“Durka, durka, durka, Mohammed, Mohammed, jihad!” “Durka, durk, Allah, Mohammed, Mohammed, jihad!”
You’ll have to forgive me: my Arabic isn’t quite what it used to be. In any case, it doesn’t really matter what the men in the video are babbling. It matters what they’re doing—or, rather, what they’ve just done.
What they’ve just done, as far as we can tell, is to massacre a group of Alawites, an Islamic minority that mostly inhabits the western coastal region of Syria, on the Med. Bashar al Assad and his clan are all members of the Alawite minority, and many of them maintain a strong loyalty to the deposed leader, mainly because he was their only protection in a place—the Middle East—where being a member of a religious minority threatens at any moment to turn into a death sentence.
The young men who killed these people, proudly gurning for the camera and uttering their mindless rote phrases about God’s goodness, are Sunni Islamist fighters aligned with the new Syrian regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa, a man who was on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorists until very recently, until it became convenient for him not to be.
The video in question is one of many that have made their way onto social media in the last two days, after the resumption of fighting in Syria. They make for grim viewing and presage a very dark future for the country and indeed the wider region: a future of ethnic cleansing, changing borders, occupation and, of course, the dismal handmaiden of all these things—mass migration out of the region towards Europe and maybe even America.
Some of us knew this would happen if Bashar al Assad was removed. None of us were or are possessed of unusual foresight or the gift of prophecy. Those who didn’t know can only be described as ignorant or wilfully blind, indifferent to the plight of the Syrian people.
Here’s what we know about the fighting so far. Hundreds have been killed since Thursday, as Alawite groups battle government forces. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that at least 180 people have been killed in the Alawite region of the country, including more than 20 men in the town of Muktareyah alone. A prominent Alawite cleric, Sheikh Shabaan Mansour, aged 86, is also reported to have been killed.
President al-Sharaa has blamed the hostilities on forces loyal to Assad, and said that his government is committed to rooting out “remnants” of the old regime.
“We will continue to pursue the remnants of the fallen regime,” he said.
“We will bring them to a fair court, and we will continue to restrict weapons to the state, and no loose weapons will remain in Syria.”
The President also claimed that anybody found to be persecuting civilians or committing massacres would face swift justice.
So: The new government is simply attempting to maintain the peace. It’s mopping up what remains of Assad’s military forces and attempting to do so in a way that minimises civilian casualties and prevents atrocities. Got it.
Forgive me, but I’m not convinced. I’ve seen what happened in Iraq. We all saw what happened there, first during the US occupation, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, as Sunni and Shia turned on each other in a brutal civil war, and then in the dark days of Islamic State, which unleashed an orgy of rape and slaughter on the minorities of the region, including the Yazidis. Mercifully, President Trump brought an end to that wretched caliphate, but now elements of Islamic State are part of the Syrian government, although they call themselves a different name—so, yeah, I’m not convinced this is just an exercise in law and order.
One person who will be feeling a grim sense of vindication as she watches these events is Tulsi Gabbard, the newly appointed Director of National Intelligence. For the better part of a decade, Gabbard warned against the consequences of toppling Assad. In 2017, she actually travelled to Syria to meet him, and when she came back to the US, she said there was “no difference” between the “mainstream” rebels fighting Assad, who received US backing, and Islamic State.
Tulsi Gabbard was right. She told us exactly what would happen.
Because of her foresight, her grasp of realpolitik and her refusal to toe the deep-state line on regime change in the Middle East, Gabbard has been labelled an Assad apologist, a Putin “toadie” and, worst of all, an actual Russian agent. Baby-eating warmonger Hillary Clinton repeated that last charge on more than one occasion. In the run-up to the 2020 election, Hillary said Russia was “grooming” Gabbard as a third-party candidate to split the Democrat vote and hand the election to Donald Trump. Gabbard fired back by calling Clinton “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long.”
In truth, this has very little to do with personal reputation and who was right or wrong about the consequences of replacing Syria’s mild-mannered strongman with a government of Islamists. This is about the future of a region that has cost so much blood and treasure for the United States and promises, if this crisis is not carefully managed, to cost even more. A lot more.
Fighting is not confined to the west of the country. There is fighting in the south, in Druze areas along the border with Israel. There’s fighting in the northeast too, as Kurdish groups squabble among themselves in their semi-autonomous province and do their best to keep Islamic State at bay. Saudi Arabia and Turkey have already voiced their support for the Syrian government, while Russia, where former president Assad is now in exile, has called for an end to the bloodshed.
The situation has the potential to escalate in any numbers of ways, none of which are good.
The fighting could spread across the entire country, becoming a full-blown civil war. Neighbouring powers will of course involve themselves by proxy or even directly in a civil war, as they did while Assad was still top dog. The country could be partitioned—Turkey and Israel would both like to grab Syrian territory for themselves—leaving a rump Islamist state that would no doubt spread terror beyond its borders. And any prolonged conflict has the potential to displace significant numbers of people, who will all seek to leave the region and make their way to Europe, where so many of their fellow countrymen and -women already reside. Over a million Syrians now live cosy, state-subsidised lives in Germany. Some may also end up crossing the Atlantic too.
The entire America First movement is predicated on extricating the US from pointless, costly foreign entanglements, especially in the Middle East, where decades of war have done nothing to make America wealthier, safer, freer or better on any metric I can think of. One of the great legacies of Trump’s first term was to prevent further wars, including the war with Iran that would surely have happened if his opponent, Countess Bathory, had won that election.
How Donald Trump handles the escalating conflict in Syria, and whether he can prevent wider regional conflict and instability, will surely be one of the great tests of his second term.