Syrian population are considered refugees – a staggering number.

Given the players, the future in Syria will be violent. The best scenario – though a small possibility – is that once the dust settles, the new Syrian leadership will survey the landscape and conclude that it is better to live next to Israel with security and safety than to try to destroy the Jewish state. Not democracy, not peace – but at least not a constant state of war.

The writer is a columnist and a social and political commentator. Watch his TV show Thinking Out Loud on the Jewish Broadcasting Service.