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Israel, not the ‘liberators’ of Damascus, will decide Syria’s fate

Syria’s future under al-Qaeda spin-off HTS will come in two flavours only. Either submit and collude like the West Bank, or end up wrecked like Gaza

Jonathan Cook, Substack, Dec 19, 2024

There has been a flurry of “What next for Syria?” articles in the wake of dictator Bashar al-Assad’s hurried exit from Syria and the takeover of much of the country by al-Qaeda’s rebranded local forces.

Western governments and media have been quick to celebrate the success of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), even though the group is designated a terrorist organisation in the United States, Britain and much of Europe.

Back in 2013, the US even placed a £10 million bounty on its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, for his involvement with al-Qaeda and Islamic State (ISIS) and for carrying out a series of brutal attacks on civilians.

Once upon a time, he might have expected to end up in an orange jumpsuit in the notorious, off-the-grid detention and torture facility run by the Americans at Guantanamo Bay. Now he is positioning himself as Syria’s heir apparent, seemingly with Washington’s blessing.

Surprisingly, before either HTS or al-Julani can be tested in their new roles overseeing Syria, the West is hurrying to rehabilitate them. The US and UK are both moving to overturn HTS’s status as a proscribed organisation.

To put the extraordinary speed of this absolution in perspective, recall that Nelson Mandela, feted internationally for helping to liberate South Africa from apartheid rule, was removed from Washington’s terrorist watch list only in 2008 – 18 years after his release from prison.

Similarly, western media are helping al-Julani to rebrand himself as a statesman-in-the-making, airbrushing his past atrocities, by transitioning from using his nom de guerre to his birth name, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Piling on pressure

Stories of prisoners being freed from Assad’s dungeons and of families pouring on to the streets in celebration have helped to drive an upbeat news agenda and obscure a more likely dismal future for newly “liberated” Syria – as the US, UK, Israel, Turkey and Gulf states jostle for a share of the pie.

Syria’s status looks sealed as a permanently failed state.

Israel’s bombing raids – destroying hundreds of critical infrastructure sites across Syria – are designed precisely towards that end.

Within days, the Israeli military was boasting it had destroyed 80 per cent of Syria’s military installations. More have gone since.

On Monday, Israel unleashed 16 strikes on Tartus, a strategically important port where Russia has a naval fleet. The blasts were so powerful, they registered 3.5 on the Richter scale.

During Assad’s rule, Israel chiefly rationalised its attacks on Syria – coordinating them with Russian forces supporting Damascus – as necessary to prevent the flow of weapons overland from Iran to its Lebanese ally, Hezbollah.

But that is not the goal currently. HTS’s Sunni fighters have vowed to keep Iran and Hezbollah – the Shiite “axis of resistance” against Israel – out of Syrian territory.

Israel has prioritised instead targeting Syria’s already beleaguered military – its planes, naval ships, radars, anti-aircraft batteries and missile stockpiles – to strip the country of any offensive or defensive capability. Any hope of Syria maintaining a semblance of sovereignty is crumbling before our eyes.

These latest strikes come on top of years of western efforts to undermine Syria’s integrity and economy. The US military controls Syria’s oil and wheat production areas, plundering these key resources with the help of a Kurdish minority. More generally, the West has imposed punitive sanctions on Syria’s economy.

It was precisely these pressures that hollowed out Assad’s government and led to its collapse. Now Israel is piling on more pressure to make sure any newcomer faces an even harder task.

Maps of post-Assad Syria, like those during the latter part of his beleaguered presidency, are a patchwork of different colours, with Turkey and its local allies seizing territory in the north, the Kurds clinging on to the east, US forces in the south, and the Israeli military encroaching from the west.

This is the proper context for answering the question of what comes next.

Two possible fates

Syria is now the plaything of a complex of vaguely aligned state interests. None have Syria’s interests as a strong, unified state high on their list.

In such circumstances, Israel’s priority will be to promote sectarian divisions and stop a central authority from emerging to replace Assad.

This has been Israel’s plan stretching back decades, and has shaped the thinking of the dominant foreign policy elite in Washington since the rise of the so-called neoconservatives under President George W Bush in the early 2000s. The aim has been to Balkanise any state in the Middle East that refuses to submit to Israeli and US hegemony…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

And to top it all, Israel looks like it may finally be in sight of signing off on “normal” relations with Washington’s other major client state in the region, Saudi Arabia – a drive that had to be put on hold following Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Renewed ties between Israel and Riyadh are possible again in large part because coverage of Syria has further disappeared the Gaza genocide from the West’s news agenda, despite Palestinians there – starved and bombed by Israel for 14 months – likely dying in larger numbers than ever.

The narrative of Syria’s “liberation” currently dominates western coverage. But so far the takeover of Damascus by HTS appears only to have liberated Israel, leaving it freer to bully and terrorise its neighbours into submission.  https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/israel-not-the-liberators-of-damascus?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=476450&post_id=153321149&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

December 19, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, politics international, Syria