On March 6, the new Syrian regime’s armed forces were attacked by pro-Assad loyalists in the Latakia region on the Syrian coast. The transitional government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known as al-Joulani), a former member of the Islamic State and Jabat al-Nusra, responded immediately by deploying thousands, if not tens of thousands, of troops to quell the rebellion. Militias loyal to the new government, operating in the east of the country, were also dispatched.
The operations quickly degenerated into carnage, during which soldiers and militiamen massacred entire families of civilians — men, women, and children — mostly from the Alawite community. The Alawites, who form the majority in the coastal governorates of Latakia and Tartus, where the atrocities took place, are an ethno-religious minority from which the Assad dynasty, in power since 1971, descends. This association with the former regime explains why (but does not justify) hundreds of Alawites were massacred this weekend by the regime’s forces, which is primarily made up of Sunnis.
The perpetrators filmed their atrocities. The images are unbearable: corpses piled up and strewn in the streets, men forced to crawl on all fours and bark before being shot. These images contrast sharply with the new Syrian government’s propaganda, which boasts in its speeches of wanting to protect the country’s ethnic minorities and break with the bloody methods of the Assad regime, whose victims, piled into giant mass graves, have not yet all been found. In a televised speech, al-Sharaa downplayed the facts, declaring his intention to “pursue, firmly and without leniency, all those involved in the bloodbath of civilians,” while implying that those responsible for the massacres were pro-Assad militias or foreign elements — by which he meant Iranians. While these massacres mainly targeted Alawite Syrians, they raise fears that the repression will spread to all religious minorities: Druze, Christians, moderate Sunnis, and Shiites.
Since the takeover of HTS (Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), Alawites have been the target of numerous attacks. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), 240 of them were killed during the first two months of the year. According to the SOHR, nearly 1,400 civilians, mostly Alawites, have been killed in the counteroffensive against pro-Assad forces. While al-Sharaa has weakly condemned the attacks, he has taken no measures to prevent or contain them.
“The End of the Civil War”?
While the imperialist powers very quickly began to renew ties with the new regime and lifted some of the sanctions, faced with the investment opportunities offered by a country ravaged by a reactionary civil war for 14 years, HTS has since revealed its true face. This is not surprising given the ideological and political origins of the new rulers of the country, trained in Iraqi prisons and the ranks of ISIS and Jabat al-Nusra. A few days after the massacres, Canada decided to ease the sanctions weighing on Syria. The fragility of the new regime is palpable, however.
In the north, the integration of the semi-autonomous Kurdish institutions of northeast Syria into the state remains uncertain, although the signing of an agreement to this effect with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) suggests that a rapprochement is underway. This rapid agreement is the result of enormous Turkish pressure, which threatened to launch a brutal offensive in the absence of an agreement. The call for the PKK to lay down its arms made by Abdullah Öcalan, a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK), may also have helped weaken the SDF’s position and accelerated the process.
In the rest of the country, numerous militias not aligned with the new regime continue to operate. Pro-Assad factions maintain a presence and still benefit from foreign support, while the Islamic State has grown stronger throughout the past year, as have several al-Qaeda-affiliated militias. On the Lebanese border, violent clashes pitted the government army against Lebanese Hezbollah in February. In the south, Israel has established a buffer zone and regularly conducts incursions, while pro-independence Druze factions, supported by Israel, continue to oppose the authority of the transitional government.
On Monday, the Defense Minister announced the end of the operation in the west of the country, claiming that pro-Assad groups had been crushed. Ahmed al-Sharaa then announced the creation of an “independent” committee to investigate the massacres, including Alawite representatives, whose findings are expected to be made public. However, this initiative seems primarily intended to reassure the “international community” and lend a façade of respectability to the new regime, even though the outcome of the investigation will be in doubt. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for his part, issued a terse statement denouncing “Islamist extremists, including foreign jihadists, who have killed innocent people in Syria,” without, however, mentioning the responsibility of the army or the government.
Towards Rapprochement with the United States?
The HTS group is, for the time being, classified as a terrorist organization by the United States. This is no obstacle to establishing relations with the United States, which has collaborated with the SDF for years, despite its tenuous ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — which is itself listed as a U.S. terrorist organization.
The United States has every interest in accommodating the new Islamist regime. Assad’s Syria, a strategic ally of Russia, posed a major obstacle to the preservation of American interests. Currently, more than 2,000 American troops are deployed in Syria, notably in Rojava and at the Al-Tanf base in the southeast of the country, in an area controlled by the Free Syrian Army.
The new regime appears to be a means for the United States to advance its interests. By removing Syria from Iran’s sphere of influence, the fall of Bashar al-Assad has further isolated the Islamic Republic, following the defeat suffered by Hezbollah in Lebanon, whose high command and political apparatus were decimated by Israel. Furthermore, access to the Syrian market constitutes a significant asset in negotiations between Washington and Saudi Arabia, in which the United States is seeking new influence in the region and has offered Saudi Arabia considerable diplomatic influence over the Lebanese presidential elections in return. The United States thus has an interest in seeing the emergence of a consolidated and stable Syrian state capable of serving its interests in the region. A torn Syria constitutes fertile ground for the strengthening of ISIS as well as other groups hostile to their Israeli ally.
Until now, the United States had relied on the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which it supported financially and militarily for years, despite Ankara’s hostility. But with HTS’s takeover, many voices within the American establishment are advocating for abandoning the Kurds and aligning themselves with the new regime in Damascus. Robert S. Ford, former ambassador to Syria, thus argues in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs for a disengagement from the SDF in favor of HTS, whose leader has broken with the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda but, above all, maintains closer ties with Turkey. The same sentiment is echoed by Charles Lister, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, who defends a similar line in Foreign Policy. In any case, while the atrocities of recent days have undoubtedly caused unease in Washington, they do not constitute an insurmountable obstacle to a rapprochement with the new regime – as evidenced by the way in which bourgeois editorialists have constantly minimized or justified these events.
The Syrian civil war is far from over, and HTS is now taking over from the al-Assad regime and committing new atrocities, whether in the massacres perpetrated after HTS’s seizure of power or in recent days against the Alawite population. The idea of a unified Syria governed by Islamists, especially those supported by U.S. imperialism, is in no way a progressive alternative to the ultra-reactionary and murderous dictatorship of the Assad dynasty. Syrian workers cannot count on any of the forces present, whether they are the remaining loyalists of the regime, ready to launch suicidal operations, or the forces of HTS and its fanatical militias, trained in the school of ISIS. Only a working-class path, independent of imperialism and of the groups affiliated with regional powers that want to divide up the territory, from Turkey in the north to Saudi Arabia in the south, via Israel in the west and Iran in the east, can open up a progressive solution to the situation. This requires, more broadly, raising the question of liberating the entire region from the deadly influence of imperialism through popular mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine and against reactionary regimes, whether they collaborate with Israel and the United States or seek to advance their own interests.
Originally published in French on March 13 in Revolution Permanente
Translated by Samuel Karlin