If you have a mental map of the Middle East, rip it up. The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria by a coalition of Islamist fighters changes everything.
Assad’s regime was a linchpin of the “Axis of Resistance,” the Iran-based coalition opposing US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. Over the last year, the main nonstate actor in that Axis, Hezbollah in Lebanon, has been decisively weakened after a relentless onslaught by Israel. Hamas, the Gaza-based affiliate, has also been devastated by Israeli bombing and targeted assassinations. Russia was the main outside supporter of the Axis but was unable to come to its rescue because its president, Vladimir Putin, is focused on the war in Ukraine. A year ago, Iran was standing tall as the main patron of anti-Western groups around the Middle East. Now, although it still has partners in Iraq and Yemen, it resembles a general with a collapsing army.
The jihadi warriors now in control of Syria have a gruesome history. They have demonized the Alawite minority, to which Assad belongs, and fought with the battle cry “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave.” In 2017, the United States put a $10 million bounty on the head of their principal leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani. Its notice, under the bold red-letter heading “Stop This Terrorist,” called him “the senior leader of … the Al-Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria.” Under his leadership, the US notice said, the Al-Nusra Front “has carried out multiple terrorist attacks throughout Syria, often targeting civilians.”
Today al-Golani is Syria’s strongman and putative liberator. He has promised peace, but there have already been reports of revenge executions. Many outsiders remain dubious. “Some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses,” said President Biden after the Syrian regime collapsed. “They’re saying the right things now. But as they take on greater responsibility, we will assess not just their words but their actions.”
Syria’s spiral into civil war began in 2011, with civic protests that were part of the Arab Spring. The protests devolved into violence. Religious zealots who had long detested Assad for his secularism saw their chance. Chechens, Uighurs, Uzbeks, and other outsiders flooded into Syria. “The time has come for President Assad to step aside,” President Obama said then.
In 2013 Obama approved a secret program, Timber Sycamore, to support anti-Assad militias. Over the next four years, CIA instructors trained thousands of jihadist fighters at camps in Jordan and Turkey, and supplied them with assault rifles, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank missiles, and sundry other weaponry. Many of them were Al Qaeda veterans. “AQ is on our side in Syria,” Jake Sullivan, then a State Department official and now President Biden’s national security advisor, wrote in a memo as the anti-Assad rebellion took shape. The United States spent $1 billion on Timber Sycamore before President Trump ended it.
In 2015 a State Department official wrote a classified memo asserting that “the best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad. … It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Assad in Syria that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel’s security.” A year later Secretary of State John Kerry was asked about Syria and replied, “We’ve been putting an extraordinary amount of arms in … Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia — huge amount of arms coming in, huge amount of money.”
Assad’s transcendent goal was to reestablish Syria’s sovereignty over its territory, which has been ripped apart by foreign-backed fighters for more than a decade. This will now be al-Golani’s challenge. To succeed in reestablishing Syrian control over Syria, he will have to fend off the competing interests of Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia — and the United States, which, along with its Kurdish allies, controls more than one-third of the country.
Foreign powers set the stage for al-Golani’s rise to power, and he has promised not to carry out “external operations” against them. Yet he seems hardly likely to become pro-American. He has said that he was radicalized as a teenager by the Palestinian intifada of 2000, and began “thinking about how I could fulfill my duties, defending a people who are oppressed by occupiers and invaders.” He left Syria to fight against the US Army in Iraq, became an Al Qaeda leader, was captured, and was imprisoned in the notorious American-run prison Abu Ghraib.
“What was the reason behind these people joining Al Qaeda?” al-Golani mused in a 2021 interview with PBS. “Are the US policies after World War II toward the region partially responsible for driving people towards the Al Qaeda organization? And are the European policies in the region responsible for the reactions of people who sympathize with the Palestinian cause? … The broken and oppressed peoples who had to endure what happened in Iraq, for example, or in Afghanistan, are they responsible?”
The United States played a key role in the overthrow of two other Middle East dictators, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Removing them led not to democracy but to terror and upheaval. The same could happen in Syria. Al-Golani, like the rest of the world, is absorbing the magnitude of his victory. How he governs will decisively shape the new Middle East that he has helped create.
Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
