REIGNITED civil war in Syria is down to destabilising shockwaves from Israel’s wars of aggression in the Middle East and the malign role of Nato powers in shielding the jihadist forces in Idlib now terrorising Aleppo.
There is no ignoring the overlapping alliances which shape this conflict. Syria is allied to Iran, which Israel has repeatedly attacked, including through bombing an Iranian consulate in Syria itself. Both are allied to Hezbollah, which has fought on the Bashar al-Assad government’s side in the civil war and which Israel seeks to crush by invading Lebanon.
It does not follow that every outbreak of violence in the region is part of a master plan, but perceptions that Hezbollah and Iran have been weakened by Israeli attacks will have encouraged the terrorist regime in Idlib to reopen hostilities.
And it is a terrorist regime, though Western reportage since the civil war began 13 years ago has been coy about the nature of Syria’s opposition.
The Idlib-based Syrian Salvation Government is dominated by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), itself a merger of a number of al-Qaida-affiliated Islamist groups, including Jaysh al-Sunna, whose recruitment of child soldiers was exposed in 2016, and Nour al-din al-Zinki, notorious for filming the beheading of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy in the same year.
Ahrar al-Sham, the largest of the groups, has been nicknamed the Syrian Taliban and its rule is just as repressive. An EU asylum agency briefing noted in 2020 that “the jihadist coalition HTS has been responsible for the repressive social norms and policies against female residents … resulting in further violations including executions, corporal punishments, restrictions of freedom of movement, of dress, on work, education and on access to healthcare.”
The open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary forces in Syria has continued in the country’s north-west to date through the illegal presence of Nato armies on Syrian soil.
It is the presence of the Turkish army that has stopped Syria’s military stamping out the last bastion of jihadist rule in the country, just as it is the presence of the US military in the north-east which has prevented reintegration of Kurdish areas.
The official rationale for stationing troops in Syria against its will is to prevent a revival of the Islamic State terror group, though once-and-future president Donald Trump was more honest when he stated the US was in Syria “only for the oil,” hundreds of thousands of barrels of which have been illegally exported via Iraqi Kurdistan — with Damascus estimating revenues lost to this theft at hundreds of billions of dollars.
This underlines the hypocrisy of US officials now blaming Assad for failing to engage in a “political process” to end the war. The process has been prevented by foreign occupying armies.
Assad too has his foreign allies, and Russian bombers are again conducting air raids over rebel-held territory: if HTS assumed Russia was too overstretched in Ukraine to engage (the apparently accurate assumption of Azerbaijan when it marched past Russian peacekeepers to drive the entire Armenian population out of Nagorno-Karabakh last year) it may have miscalculated.
That only emphasises the potential of Syria’s war to draw in great powers, powers which are now far closer to direct conflict than in the war’s earlier stages. The spread of war across the Middle East comes at a huge cost in human lives, and increases the number of flashpoints for a new world war.
The answer must be to redouble our efforts for peace. These wars cannot be considered in isolation.
Stopping Israel’s genocide in Gaza and attacks on Lebanon, prioritising a ceasefire and negotiations to end great power conflict in Ukraine, and demanding British pressure on our Nato ally Turkey to stop its jihadist allies rampaging through Syria are related priorities for the peace movement.
