Assad’s jihadist reckoning
How the Assad regime turned the spectre of a Syria run by Sunni Islamists into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
On 2 December, two days after Syrian rebel forces fighting under the banner of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had captured the city of Aleppo, President Bashar al-Assad vowed to crush the advancing opposition armies. In a phone call with the leader of the Russian-backed Republic of Abkhazia, the Syrian dictator was reported to have said: “Terrorism only understands the language of force, and that is the language which we will crush it and eliminate it with”.
This was fighting talk, but Assad’s resolve proved to be an illusion: the death spasms of an exhausted despotism on the brink of collapse. Less than a week later, his regime had fallen. With its allies in Tehran and Moscow unwilling or unable to provide support and Hezbollah decapitated by Israeli military strikes in Lebanon, Assad’s military front imploded as demoralised troops fled their posts and city after city fell into rebel hands. Finally, sensing that the game was up, Assad himself abandoned Damascus and fled to an ignominious exile in Moscow. With his departure, more than half a century of Assad family rule in Syria has come to an end. A regime that clung on to power through nearly fourteen bloody years of civil war unravelled in just twelve days.
This is Assad’s jihadist reckoning. It is a legacy of the Syrian dictator’s relentless quest to crush the democratic promise of the Arab Spring. The capture of Damascus by HTS, a Turkish-backed Islamist militant group led by a former ally of Al-Qaeda and ISIS, is the fruit of the regime’s earlier success in derailing Syria’s civil uprising. In 2011, after peaceful popular protests against his rule broke out across Syria, Assad unleashed jihadist forces to combat the democratic nationalist challenge to his regime. Now, over a decade later, his gamble has backfired and the jihadists have come for him, albeit in a reformed guise, proving the essential truth of the Biblical prophecy that those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.
In order to understand this story of hubris and nemesis, it is necessary to return to the Arab Spring and the opening salvoes of Syria’s long Civil War. In March 2011, inspired by the fall of authoritarian governments in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrians began to mobilise protests calling for sweeping changes in their own country. By April 2011 the regime’s violent repression of peaceful demonstrators with lethal force had triggered a cascade of popular unrest across the country. Further severe repression, in turn, led some of the protestors to begin arming themselves, attacking symbols of the regime and waging an insurrection against government forces. Syria was now on a high road to civil war.
Under the weight of sustained repression by the Assad regime, Syria’s civil uprising morphed into an armed insurgency. This was bolstered by the early defection of large numbers of soldiers from the Syrian military to the rebel cause. (The vast majority of these defectors were Sunni Muslims who objected to repressing crowds largely made up of Sunni protestors). By July 2011, these defectors had coalesced into the Free Syrian Army (FSA) – a broadly nationalist and secular military force committed to ousting President Assad from power in favour of a pluralistic and democratic government.
There were many factors that condemned the FSA to failure as the Syrian Civil War progressed. One factor, however, was the regime’s readiness to release jihadist militants from its prisons. In May 2011, President Assad announced an amnesty for political opponents. This amnesty, however, was highly selective in nature, as the regime freed hundreds of jihadists from its jails at a time when it continued to lock up, torture and murder civilian activists. One account suggests that this amnesty may even have included Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the future leader of HTS, who had been imprisoned by American forces for fighting alongside Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Assad and his generals wanted to release these battle-hardened jihadists and use them as a wedge to divide and conquer the opposition. They believed that they could rely on Islamist and jihadist militants to weaken the nationalist FSA by forcing it to fight on multiple fronts against hostile Islamist militants as well as the regime. Their plan was to discredit and defeat Syria’s nationalist revolution, and then to focus on crushing the jihadists and their Islamist revolution.
Combined with a lack of coherent or consistent support from western powers, this strategic decision would shape the nature of the Syrian uprising. Through such measures, the Assad regime may have helped to tip the balance of forces away from the democratic nationalists of the FSA and towards jihadist groups. Above all, they sowed division among the anti-Assad opposition, which played into the hands of government forces.
At the same time, Assad sought to paint the entire Syrian uprising as terrorist insurgency aligned, according to the regime’s propaganda machine, with Al Qaeda and ISIS. The thinking was that Syria’s various ethno-religious minorities and secular Sunnis would rally to Assad for fear of the Islamist alternative. The notion that Syria was under threat from a Sunni jihadist conspiracy therefore became a key feature of the regime’s propaganda campaign from an early stage. Drawing on the language of the War on Terror, President Assad declared in March 2012: “We cannot relent in the battle against terrorism”.
In reality, as Jean-Pierre Filiu and others have argued, Assad’s Phony War on Terror merely provided cover for the regime as it sought to outflank and defeat those who were striving for a free and democratic Syria. This is why, time and time again, Assad allowed jihadist groups to thrive while he prioritised the military challenge from the FSA. Throughout 2012-2014, the Syrian government ferociously bombed areas held by the nationalist opposition but left the jihadists’ positions largely unscathed.
This strategy arguably reached its apex in January 2014, after the FSA and other non-jihadist opposition forces waged a successful campaign to expel ISIS from Aleppo and Idlib provinces. Following the campaign, Assad’s Syrian Air Force then proceeded to unleash a massive bombing campaign on areas held by the FSA and the non-jihadist opposition. Later, with help from Russia, Iran and Iranian-backed Shia militias, Assad was able to retake Aleppo in December 2016.
For a while, it seemed as if Assad’s jihadist wager had succeeded. Steadily, the nationalist opposition was suppressed, and its members forced either to lay down their arms or cooperate as junior partners with stronger Islamist militant groups. Meanwhile, by the end of 2018, the Syrian government was able to confine its jihadist enemies to a small pocket of territory in Idlib Province, in the North West of Syria. There they were sustained by Turkish military support, but no longer appeared to pose a serious threat to the Assad regime’s grip on power. Indeed, by this time the jihadist militias had fulfilled their purpose for the regime. They had taken pressure off pro-Assad forces as they snuffed out Syria’s nationalist revolution; now, the regime seemed to be tightening its noose around the Islamist revolution as well.
Ultimately, the regime’s catastrophic victory proved to be Pyrrhic and short lived. The regime’s reconquest of the country had come at a terrible human cost. Its apparent stability flattered to deceive, and beneath the surface, the pillars of the regime were decaying. Throughout nearly fifteen years of civil war, Assad, along with assistance from Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and other Shia militants, sought to brutalise, bomb, gas and starve his opponents into submission. His supporters spray painted “Assad or we burn the country” throughout the ruined cities that they claimed to be liberating.
In the end, the Assad regime destroyed a nation, but was unable to rebuild it. It regained territory from rebel forces, but its authority and any semblance of a centralised Syrian state were shattered in the process. The Assadistan which emerged from the civil war was, in Tobias Schneider’s words, “a loose coalition of thieves and fiefdoms” presided over by “a dizzying array of hyper-local militias.”
Out of the rubble of Syria’s revolution, the jihadist threat conjured into being by the Assad regime returned with a vengeance. While the regime overextended itself, the holdout opposition groups reorganised and bided their time. In 2016, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, officially renounced his group’s affiliation with “any external or foreign entity”, including Al-Qaeda and ISIS. He eschewed international jihadism and instead began to focus exclusively on waging war against the Syrian regime. In January 2017, following the fall of Aleppo, he announced the creation of HTS, “The Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant”, which was conceived as a vehicle for uniting disparate Syrian jihadist and Islamist militias into one coherent group.
In this way, Idlib became the hub of a reformed Islamist opposition. Jolani strictly prioritised defeating the “near enemy” – Assad and his supporters in Syria – and shunned Al-Qaeda’s fantasy of forging a transnational caliphate to wage jihad against the “far enemy” in America and the Christian West. In this new order of priorities, building effective local government was to be prized as much as prowess on the battlefield. All the while, Jolani steadily outmanoeuvred rivals for leadership of the opposition, consolidating his personal control and imposing discipline on the rank and file. In time, and with support from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, HTS was able to build an organised fighting force adept in the use of modern military equipment and drones.
The organisation also went on a PR offensive, moderating its rhetoric and softening its approach to Syria’s non-Sunni religious groups, which include the country’s substantial Christian, Isma’ili, Druze and ‘Alawi communities. Jolani and HTS reached out to these minorities and even former opponents, promising that they would not be the targets of retribution if HTS were to take power. By reinventing itself as a vehicle for national liberation and playing down its commitment to jihad, the group was able to present itself to many Syrians as the lesser of two evils when compared to the Assad regime and its secular reign of terror.
By 27 November 2024, when HTS broke out of Idlib, the stage was set for Assad’s reckoning with the jihadist forces that he had unleashed years before. By crushing his nationalist opponents and allowing jihadist groups to thrive, Assad ultimately turned his forewarnings of a Syria run by Sunni Islamists into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, the opposition, under the direction of HTS, has devoured the regime and consigned it to the dustbin of history; its charismatic leader, Al-Jolani, has the future of Syria in his hands. We are about to find out how sincere he was being when he announced his Damascene conversion to religious pluralism and democratic government.
For now, a new dawn has broken over Damascus. As with the Arab Spring over a decade ago, it is filled with promise and perils. The fall of the House of Assad has burst asunder the political landscape in the Levant and threatens to open up a new chapter in the perennial struggle for Syria.