Opinion | The fall of the Assad Regime and Syria's future

By Tom Fowdy

The regime of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria has fallen.

To the surprise of the world, the Ba'athist state, that has held power in Damascus for over 50 years, collapsed like a stack of cards as it was overrun through multiple directions through various rebel factions, the most prominent being backed by Turkey to the North. Assad successfully escaped the country to Russia, despite rumors of his plane crashing, where he will now live in asylum.

However, as information starts to filter through, it appears that Moscow may have otherwise thrown him under the bus in a brokered deal with Ankara and Iran which effectively negotiated a surrender, hence why a collapse happened so quickly. In doing so, it is reported that Russia will get to keep its military bases to the country's west coast on the Mediterranean.

Although the demise of Assad was quickly marketed by the western media as a blow to Russia's prestige, the new Syrian state, whatever form it will take (if any), is not likely to shut out Moscow for the primary factor as a fragile country it needs diplomatic ties and geopolitical options in order to survive, especially when it has huge sphere of influences in its territory already carved out by Turkish and US backed forces, as well as Israel having now invaded the country and seized territory next to the border with Lebanon.

But how did this all come about? First of all, we must be honest that Syria is a failed state and that the authority of its ruling government was always brittle. Syria might be part of the most ancient region in the history of civilization, but the current legal entity post the sykes-picot agreement of 1917 is the artificial creation of French colonialism that drew random, illegitimate and arbitrary lines on a map in view of its own economic and strategic needs. In doing so, the new "Syria" hobbled together a number of contradictory ethnic and sectarian identities that have no loyalty to each other under an illegitimate state structure. Contemporary Syria is a mash of Sunni Muslim, Alawite (Shi'ite) Muslims and Kurds.

These factors have led to a history of instability and violence that ultimately led to the rise of the Assads under the revolutionary left-leaning ideology of Ba'athism, an anticolonial, Arabist movement which also ruled Iraq and defined the Saddam Hussein era. Ba'athist leaders compensated for the fundamental weakness of the state through a resort to sheer violence and sought to suppress radical Islam through emphasizing secularism. Such regimes, however, were never truly powerful or competent, and owing to their opposition to Israel, the west and the status quo gulf states, they were geopolitically contained with their economic and military development blocked. Even with the advantage of vast oil reserves, Saddam Hussein made huge miscalculations through his invasions of Iran and Kuwait.

Thus, when the Arab Spring broke out in 2011 and Assad's authority fractured, it never recovered, even as he violently retook areas of the country with Russian and Iranian military support. The rise of ISIS allowed the United States to claim the Northeast part of the country for themselves through forces they backed, an illegal military occupation they have not relinquished, while Turkey was not going to sit idly by as the chaos unfolded on its own border and they experienced massive refugee inflows. The loss of its natural resources, combined with crippling sanctions, meant that Assad continued from 2016 to the present day in a hollowed out state as the country suffered from fractured authority and impoverishment. The demise of Assad had been delayed, but one should be realistic it was just not possible for Syria to be returned to its pre-2011 state.

Thus, geopolitics would mark his ultimate downfall, a chain of events stemming from Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Israel's wars against Hamas and Hezbollah would severely weaken Iran's sphere of influence and thus open up a window for the Syrian state to be swept aside, and it was. However, for the reasons above I am not going to say this is truly a major loss for Russia or China, because in diplomatic pragmatism they will simply seek to engage the new regime, hence the Taliban never stopped them from doing so in Afghanistan. However, we should not be naïve to assume Syria is suddenly going to become a free, stable or prosperous country again. This is not like the US invasion of Iraq where a new regime is forcibly installed, this is essentially a toss up between multiple warring factions and a power vacuum. The challenge of building a unified, democratic state is bound to be a challenge, and thus Syria's woes don't truly have an end in sight yet, but what a pleasure it would be if a country with a historical tradition as rich as Syria's could blossom again.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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