"A well-informed political scientist, Ziad Majed gives an overview of the Syrian conflict, which broke out on March 15, 2011, ten years ago. For him, Assad's regime is, by far, the first responsible for the disaster. And he and the djihadist camp need each other. He answers questions from Baudouin Loos in the special report entitled "The long Syrian night, a debacle for humanity" in the daily Le Soir".
In this Syrian disaster, would you say that the regime,
obsessed with its survival, is the first responsible for the situation?
Yes, absolutely. The Assad regime is by far the first
responsible for the Syrian disaster. Documentation shows that 88% of civiliancasualties since 2011 have fallen under its bombs, shootings and executions.
Violence has been its only policy since the first day of the popular uprising
and long before its militarization. It became unprecedentedly intense as of the
summer of 2012, when the regime began its aerial bombing campaigns, the
systematic destruction of hospitals, schools and infrastructure in areas that
had escaped its control, when it imposed the sieges on several localities
around Homs and Damascus, and organized “industrial scale” torture and
execution in its jails. Assad thus ruled out any possibility of compromise,
serious negotiations and political reforms. He reproduced a scenario similar to
that which was reserved for the martyred city of Hamah in February 1982 (which,
under his father, had undergone a siege, destruction and massacres, killing and
injuring tens of thousands of civilians under the pretext of overcoming a
Muslim Brotherhood rebellion). Except that this time, the scenario was extended
to a national level. The objective in both cases was the crushing of any emerging
political dynamics or any threat to the absolute power meticulously built up
since 1970 and protected by a system of intelligence services, clientelist
networks, confessional cleavages masked by "secular" nationalist
propaganda, a multi-purpose “anti-imperialist” discourse, and international
alliances placing it at the heart of regional issues and allowing it to stifle
any internal contestation and any political right of Syrians.
Some point to the West, which has shown itself incapable of
acting in a coherent and decisive manner...
Faced with the efforts of Russia and Iran to protect the
Assad regime, the West has been hesitant and divided. Its messages have often
been very ambiguous. Between "change of attitude" rather than
"regime change", and "red line" (regarding the use of
chemical weapons) without sanctioning its violation, then "Assad is the
enemy of his people, we, our enemies are the djihadists" and "Assad
must distance himself from the Iranians", the messages have always
suggested that if Assad changed his attitude or distanced himself from Tehran
or fought the djihadists, he would not be threatened despite his war crimes and
crimes against humanity. This had the effect of comforting Assad on the one
hand and pushing his allies on the other to be even more firm and determined.
Did Obama commit a serious fault in August 2013 when he did
not respond to the regime's use of gas, contrary to what he had announced?
Certainly. The first serious mistake was in 2012, when the Obama administration rejected any shipment of "Manpads" (man-portable air defense system) to the armed Syrian opposition. At that point in the conflict, Daesh (the Islamic State) did not yet exist, the An-Nosra Front (al-Qaeda) was marginal, the Islamist groups were under Saudi and Qatari control, and the "Free Syrian Army" was the most powerful actor on the ground. If it had obtained these weapons to neutralize the regime's air force, several regions could have been protected, political experiments, such as local councils in "liberated" villages and towns, could have developed, and the number of IDPs and refugees would certainly have been lower. Moreover, it could have been a strong message to the Russians and Iranians that the Americans and the West would not let Assad go unpunished and would not allow an all-out war against the Syrian population. None of this was done. Then came the famous "red line", which was a double fault. It meant that any attack, as long as it was not chemical, was "tolerated"; more importantly, not reacting to the fact that the regime had crossed it repeatedly even before the major Sarin gas attack on the Ghouta area near Damascus on August 21, 2013, indicated that Washington had no intention of intervening or enforcing its ultimatums. In the face of this, Assad and his allies considered that they had "a license to kill."
I think Obama's considerations
were mostly related to the anti-interventionism of his electoral base, his own
stance against the Iraq war and the American failure that followed it, and the
chaos in Libya after the fall of Gaddafi thanks to NATO operations in 2011.
Moreover, his essentialist reading of the Middle East and its "eternal
conflicts," as he himself put it, played a role in shaping his approach.
Add to this his regional priority of nuclear negotiations with Iran, which his
advisors said required appeasement in Syria rather than direct confrontation.
Isn't Assad's "masterstroke" to have succeeded in posing as the "lesser evil" in the face of the head-chopping, suicide-bombing djihadists in Europe?
It is true that his formula "Assad or the djihadists", relayed in the West by politicians, journalists and some researchers, has worked well. It has supported conspiracy narratives on the right as well as in certain left-wing circles, and it has taken advantage of the fear of refugees, identity-based tensions and the rise of Islamophobia in several Western societies. But if these "head-choppers" and suicide bombers have killed hundreds of people in Europe, Assad and his allies have killed hundreds of thousands in Syria. And the rise of the djihadists was largely due to this, to the destruction of the country and the abandonment of the Syrians. In that sense, Assad and the djihadists were (and still are) objective allies. He needs them to talk about his "war on terror" and they need him and the "abandonment of the world" to recruit and advance their discourse of victimization and revenge.
Let us add that the majority of "djihadists"
in Europe were above all Europeans. Their references and "software"
were nourished and formatted by their experiences in the suburbs and marginalized
neighborhoods, by exclusion and failure, and by fantasies of a djihad that
sublimated their criminal acts and spectacular suicides and placed them in the
framework of the "holy war", transforming them into
"martyrs".
Nevertheless, without Putin, could Assad have got away with
it?
Certainly not. Assad survived thanks to his Iranian ally,
who mobilized resources and advisors from the summer of 2011, and from the
summer of 2012, troops and Shiite militias from Iraq, Lebanon (Hezbollah) and
Afghanistan. At the same time, Putin's Russia was sending weapons and blocking
the United Nations by repeatedly using its veto power. Then all this took
another dimension in September 2015 with the Russian military intervention,
which radically changed the face and the configuration of the conflict.
Erdogan's Turkey was accused of ambiguity towards the djihadists,
of manipulation towards the refugees...
There was a complicity of Turkish services regarding the passage of djihadists to Syria in 2012 and 2013. Ankara thought it could control them, and even use them as scarecrows against the Kurdish militias in northern Syria. But the massive influx of djihadists from Iraq and the mutations within the djihadist movement allowing the emergence of Daesh in 2013 and then its meteoric rise in 2014 changed everything. The djihadists in Syria got divided, they even massacred each other in Deir Ezzor and Raqqa, and in the end it was Daesh, with its own agenda, that won, escaping Turkish control.
As for the refugee issue, it should be noted that the largest number of Syrian refugees (more than 3 million) are now in Turkey, and for years - at least until 2016 - their conditions there were better than in other asylum countries, including some countries in Europe. The situation has deteriorated since, and certainly there has been an instrumentalization of the issue by Ankara. But the European policy towards this human tragedy, with the exception of Germany, does not really deserve any praise. And this does not only concern the Syrians. Just look at the situation in the Mediterranean and see how our sea turns into a mass grave for thousands of migrants every year...
What was the agenda of the Petro-monarchies and their
influence on the events?
Saoudi Arabia was mainly concerned with Iranian expansion in
the region and therefore with the need to confront Tehran and take advantage of
all possible theaters of confrontation to trap the Iranians and their allies
and weaken them. Riyadh thus supported certain groups of the Syrian political
and armed opposition, of liberal or Salafist tendencies, between 2012 and 2015.
Its support for armed groups stopped on the eve of the Russian military
intervention, and its priority shifted to Yemen (and internal succession
issues). As for Qatar, between 2011 and 2013 it sought a regional role,
focusing on the Muslim Brotherhood (in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria) and
some liberals. The military coup against President Morsi in Egypt, the civil
war in Libya, the setback of the Ennahda party in Tunisia, made it reconsider
its ambitions. Then, as early as 2014, the confrontation opposing Doha to
Riyadh and Abu Dhabi (that was at the origin of a series of counter-revolutions
in the region) pushed the Qataris to withdraw from the last theater where they
were still trying to maintain themselves, Syria. Since then, they have been
content to fall in line behind their Turkish ally.
Who revolted in 2011 in Syria?
A large part of the population participated in the revolution.
The map of demonstrations and rallies shows this. The fact that more than 75%
of Syrian territory escaped the control of the regime between 2013 and 2016
also illustrates the extent of the rejection of this regime, which was unable,
without Russian and Iranian interventions, to "recover" what it was
losing. In areas with a Sunni Arab or Kurdish majority, but also in mixed areas
or in towns with an Ismaili majority (such as Salamiya) or a Druze majority
(such as Soueida), demonstrators and activists from all communities, pious or
not, mobilized for months. This does not contradict the fact that there was a
concentration of demonstrations in the countryside with a Sunni demographic
majority or in the suburbs and outskirts of the cities, also with a Sunni majority.
And the regime's violence was mainly directed at the latter in a perspective of
confessionalization of the uprising. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that
Sunni Arabs make up more than 65% of the Syrian population.
Would you say that Assad "won the war", even if it
meant destroying half the country?
Assad had, like his father before him, absolute power in
Syria in a totalitarian system that he ruled from 2000 to 2011. He has since
confronted the revolution and declared his "total war" against its
social bases. While it is true, ten years later, that he has survived this
revolution and war and is still in the presidential palace in Damascus, it is
also true that this is due, as we have already mentioned, to his Iranian ally,
but especially to the intervention of his Russian ally. Assad's absolute power,
however, has never been restored. The 65 per cent of Syrian territory that he
officially "controls" today is in fact under Russian and Iranian
occupation. The same is true of most of Syria's borders. Turkish and American
troops are deployed in the remaining 35 per cent to support opposition groups
and Kurdish militias (who have fought Daesh). Israel of course continues to
occupy the Golan Heights and to bomb Hezbollah (and other) fighters near the
Lebanese borders. Both escalation and negotiation are decided by these regional
and international actors, with Russia, Iran and Turkey being the most
influential among them, while Assad (as well as the Syrian opposition) has no
say. What remains of his state's sovereignty is in fact his authority inside
his prison institution, where tens of thousands of political prisoners are held
in terrifying conditions.
How do you see the next steps?
I do not see any possible solution in the near future. On
the one hand, because international and regional negotiations are not
progressing, and all UN initiatives have failed. And on the other hand because
no transition or stability is possible if Assad remains in power. Russia and
Iran know this but will not sacrifice him until they get (each) what they want:
Moscow, a recognition of its role as a "mandatory" power in Syria
fully in charge of the political process and supervision of reconstruction;
Tehran, a recognition of its regional role, an agreement on its nuclear power
and a lifting of economic sanctions. Neither the United States, nor Turkey, nor
other actors can accept all of this at this time.
