Syria: Civil War to Holy War
Charles Glass, OR Books, £14.99

“If modern Syrian history taught any lesson, it was that deliverance from a wretched past did not guarantee a brighter future,” writes Charles Glass in a recent article examining where the new regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa might be heading.

He is characteristically ambivalent, as much about Syria is very uncertain. But Charles Glass has a lot of form on the Middle East, having first visited in 1973 and been on the ground as a journalist covering the area for much of the intervening time. His experience is very much in the thick of it and includes being held hostage in Beirut and getting injured by artillery fire.

This book is an update to 2016’s Syria Burning, which broadly examined events from the 2011 Arab uprising in Syria which then turned into a bloody civil war. Hard facts are often difficult to ascertain in this battered country and much information must be gathered from witnesses, political actors and selected specialist study.

Once a sprawling territory, “Greater Syria” would encompass Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Palestine and chunks of Iraq and Turkey. As a state carved out of the Ottoman empire by the British and French, it was no less diverse. A visitor in the 1930s noted “at least a dozen different races... about thirty religious sects. Amongst the Christians alone there are seventeen high dignitaries with the title Patriarch... Moslems, Druse, Ismaeiltes, Nosairis [Alawites], Yessides [Yazidis] and various sub-sects too numerous to mention.”

The Assad regime which began with Hafez in 1970 and ended with his son Bashar in 2024 was in some respects a considerable balancing act for all its serious and numerous faults. The regime was more or less inclusive of its many minority groups. About 70 per cent of the population was Sunni Muslim yet the Assads were from the Alawite minority. But Syria was in a strategically sensitive area: it supported and was bolstered by Hezbollah in Lebanon, worked closely with Iran and was part of the resistance to the colonial Israeli regime.  

But Syria is also in the cauldron of imperialism. Probably no country on Earth has had more foreign military intervention in a theatre which has innumerable internal factions. The civil war which started in 2011 comprised what was almost a war of all against all.

Turkey wanted to suppress the Kurds, the Americans made the Kurds allies before abandoning them. Crippling sanctions were imposed. The Islamic State imposed its strict head-chopping doctrines and was successful in Raqqa for a few years. Palmyra was trashed en route. Russia and Iran provided support to the Assad government, Britain and France meddled in the sidelines, Israel bombed and plotted. In the midst of this one finds the al-Nusra Front, al-Qaida, and a host of militias with myriad goals. A 2012 estimate put the number of armed militias at 3,250.

What is also striking is how little the actual people living in Syria determined their own future. The King-Crane commission of 1919 travelled the length of Greater Syria to ascertain what the people of the region wanted and produced a number of recommendations, none of which bore fruit. This is likely the last time a remotely democratic exercise was conducted. Since 2011 Syria has spewed refugees into neighbouring countries and further afield, hundreds of thousands are dead and more internally displaced.

As for the present situation, al-Sharaa may have put on a suit, but there are still reports of killings and beatings from Alawites and Christians. It is too soon to guess where this goes. This book, however, is an essential guide from a journalist immersed in the details of a complex country in a bad neighbourhood.