Konflikten i Syrien

The Syrian writer Ehsani (pseudonym) later, also with some hindsight, gave a view that could be considered closer to reflecting the perception from Damascus:

As the crisis first unfolded in Daraa, Sheikh Sayasneh was invited to Damascus in an attempt by the authorities to de-escalate the situation. One of the key demands of the cleric was the release of prisoners, the majority of whom were Islamists. This pattern was often repeated throughout the early phase of the crisis. The UN mediator took up this demand. He too requested the release of prisoners as a trust-building measure. While many in the opposition are convinced that the release of people like Zahran Alloush was engineered by Damascus to help radicalise the opposition, the truth is probably more nuanced. The Syrian State was desperately trying to stop the uprising through both using a stick (swift response against protestors) and a carrot (release of prisoners when urged). While one may still debate this argument and claim that the government’s secret intent was to turn the uprising into a Jihad, the fact is that what Damascus sees today are insurgents and Islamist armed groups who want nothing less than to destroy the Syrian State and replace it with a state designed to conform to Sharia. They call it ‘more Islamist in identity’.

If Ehsani’s comments are correct, the regime at the time did not yet fully understand that its disproportional force was completely out of balance if it had wanted to apply

According to Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, p. 107, ‘new evidence had emerged suggesting that this assassination may have been an inside job, waged by Iranian-backed hardliners against Shawkat, who advocated negotiating with the anti-al-Assad opposition’. It appears strange, however, that Iran, being one of the main allies of the Syrian regime, would be behind such an operation. According to Ehsani, it was someone linked to the opposition who had been behind the assassination of Shawkat, and later informed the regime that they wanted ‘to convince President Assad and his generals that they should come to a political agreement with the opposition and leave Syria because the opposition could assassinate them as surely as it has assassinated Assef Shawkat’. Ehsani2, ‘Is Assad the author of ISIS? Did Iran blow up Assef Shawkat?’, Syria Comment, 5 December 2016.

Exactly when – and, more important, why – peaceful protest turned to armed uprising and then, inevitably, to an Islamist insurgency against the supposedly “secular” rule of the regime is one of the most important historical questions about Syria’s war. And it remains largely unanswered. There are clues enough. Van Dam is scalpel-sharp in his condemnation of Western policies, which breathed fire into the bosom of the opposition – the American and French diplomats who travelled to Homs to join the demonstrators immediately lost their neutrality, he says – and then left them to the mercy of their enemies. Van Dam praises the work of my colleague Patrick Cockburn, who has often pointed out how those two ambassadors told the protestors not to negotiate with the Assad regime on the basis that it would soon collapse.

When the rebellion turned largely Islamist, there was no one to explain to us why this had happened. Journalists who had arrived in Aleppo with the rebels, en route for the “liberation” of Damascus along the lines of the “liberation” of Tripoli in Libya, justifiably retreated when the warriors of Isis took to beating, imprisoning and chopping off their heads – but largely without telling us what had happened to the revolution. The “good guys” in our stories, after all, are not supposed to turn into the “bad guys”. Van Dam asks why, in all the later reports on the bombardment by the regime of eastern Aleppo, the world never saw film of the Islamist fighters there, nor their weapons, nor their armed control of the streets. “If you look at the media reports,” he says, “it’s as if the bombs only fell on schools and hospitals.”

The people of Aleppo did not invite the armed opposition into their streets, according to Van Dam – he is right – and the fighters then, eventually, failed to win their battle. They lost. The declarations of horror by Western nations helped to obscure this defeat. All along, both the original demonstrators and the fighters and the West “miscalculated the ruthlessness of the regime”.

U.S.-backed SDF to let Syrian Islamic State fighters leave Raqqa