On the Syrian Spiral of Complexity

December 5, 2024

by: Sarah N. Stern ~ JNS

Thursday, 5 December 2024 | In the United States, people like easy, coherent definitions of “good guys” and ‘bad guys.” Unfortunately, in the Middle East, things aren’t so simple.

Back in 2012, we at the Endowment for Middle East Truth [EMET] sent a letter to then-President Barack Obama addressing “wide-scale humanitarian abuses” in Syria. We wrote our letter in the backdrop of “the systematic and indiscriminate pummeling of entire cities, the arbitrary arrest, beatings and torture of men, women and children that the Assad regime arbitrarily viewed as dissidents, the closure of access to the international press, blockades on entire regions, and the denial of access to vital assistance such as hospitals and medical care to large populations.”

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed by the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, allied with Russia and Iran. More than 5.4 million Syrians have become refugees. Many of them fled to Turkey and from there into Europe. In August 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said: “It is time for Assad to get out of the way.” She further accused the regime of “torturing opposition leaders, laying siege to unarmed civilians, including children” and relying on Iran.

That regime now faces a fight for control of Syria against rebels from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HST), designated in 2014 as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department. HST was formerly a part of the Syrian Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. The group began with allegiance to Sunni insurgencies aligned with ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Now, Turkey and other Sunni states are beginning to align with the rebels.

The evolution of the internal Syrian conflict began years ago when a few innocent children were arrested and tortured for spray-painting anti-government graffiti. The Assad government blackmailed the families—the rape of their wives in exchange for the children—leaving them with horrific choices.

The time to support the Syrian opposition was 12 or 13 years ago, but the Obama administration limited its response to diplomatic and economic isolation, freezing Syrian assets and petroleum imports. US strategy of diplomacy and international pressure was overtaken by events on the ground in Syria and elsewhere. Regional Arab states, notably Saudi Arabia and Qatar, began to arm elements of the Syrian opposition. Iran and Russia continued to provide weapons, training and military advisers for Assad’s security forces to help them more efficiently conduct their bloody work. Many outside experts concluded that absent stronger American involvement, the Assad regime was likely to survive.

In 2011, we concluded that the US should support the Syrian opposition with humanitarian aid, communications and electronic equipment, and arms and military advisers.

It was in the national interest of the US for the brutal Assad regime to go. Syria’s support for international terrorism and its regional alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran was a primary factor in destabilizing the Mideast and threatened US interests and American allies. As we had written to Obama:

“It is also in the American interest for the US, and not other powers, such as Qatar or Saudi Arabia, to take the lead in organizing and arming the Syrian resistance. Bluntly, involvement by these nations can be expected to be to the advantage of Islamist and Salafi–Jihadist elements of the Syrian opposition, which are certain to be anti-American, anti-secular and anti-democratic in nature.

“Additionally, it increases the probability that general opposition to Assad will devolve into sectarian and ethnic violence,” we wrote, adding “Only American involvement can provide support to the secular and democratic elements of the opposition” and “can insist on an opposition coalition which opposes sectarianism and which rejects ethnic and religious violence in favor of a national democratic resistance to Assad and which includes religious and ethnic minorities.”

We added that “American leadership in support of the opposition in this manner cannot guarantee a peaceful, secular and democratic Syria. However, a failure of American leadership and refusal to act will certainly guarantee the defeat of Syrian secularists and democrats, either at the hands of Assad or at the hands of Syrian Islamists.”

America has simply been distracted by other conflicts and willfully blinded itself to the resurgence of Sunni Islamists.

All of the actions of the Obama administration proved insufficient in isolating Syria. And, during the Trump administration, the hasty decision on October 6, 2019, to withdraw more than 2,000 US troops from northeastern Syria, where they had been working with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), further destabilized the region, causing the displacement of thousands of pro-American Kurds.

The Kurds, who have been extremely loyal to the US, are now also under tremendous siege. The SDF has put out a call for everyone who can to help in their fight. If the rebels conquer more Kurdish territory, they may release the many ISIS members in Kurdish prisons.

Syria is now a part of the UN General Assembly and sits on many crucial committees.

In the Middle East, things are not neatly carved out into blocks of good and evil, black and white. Or, as the American–Syrian former State Department adviser Hazem Alghabra put it, “When has Israel seen a good guy here? This is why, unless the US or Israel is threatened directly, we should not be involved.”

The time to get involved has long elapsed.

Posted on December 5, 2024

Source: (This article was originally published by the Jewish News Syndicate on December 4, 2024. Time-related language has been modified to reflect our republication today. See original article at this link.)

Photo Credit: Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images/JNS