ٌRussia, Ukraine and Syria - A reminder

The Russian army has been training and testing its military arsenal for 7 years against Syrian civilians, hospitals, infrastructure, schools, roads and agricultural lands and against the command centers and positions of Syrian opposition fighters in the north, south, center and around the capital Damascus.

It has turned millions of Syrians as well as their towns and villages into targets, regularly praising the effectiveness of its tactical and strategic weapons.

More than 20,000 Syrians (civilians and fighters) have been killed in these strikes, and hundreds of thousands have been injured and/or displaced. Dozens of hospitals and medical centers have been destroyed or put out of service and entire neighborhoods have been ravaged or even razed.

All this happened with impunity, without Putin being worried or sanctioned.

This is a reality to keep in mind when analyzing the invasion of Ukraine today, even if the political (and geopolitical) context is very different.

On the Syrian regime, its structure and networks in 2021

Professor at the American University of Paris, author of Dans la tête de Bachar al-Assad (with Subhi Hadidi and Farouk Mardam Bey, Actes Sud, 2018) and Syria: La révolution orpheline (Actes Sud, 2014), Ziad Majed evokes the situation in Syria and within the regime circles and networks.

An interview published (originally in French) in Moyen-Orient, April 2021.

Between 2011 and 2021, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad (in power since 2000) went from threatened and moribund to strengthened and durable. How did he manage to adapt in a time of war?

There are several factors that have allowed Bashar Al-Assad to maintain himself in Damascus and to survive the revolution and then the war, which he himself initiated against a large part of the Syrian society.

The first is violence, which has been his only policy since the first day of the popular uprising and long before its militarization. It became unprecedentedly intense from the summer of 2012 onwards when he started his aerial bombing campaigns, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools and infrastructure in the areas that escaped his control, the sieges he imposed on several localities, and the torture on an industrial scale in his jails. He has thus reproduced a scenario similar to the one reserved for the city of Hamah in February 1982 (which, under his father Hafez, had suffered a siege, destruction and massacres killing and injuring tens of thousands of civilians under the pretext of facing a rebellion of the Muslim brothers). Except that this time the scenario was extended to the national scale.

War in Syria: Assad, ten years later, reigns over a heap of ruins

"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".

The Crossing of the "Red Line" in Syria: The Use of Chemical Weapons as Turning Point

The following paragraphs are translated excerpts from "Syrie, la revolution orpheline” (Syria, the Orphaned revolution) published in Arabic in December 2013 and in French in March 2014.

 

In August 2012, Obama responded to the violence of the Assad regime by drawing a single “red line”: that of chemical weapons use. This line clearly indicated that America wanted to avoid intervening directly in the conflict; it also suggested—albeit implicitly—that while the use of “strategic” weaponry would not be tolerated by Washington, the continuation of massacres with traditional weapons would be.

Feeling unthreatened by a possible American intervention, the regime deployed its arsenal in the repression—i.e., ballistic missiles, tanks, and other heavy weapons. It even probed US determination regarding chemical weapons by using Sarin gas on a few occasions, as many medical reports have demonstrated [1].

What Is Behind the Tensions Inside Syria's Regime?

In Carnegie's Diwan regular survey of experts on matters relating to Middle Eastern and North African politics and security, Ziad Majed (among other researchers) analyzes the dynamics of the Assad-Makhlouf rift.

"The tensions inside the inner circle of the Syrian regime reflect three dynamics. The first pertains to the family. Since the Russian military intervention in 2015, followed by the death of Bashar al-Assad’s powerful mother in 2016, the Makhloufs (his mother’s family) have been gradually ousted from positions of authority. The measures against Rami, who once controlled more than 50 percent of Syria’s economy, complete this process—after his brother Hafez and father Mohammed. He is being replaced by businessmen close to Asma, Bashar’s influential wife, in an attempt to enlarge the regime’s clientelistic networks.

The second is related to Russian pressure on Assad. Moscow wants to restructure state institutions, reorganize the army, and centralize the decisionmaking mechanisms under its command, in order to negotiate reconstruction contracts with possible Western and Chinese partners and bring Russian companies and entrepreneurs into a fully controlled theater of operations. To achieve such a situation, Iranian influence within regime circles has to be reduced and Syrian tycoons with monopoles (and Iranian ties) should be sidelined. For Assad, this provides an opening to get rid of his cousin, with his bad reputation, and say he is doing his best to fulfill Russian requirements.

The third can be read through the analysis of the regime’s history and the tensions and defections it faced. After the removal of Rif‘at al-Assad, Bashar’s uncle, in 1984, of Ghazi Kan‘an, the strongman of the security services, in 2005, and of Assef Shawqat, Bashar’s brother in law, in 2012, the Makhloufs are now being targeted. This is not surprising in totalitarian regimes with sectarian, tribal, and familial considerations—often built on the basis of delicate equations.

All this means that the regime will be facing increasing pressure and internal struggles in the coming months. Russia needs official international recognition of its hegemony over Syria and its reconstruction projects. Iran will not agree to be marginalized. And Bashar is mainly concerned with his “reelection” in 2021. Meanwhile, other foreign actors, such as Turkey and the United States, are also reassessing their roles and reshaping relations with their local allies in Syria’s northwest and northeast in preparation for the next phases".

To read the full report on Carnegie's website, please click here.

Iran and its four Arab fronts

Foreword

This text seeks to read the strategies adopted by Iran in the Middle East since the year 2003, especially in Arab arenas that have witnessed open political, sectarian, and military conflicts[1]. In these conflicts, Iran has old and new weighty allies that it supports or has intervened directly in order to protect and guarantee their supremacy.

The text focuses on four arenas: Iraq and Syria, where Iran has escalated its direct intervention since 2011; Lebanon, where Iran’s most powerful local ally has been employed in the Syrian conflict; and Yemen, where Iran is trapping Saudi Arabia in a war that will be very hard to win.