Beyond the Fall of the Syrian Regime

by Peter Harling , Sarah Birke 

Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)

published February 24, 2012 

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero022412

Syrians are approaching the one-year anniversary of what has
become the most tragic, far-reaching and uncertain episode
of the Arab uprisings. Since protesters first took to the
streets in towns and villages across the country in March
2011, they have paid an exorbitant price in a domestic
crisis that has become intertwined with a strategic struggle
over the future of Syria.

The regime of Bashar al-Asad has fought its citizens in an
unsuccessful attempt to put down any serious challenge to
its four-decade rule, leaving several thousand dead. Many
more languish in jail. The regime has polarized the
population, rallying its supporters by decrying the
protesters as saboteurs, Islamists and part of a foreign
conspiracy. In order to shore up its own ranks, it has
played on the fears of the `Alawi minority from which the
ruling family hails, lending the conflict sectarian
overtones. All these measures have pushed a growing number
of young men on the street -- and a small but steady stream
of army defectors -- to put up an armed response, while
impelling large sections of the opposition to seek
financial, political and military help from abroad. Loyalist
units have taken considerable casualties from the armed
rebels, and the regime has hit back with disproportionate
force.

Events have aided the regime in its attempt to dismiss the
protest movement and further tip the balance from nominal
reform to escalating repression, fueling a vicious cycle
that has turned sporadic clashes into a nascent civil war.
In a sense, the regime may already have won: By pushing
frustrated protesters to take up arms and the international
community to offer them support, it is succeeding in
disfiguring what it saw as the greatest threat to its rule,
namely the grassroots and mostly peaceful protest movement
that demanded profound change. In another sense, the regime
may already have lost: By treating too broad a cross-section
of the Syrian people as the enemy, and giving foreign
adversaries justification to act, it seems to have forged
against itself a coalition too big to defeat. At a minimum,
Bashar al-Asad has reversed his father's legacy: Through
tenacious diplomacy over three decades (from his takeover in
1970 to his death in 2000), Hafiz al-Asad made Syria,
formerly a prize in the regional strategic game, a player in
its own right. In less than a year, Bashar's obduracy will
have done the opposite, turning actor into arena.

At the start of February, the regime stepped up its assault
by using heavy weapons against rebellious neighborhoods of
Homs, the third-largest city in Syria and the most
religiously mixed one to become a hub of the uprising. The
escalation was bolstered by Russia and China, which on
February 4 blocked the Arab League-inspired, Western-backed
attempts to pass a resolution at the UN Security Council
condemning the violence and suggesting a plan for a
negotiated solution by which Asad would hand over power to a
deputy, who would form a unity government ahead of
elections. The assumption in Moscow, which fears instability
and views the struggle in Syria as a contest with the West,
is that the regime will succeed in defeating both the
ongoing protest movement and the emerging insurgency. In so
doing, runs Russian reasoning, Syria's regime will reassert
its control over the country and compel at least significant
parts of the opposition to negotiate on its own terms --
preferably in Moscow. 

Losing Control

This outcome seems unlikely. Behind all the bloody, one-off
battles lies a picture of this country of 23 million
slipping out of the regime's control. Over a period of 11
months, the regime has altogether failed to cow protesters
through its mixture of violent intimidation and offers of
paltry reforms.

Time and time again, the regime has proved its promises to
reform, already grudging and tardy, to be largely empty as
well. The lifting of emergency law in April 2011, for
example, did not stop the shooting or arbitrary detention of
protesters. Pulling in the leash on the security services,
whose harassment of citizens fed the anger of the uprising,
is off the table, for fear that it would weaken the regime's
hold on the country. Any measure that could jeopardize the
ruling clique's unaccountable reign is equally out of the
question. What can be changed is what matters least. The
Baath Party's role will certainly decrease, but Syria is a
one-party state no longer: It is a state of a few families
and multiple security services, who have long used
resistance to US imperialism and Israeli occupation as a
substitute for clear political vision. Participation in the
legislative branch of government will be opened to the
tamest of oppositions and perhaps in the cabinet as well;
real decision-making happens in the presidential palace,
anyway. The regime has set the ceiling on reforms low. Its
calls for "dialogue" are designed only to legitimize this
course of action. 

Rather than reform, the regime's default setting has been to
push society to the brink. As soon as protests started,
security agents hung posters warning of sectarian strife.
State media showed staged footage of arms being found in a
mosque in Dir'a, the southern city where protests first
broke out, and warned that a sit-in in Homs on April 18 was
an attempt to erect a mini-caliphate. This manipulation of
Syrians meant the regime was confident that the threat of
civil war would force citizens and outside players alike to
agree on preserving the existing power structure as the only
bulwark against collapse. In an October interview, Asad
reiterated threats of an "earthquake" and "ten Afghanistans"
in the region. The regime's narrative boils down to, "Après
moi le deluge."

It is doubtful that this blackmail will work. All too many
Syrians have buried friends killed during protests (or, for
that matter, funerals, which routinely come under fire), or
have been shuffled through the regime's ghastly prisons
(which consistently fail to break them, radicalizing them
instead), or have watched their homes destroyed and looted.
They say they will not stop, whatever the cost -- and the
costs are already huge. Having weakened its home front
beyond repair, the regime is also vulnerable to growing
pressure from abroad. In particular, the United States and
Saudi Arabia, who have long feuded with Syria over its role
as a linchpin of Iranian influence, have been given an
opportunity to change the Syrian regime that they could
never have dreamed of.

The regime may win a pyrrhic victory, by bringing about a
civil war that will destroy its own structures, wreck the
country and suck in the outside world. It would be a sad end
for the most surprising explosion of empowerment of the Arab
spring. As protest roiled Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in 2011,
many, including Syrians themselves, who saw the population
as depoliticized, thought an uprising would not come. But it
did: When a handful of schoolchildren in Dir'a were detained
and tortured for scrawling graffiti calling for the end of
the regime, protesters took to the streets from Dir'a to
Idlib in the northwest, from the Mediterranean coast to
eastern Dayr al-Zawr, and in tiny towns and villages from
the sandy desert to the fertile plains. Calls for "toppling
the regime" saw their meaning evolve from "reforming the
system" to "executing the president," as they were met with
ever more violence. The hope that the regime could offer any
future was chipped away and then shattered.

Many see Syria, with its wealth of ethnicities and sects
surrounding a Sunni Arab majority, as doomed to fail;
parallels with fractious Iraq and Lebanon, which suffered
long years of civil war, are frequently drawn. Yet there is
reason to think that, given the chance, Syrian society could
survive the family-based regime that has ruled it since
Hafiz al-Asad came to power in a bloodless coup in 1970. All
depends on whether society will surrender to, or face up to,
its own demons, as a deep political crisis devolves into a
no less profound social predicament. 

The Struggle

The struggle over Syria pits two symmetrical narratives
against each other. For the regime, its supporters and its
allies, Syria's is an immature, if not disease-ridden
society. They posit -- with evidence both real and invented,
and generally blown out of proportion -- that Syrian society
shows sectarian, fundamentalist, violent and seditious
proclivities that can be contained only by a ruthless power
structure. Remove Bashar al-Asad, and the alternative is
either civil war or the hegemony of Islamists beholden to
Turkey and the Gulf and sold out to the West. Regime
loyalists argue that society is not ready for change and, in
fact, deserves no better than its present shackling.
Hizballah and Iran, rather than cultivate popular support to
ensure enduring influence, have placed all their chips on
the regime's ability to crush what, early on, they chose to
see overwhelmingly through the lens of foreign conspiracy.

The regime's opponents, by contrast, posit that any and all
change is desirable, given the regime's own nature. Over its
four decades in power, the Asad dynasty has increasingly
treated the country as family property, plundering its
wealth for redistribution to narrowing circles of cronies.
In line with divide-and-rule traditions inherited from
colonialism, the regime has cynically strengthened its grip
by nurturing fractures within society, keeping state
institutions weak for fear they might underpin genuine
national sentiment, and setting up a security apparatus
heavily staffed with members of one minority, the `Alawi
community. It has suppressed dissent with at times extreme
brutality, as typified by the 1982 shelling of Hama, which
left many thousands dead. Regime opponents argue that,
without Bashar al-Asad, Syria will finally be free to
express its stifled economic potential, its natural communal
harmony and its aspiration to an open, democratic political
system. For their part, Gulf states and the West see in
regime change a solution to all problems, not necessarily
within Syria itself, but throughout the region: At last,
Hizballah, the Lebanese resistance movement that relies on
Syria as a transit route for weapons, would be neutralized,
Iran badly weakened and the so-called moderate Arab states
empowered.

Although the two narratives appear mutually exclusive, they
both hold a measure of truth. The regime and the opposition
in exile, who accuse the other of being the mother of all
ills, have each tended to conform to stereotype.

Throughout the crisis, the regime has proven more sectarian,
unaccountable and vicious than ever. Obsessed with the
challenge posed by peaceful protests, its mukhabarat
security services -- almost none of whose members have been
put on trial as promised -- have hunted non-violent
progressive activists, often with more zeal than shown
toward criminal gangs and armed groups. The mukhabarat have
recruited thugs and criminals -- the more extreme, venal and
subservient elements of society -- into an army of proxies
known across the country as shabbiha. It has tried to
intimidate protesters through gruesome tactics. An
emblematic case for the opposition is Hamza al-Khatib, a 14-
year old from Dir'a whose battered and castrated corpse was
returned to his family a month after he was taken. (The
regime never denied the boy had been arrested and killed,
but had forensic experts explain on television that he was
in fact a professional rapist operating within a jihadi
network.) Asad has gradually shed all pretense of being a
national leader, speaking instead as the head of one camp
determined to vanquish the other.

For its part, the Syrian National Council (SNC), the main
opposition group that is composed mostly of exiles, has
failed to offer an inspiring alternative since it was formed
in September 2011. Its mainly unknown and inexperienced
members have done little to counteract the regime's
propaganda. Unable to agree on any positive political
platform, the SNC has refused any negotiation with the
regime and called for "international intervention" that is
conveniently left undefined, leaving to their anxieties the
many Syrians who simultaneously loathe the regime, dread
foreign interference and panic at the idea of a high-risk
transition. It has estranged, among others, Kurdish
factions, who fear a Turkish agenda, and petrified Syrians
distrustful of Qatari and Saudi influence. It has most
notably failed to reach out to the `Alawis, many of whom are
poor and disgruntled but afraid to change sides lest they
suffer a backlash due to their association with the security
forces and army units responsible for much of the violence.
By abandoning all these people to their dark forebodings,
the SNC's members have missed an opportunity to hasten the
decline of the regime and ward off civil strife in the event
of Bashar's fall. On the international level, the SNC has
displayed political naïveté by putting all its energy into
lobbying for support from Turkey, the Gulf monarchies and
the West, all of whom are already sympathetic, while
ignoring and alienating the regime's allies. 

Social Shifts

What does not fit any prior stereotype is the behavior of
Syrian society. It certainly is fissiparous, but not along
predictable lines. Past uprisings -- the Muslim Brother-led
insurgency in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Druze
intifada of 2000 and the Kurdish rebellion of 2004 -- raised
suspicions in society at large for their communal nature. In
contrast, today's protest movement is surprisingly broad-
based and cross-cutting. Many an `Alawi, especially among
intellectuals and simple villagers, resents how his
community has been taken hostage by the regime. The Druze
are split somewhere down the middle. Christians, who are
geographically dispersed, adopt remarkably different
viewpoints depending on how much they see of the security
services' abuse on the ground. Those in Damascus and Aleppo
have generally rallied to the regime's side, but in many
other areas Christians at least sympathize with protesters.
Ismailis, based in the town of Salamiyya, were among the
first to join the opposition. And Sunni Arabs, of course,
are not all against Bashar; the Shawaya tribes in the
northeast, to cite one example, tend to be supportive.

Nor is a communal prism the only one through which the
conflict should be seen. Although it started off as an
underclass and provincial phenomenon in the Hawran plain,
the protest movement has crossed socio-economic boundaries,
drawing in doctors, engineers and teachers. It has spread to
the capital, where flash demonstrations stand in for the
large rallies that would take place were it not for massive
security deployments. The business establishment, whose
interests initially made for a cautious, conservative
stance, has realized the regime is compromising them: Most
-- even within crony capitalist circles -- have long been
donating money to the opposition. Fault lines have appeared
in less likely places still. Within the same family, older
generations are more likely than the youth to cling to the
devil they know. Couples are sometimes torn; some women are
prone to prefer stability and dialogue, while others push
the limits of dissent beyond what their husbands are
inclined to do.

The uprising has caused parts of Syrian society, which had
long been apathetic and fragmented, to undergo a sort of
renaissance. Protesters have been extraordinarily dedicated
and creative. They have set up committees to collect and
distribute money and document individual deaths with a
fastidious sense of duty. In the midst of bloodshed, they
have expanded their inventory of smart slogans and eye-
catching posters, chanted in support of besieged cities in
different areas of the country, stitched together new flags,
and spoofed the regime in video and animation. Areas such as
Daraya, close to Damascus, have become known for their acts
of civil resistance. Ghiyath Matar, a young activist who was
later killed under torture, had ordered roses and water to
hand out to soldiers and security forces sent to police the
area.

Precisely because the regime has sought to exploit every
source of possible strife, its opponents have had to work
hard to contain the more thuggish, sectarian and
fundamentalist strands in their midst. Their efforts are
what have kept society together, despite a growing and
worrying pattern of confessional, criminal and revenge-
inspired violence. The protest movement would have
degenerated into chaos long ago if it were not for an
overriding desire among the majority of its members to
recover their country, their dignity and their destiny,
rather than forfeit them.

There is a distinctly Syrian character to the crisis. Unlike
Libyans, who in a matter of hours defected en masse, took up
arms and called upon the outside world to step in, Syrians
took months to resort to weapons or cry out for
international intervention. Unlike Egypt, where revolution
was a sublime but somewhat shallow moment of grace, the
Syrian uprising has been a long, hard slog: The protest
movement has gradually built itself up, studied the regime's
every move and mapped out the country to the extent that
small towns such as Binnish in the northwest are now known
to all.

Alongside actual demonstrations, an expansive albeit largely
invisible civil society has emerged to render them possible,
by offering numerous forms of support. Businessmen have
donated money and food; doctors sneak out medicines from
hospitals and man field clinics in the most violence-ridden
areas; religious leaders, by and large, try to keep a lid on
sectarianism and violence. Over the course of the uprising,
Syrians have articulated a now deeply rooted culture of
dissent and developed sometimes sophisticated forms of self-
rule by setting up local councils: Homs, which is also home
to unruly armed groups, has developed a revolutionary
council with an 11-member executive that presides over
committees responsible for different aspects of the crisis,
from interacting with the media to procuring medical
supplies. Within revolting communities there is a greater
sense of purpose, solidarity and national unity than at any
time in recent Syrian history.

Even the growing insurgency makes for an interesting
paradox: Proliferating armed groups derive their popular
legitimacy from the need to protect peaceful protests
militarily. No mad dash to the arsenal, the armament in most
places has proceeded in stages. People first purchased
weapons to keep in the house for self-defense in the event
of raids by security forces. Small groups of armed men then
went out with protesters to respond if the security forces
started to shoot at them. Over time, the action has
transformed from pure defense into a more aggressive modus
operandi -- targeting government checkpoints, regime proxies
and informants, military convoys and security facilities.
Tit-for-tat sectarian killings occur all too frequently in
central Syria. But much of the violence, up to this point,
has been not random but constrained by a mandate of sorts,
as it takes protecting the protests and civilians as the
base for action. 

Troubling Times Ahead

Of course, the foregoing is the better part of the story. On
both sides, thugs and criminals are exploiting the struggle
as a vehicle for social promotion, a means of enrichment and
an outlet for sectarian hatred. This statement is true of
regime forces, whose fallacious claim to stand for law and
order is disproved all too often by their heinous behavior,
as it is of some armed groups fighting them under the
umbrella of the "Free Syrian Army," a motley assortment of
local vigilantes. The recruits into this "Army" range from
fathers defending their families to bereaved young men to
defectors fighting for their lives, but its ranks are not
devoid of fundamentalist militants and unreconstructed
villains. To date, the latter elements have not been
predominant, although they are all that the regime, its
supporters and its allies want to see. The logic is self-
evident: The ruling elite, having little good to offer, is
hell-bent on proving that anything else to emerge from
Syrian society can only be much worse. Thus the almost
hysterical cult of Bashar, whose gross mishandling of this
crisis matters not to his supporters: He alone can save this
society from itself.

But Syrian society is better prepared to manage a transition
than it would have been had the power structure collapsed
early on. It has been forced into learning how to organize
itself to prevent its own collapse. The regime's divide-and-
rule tactics have been a key unifying factor for large
swathes of society, which to survive has had to reach across
geographic, communal and socio-economic boundaries. Were the
revolutionaries to be successful, however, that source of
unity would disappear, leaving them disoriented. As
elsewhere in the region, "the fall of the regime" is a
remedy for the depressing impasse that ruling elites lock
their societies into, not a blueprint for successful change.

Spurred on by Iran and Hizballah and bolstered by Russian
support, while facing an increasingly potent insurgency
backed -- politically if not militarily -- from abroad, the
chances are that the regime will neither survive nor "fall,"
but gradually erode and mutate into militias fighting an
all-out civil war. But assuming the power structure does
give way before that corner is turned, there are at least
three threats that could quickly derail a political
transition.

The first is the reality of Bashar's power base, which has
narrowed spectacularly but remains an incontrovertible fact
on the ground. Just as the regime dismisses the protest
movement with the spurious argument that a majority has not
taken to the streets (as if any country around the world had
ever witnessed half its people on the march), the regime's
opponents berate its supporters as a minority of delusional,
criminal, treacherous citizens. The fact is that, just as
the regime cannot survive this crisis by ignoring the
millions mobilized against it, so a transition cannot
succeed while overlooking the millions -- security officers,
proxies and regular people -- who have thrown in their lot
with Bashar. Short of protection for the people most exposed
to retribution, notably among the `Alawis, a genuine
reconciliation mechanism, an effective transitional justice
process and a thorough but smooth overhaul of the security
services, it could all go very wrong.

Secondly, judging by the SNC's performance, there is cause
for concern if it were to play a key role in such a
transition. Its leading members, hindered by personal
rivalries, unable to formulate clear political positions for
fear of implosion and seemingly consumed with having a spot
in the limelight, may fall back on sectarian apportionment
as the only consensual criterion for power sharing. Syrians
on the street have made clear that they see the SNC's
legitimacy as based on their ability to lobby for diplomatic
pressure and see their mandate as stretching no further, but
the outside world's quest for a ready-made "alternative,"
and the prevailing assumption that pluralist societies in
the Middle East are condemned to such evolution, could prove
to be Syria's undoing. A political process including the
SNC, but built primarily around locally led organizations,
along with technocrats and businessmen, would have more
legitimacy and a greater chance of success.

Finally, as increasingly desperate protesters call for help,
there is a danger that the outside world will make matters
worse as it plays at being savior. Calls for aid are
somewhat worse than a pact with the devil: They entail pacts
with many devils that do not agree on much. The Gulf
monarchies, Iraq, Turkey, Russia, the US, Iran and others
all see geostrategic stakes in the fate of the Asad regime.
The greater their involvement, the less Syrians will remain
in control of their destiny. Crying out for foreign
intervention of any kind, to bring this emergency to an end
at any cost, is more than understandable coming from
ordinary citizens subjected to extreme forms of regime
violence. Exiled opposition figures who pose as national
leaders have no excuse for behaving likewise, when what is
needed is a cool-headed, careful calibration of what type of
outside "help" would do the minimum of harm.

Close to home, another Middle Eastern experience -- Iraq --
serves as an example on all three fronts. A political
process excluding even a relatively small minority within
Iraqi society led to a collective disaster. A group of
returning exiles, without a social base but enjoying
international support as the only visible, pre-existing
"alternative," quickly took over the transition and agreed
only on splitting up power among themselves on the basis of
a communal calculus. Their division of the spoils gradually
contaminated the entire polity, and ultimately led to civil
war. And the US, presiding over this tragedy, succeeded only
in turning Iraq into a parody of itself, a country that now
fits every sectarian and troubled stereotype the occupying
power initially saw in it.

All told, on a domestic level Syria has entered a struggle
to bring its post-colonial era to a close. It is not simply
about toppling a "regime" but about uprooting a "system" --
the Arabic word nizam conveniently evoking both notions. The
current system is based on keeping Syrians hostage to
communal divisions and regional power plays. Indeed, the
regime's residual legitimacy derives entirely from playing
indigenous communities and foreign powers off each other, at
the expense of genuine state building and accountable
leadership. Prior attempts at breaking with the legacy of
colonialism, in the revolutionary bustle of the mid-
twentieth century, failed, grounded as they were in narrow
politicized elites and military circles. What is different
today is the awakening of a broad popular movement,
motivated less by parochial interests and grand ideologies
than by a sense of wholesale dispossession of their wealth,
dignity and destiny.

This awakening, in a sense, is precisely what the regime has
been fighting. Although foreign interference is a fact,
there is less a conspiracy in Syria than a society on the
move, headed along a path that the regime simply will not
follow. The road ahead is a dangerous one, and the chances
are real that it will lead Syria, and the region, into the
maze of civil war. But for all too many Syrians there is no
going back. The regime was given a year to stake out a safer
way forward, but has clung ever more fiercely to its old
narrative, ultimately recasting itself as a historical cul-
de-sac.

[Peter Harling is Iraq, Lebanon and Syria program director
for the International Crisis Group, based part-time in
Damascus.

Sarah Birke is a Middle East correspondent currently writing
for The Economist.]

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