“There are indications that it was unarmed civil resistance led by the resurgent popular committees and local councils, which initially came to the fore in the early nonviolent phase of the revolution back in 2011, that actually wrested control of much of the local governance from the regime.”

In this interview, exclusive for CounterPunch, foreign policy expert Stephen Zunes talks about the lightning offensive that resulted in the unseating of authoritarian president of Syria Bashar al-Assad. Zunes breaks down how the capitulation will go down in history as a surprise as well as provides the meaning of what comes next militarily and politically. Further, he talks about the wider Mideast war, the role of US foreign policy doctrines, and how conversations around Syria impact the broader leftist discourse.

Daniel Falcone: As someone who studies the Middle East as a professional analyst and scholar of international relations, how did the recent events leading up to the collapse of the Assad regime come as a surprise?

Stephen Zunes: The surprise is rooted in the naïve assumption that political power comes solely from above, that an autocratic leader who has the most weapons and international support can maintain power indefinitely. Clearly, though, this was a political collapse more than a military defeat. There were hardly any battles in those final weeks. It demonstrates once again that political power is ultimately dependent on the perceived legitimacy of the rulers in the eyes of the people. In the case of the Assad regime, it has always been low and has only worsened over the years because of his savage repression, the endemic corruption, and the country’s growing poverty.

The world was similarly “surprised” at the collapse of the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese regime in the spring of 1975 and the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan regime in the summer of 2021. Yet people are willing to allow even autocratic movements to take over if they see the existing regime as even worse or if its staying power is based on foreign backing rather than a social base. Assad was only able to stay in power if he did because of outside assistance. Now, however, without Russian air support, which largely left the country to fight in Ukraine, or Hezbollah ground forces, decimated by Israeli attacks in both Lebanon and Syria, he had to rely on his own largely conscripted army, who were clearly unwilling to fight and die on his behalf.

While it was the advancing military forces of Hayat Tahrir al Sham who marched into Damascus as Assad and his family fled, there are indications that it was unarmed civil resistance led by the resurgent popular committees and local councils, which initially came to the fore in the early nonviolent phase of the revolution back in 2011, that actually wrested control of much of the local governance from the regime, particularly in Daraa and As-Suwayda provinces in the south.

Daniel Falcone: From a global politics perspective, what does the removal of Assad mean for the wider Middle East war?

Stephen Zunes: Russian and Iranian influence in the region has now been substantially reduced, but this struggle was a Syrian one. Syrians were not thinking in terms of geopolitics. They simply wanted to rid themselves of a repressive regime which had torn the country apart.

The Syrians still want to liberate their occupied Golan region from the U.S.-backed Israeli occupation. Israeli occupation forces in the Golan, however, are taking advantage of the change in regime to extend their military occupation further into Syria and that is likely to be met with strong resistance. In addition, my strong impression is that Syrians still support the Palestinian cause. They recognize that, despite his rhetoric, Assad was no friend of Palestine, suppressing any Palestinian movement not under his control. Though Israel indirectly contributed to the rebel victory because of its war with Hezbollah, Israelis have long indicated they would rather have Assad in power than Islamists.

Assad had repeatedly offered to make peace with Israel in return for the Golan Heights, which Israel invaded and occupied in 1967, but the Israelis have refused, in part due to the encouragement of the United States, which is the only country in the world to formally recognize that occupied territory as part of Israel. Indeed, if Israel maintains its illegal occupations, apartheid system, and attacks against civilian population centers, there will be continued war on some level in Israel/Palestine and beyond.

Hezbollah will be further isolated, now lacking a land bridge for Iranian arms and other supplies. They were already weakened, however, by relentless Israeli bombardment and by their diminished support among the Lebanese population, in part due to their backing of Assad’s repression.

Lebanon will still be a mess because of their dysfunctional government and Israeli attacks on its civilian infrastructure. There will still be conflict in Sudan, Yemen, and Iraq. The peoples of Egypt, Iran, Bahrain, Western Sahara, and elsewhere will continue to struggle for their freedom. Most of the greater Middle East will be unchanged. The biggest question regarding war and peace is whether HTS can put forward an inclusive enough government to unify the country and avoid further warfare within Syria itself.

Daniel Falcone: From the US point of view, the Assad regime never had legitimacy as he used harsh measures to suppress his own people. Can you attribute his actions to the collective foreign policy doctrines and failures of US leadership?

Stephen Zunes: First, Assad’s repression was never the reason for U.S. opposition to his regime. U.S. support for the Israeli, Turkish, Moroccan, and Saudi armed forces in the face of horrific war crimes and U.S. backing of brutal dictatorships in the Gulf, in Egypt, and elsewhere are indicative that a regime’s repression is not an important factor when it comes to U.S. policy. Assad’s biggest crime, in the eyes of the United States, was his rejection of U.S. hegemonic goals in the region. The Bush administration actively sought to undermine his government, but Obama put an end to that, along with similar efforts targeting Iran, as soon as he came to office in 2009.
Similarly, the popular resistance movement against Assad that arose in 2011 would have happened regardless of U.S. policy, just as would have the savage repression by the regime in response. The limited U.S. assistance to secular opposition forces well after the revolution was underway was of little consequence. Despite this, Obama has been subjected to unfair criticisms both for providing some support for the resistance as well as for not doing enough. It’s easy to blame the United States for doing too much or too little, but in an increasingly complex world—particularly in a country like Syria—there are often few good options that Washington could have reasonably pursued.

Indeed, even many supporters of the revolution were wary about calls for direct U.S. military intervention, given what happened in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. Furthermore, combined opposition from Republicans and antiwar Democrats would have made it impossible for Obama to have received Congressional authorization to follow up on his threatened “red line” over the use of banned chemical and launch a war against the regime. Ironically, Trump and other Republicans who explicitly opposed U.S. intervention following the chemical weapons attack and insisted that it could not be done without the approval of Congress have subsequently criticized Obama for his supposed “weakness.”

A major problem is that the predictable fiasco from the U.S. invasion of Iraq has made it extremely difficult for Washington to support even popular internal movements demanding regime change. The legacy of Iraq has played right into the hands of tyrants like Assad. The Syrian dictator and his apologists were able to depict any challenge to his rule as some kind of Western imperialist plot.

Daniel Falcone: Will the so-called “hard left” and “tankies” deny the Syrian Revolution in your view? How will the politics of the left in Syria in the US unfold?

Stephen Zunes: The history of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East has made it easy for some critics to assume that anti-imperialist governments and movements in the region were therefore progressive alternatives. Iran and its allied militia as well as the Assad regime are/were reactionary and have engaged in imperialism machinations themselves. The attitude that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has even led to preposterous attacks on the United Nations, human rights organizations, and progressive scholars and journalists by some on the hard left simply for documenting war crimes by the Assad regime in language which mirrors similarly disingenuous attacks against those documenting war crimes by Israel. Even rescue workers digging through the rubble of apartment buildings leveled by Syrian and Russian airstrikes were labeled as Al-Qaeda terrorists. And the well-documented chemical weapons attacks by the regime were dismissed as “false flags.”

Many of these Western “anti-imperialists” are themselves stuck in an imperialist mindset which denies agency to people of color in the Global South (or Slavs in Eastern Europe) who are struggling for their freedom against tyranny. We may not always agree with their ideology or tactics, but they are acting on their own perceived imperatives for action, not because someone in Washington is telling them to do so. The United States could no more cause a revolution to take place in Syria that the Soviet Union could cause a revolution to take place in Central America. As Marx recognized, revolutions can only take place because of certain social conditions. The popular struggles in Syria against Assad had little in common with CIA coups of the Cold War era or the rise of mercenary armies like the Nicaraguan Contras, neither of which would have ever taken place without U.S. intervention.

Despite what some are alleging, the United States has never armed or funded Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. In fact, the State Department formally recognizes HTS as a terrorist group and the U.S. government has offered a $10 million award for information leading to the arrest of HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. In 2012-14, the U.S. provided some limited assistance to some secular rebel groups in Syria, some of which later aligned with some Islamist groups to resist advances of regime forces into liberated areas. Some U.S.-made weapons made their way to Islamists via the Gulf or Iraq, but the U.S. never armed such groups directly. Indeed, the United States has not armed any Syrian rebel group taking on Assad since 2015, in large part because the Islamists came to dominate the resistance. Instead, the U.S. has been arming a Kurdish-led Syrian group fighting ISIS, not the regime.

Daniel Falcone: Journalist Dima Khatib has written: “The Assad regime will go down in history as one of the ugliest, bloodiest, and most brutal regimes ever known. The post-Assad era is unknown. Everything is possible. But this is a truly historic moment of freedom that is worth celebrating, big time, regardless of what comes next.” What do you suspect will come next?

Stephen Zunes: I really don’t know what to expect. Given the need to mobilize Syrian society to rebuild the country and its institutions, repatriate refugees, and deal with the economic mess, the HTS leadership could indeed recognize that they need to be open to some degree of political pluralism. While their rule in Idlib was conservative and autocratic, they appear to have respected the rights of religious minorities and did not force women to completely cover up. They would also have an incentive to convince areas of the country not under their control that it would be safe to once again be part of a unified Syria.

It is also quite possible, however, that they could take advantage of their triumph and the desperate situation in the country to try to impose some kind of hardline Salafist rule. In addition, with so many different armed groups in the country, there is the risk that some will try to assert power militarily, either in fighting the new government for influence or further carving out fiefdoms of their own.

Most Syrians I know, who are overwhelmingly secular and leftist, are nevertheless celebrating Assad’s removal. After decades of totalitarian rule, with over 350,000 killed, half the popular displaced, the economy in ruins, and tens of thousands imprisoned, torture, and disappeared, it is hard for many to imagine things getting worse. What they are unsure about is whether the HTS will prove to be liberators or simply removers. Or whether the demand for freedom, justice, and democracy which ignited the initial unarmed revolution against Assad in 2011 is still strong enough to resist the authoritarian impulses of Syria’s new rule.

Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is still listed by the U.S. government as a specially designated global terrorist with a $10 million reward for information that leads to his capture.

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