On the Road to Damascus: Battle for Peace Continues

“You can’t extinguish fire with fire. You can’t address a mistake with another mistake. You have to correct the situation in Syria,” Mizgin Khalil tells me, as we sit in her office in Kobani, north east Syria. Khalil, a member of Syria’s Kurdish minority, is the Deputy Chair of the Kobani Executive Council, which administers this border town on behalf of the Kurdish dominated authority that currently rules Syria east of the Euphrates. 70 kilometers west of where we’re meeting, war in Syria is not over, and fighting is ongoing between forces loyal to Mizgin Khalil’s employers, and Islamist militias backed by Turkey. Kobani, which became famous a decade ago as the fulcrum of resistance to the advance of the Islamic State, is not a bad place to start if you want to listen to concerns about the direction that Syria is taking, post Assad.

I have come to Syria looking for answers. I spent the years of the Syrian civil war reporting from all sides of the conflict. Regime, rebels, Kurds, jihadis. During that time, I came to be fascinated by the country, its history, but also its sights, sounds, peoples, histories. The apparent victory of the Assad regime by 2020 or so, however, had sealed off large parts of the country to me. At the height of the war, the Assad regime had closed its areas of control to all but its most devoted supporters in the outside world. This had impacted on the picture the world received, enabling the regime to project an image of strength not subject to close examination. To get round this restriction, in 2017 I had posed as a passionate supporter of the Assads, and thus obtained an entry visa. I had observed the poverty and hollowness of the regime from close up, and had then reported on this. The Assad regime was not noted for its forgiving attitude. Threats of various kinds followed. I had resigned myself to the fact that I would never see Damascus again. The unexpected victory of Hayat Tahrir al Sham opened up a perhaps fleeting window. I was keen to take advantage of it.

There was little time for mulling over the past. A key question needed to be addressed: The old dictatorship was gone. But was a new, Islamist regime in the process of being formed? And if so, what were the implications of its emergence, both for Syrians themselves and for the wider world?

“Most of the current transitional government come from Idlib,” Mizgin Khalil continued. “Hayat Tahrir al Sham have ruled there since 2017. And recently a video emerged showing the current justice minister Shadi Waisi presiding over the executions of two women there…the current government is trying to apply Islamic Sharia law, and to return the situation to the time of the Ottomans. But Syria is not like Afghanistan. Its society is diverse.”

The video that Mizgin Khalil was referring to dates back to 2015. It depicts Shadi Waisi, who serves as justice minister in Syria’s current transitional government, managing the public execution in then rebel-controlled Idlib province of two women convicted of ‘prostitution and corruption.’ The video has come to serve as a focus for concerns that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist movement whose astonishing march from Idlib to Damascus late last year brought it to power in Syria, may be in the opening stages of creating a repressive Islamic dictatorship in the country.

HTS has controlled Idlib, the devout northern province from which it began its march to Damascus, since 2017. The regime it established there, which it called the Syrian Salvation Government, may well offer clues as to the likely direction of Syria under its rule. The evidence is not encouraging. Governance was and is conducted in Idlib according to ultra-conservative interpretations of Islamic law – up to and including public executions. Women and non-Muslims cannot hold office in the representative bodies established by HTS. Alcohol and most types of music are banned. Hijab is compulsory for women.

But while undoubtedly deeply repressive, HTS governance has notably differed from the most extreme manifestations of Sunni political Islam witnessed in Syria over the last decade. HTS avoided many of the insanities of ISIS. There was no attempt at genocide of non-Muslim populations, there was no cannibalism. HTS did not formally reintroduce the practice of slavery (though Idlib did serve as a place of refuge for ISIS members bringing enslaved people from their own areas of control.)

This combination – ultra-hardline political Islam combined with a certain strategic patience and caution – is what has most characterized HTS and its leader Ahmed Sharaa throughout the organisation’s remarkable trajectory. It is also what underlies the current ambiguity as to where Syria may be heading.

At the al-Hawl camp, which houses 39000 people, there is little doubt among both residents and staff that Syria is on its way to a new Islamic dictatorship. The former welcome this prospect. The latter contemplate it with dread. The camp houses the families of ISIS fighters from Syria, Iraq and a variety of other countries. For these people, HTS’s victory brings with it the promise of imminent liberation. The two organisations spring from the common root of the al-Qaeda network, their paths diverging only 12 years ago.

“The Syrians and the foreigners were especially enthusiastic,” Jihan Hanan, a senior administrator at the camp, told me. “Some of the Iraqis of non-ISIS background were concerned, because they know the background of (HTS leader) Jolani and what he did in Iraq.” The HTS leader, who nowadays goes by his original name, Ahmed Sheraa, began his career as an al-Qaeda fighter in Iraq.

“But the majority were preparing to be released. They were telling NGOs – ‘now youre helping us voluntarily, but in the next days you’ll be forced to, because we’ll take over the region. We’ll be released now.’ We have intelligence from the coalition of an attack from ISIS sleeper cells. Everyone is expecting an attack at any moment. There’s been a big increase in smuggling, and in attempts to escape. None successful so far, though.”

We wandered in the market at the camp, observing the women members of ISIS, covered head to toe in the shapeless black garments that the movement requires of its female devotees. “Since the regime fell, they like to come up to us here and whisper ‘Qariban, qariban.’ It means something like ‘its coming closer,’, or ‘its almost here,’” my translator told me. Observing the ISIS women as they bought their fruits and vegetables amid the dust and noise of the camp, I remembered Raqqa and Mosul and the testimonies of those who lived there under Islamic State rule. And I recalled also the faces of some of the many people who I knew who had died in the long fight to destroy the Islamic State Caliphate, just a few years ago. Keith Broomfield from Massachusetts, Majdid Haraki, Faisal Saadoun ‘Abu Leyla’ and the others. Was the final outcome to be a sort of belated victory for the people they fought against?

“I see no difference between ISIS and HTS,” Jihan told us, by way of parting. “The women that you see there in the market, maybe their husbands are in Damascus now.”

To get to Damascus from eastern Syria, you must take Highway 42 across the desert. It’s a long way to travel, but it has its advantages. The route enables a close look at the ruined debris left by the old regime. It also showcases the still very provisional, partial nature of the new government’s authority.

A large section of the desert between the Tabqa Dam and the city of Homs is now bereft of any ruling authority. HTS doesn’t yet have the manpower to extend its hold that far eastwards. And the Kurdish dominated Syrian Democratic Forces aren’t interested in territorial expansion. This means you have to drive, very fast and preferably not alone, through about 200km of ungoverned desert between the last SDF checkpoint and the first HTS one.

All along the way, you pass through the abandoned positions of the vanished old regime. The Assads liked flags, so the huge structures where their soldiers used to control entry and exit to Syria’s main cities are painted endlessly in the regime’s colours. It occurred to me as we drove through the deserted checkpoints that the Assad flag has now passed into the small and inglorious club of the banners of fallen regimes. A very short time ago, its appearance carried force, and the threat of terrible violence behind it. That was how it had been, whenever I had visited Syria before. The Assads ruled by a fathomless cruelty. Some of the details are only just now becoming available. Others were visible all the way through, but largely ignored. And now, here are their flags, and the great portraits of Hafez the founder and his hapless son Bashar. Their power to terrify drained away. Their flag gone to join the banners of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, the DDR, the Confederate States of America in the club of formerly terrifying, now empty signifiers.

This absence is felt in Damascus itself. We hit the first checkpoints of HTS around Homs. There was a security operation of some kind going on in the city. The jihadis on the checkpoints But once we were through this little cluster, the new regime didn’t bother us again all the way into the capital. I had last been in the city in 2017. I have never been in an urban space more closely and tightly covered by the organs of state security than Assad’s Syria. Its presence, everywhere, had been pervasive. Visible representatives of its authority had been ubiquitous, both in uniform and not. And now? The new rulers, very clearly, lack the manpower to impose any such hold, even if they wished to. Instead, the city seems largely left to its own devices, the new rulers, for now, existing alongside, rather than within it. HTS fighters were everywhere, in their tatty uniforms and carrying AK47s. But mostly, they seemed to be off duty, in ones or twos, still partaking of the celebrations associated with victory. Their own use of flags tells something about their intentions. By Umayyad Square, we saw an improvised procession of HTS men and their vehicles. They were flying the white jihadi ‘Tawhid’ flag proclaiming the oneness of God. Beside it, HTS has adopted the old flag of the Syrian republic, which the rebellion against Assad made its own.

Some former civil society activists with the opposition prefer to notice the latter, rather than the former, maintaining a cautious optimism regarding the emergent regime. My friend Mohamed Issa, who was jailed for 20 days in the infamous Palestine Branch of Military Intelligence during the civil war, is among them. As we sat in the main room of his apartment in one of the city’s suburbs, he assured me that HTS in its ‘new form’ has shown a ‘great ability to change.’ HTS, Mohammed suggested, had so far kept to ‘the pledges it made to the international community - to Turkey and the United States. Looking ahead, what needed to happen was ‘internal peace among the components of society that were demonized by the defunct regime,’ on the basis of a shared citizenship.

One can only wish success to such sentiments, of course. Still, it occurs to me that the problem facing authentic secular liberals (which Mohammed Issa is, and there are others) in Syria is that in a reality in which the currency of power has long been guns and ammunition in the hands of young men, the liberals lack the organized capacity for force. The result is that while rejoicing at the fall of the Assad regime, they can do little but hope for the best regarding its successors.

Does the situation in Damascus offer a basis for such hopes? As of now, HTS has yet to implement in the city many of the more stringent elements imposed in its Idlib fiefdom. Under the guidance of Turkey, and with the need for foreign investment, it may hold off for a while. Yet the general trend appears clear, and it is one direction. The top positions in the transitional government, including the post of prime minister, are all held by old HTS comrades of Ahmed Sharaa from the Idlib days. Norms of Islamic governance HTS style are slowly being introduced also into daily life. The latest move is the segregation of the sexes on public transport, men at the front, women at the back. Sharaa has said it will be four years til elections.

Syria is a country that defies prediction. And as one watches the HTS fighters and their Idlib friends around Jebel Qassoiun, Hamidiyeh Market and all the other landmarks of Damascus, still congratulating each other and themselves on their astonishing victory, it’s worth remembering that at present, HTS’s seizure of power in Syria is not yet complete. This is so not only with reference to the slow imposition of its preferred Islamic norms in the areas it controls. It also does not yet hold uncontested power across the entirety of the country.

In some ways, a historical parallel might be drawn with the Russian revolution. In early 1918, the Bolsheviks had secured power in Moscow. But Russia was still full of a variety of militias, pledging loyalty to a number of foreign governments. It would take a further half decade of strife before communist rule was clamped on to all of Russia for the next seventy years.

Similarly, Ahmed Sharaa and HTS hold Damascus. But as we have seen, beyond the empty deserts, the secular and anti-jihadi Syrian Democratic Forces still control the country east of the Euphrates, (along with thousands of Islamist captives who await HTS’s arrival). To the south of the capital, a Druze militia, the Rijal al Karameh, hold Suwaida province. Next to them ,in Deraa, an Islamist commander called Ahmed Oda has 15000 men under command, and reputedly enjoys the backing of the United Arab Emirates. In the western coastal area the Alawis, the group who the Assads themselves emerged from, are facing a concerted campaign of retribution at the hands of Sunni elements loyal to the new government. There are indications that they also are organizing to respond. On a number of occasions in recent days, HTS fighters in Latakia province have been ambushed and killed by gunmen who have then melted away back into the Alawi dominated countryside.

The challenge facing the new rulers of Damascus will be to advance along their preferred route of societal Islamisation in a form and at a pace that does not alienate either international backers or the Syrian people themselves, (or their own militants, who will want to force the pace), while working to draw in those parts of the country that are not yet under their control. They are likely to face resistance from a variety of directions on both these fronts. Syria, at war now for 14 years, is not yet at peace.