HTS’s triumph is a blow not just to Syria

What to say other than that I read Syria wrong or, worse – though it’s too early to call – read the Axis of Resistance wrong. In my last post but one I acknowledged the terrible danger for that long suffering escapee from Ottoman then French rule – likewise the treachery of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of which more later – but opined that:

Neither Moscow nor Tehran – nor for that matter Beijing – can afford to let Damascus fall to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. Which is to say, to Washington.

Since that appears  (I use the word advisedly) to be precisely what happened in the early hours of today, December 8, it’s hard to gainsay Caitlin Johnstone’s assessment in Assad Out/Woke Al Qaeda in that:

Many pundits on my end of the commentary spectrum had been calling those proxy wars self-defeating and framing them as the desperate flailings of a dying empire which will only accelerate its demise, but now here we are watching the empire score a victory it’s been chasing for years, with the western/Israeli stranglehold on the middle east growing tighter than ever.

Nor that I’m one of the pundits she has in mind. Did I too succumb to wishful thinking? Again it’s too early to tell, but we can’t rule out her grim conclusion that:

… being the world’s dominant superpower gives you the luxury of time. If one regime change operation fails, you can move some chess pieces around and take another shot. If a coup attempt fails in Latin America, relax, there will be others. If your efforts to grab Syria fail, just smash it with sanctions, occupy its oil fields to impoverish it while overextending its military allies in proxy conflicts elsewhere, and grab it later ….

No empire lasts forever, but there’s no evidence that this one is going away any time in the immediate future. This ugliness could conceivably drag itself out for generations.

That’s a possibility, but first things first. Let’s take stock of the extent of the disaster, for disaster it surely is to all but those still buying the fairy tale of a detested and brutal regime overthrown by freedom fighting ‘rebels’. ¹ Which is to say those yet to recognise that (a) the USA is hub of a globe-spanning empire, (b) its aims and methods – like arming Nazis in Ukraine and Jihadists in Syria – are evil, (c) on interests as vital to that empire as Syria, corporate media are obliged by their business models to prioritise the promotion of its narratives over truth.

What happened?

• Washington’s attempts to oust Bashar al-Assad and his Ba’athist Party – part of the wider project, revealed by US Brigadier General Wesley Clark, of regime change in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘Arab Spring’ but in reality to forge a new regional order answerable to Washington – was foiled by Russia’s air force intervention of 2015/16. This allowed the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) to drive the terrorists (including Hamas, a fact I’ll pass over in the interests of brevity) – who’d subjected Druze, Alawite Shia, Christian, Jew and Sunni alike to a rule, underpinned by horror and informed by harsh wahabist readings of the Qur’an, of unspeakable cruelty – into the northwest province of Idlib bordering with Turkiye.
• Instead of finishing off these cut-throats and head choppers a deal between Moscow and Ankara (with Tehran an uneasy party) known as the Astana Agreements confined them to a glorified form of house arrest – “a gilded cage” as Kevork Almassian of Syriana Analysis put it yesterday, with the emphasis more on the gilded than the cage – in Idlib. This was ill advised to put it mildly.
• While Astana froze the conflict, Syria’s ordeal continued. Most of its people – 90% says Al-Jazeera this morning ² – now lived below the poverty line due to lethal sanctions and US theft of their oil to pay its Kurdish proxies, while talk of corruption in Damascus ³ did little to endear its government to an underpaid SAA, its most seasoned men now retired.
• On Friday, November 29 the terrorists broke out of Idlib, having spent years being trained by Turkish and Ukrainian special forces. At lightning speed, thousands of Jihadists drove courtesy tanks from Ankara down the M5 highway to take Aleppo then Hama; separated from the Mediterranean (and Russia’s naval base at Tartus and airbase at Hmeimim) only by the Al-Ansariyah mountain range. With Ukrainian drones and radio jammers adding to the confusion and demoralisation, the SAA – offered safe passage by HTS ⁴  – turned tail and fled. When Homs went the way of its northern neighbours, the fate of Damascus was sealed.

• As Conor Gallagher wrote in Naked Capitalism on December 2:

Turkish intelligence gave the green light to and is helping direct the offensive. It was coordinated between Turkish, Ukrainian, and French intelligence, with Israeli backing and US approval. HTS also receives considerable support from Ukrainian special forces with a focus on drone warfare to target Russian and Syrian positions — a connection facilitated by the Turks.

Erdogan Backstabs His Way Into Center of Middle East Conflict

• Today, Sunday December 8, I woke to news that Assad had fled Damascus, whereabouts unknown.

Who is threatened?

• For the Syrian people it’s goodbye to what remained of Ba’athism – “Arab socialism” – in Syria. Goodbye too – unless you believe in Santa, tooth fairy, a flat earth and HTS PR on having embraced diversity and gone all cuddly-woke – both to its secularism and to all remaining obstacles to Western asset strippers investors.

• For Palestinians the news is no less dire. Whether as HTS, Jabhat al-Nusra or Al-Qaeda, Syria’s new occupiers are Israel’s allies. (Do not be taken in by superficial animosities. In a region renowned for strange bedfellows of convenience, AQ/ISIS have never struck at Israel, despite its murderous policies towards practitioners of the faith they profess. On the contrary, their actions have always advanced the Zionist State, first and foremost in the long and dirty war on Syria.) An immediate consequence of the fall of Assad is that arms routes from Iran to Lebanon, hence Hezbollah, are blocked. For Israel and its US backer, this is a glittering prize.
• Iran is weakened in several ways. First, it is humiliated: why did its intelligence services not see this coming? Second, it brings an Israeli/US proxy closer to its borders, thereby diluting the advantage of its hypersonic missile reach while remaining out of fuel range for Israel’s US supplied F-16s and F-35s. Third, it extends Ankara’s influence in Central Asia, where ethnic Turkic groups may disrupt the New Silk Road arm of the Belt & Road Project ⁵ and advance Erdogan’s dream of an Ottoman Empire Mark II.
• Russia is humiliated in the same way as Iran, and endangered to the extent her bases on the Eastern Mediterranean are threatened. At the same time it remains to be see whether and to what extent she seeks to limit the damage. Since wars cannot be won from the air, without a presence on the ground, will she now confine her energies to bagging a slice of a dismembered Syria? A slice on its small but highly strategic coastline? I for one would not hold that against the Russian leadership.
• With Iran weakened, Beijing must be anxious. Belt & Road aside, fifty percent of China’s oil comes though the Hormuz Strait, to which HTS/Al Qaeda – hence the US Empire – has moved palpably closer.
• In dialogue just yesterday with Nima Alkhorshid, a Pepe Escobar in incisive if glum form opines that what we are seeing in Syria is the world’s first BRICS war. I believe he may be right. If so, though this is assuredly a major setback for a BRICS decreasingly separable from the Axis of Resistance to US hegemony, not all the players have shown their hand.

Cui bono?

The timing, so close to Israel’s warped ‘truce’ in Lebanon, points to Erdogan having done the dirtiest of deals with Netanyahu, its implications still sinking in. With Ankara poised to annexe chunks of northern Syria it has long claimed as Turkish, Tel Aviv stands equally poised, as the fighting capabilities of Hezbollah are degraded, to advance its Greater (Biblical) Israel project in a fulfilment of Jehovah’s Will – and Washington’s ⁶– toward which the annexation of Southern Lebanon would mark a major milestone.

Since Turkiye will never again be trusted by the BRICS, Erdogan has called time on his country’s strategic ambiguity by taking it decisively into the Washington fold. With Israel strengthened, and Turkiye more West-facing than in years, the biggest winner of this round – I don’t say of the wider war, nor do I share Caitlin’s pessimism of “the ugliness dragging out for generations” – is once again your friendly, peace loving and law-abiding Uncle Sam.

And here I must leave it for now. There are things at play we can’t yet know.

* * *

1. To qualify as rebels against a government, don’t we have to be its citizens? As opposed to being Central Asians or Uighurs from Xinjiang, wallets stuffed with Turkish lira?
2. Qatari-owned Al-Jazeera is not a reliable source on Syria but there’s little reason to doubt this particular claim.
3. I don’t know enough to say whether Damascus was hopelessly corrupt. What we can say is that (a) the conditions for that were ideal, and (b) to focus on it to the exclusion of the bigger picture – why the USA sought Assad’s ouster – points to a credulity much prized in Washington.
4. As noted by Simplicius two days ago, it suits the terrorists to allow the SAA a safe exit. In part this is informed by its new and friendly image makeover but, more pressingly, by the tactical imperative of maintaining blitzkreig  momentum.
5. With Turkiye’s ‘strategic ambiguity’ dead in the water, I take as read its withdrawal, de facto  if not de jure, from all things Belt & Road.
6. See my posts on US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Parts one, two, three and four.