Month: December 2024

2024 in review …a year of everything, everywhere, all at once

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In That Howling Infinite celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024, and we have we have published an annual roundup since 2015. they can be viewed HERE.

The title of 2024’s That was that Year that was is taken from an opinion piece by Australian commentator and author Nick Bryant in the Sydney Morning Herald on 10th December when summing up the tumultuous events of the year, and particularly the last three months.

“The war in the Middle East. The battle for Ukraine. The departure of Bashar al-Assad. The restoration of Donald Trump. The ground is shifting everywhere. Nothing is fixed and certain. Perhaps we should rethink the designation of 2024 as the year of democracy. Maybe we should think of it as the year of everything, everywhere, all at once”.

It’s a mad world …

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very very mad world
Roland Orzabal, Tears for Fears

It might indeed have been year of democracy, as it had ibeen designated by Time Magazine last January because more than half of the world’s population – across 72 countries – went to the polls, but most of these polls produced right wing governments with populist and increasingly authoritarian governments leading commentators to lament the decline of democracy. As political strongmen maintained their grip on power, providing role models for wannabe autocrats the world over. The wars of 2022 and 2023 dragged on in Gaza and Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar without any resolution in sight, whilst old wars reheated in Lebanon and in Syria, although by years end, appeared to have cooled down, though whether permanently, no one can say. The year ended on an epic and frenetic note with events  moving at such a hurtling pace and history coming at us so thick and fast as we headed  towards 2025.

Just think about all that has happened since Donald Trump’s unexpectedly clear and indisputable election victory in November. First, there was the collapse of the German government and the sacking of Israel’s defense secretary, Yoav Gallant, on the very day of the American election, the latter having prosecuted Israel’s war of vengeance in Gaza. Then came Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s ceasefire-deal with a dazed and confused Hezbollah after the IDF’s elimination of much of the Iranian proxy’s chain of command and hitherto formidable arsenal. Iran hurled hundreds of missiles at Israel in response to the elimination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Israel responded by destroying the Islamic Republic’s air defense system and seriously damaging its drone and missile manufacturing capacity. One could argue that Iran, the instigator of much of the region’s woes, had a very bad year. Its president Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash in May, and things only got worse from there for the hard-line rulers in Tehran.

As Ukraine endured relentless Russian military pressure in the Donbas quagmire, the Pentagon’ authorised of the firing of long-range American missiles into Russia after a year of American procrastination. Then there was the publication of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s peace plan in anticipation of what Donald Trump may or may not do to end the war, and the collapse in the value of the Russian rouble under fresh American sanctions. There was then the collapse of the French government, and an almost comic-opera attempted coup d’état by South Korea’s autocratic president.

And finally, in just twelve days, the sudden implosion of the fifty-four-year-old Syrian regime literally and figuratively resetting the geopolitics of the Middle East as erstwhile friends and foes scramble to recalibrate. To borrow from the late Donald Rumsfeld, Syria is one of 2025’s “known unknowns” – as is the upcoming and predictably unpredictable reign of the 47th president of the USA.

In an opinion piece in The Free Press in mid-December,https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-the-vibe-shift-goes-global-assad-putin-trump British historian Niall Ferguson wrote:

“The vibe shift hit American politics on the night of November 5. What no one foresaw was that it would almost immediately go global, too. The crude way to think about this is just geopolitical physics. The American electorate decisively reelects Donald Trump. Ergo: The German government falls, the French government falls, the South Korean president declares martial law, Bashar al-Assad flees Syria. There’s an economic chain reaction, too. Bitcoin rallies, the dollar rallies, U.S. stocks rally, Tesla rallies. Meanwhile, the Russian currency weakens, China slides deeper into deflation, and Iran’s economy reels. If the vibe shift in culture is about founder mode versus diversity, equity, and inclusion committees, the global vibe shift is about peace through strength versus chaos through de-escalation. It’s Daddy’s Home—not the fraying liberal international order”.

A woman outside a destroyed building Wednesday after an Israeli airstrike in Dahiyeh, south Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold. Hassan Ammar/AP

Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime

When I heard the following song by American “newgrass” artist Sierra Hull two weeks ago, I had it in my head all day. I thought it an apt if angsty, lyrical commentary on the turbulent political events of 2024. It’s a beautiful cover, and Hull’s mandolin solo is exquisite.

Australia’s year of nastiness 

Meanwhile, Australia and Australians have rarely as a nation been as deeply divide as they are today as they continue to struggle with a multitude of economic and social crises, while, as if we did not have troubles enough of our own, we’ve been sucked down by the undertow of events thousands of miles away in countries of which we know very little.

To quote academic and sociologist John Carroll, it has been “an ugly year – the habitat fouled, the odour sour. The time is one of degraded public spaces, smeared with grunge, grimed with graffiti, potholed roads, uncollected rubbish littering country roads, bronze statues of national heroes such as James Cook hacked down and stolen, police horses attacked with stones and acid, slovenly governments squandering their power, citizens ditching the ethos of tolerance and a fair go that has made the country one of the best places in the world to live. Then, pressing at the desolate limits of civic rupture, the firebombing of a synagogue”.

“The ancient Greeks”, Carroll wrote, “imagined this kind of obscure force as a miasma, a kind of dark mist or oppressive supernatural vapour settling over humans and their doings, discombobulating them, making them behave badly and do stupid things”.

In this miasma, we watch social cohesion breaking down with covert and open anti-Semitism simmering away among well-educated professionals who ought to know better question Israel’s legitimacy and historically illiterate, omni-cause activists of the regressive left who are manipulated by Islamist extremists into giving aid and comfort to the misogynistic and murderous “resistance” groups who perpetrated last year’s bloody pogrom in the Negev. As the jihadi tail wags the leftist dog, neighbourhoods are vandalized and imams are allowed to preach genocidal hatred echoing Nazi doctrine in public mosques. [There was even an outbreak of antisemitism in our own ostensibly “caring and sharing” quasi-hippie rural town – see the postscript at the end of this review]

All the while, governments and police timidly look away or make token gestures, in effect colluding in social division. The majority of Australians who disapprove of keffiyeh cosplay and disruptive and often violent Free Palestine demonstrations are left perplexed by what they perceive as their now leaderless country.

Social cohesion is also under stress with the country having experienced the most drastic, confidence-shaking drop in living standards since the recession of the late 1950. We are in the midst of what seem like multiple domestic crises – basic needs are not being met, a seemingly insoluble cost of living crisis, led by affordable gas and electricity, housing availability and affordability, and declining levels of service in health and social services, and deteriorating education standards. are punished by interest rates significantly higher than in equivalent developed countries. Australians, young people especially, are increasingly pessimistic, and their perceptions are well-justified perception.

It is a time of increasing disengagement in our politics and beset by a seemingly endless cost of living crisis, voters want to punish somebody, anybody. A year of parliamentary stalemate and obstructionism hasn’t helped, and to cap it all, as Herald political correspondent David Crowe put it, exchanges between senators Thorpe and Hanson “created a televised drama that told voters the story of a dysfunctional parliament that was utterly out of touch with ordinary Australians”.

And the powers that be do not seem either willing or able to do anything about it. As Crowe observes, “… we are governed by politicians too nervous to do what’s necessary to wake our economy out if its torpor. As long as our demand for relief from cost-of-living pressures and improved services from government grows, without structural changes to our system of taxation, politicians are going to struggle to make ends meet, fiscally and politically … There is a case to consider tax reform to encourage work, federation reform to curb the waste of federal and state duplication, housing reform so people can afford to live, and competition reform to make sure the economy works for consumers rather than the duopolies that dominate most markets. But the political risks are formidable on every front”.

We opened this retrospective of 2024 with reference to the Year of Democracy and the number of elections worldwide. The outcome was that governments around the Western world, and of all colours, are being thrown out – they are perceived as failing to be looking after their people. There was much talk amongst the commentary about the “crisis of democracy” – but easier this is Different guy who killed Richard overwhelmingly a crisis of the Left.

The Trump victory was carried by a revolt right across middle America and, irrespective of gender, ethnicity and location, against government that it saw as lost in faddish causes instead of attending to basic needs. And, as we in Australia enter an election year, there are lessons aplenty for Australian politics from events in the United States. Voters don’t do nuance. They’re dissatisfied with the status quo and disappointed in the government. They’ll just want to punish the mob in charge. Sure, they’ll be burning down the house, and they’ll be in the house when it burns down (two song references there!) but they won’t care. The question will be “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” And, like in America, for a great many, the answer will be a big “no!”

Anti-war activists protest the Land Forces 2024 International Land Defence Exposition at the Melbourne Convention. Jake Nowakowski

Are we witnessing the demise of “woke”?
Call out the instigators
Because there’s something in the air
We got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution’s here
And you know it’s right
And you know that it’s right
We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now
Thunderclap Newman 1969

Events in America have been interpreted by numerous pundits and  commentators as a backlash on the part of the electorate against the Democratic Party and what was perceived as its pandering to the “fashionable beliefs” of the political and intellectual establishment and the “progressive left: with identity politics and value signalling, and with the interests of minorities and special interests while neglecting the values and needs of the populace at large. A similar development has been at play here in Australia, beginning with the defeat of last year’s referendum on the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, and  building exponentially since. Niall Ferguson referred to this in the opinion piece mentioned above. https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-the-vibe-shift-goes-global-assad-putin-trump

Yes, indeed, there is something in the air!

But,  rumours of the death of Woke are probably, as they say, exaggerated, and may be attributed to a surfeit of schadenfreude on the part of cultural warriors who see the outcome of the recent us election as turning the clock back to what they regarded as the way things were.

Technically, according to the dictionary definition, woke is a political term of African American vernacular which means being aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issue, especially issues of racial and social justice, and other forms of oppression. And yet, it has been weaponized as a term of opprobrium by those of an extreme conservative worldview, an all-purpose epithet to be flung at the left.

What is perceived as “woke” provokes the easily offended who see woke in every dissenting post, tweet, or opinion piece, whilst rightwing commentators endeavour to trump (no pun intended) their peers in paroxysms of partisan contempt, condescension and self-righteousness.

Invariably, their perceived targets are the young and the restless, the idealistic and the naive who are transmogrified into the ignorant, the selfish and the deluded – rebels without a clue, indeed. And their faceless handlers, enablers, ideologues and puppet-masters – to wit, the anonymous leaders of amorphous mobs like antifa and Extinction Rebellion, university deans and the supine mainstream media.

In many ways, extreme wokesters have only themselves to blame for the perceived pushback against many of the more outlandish expressions of identity politics and value signaling. “Wokeness” indeed became an embarrassing parody of itself rendering it an easy target for rebuke and ridicule, a now, in the wake of the US election, active resistance.

But like Hippiedom, traces will linger on and become mainstream. The tide of woke was receding before the Trump victory, mainly through ridicule and ridiculousness. A lot of its shibboleths were about “doing the right thing” and these will remain when the anti-woke wave breaks, the tribal wars stutter to a close, and commonsense, tolerance and some semblance of cultural consensus reasserts itself in calmer times. But right now, to bowdlerize Old Abe, the bitter angels of our nature are savouring their victory lap and will sound their “barbarian yawp”. To gainsay the old song, happy days are not yet here again.

So …

At the end of one year and at the beginning of a new one we are expected to look back with a critical eye and yet, forward with optimism. Nowadays we don’t generally hear too much optimistic talk or feel much optimism. We seem to hear of nothing except wars, disaster and mayhem in world affairs. To which we can add our own domestic worries about the cost of living, housing affordability, energy confusion and uncertainty, failing health and other social services, and declining educational standards. Have I missed anything? 

As we enter the second quarter of the 22nd century, what do we have to look forward to? Will it be, to quote the unfortunate Kent in King Lear, “… cheerless, dark and deadly”? Or have we reasons to be cheerful?

I’ll sign off with a quote from one of my favourite films, the 1970 classic war movie Kelly’s Heroes, by the eccentric tank commander Oddball, portrayed by the wonderful Donald Sutherland who passed this year: “Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don’t you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change? To which his driver Moriarty responds: “Crap!”

What We Wrote in 2024

It seems that we published a record number of articles in In That Howling Infinite in 2024 on a wide variety of subjects.

Given its prominence in wired affairs this year, and my own special interest in the region, the Middle East featured in eleven posts, with Gaza and Hamas particularly, and Lebanon, inevitably, to the fore, and at year-end, the Syrian shock or surprise (depending on how one interprets it): Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants 

Australian history and politics accounted for seven posts, including three on the dark side of Australia’s fractured relationship with our indigenous compatriots, and a reappraisal of Robert Hughes’ iconic history of the conviction days, The Fatal Shore.

There were five pieces on poets and poetry, including a profile of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, and a look at iconic Australian poet AD Hope’s very original poem Man Friday; and four on books, including a long essay of the genesis, context and content of the famous “Arabian Nights”, and an even longer one on Sarah Churchwell’s enthralling polemic The Wrath to Come. Gone With the Wind and America’s Big Lie .

There were three pieces on music, and three also in our Small stories, tall tales, eulogies and epiphanies series, including an eclectic appraisal (or reappraisal?) of Lucifer, the famous fallen angel. Lucifer Descending … encounters with the morning star was particularly tremendous fun to write.

Unusually for In That Howling Infinite, non-Australian history merited but four, including Blood and Brick … a world of walls, a wide-ranging and eclectic journey through history and popular culture that was a long time in the writing; and world politics but two, both relating to the now president-elect Donald Trump.

Poets and poetry  

Books

Music

Politics

Down Under

The Middle East

Postscript … a Bellingen epilogue 

For us, personally, it has been an unusual year of disengagement from matters local insofar as we have very much withdrawn from our very active involvement with the local branch of the Australian Labor Party. It seems that we have spent most of our time maintaining our grounds and enhancing the biodiversity of our bush property and conservation area, the Tarkeeth Wildlife Refuge – with the help of a team of bush regenerators financed by a three-year grant from the Biodiversity Conservation Trust of New South Wales. We’ve just completed Year 2 with excellent results. As Friends of Tarkeeth Koalas, we are also founder members of a close-knit community endeavour to protect and preserve the endangered koalas of our region.

With respect to “news” on our block, I’d like place on record here in In That Howling Infinite two items of local import that have not received the attention they deserve in either local or national media, mainstream or social. Both were certainly quite out of place in a small country town, and yet stirred little interest among its ostensibly easy-going residents.

A strange day in Urunga 

The strangest of events occurred a month ago in a quiet street in an outlying suburb of the our sleepy mid-north coast town of Urunga, some 28 km south of the regional centre of Coffs Harbour.

At two o’clock in the morning a family in an ordinary suburban house was awakened to what they thought were a series of gun shots and fled to the shelter of their bathroom. When the racket subsided, they peered out of their window into the driveway between their house and the next and beheld a cohort of dark figures surrounding their neighbour’s cottage.

The neighbour, meanwhile, was asleep in his office/bedroom while his house guest lay abed in the master bedroom. What the neighbours had heard was the front door being smashed down and the window to the master bedroom demolished as stun grenades were hurled into the room in a shower of shattered glass and splintered wood followed immediately by armed men in combat gear, helmets, masks, respirators and night vision who pointed their automatic weapons at the house guest – he, as if by premonition, avoided serious injury by fleeing into the corridor seconds ahead of the onslaught and stood there motionless with red laser dots on his chest.

When the ninjas discovered that there were no hostile elements likely to fire back, they settled in for the day as other strangers arrived and departed in shifts, searching through devices, papers, books and sundry stuff. Though they actually have a warrant, no charges were laid, nor have there been since. The circus left town late afternoon, taking with it the devices, files, and the householder’s passport.

If all this seems like an unusual occurrence, what was happening outside the house whilst all this was going on was just as remarkable. According to eyewitnesses who had been roused from slumber by the events of the wee small hours, some thirty sundry vehicles were lined up and down a usually deserted street. Residents, promenaders, exercisers and dog walkers passed the day standing around gossiping and gawking and exchanging theories as to what was going on – the owner of the suspect house remained indoors all day and no one was provided with an official explanation.

And yet, in these magical days of instant communication, social media and smartphones, no-one was live-streaming or facebooking or instagramming. There was no mention of the incident in the two local newspapers or in mainstream media (the ABC called the owner but never called back). I am informed that people connected to the operation strolled among the rubber-necking throng advising that they refrain from saying anything to anyone anywhere or anyhow …

A couple of alternative media platforms did pick up the story and suggested some hypothetical reasons for the why, when and how – particularly as it may or may not be connected to our country’s relationships with Indonesia and New Zealan, as the links below explain. I’d suggest also that the news blackout might also associated with the need to avoid complicating current negotiations with Indonesia regarding the release of the Bali Five.

“Strange days, indeed. Most peculiar, mama!” JW Lennon

Postscript
At the time, the ostensible target of the raid was told that he could have his computer and phone back in a week. When he called later to arrange this, he was told that he’d have to go to Brisbane to pick them up personally. Apparently, there wasn’t a budget for bringing them back down to Urunga – not even a certified postal delivery.

Bigotry in Byron and Bello …

There have been many instances of antisemitic graffiti and threats of boycotts in ostensibly tolerant and easygoing Byron Bay and Bellingen (yes, that’s right, Bellingen!) over the past year.

Notwithstanding the rights and wrongs of a conflict being waged a world away, bullying Jewish residents and business owners in rural towns on the basis of their race or religion is a cowardly, low mongrel thing, and potentially illegal.

The following was published in today’s Coffs Coast Advocate.

“Regional tourist hotspot Byron Bay ‘at war’ amid spike in anti-Semitism”

Jewish families facing devastating doxxings and appearing on “mass-circulated boycott lists” are learning self-defense or fleeing the communities they call home, amid a shocking rise in anti-Semitism creeping out of cities and into regional Australia.

As NSW Police descend on Sydney’s eastern suburbs in a show of force to stamp out targeted anti-Semitic attacks, Jewish leaders have revealed to The Saturday Telegraph the holiday haven of Byron Bay is “at war” and descending into chaos as fearful families prepare to pack up and leave.

“Byron was once a relaxed, tourist town,” Northern Rivers Jewish Community Association head Annalee Atia said. “But this community is now at war with itself. We know of people who are actively campaigning and spreading disgusting messages of hate against Jewish families in the community. They are hosting anti-Israeli events. There is a growing Jewish business boycott list. It is completely devastating”. Ms. Atia said she had been doxxed by members of her own community.

The Saturday Telegraph has seen evidence of multiple Jewish business boycott lists, as well as anti-Semitic graffiti scattered across the tourist town. One example in recent weeks includes a massive yellow swastika spray-painted in the heart of Byron, alongside signs which claim: “Isreael (sic) burns babies”.

“My kids are born here, we love this place and the majority of the people – but it’s longer safe,” Ms Atia said. “So many are fearful for our lives, we are taking self defense classes, my Jewish friends are studying French in order to disguise where we are from. We have people renting out their homes or selling up and fleeing Australia. They don’t want to be in the community because of this rise in anti-Semitic attacks. The local Jewish community is resilient and under the circumstances, community members have been amazing at taking care of each other. But we have seen a direct link between lack of leadership on anti-Semitism from local and federal government and other institutions and certain actions taken by these (such as condemning Israel but not other conflicts), leading to increased impacts in communities on the ground.”

Byron Bay business owner Yonit Oakley said she was aware her shop had been listed on multiple “Israeli business boycott lists”.

“A member of the community approached one of my employees and questioned her repeatedly about where she and her parents were born,” Ms. Oakley said. “Members of our own community are even targeting Australian-born residents because of where their parents are from. They told her they were adding our small business, a locally-run, AustraliFan business, to a boycott list.”

She said Jewish communities across the northern rivers had sounded the alarm over incidents of doxxing, where personal details are released publicly.

Special envoy to combat anti-Semitism, Jillian Segal, confirmed Jewish-Australian families had told her they were preparing to pack up their lives and leave their homes if attacks escalated: “There are instances of community members who do feel extremely threatened and unsafe because that’s what terrorism is about, it is to terrorize people and to make them feel unsafe, and they’re looking to leave,” she said.

The special envoy, appointed by the Albanese government in July, said parents were fearful about sending their children to school, university, and overseas. “That’s shameful”, she said. “I have experienced anti-Semitism in small ways, small insults, comments and how you look, and this kind of stuff, but I’ve never experienced the sort of anti-Semitism that everyday Jewish Australians are experiencing. It’s more extreme than ever before, it’s certainly escalated dramatically, and it must be condemned.”

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies president David Ossip said the organisation had reported incidents of doxxing and Jewish business boycott lists, as well as a growing list of anti-Semitic incidents in regional communities, to NSW Police. The Jewish leader said Sydney families had expressed fears the mezuzah – a parchment featuring Hebrew verses from the Torah, which Jews affix in a small case to the doorposts of their homes, was placing a target on places “families should feel safe”.

NSW Jewish Board of Deputies chief executive Michele Goldman doubled down on the rise in anti-Semitism across the state amid a list of incidents reported to the organisation since the Melbourne Synagogue terror attack earlier this month.

“Jewish people have been working and contributing to this nation since the First Fleet, we’ve never seen this kind of open bigotry and hatred before,” she said. “This goes beyond the Jewish community, when places of worship are being burnt down and threats of violence are being chanted openly, our nation’s multicultural values are under attack. is simply outrageous and beyond intolerable that this week we saw groups who felt entirely safe to chant slogans on the streets of Sydney calling for the massacre of another group of Australians.”

Ms. Goldman said while Jewish people were “proud to call Australia home … there are growing fears about where this escalating campaign of targeted harassment and incitement could lead”.

In recent months the organisation has received a dramatic rise in anti-Semitic incident reports. It is understood police and council workers have repeatedly removed anti-Semitic graffiti across Byron over the past 12 months.

NSW Police said it had planned high-visibility patrols of key locations across the Northern Rivers region. “NSW Police will not tolerate any behaviour that incites, or advocates violence or hatred based on race and religion,” a spokesman said.

Daily Telegraph, 14 December. 2024

Kiwi pilot kidnapped in West Papua leads to police raids in Australia

West Papua, an Australian and UN crime scene

howlnginfinite.com

Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

So we march to the rhythm of the revolution;
Oh it is our shining hour.
Move to the rhythm of the revolution,
And the revolution’s power.
Run with the rhythm of the revolution,
Storm the palace, seize the crown.
Rise to the rhythm of the revolution,
Shake the system, break it down!
Paul Hemphill, Rhythm of the Revolution

Recent events in the Middle East seem to validate Vladimir Lenin’s aphorism, “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.

”For years” wrote Bel Tru, the Independent’s correspondent in the Levant, a worthy successor to the late Robert Fisk and now retired Patrick Cockburn.East, “the world forgot about Syria. Many believed it was lost in an unsolvable abyss following the collapse of the 2011 revolution into a bloody civil war – made increasingly complex by the intervention of a mess of internal and international actors. Most assumed that the immovable regime of Bashar al-Assad had won, and that nothing would ever change. Few could even tell you if the war was still ongoing, let alone what stage it was at”.

Until Syrian rebel fighters stormed out of their fastness in Idlib province, which had been besieged and contained and for years by government forces and Russian bombers, and in an off sense that too the world by surprise, they took control of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city?

Over the space of a week, it seemed as if the nightmares of the past had come rushing into the present as the current wars in Gaza and Lebanon were pushed to the sidelines.

Iran’s theocratic tyrant Ayatollah Khamenei declared that the rebel offensive that destroyed the 52-year-old Assad dynasty in a mere eleven days was all a foreign plot concocted by the Great Satan and the Little Satan, aided and abetted by the wannabe Sultan of Türkiye (and there might indeed be a kernel of truth in that). In his opinion, it had nothing to do with the fact that the brutal and irredeemably corrupt Syrian regime was rotten to its core and that like the Russian army in 1917, its reluctant conscript soldiers, neglected, poorly paid and hungry, refused to fight for it whilst its commanders ran for their lives. Built to fight Israel and then to subdue Syrians, it had over time ate itself in corruption, neglect and ineptitude. Western radicals of the regressive left will doubtless believe the good ayatollah because that is what they are conditioned to believe rather than learning anything about Syria or the region generally.

if Khamenei could only have removed the mote from his eye, he’d have seen that the fall of Bashar al Assad was the indirect result of the most disastrous series of foreign policy miscalculations since the theocratic regime took power in Tehran in 1979. In the wake of Hamas’s murderous attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Iran made the fatal error of ordering its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon to begin a low-level war against northern Israel, lobbing missiles and drones into it almost daily. What Tehran did not calculate was that once Israel had largely destroyed Hamas in Gaza it would turn its guns on to Hezbollah with stunning force. The indirect effect of Iran’s miscalculation was that neither Hezbollah nor Iran was in a position to help Assad repel the rebels when they launched their assault. Iran has now lost its regional ally Syria, in addition to Hezbollah and Hamas, leaving it unusually isolated in the region when its ageing clerical leadership is increasingly unpopular with its own people.

Over the coming weeks and months, commentators, pundits and so-called experts will ruminate on the causes of the fall of one of the Middle East’s most enduring and also, even by the region’s low standards, brutal regime, and on what may or may not happen now.

I republish below two excellent opinion pieces offering some answers to each question respectively. Each in their own way follow the advice of most scholars of the Middle East: expect the unexpected. And whilst most observers admit to having been taken by surprise when Hayat al Tahrir al Sham fell upon Aleppo, including intelligence organizations that ought to have known better, none were perhaps more surprised than the insurgents themselves when only a fortnight ago, they were given the nod by their Turkish patron to endeavour to expand the borders of their statelet and suddenly found themselves on an almost empty highway to Damascus.

Analyst and commentator David McCullen (who has featured prominently on this blog in the past) examines warning signs that may have indicated that all was not well in the Assad kingdom, drawing on on historical parallels to explain why the Bashar al Assad and his longtime all-pervasive and ever-watching security apparatus failed to see the gathering storm unlit it had engulfed them.

He references particularly the political scientist Timur Kuran, the originator of the concept of “preference cascade”: “… under repressive regimes (or ostensibly democratic ones that censor dissent) the gap between public pronouncements and private opinions increases over time, until many individuals dissent from the approved narrative and lose faith in institutions that promote it but remain reluctant to reveal their real views. This “preference falsification” creates a deceptive impression of consensus. It can make regimes believe they have more support than they really do, while convincing dissidents they are all alone so there is no point expressing a contrary opinion. But when an unexpected shock reduces the regime’s power to suppress dissent, people suddenly feel empowered to express their real opinions. They realise these opinions are widely shared and the false consensus evaporates. This can trigger a “preference cascade”, where individuals or institutions suddenly change sides and support for the government collapses overnight”.

Kilcullen concludes: “Given the speed and totality of Assad’s collapse, some observers seem to be assuming that HTS will now, by default, become the dominant player in Syria. On its face, this may seem a reasonable assumption, given what happened in similar situations – Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021 and so on”. But he cautions that “it would be premature in Syria’s case since the war is very much ongoing. As the northern hemisphere winter closes in and Western allies prepare for a change of administration in Washington, Syria – along with Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula – will remain a major flashpoint into the new year”.

Indeed, the immediate future is far from clear. It is axiomatic to say that most commentators who say they understand what is going to happen in the Levant often don’t. To quote B Dylan, something’s happening, and we don’t yet know what it is …

In the second article republished below, Israeli commentator Zvi Bar’el examines possibilities, including the Herculean task of putting the fractured state of Syria back together again. As Australian diplomat David Livingstone wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 3 December, “Syria and its conflict is a mosaic of combatants rather than a dichotomy of good versus evil. Loyalties usually reflect a person’s religion or ethnicity. The Sunnis hate the nominally Shiite regime of Assad; Assad himself is the inheritor of atrocities by his father’s regime against the Sunni, including the destruction of Hama and slaughter of many of its inhabitants in 1982; the Kurds want an autonomous homeland; and the Turkmen are no friends to Assad or extremist Sunnis”.

So, where to from here? Syria now pauses at a crossroads, where both hope for a better future, and scepticism that it will be achieved, are equally warranted. Whether or not the new Syrian regime can succeed is an open question.

There is much to be done, with little time and meagre resources to do it. Forces, factions and faiths will now have to be reconciled. The divided country is shattered physically, economically and psychologically. Some 410,000 Syrians are estimated to have been killed in war-related violence up to the end of last year making it the bloodiest conflict of the 21st century to date. The dead will have to counted and accounted for, including tens and tens of thousands lost in the regime’s jails and prisons, and the survivors of rehabilitated. Scores may have to be settled either in blood or in spirit. About half of the country’s pre-war population has either fled abroad or internally displaced. The new government will need to ensure civilians’ safety, enable the return of millions of refugees and internally displaced, and rehabilitate the infrastructure and civil services. But the country is broke, while one economist estimates that the physical damage across the country amounts to $150 billion.

What form will a government take? Does the new administration intend to hold elections? Will HTS leader Ahmed al Shara and his comrades set up a government that will be agreed on by all the communities, factions, militia, and foreign forces? Will the new constitution be Islamic? To this his new prime minister replies, “God willing, but clearly all these details will be discussed in the constitutional process.” When Italian journalist Andrea Nicastro asks him “do I understand correctly when I say you’re ready to make peace with Israel and that you’re hostile to Iran, Hezbollah and Russia?” Al-Bashir thanks him and leaves without answering.

Meanwhile, Arab states, who once spurned Assad’s regime and were tentatively cozying up to him only recently, having invited Syria back into the Arab League. European states are contemplating whether or not to remove HTS from their lists of proscribed terrorist organizations. Assad’s erstwhile backers, Iran and Russia, which in fact controlled large parts of Syria, left Dodge in haste and are now replaced by two new-old occupiers, Israel, and Turkey. One took over the “Syrian Hermon” and a little further – to the condemnation of Arab regimes and the United Nations, the other is completing the occupation of the Kurdish regions in northern Syria.

No love is lost between the two of them, but it seems fate insists on making them meet in war fronts. As Bar’el adds, “… once as partners when they helped Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia and once as enemies in the Gaza front or now on Syrian soil. There’s no knowing, maybe al Shara will be the best man who will get to reconcile between them. Miracles happen, even if under the nose of the best intelligence services in the world, who didn’t know and didn’t evaluate the complete collapse of the Assad regime”. “The warm Arab and international envelope tightening around Damascus”, he writes, “is ready to give him credit although it doesn’t know yet where he’s heading, assuming any leader will be better than Assad. That, by the way, is what the Syrians also believed Assad senior would be when he toppled the rule of General Salah Jedid, only to get a new mass murderer.

Right now, as the old song goes, “the future’s not ours to see …” But we might take hope from the last line of the late Robert Fisk‘s last book, The Night of Power, published posthumously earlier this year: “… all wars come to an end and that’s where history restarts”. 

Author’s note

There have been many stunning pictures published to date of the Syrian revolution, but none that I’ve found as personally poignant as this one. It depicts jubilant Syrians lining the Roman archway that stands at the eastern end of Damascus’ historic Suq al Hamadiyah. When we were last in Syria, in the Spring of 2009, I photographed the arch from inside the darkened Suq (during one of the city’s frequent power cuts) , revealing the impressive remnants of the Roman Temple of Jupiter and the magnificent Omayyad Mosque, the fourth holiest place in Islam (after Mecca, Medina and Al Quds/Jerusalem).

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany:  

Syrians atop the Roman archway at the end of Damascus’ historic Suq al Hamadiyah

The Suq Al Hamadiyah, Temple of Jupiter and the Umayyad Mosque Mosque. P Hemphill 2009

The Suq Al Hamadiyah, Temple of Jupiter and the Umayyad Mosque Mosque. P Hemphill 2009

Aleppo shock to Hama huge leap forward: triggers in Syria’s 11-day blitz that unravelled Assad

David Kilcullen, The Australian, 13th December 2024

The speed of the regime’s collapse was startling, but it should not have been. Beyond the general dynamics of government collapse, something else was happening.

The regime’s collapse accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time. Picture: Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images

The regime’s collapse accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time. Picture: Emin Sansar/Anadolu via Getty Images

Last week’s offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham escalated quickly, as the kids say. In 11 days, HTS routed regime forces, captured masses of military materiel and seized three cities, triggering the collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic and ending the Assad family’s 54-year rule. Even for many analysts who track the Middle East for a living, the assault seemed to come from nowhere.

This was not strictly true: HTS had been biding its time in its stronghold of Idlib province, on Syria’s northwestern border with Turkey, for five years since a ceasefire brokered by Turkish and Russian negotiators in 2020, avoiding direct confrontation with the regime and building its own structure outside state control.

Its parallel government included several ministries and a civil administration, the Syrian Salvation Government, governing a population of four million, the size of Croatia or Panama. Though dominated by HTS, the SSG has been somewhat politically inclusive, and several non-HTS leaders have had key roles in its administration.

It sought to include the independent governance councils that had arisen organically during the early days of the anti-Assad rebellion, and it established local municipal managers to provide essential services across its territory.

HTS’s small combat groups operated like a fast-moving light cavalry force. Picture: Omar Haj Kadour / AFP

HTS’s small combat groups operated like a fast-moving light cavalry force. Picture: Omar Haj Kadour / AFP

American analysts in 2020 assessed the SSG as technocratic, “post-jihadi”, focused on internal stability and non-ideological governance, seeking acceptance from Turkey and the US, and unlikely to become a launch pad for external attacks.

Aaron Zelin – the Western expert most familiar with HTS and the author of an important book on the organisation, The Age of Political Jihadism – has observed that despite still holding extremist beliefs, HTS acts more like a state than a jihadist group.

While the SSG was focusing on social services and economic activity, HTS commanders were investing in advanced military capabilities. Building on experience from before the 2020 ceasefire, HTS organised its forces into small combat groups of 20 to 40 fighters that could mass quickly to swarm a target using several teams, or disperse to avoid enemy airstrikes or artillery.

They were highly mobile, operating like a fast-moving light cavalry force, mounted in a mix of hard and soft-skinned vehicles that included captured armoured vehicles and armed pick-up trucks (known as technicals).

Reconnaissance teams, scouts and snipers moved in civilian cars or on motorcycles. HTS combat groups carried heavy and light weapons including rocket launchers, captured artillery pieces, mortars, recoilless rifles, anti-tank missiles and Soviet-bloc small arms seized from the government or rival resistance groups including Islamic State.

Rebel fighters stand next to the burning gravesite of Syria's late president Hafez al-Assad at his mausoleum in the family's ancestral village of Qardaha. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

Rebel fighters stand next to the burning gravesite of Syria’s late president Hafez al-Assad at his mausoleum in the family’s ancestral village of Qardaha. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

HTS also used the ceasefire to professionalise itself, studying the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon. It established a military academy to educate officers in “military art and science”, and created civil affairs units, humanitarian agencies and a specialised organisation to convince government supporters to defect.

It used drones for reconnaissance, for leaflet drops on regime-controlled areas and as one-way attack munitions to strike targets with explosive warheads. It manufactured weapons and drones, and modified technicals with additional armour. HTS leaders built intelligence networks and command-and-control systems while allegedly also forging relationships with regional intelligence services and special operations forces.

Thus, the strength of HTS was not unexpected in itself. On the other hand, the rapidity of the regime’s collapse – which accelerated dramatically after the fall of the central Syrian city of Hama on the evening of Thursday, December 5, Syria time – was startling. It probably should not have been. Governments, unlike resistance movements, are tightly coupled complex systems that rely on numerous institutions and organisations, all of which must work together for the state to function.

As Joseph Tainter showed in The Collapse of Complex Societies, once co-ordination begins to break down, these interdependent systems unravel, the collapse of each brings down the next, and the entire structure falls apart. For this reason, in a process familiar to practitioners of irregular warfare, resistance groups (which tend to be loosely structured and thus more resilient to chaos) degrade slowly under pressure – and rebound once it is relieved – whereas governments collapse quickly and irrevocably once initial cohesion is lost.

As a team led by Gordon McCormick showed in a seminal 2006 study, governments that are losing to insurgencies reach a tipping point, after which they begin to decay at an accelerating rate. The conflict then seems to speed up and the end “is typically decisive, sudden and often violent”.

This pattern was very noticeable during the fall of the Afghan republic in 2021, for example, which also occurred in an 11-day period. The final Taliban offensive captured every province but one, and took the capital, Kabul, in a series of victories between August 4 and 15, 2021. Many garrisons surrendered, fled without fighting or changed sides.

Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

To be sure, the Taliban’s final campaign was built on years of coalition-building and insurgent warfare. Similar to HTS, the Taliban relied on patient construction of parallel networks largely illegible to an Afghan state increasingly alienated from, and seen as illegitimate by, its own people.

It also was enabled by a stunningly shortsighted political deal with the US in 2020 and an incompetent US-led withdrawal in 2021. Even so, the collapse of the Kabul government was faster than expected, with president Ashraf Ghani fleeing by helicopter in a manner remarkably similar to Bashar al-Assad’s exit last weekend.

The fall of South Vietnam in 1975 was likewise extraordinarily rapid, occurring in just nine days after the decisive battle of Xuan Loc, with South Vietnam’s last president, Nguyen Van Thieu, fleeing for Taiwan on a military transport plane.

Similarly, Fulgencio Batista’s government in Cuba fell in only five days, between December 28, 1958 – when a rebel column under Che Guevara captured the town of Santa Clara – and the early hours of January 1, 1959, when Batista fled by aircraft to the Dominican Republic. He had announced his resignation to shocked supporters a few hours earlier at a New Year’s Eve party in Havana, starting a scramble for the airport.

 

In Syria’s case, beyond these general dynamics of government collapse, something else was happening: a military version of what political scientists call a “preference cascade”.

As Timur Kuran, originator of the concept, points out, under repressive regimes (or ostensibly democratic ones that censor dissent) the gap between public pronouncements and private opinions increases over time, until many individuals dissent from the approved narrative and lose faith in institutions that promote it but remain reluctant to reveal their real views. This “preference falsification” creates a deceptive impression of consensus. It can make regimes believe they have more support than they really do, while convincing dissidents they are all alone so there is no point expressing a contrary opinion.

But when an unexpected shock reduces the regime’s power to suppress dissent, people suddenly feel empowered to express their real opinions. They realise these opinions are widely shared and the false consensus evaporates. This can trigger a “preference cascade”, where individuals or institutions suddenly change sides and support for the government collapses overnight.

In particular, the moment when security forces, particularly police, refuse to fire on protesters is often decisive, as seen in the fall of the Suharto government in 1998, the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 or the collapse of the East German regime in 1989.

Kuran’s initial work centred on the East European revolutions of 1989, which were unexpected at the time but seemed inevitable in retrospect, something Kuran later came to see as inherent in revolutionary preference cascades.

The most extreme case was the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania. During a mass rally on December 21, 1989 the dictator suddenly realised, his face on camera registering utter shock, that what he had initially perceived as shouts of support were actually calls for his downfall. When his security ser­vices refused to fire on the protesters, Ceausescu was forced to flee by helicopter. Four days later, he and his wife Elena were dead, executed after a brief military trial.

A woman poses for a photograph with a rebel fighter's gun in Umayyad Square in Damascus. Syria’s population finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

A woman poses for a photograph with a rebel fighter’s gun in Umayyad Square in Damascus. Syria’s population finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Picture: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Syria this week was another example of a preference cascade. Initial rebel successes made the regime look weak, allies failed to offer support, the security forces defected and other rebel groups suddenly rose up across the country. Syria’s population – previously reluctant to express anti-regime sentiment for fear of repression or social ostracism – finally felt free to dissent from the dominant narrative. Assad lost control, was forced to flee, and his government collapsed. It is worth briefly recounting the sequence of events.

On November 27, the HTS offensive began with a sudden attack on Aleppo City. The outskirts of Aleppo are only 25km from the HTS stronghold in Idlib, so although the outbreak of violence was a surprise, there was little initial panic. The regime responded with airstrikes and artillery, with Russian warplanes in support.

The first major shock was the fall of Aleppo on November 30, after three days of heavy fighting. As Syria’s second largest city, scene of a bloody urban battle in 2012-16, Aleppo’s sudden collapse was a huge blow to the government. The HTS capture of Aleppo airport, east of the city, denied the regime a key airbase from which to strike the rebels, and cut the highway to northeast Syria. At this point the regime seemed capable of containing HTS, though clearly under pressure, and there was still relatively little panic.

But then on December 4, HTS attacked the city of Hama, which fell on the evening of December 5. This was a huge leap forward – Hama is 140km south of Aleppo down Syria’s main north-south M5 highway, meaning the rebel forces had covered a third of the distance to Damascus in a week. The fall of Hama was another political and psychological blow to Assad’s regime: Hama had never been under rebel control at any time since 2011.

Syrian rebel fighters at the town of Homs, 40km south of Hama, a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

Syrian rebel fighters at the town of Homs, 40km south of Hama, a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. Picture: Aaref Watad / AFP

The collapse at Hama – and the perception of regime weakness this created – triggered a preference cascade. Immediately, commanders began negotiating with or surrendering to the rebels or evacuating their positions. Also, after Hama’s fall, Iranian forces negotiated safe passage and began withdrawing from Syria, denying the government one of its key allies, further weakening Assad’s credibility, and encouraging yet more supporters to defect.

The regime’s other main ally, Russia, had already retreated to its bases at Khmeimim and Tartous, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, after losing large amounts of military equipment and a still-unknown number of casualties. The same day, Hezbollah declined to offer material assistance to the Syrian government, given that it was still under Israeli pressure and had taken significant damage in 66 days of conflict.

The town of Homs lay 40km south of Hama – not much closer to Damascus but a critically important junction controlling the M5 and the east-west M1 highway that links Damascus and central Syria to the coast, and dominating Syria’s heavily populated central breadbasket. By early Friday, December 6, HTS combat groups were massing to assault Homs, but the city’s defences collapsed and it fell without a significant fight. By this point, security forces were dispersing, some retreating to Damascus but many fleeing to coastal areas.

The fall of Hama and Homs in quick succession encouraged other rebel groups to pile on, with several now mounting their own offensives against the regime. Uprisings broke out in the southern cities of Daraa and As-Suwayda on Friday and Saturday, December 6 and 7. These were less of a shock than the loss of Hama – Daraa was, after all, the cradle of the revolution in 2011 – but given everything else that was happening, the government simply lacked the forces to suppress them.

Simultaneously, US-backed forces in the far south advanced north from their base at al-Tanf, near the Jordanian border, while US-allied Kurdish troops of the Syrian Democratic Forces attacked in the east, crossing the Euphrates and seizing regime-controlled territory near Deir Ezzour. American aircraft flew airstrikes to support the SDF, which also seized the border post at Bou Kamal, blocking access to Iraqi militias that had been crossing into Syria to support the regime.

By Sunday, the regime had collapsed and the rebels occupied Damascus without a fight. Picture: Louai Beshara / AFP

By this point – last Saturday evening, December 7, Syria time – the government was on its last legs. That night an uprising broke out in Damascus, launched by civilian resistance groups and disaffected military units keen to distance themselves from the regime as the rebels closed in. Government troops began abandoning their posts, changing into civilian clothes, ditching their equipment and disappearing into the night. Large numbers of armoured vehicles, including T-72 tanks, were abandoned in the streets of the capital. Assad had planned to address the nation that evening but did not appear.

Later that night, apparently without asking Assad, the high command of the Syrian armed forces issued an order to all remaining troops to lay down their weapons and disperse. Assad fled about 2am on Sunday, flying out in a Russian transport aircraft. Assad’s prime minister, Mohammed al-Jalali, announced that he was willing to act as caretaker during transition to a provisional government, showing that Syria’s civil government, like the regime’s military forces, had collapsed. Despite initial reports that Assad’s aircraft had been denied entry into Lebanese airspace then shot down over Homs, Russian media reported later on Sunday that he had arrived in Moscow.

By Sunday, the regime had completely collapsed and the rebels, led by HTS commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, occupied Damascus without a fight.

The same day, US aircraft mounted dozens of airstrikes across the country, targeting Islamic State or regime forces, while Israeli troops crossed the Golan Heights buffer zone and began advancing towards Damascus. By Monday, despite initially claiming their incursion was limited and temporary, Israeli forces were 25km from Damascus, Israeli politicians had announced the permanent annexation of the Golan, and Israeli aircraft were striking Syrian military bases and sinking Syrian ships at the Latakia naval base.

Israel has denied media reports that its troops have taken control of Syrian territory.
In addition to the Israeli incursion through the Golan, Turkish-backed troops of the Syrian National Army are attacking the SDF across a strip of northern Syria, apparently attempting to create their own buffer zone separating the SDF – which Ankara sees as allied to the Kurdistan Workers Party – from Turkish territory.

The SDF has seized a chunk of eastern Syria, other US-allied rebel groups hold key parts of the south, and Islamic State still has numerous supporters and active cells in the country. Russia still controls its two Syrian bases, while Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities including Christians and Alawites are deeply anxious about the future, despite promises of tolerance from HTS.

Given the speed and totality of Assad’s collapse, some observers seem to be assuming that HTS will now, by default, become the dominant player in Syria. On its face, this may seem a reasonable assumption, given what happened in similar situations – Havana 1959, Saigon 1975, Kabul 2021 and so on.

But it would be premature in Syria’s case since the war is very much ongoing. As the northern hemisphere winter closes in and Western allies prepare for a change of administration in Washington, Syria – along with Gaza, Lebanon, the Red Sea, Ukraine, Taiwan and the Korean peninsula – will remain a major flashpoint into the new year.

David Kilcullen served in the Australian Army from 1985 to 2007 and was a senior counter-insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, when he helped design and monitor the Iraq War troop surge.

The Most Courted Leader in the Middle East Still Has No State

Arab and European heads of state are lining up to meet Ahmed A-Shara, the leader of the Syrian rebel organizations that ousted Assad, who has returned to his original name and is no longer calling himself al-Golani

Zvi Bar’el, Haaretz ,Dec 13, 2024
After taking control, he hastened to renounce his underground name and resumed his local name, Ahmed A-Shara. He ousted Bashar Assad’s horror regime and started to sprout the first buds of “new Syria,” whose outcome is still hard to fathom. The race for shaking his hand is in full swing.
Qatar is an old friend of A-Shara (one has to practice the name) and during the years of his organization’s existence it supported the militias that made up Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which he set up on the ruins of Jabhat a-Nusra and it’s also expected to help him rehabilitate his country.

Qatar isn’t alone. In the race to the presidential palace in Damascus the Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan came first to shake A-Shara’s hand. The foreign ministers of other Arab states, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are preparing to land in Damascus in the coming days to personally congratulate the leader of the sister state.

At the same time Biden’s administration is examining the possibility of removing A-Shara and his group from the terrorists’ list while European leaders, headed by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who only two weeks ago spoke of the possibility to normalize their relations with the Assad regime, are already trying to coordinate meetings with the new regime’s leadership.

The irony doesn’t stop there. Iran and Russia, which in fact controlled large parts of Syria, are now replaced by two new-old occupiers, Israel, and Turkey. One took over the “Syrian Hermon “and a little further, the other is completing the occupation of the Kurdish regions in North Syria. No love is lost between the two of them, but it seems fate insists on making them meet in war fronts.

Once as partners when they helped Azerbaijan in its war against Armenia and once as enemies in the Gaza front or now on Syrian soil. There’s no knowing, maybe A-Shara will be the best man who will get to reconcile between them. Miracles happen, even if under the nose of the best intelligence services in the world, who didn’t know and didn’t evaluate the complete collapse of the Assad regime.

The warm Arab and international envelope tightening around Damascus is ready to give him credit although it doesn’t know yet where he’s heading, assuming any leader will be better than Assad. That, by the way, is what the Syrians also believed Assad senior would be when he toppled the rule of General Salah Jedid, only to get a new mass murderer.

The first declarations and interviews of A-Shara and senior officials of his administration sound good and even encouraging. The temporary prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, said in an interview to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Wednesday that at this stage the new administration has three top goals – to ensure the civilians’ safety, to return the refugees and to rehabilitate the infrastructure and civil services.
How to achieve those goals? “It will take time but we’ll get there,” says the former prime minister of the Idlib region’s rescue government under A-Shara’s command and was blasted publicly for the brutal way he ran the rebel province.
Al-Bashir also says the temporary government will serve until the beginning of March, but does not clarify what will happen after that date. Will he manage to draft a new constitution and election law by then? Does the new administration even intend to hold elections, or does he hope within that time to set up a government that will be agreed on by all the communities, factions, militia, and foreign forces?
Will the new constitution be Islamic? To this he replies, “God willing, but clearly all these details will be discussed in the constitutional process.”
Journalist Andrea Nicastro asks him “do I understand correctly when I say you’re ready to make peace with Israel and that you’re hostile to Iran, Hezbollah and Russia?” Al-Bashir thanks him and leaves without answering.
There can be no complaints about a prime minister or organization head who only two weeks ago merely prepared to expand the borders of his control region and suddenly found himself on an empty highway to Damascus, for having no political, economic, or strategic plan and for having to wriggle around ideological and religious issues. A-Shara has more urgent business, for example, an empty state coffer.
If he wants to ensure civilian safety and public services he’ll have to pay wages to thousands of policemen, teachers, judges, garbage contractors, rebuild the crushed electric system, mend roads and traffic lights when not a single dollar, according to al-Bashir, remain in the till.
Head of the Syrian trade bureau said this week Syria will move from a state-controlled economy to a free market economy. This is encouraging but to apply it they will need investors and ensure their investment.
Government ministers, most of them served in the “rescue government” in Idlib, estimate they’d be able to raise funds from Arab countries and mainly the UAE and Turkey, persuade Syrian businesspeople in exile to invest in the homeland and also return to Syria funds that were smuggled out by the Assad regime. But Arab and international aid usually comes with a list of rigid conditions, like demands for a profound economic reform, preserving human rights and minority rights, civilian safety, and no less important a political agenda that is compatible with the donor states’ aspirations.
Syria is not an only child. Soon the donor states will be asked to help to rebuild Lebanon and perhaps later Gaza as well. A conservative estimate sets Syria’s national debt at some $31 billion, $5 billion of them to the IMF and $26 billion to Russia and to Iran.
More realistic estimates cite a debt of more than $30 billion to Iran alone, which invested some $50 billion in the last 14 years.
The oil wells that remained in the Assad regime’s control produced only some 9,000 oil barrels a day, now the new administration can produce oil from the oil fields controlled by the Kurds in the northeast of the state after they retreated from Dir A-Zur, which was reoccupied by the pro-Turkish militias.
But perhaps this will no longer be enough to reinstate the agriculture and food production industry, or to generate millions of workplaces that were lost during the war.
A-Shara portrays himself as “everyone'” leader and his prime minister aspires to set up an administration that represents all the ethnic communities and minorities. But will he gain the cooperation of the Alawite minority, which makes up 10 percent of the population? Will the Kurds in the north give up their aspirations for autonomy?
A large concentration of Alawites resides in the Latakia province on the Mediterranean coast, its people are well armed and afraid that armed militias or the regime itself would want to take revenge on them. Will they agree to disarm?
The Kurds are being pushed out of some of their provinces and only this week retreated from Manjib city west of the Euphrates River, after the Syrian National Army, the large pro-Turkish militia, conquered the city.
This retreat is the outcome of American mediation leaning on a Turkish commitment not to harm Kurdish civilians who leave the city. But Kurds continue to control the regions east of Euphrates, and Turkey wants to keep them away from those too. AT the same time their conduct has made it clear it is ready to cooperate with the A-Shara regime and be an integral part of Syria.

But it’s not clear yet under what terms. Will they want to preserve their provinces’ autonomy, and will the Syrian regime agree, when Turkey operates its military and economic leverages. Will the Kurds even have a bargaining chip left when Trump enters the White House? Trump tried already in 2019 to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and was blocked by internal and external pressure. Now he may implement his wish with his ally Recep Erdogan.

Syrian commentators have begun to draw a map in which Syria could be a federation divided into autonomous cantons, Kurdish in the north, Sunni-Arab in the center, Alawite in the west and perhaps Druze in the south, a sort of expansion of the Iraqi model where an autonomous Kurdish region exists. The Shi’ites in the south are demanding their own province.
It is doubtful whether this model has a chance of being implemented in Syria but bringing it up in itself shows the explosives in store for the new Syrian regime. This is only a partial list because beyond the various ethnic communities and minorities, A-Shara will have to deal with a population that is mostly Sunni but secular. Will this population toe the line with a radical religious agenda, on which A-Shara was raised and has preached?
So far Syria has conveniently been attached to the “Shi’ite axis though it was an organ of Iran’s Islamic revolution.
But the Alawite faction doesn’t count in Iran as an authentic Shi’ite faction. Hafez Assad himself had to ask his friend, the influential religious leader Moussa al-Sader, to issue a ruling that the Alawite religion is part of the formal “Shi’a” and therefore part of the Islam religion.
This was after a long violent clash he conducted against Sunni and Shi’ite religious leaders who ruled the Alawite faction wasn’t Muslim at all and therefore Assad senior cannot be president, because the constitution stipulated the state’s president had to be Muslim.
A-Shara won’t have that dilemma, but as one who hasn’t concealed his aspiration to set up a religious state, he will have to decide how to settle between the religious vision and the character of the population and the state that hasn’t yet been established