Nearly a decade after the Arab Uprisings began, the Middle East continues to convulse violently bringing hope and terror in its wake. The second wave of mass protests across Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Algeria, Sudan and Egypt in North Africa have shaken the region throughout 2019. Israeli politics has been paralysed by successive elections, as Prime Minister Netanyahu clings to power, best by indictments of bribery, fraud and a breach of trust. Hamas, the Islamist party ruling Gaza - considered a terrorist group by many international powers - cracked down violently on economic protests in March.
Social protests and dissent against President Erdogan’s escalation of military operations against the Syrian Kurds, and intervention in the Syrian Civil War have rocked Turkey. In September and October, the Jordanian monarchy was forced to react to its longest public sector strike led by teachers across the country as austerity, unemployment, a climate emergency and the Syrian refugee crisis have placed enormous pressure on a buckling economy. Libya in North Africa and Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, like Syria, are gripped by civil wars. Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel’s proxy war with Iran has threatened to spill over into regional war, as has Israel’s ongoing rivalry with Hezbollah. Underlying the wars across the region lies the ongoing threat emanating from terrorist organisations such as Al-Qa’ida, Islamic State and Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham.
At the centre of the chaos across the region, seeping blood and refugees is Syria. Nearly a decade of protracted war has turned the 2011 uprising against President Bashar Assad into a civil war which has since mutated into a military conflict between competing global and regional powers. The impact of the civil war has reverberated across the globe and this has been expressed in various forms whether it be Islamic State soldiers launching terrorist attacks in cities around the world to the refugee crisis spilling across the Middle East and Central Europe and, most notoriously, the deployment of chemical weapons by the regime.
In the Middle Eastern conflicts, justice can be hard to find. Lacerated and scarred, the region heaps one war after another onto the diverse communities living within its borders. The dead follow, the wounded and traumatised accompany them and the disappeared are discarded, generation after generation of missing persons following them into the mass-graves of the Middle East. In modern Middle Eastern history, it seems to be a twisted phenomenon to bury evidence of terror and leave the wounds to fester. 250,000 to one million people are missing in Iraq after successive Gulf Wars between 1980 and 2017. An estimated 17,000 men, women and children have yet to be found in Lebanon after fifteen years of conflict.
The vast number of dead can detract from the rawness behind a single numeral. Behind each number lies a name, a life, a unique dream or struggle shattered or changed for good by circumstances beyond their control. In Hama, where Hafez Assad, the father of President Bashar Assad, annihilated an entire city in 1982, the dead were erased from the face of the earth, eviscerated buildings were swept away where the dead lay and new ones were built upon them, entombing them. For the Assad circle, silencing the dead is as important as repressing and bombing its people. As the country crawls towards a decade of war, the Assad regime has reanimated the old traditions of erasing its deeds and burying them until the next rebellion comes to Syria. In most instances, the scale of the cruelty inflicted by Bashar’s circle on Syria has surpassed that of his father. In 2018, 100,000 people were estimated to have disappeared in Syria. By 2019, these sobering statistics have risen, The New York Times writing that it could be higher than 128,000. “No one knows exactly how many Syrians have passed through the system since; rights groups estimate hundreds of thousands to over a million. Damascus does not release prison data.”
In a report published by Amnesty International in 2017, 5,000 to 13,000 people were determined to have been executed at Saydnaya military prison alone between September 2011 and December 2015. A further 14,000 have died as a result of torture in prisons across Syria. Between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women are believed to remain in detainment in Sadnaya and 90 per cent of all disappearances are linked to the Syrian government, dwarfing the kidnaps carried out by jihadist and paramilitary opposition groups. The United Nations bluntly described the torture camps as a campaign of extermination, not so different from the gulags in the Soviet Union, the network of concentration camps run by fighting groups in the Bosnian War such as Omarska or the horrific prisons run by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge during the Cambodian genocide and civil war years. The crimes against humanity being carried out in the network of government detention centres across Syria are a fraction of the wider carnage which has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and maimed more.
The civil war rolls on with a series of conflicts raging within Assad’s war against his own people as tensions fester between Israel, Hezbollah and Iran in their shadow war and Turkey’s war against Rojava and the Syrian Kurds changes the face of northern Syria. In Idlib, hospitals and more civilian locations are still being targeted with impunity by Russian and Syrian bombers as the country’s humanitarian crisis deepens with each passing year. According to Elizabeth Tsurkov, the humanitarian crisis in Syria has “never been worse” with over 13 million civilians currently refugees and a further 6.6 million displaced. Sanctions and the collapse of the Syrian lira by 30% has left millions more in deep poverty (90% of the country according to the Syrian Centre for Policy Research).
Assad’s survival is guaranteed, for now, however, the president is far from secure. His patrons, Iran, Hezbollah and Russia face challenges in foreign policy and domestically. The Arab Uprisings continue across the Middle East, with multiple protesters directing their rage directly at Iranian interference, covert and overt, and their support of repressive paramilitaries and governments across the region. In Iraq, Iranian consulates have been incinerated and in Lebanon, organic protests in response to corruption have been met with fierce responses by pro-Hezbollah thugs. Hundreds of Iraqi civilians have been killed by paramilitaries and security, many of whom are directly linked to Tehran. In Iran itself, over one hundred civilians have been killed at-least after protests were sparked by fuel prices rising, and the continued cost of President Trump’s draconian sanctions take hold.
In Russia, the government of President Putin has faced multiple protests, some of the largest the country has seen in the last two decades in the face of repression and unfair elections, and cannot remain in Syria without costs in perpetuity. President Assad’s regime has been reliant on Russia and Iran’s military might to survive, and without them, he will remain vulnerable to coup and revolt within Syria. His own allies are a larger threat to his power than the remaining rebels in Idlib including the warlords who have propped up the regime.
Economic collapse could hasten an internal power struggle. The collapse of the lira to its lowest value since 1919 has led to renewed criticisms of the Assad regime, ‘even in the country’s usually docile parliament, (who have) excoriated the government for its lacklustre response, even as they call for a wide-scale crackdown on corruption benefiting those they describe as parasites and cronies close to the ruling class.’ As The Los Angles Times notes, Syrian citizens who had been patient during the war ‘have been sorely tested’ as the government have failed to make structural reforms. The tourism sector has been gutted by a decade of war and the country’s trade deficit has expanded to $3.8 billion. The country’s oil sector is in tatters, and ‘the credit line from Iran has also tumbled.’ According to Nabih Bulos, ‘Syrians have been forced to take on two or three jobs to keep food on their tables; shortages of staples and essential products such as medicines, rice and flour are expected to hit soon.’ However, economic collapse may not be enough to force Assad from power and will hit ordinary Syrians harder than key regime figures. Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un in North Korea, and the Iranian government all showed considerable endurance in the face of punishing international sanctions and isolation from the international community. Iraqi and Lebanese civilians have not been deterred by previous civil wars and violence, regional and local, to continue protesting against corruption and poor governance and Syria will be no different even after the civil war. Omar Bashir brought misery in Darfur and the future state of South Sudan, yet eventually, his military and security forces could not stand in the way of change in 2019.
Provoking an internal power struggle carries considerable risks. Muammar Qaddafi was a monster as was Saddam Hussein, yet their deposition by military intervention and their deaths brought further instability, something which remains a staple in Libya and Iraq’s turbulent political landscapes. Assad’s death, exile or imprisonment would not bring peace to Syria but inflame local and regional rivalries if his transition from power is brutal or mismanaged. Assad could be replaced by another Syrian strongman, also unwilling or unable to tackle corruption, solve Syria’s economic collapse or usher in an era of instability similar to that before Hafez Assad seized power in 1970 where coups, bloodless and bloody, were a regular feature of life in Syria between for nearly three decades. There is also little guarantee that a new government would be loyal to the Western governments or be open to a peace treaty with the Israelis. To destroy Bashar’s power, the Assad Circle - not so dissimilar from a transnational criminal organisation - must be strangled, suffocated and dismantled piece by piece. Should these checks - the different factions making up the secret police - disappear, the Syrian regime could fall like a house of cards.
Isolated, economically broken and dependent on a shadow economy which favours a narrow corrupt clique, predominantly the president’s family and key individuals within the regime and the secret police, even the loyalists and Alawites may abandon the Assad regime when the time arrives. The international community must be ready to pluck these allies from Assad’s circle when the time comes, and ensure Syria does not fall apart (again) in the ensuing power struggle.