The resumption of large-scale fighting in Syria’s civil war affirms, once more, the wisdom of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who wrote that when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.”
In Syria’s case, the region’s security arrangements fell apart, the delicate balance of power could not hold, and so the strongest of the country’s armed militias rushed into the resulting void, unleashing a blood-dimmed tide along the way.
Which is to say: Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s main allies, which have kept him in power for the past decade by helping him bomb, strafe, and otherwise crush a variety of rebel groups (along with much of the general population)—are now gravely weakened or preoccupied elsewhere. Last week, the strongest of these rebel groups, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (known as HTS), exploited Assad’s isolation by going on the offensive, taking control of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, and is now on the verge of capturing Hama, a crucial point on the route by which Assad has received arms from Hezbollah and Iran.
For the moment, Assad is still safe. Damascus, the capital, is 115 miles from Hama. But the Syrian army collapsed with surprising ease, with many troops deserting the battlefield, in the face of the HTS rebels’ onslaught. Russia sent a few planes to bomb the rebel positions, but not many and, so far, to little effect; the Russian deployments in Syria were also overrun (the commanding officer has since reportedly been fired). Iran’s ministry of foreign affairs condemned the assault as “terrorism,” but it has done little to help.
Their predicaments are clear. Russia’s military is stretched thin by the war in Ukraine. (It is now reliant on former underlings, importing drones from Iran and rockets—as well as 10,000 troops—from North Korea.) Iran is weakened in two ways. First, Hezbollah, which has acted as its main agent in helping Syria, has been decimated in recent battles with Israel. Second, Iran itself is nearing economic collapse, which has compelled Tehran’s leaders to seek renewed contact with the West.
The collapse of Syria’s network isn’t the only cause of the rebels’ surge. In the 13 years of the country’s civil war, Assad, his army, and his allies have killed more than 500,000 of his own citizens, many of them peaceful pro-democracy activists. He has little support among the civilian population. Assad’s policies, combined with Western sanctions, have impoverished the country. Even his soldiers, 100,000 of whom have been killed or wounded in the fighting, are short on supplies, which could explain why they so quickly ran from fighting.
So, who are the rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham? Should we be rooting for them? Reports are mixed and at times contradictory, perhaps in part because with all the wars going on in the Middle East, the Syrian civil war—which has been relatively dormant in the past few years—has escaped the attention of many journalists and analysts in the region.
The group was once affiliated with al-Qaida. Its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, cut ties with the terrorist group some years ago, saying he wanted to attain international legitimacy, in part so that he could step up as leader of Syria’s myriad rebel groups—some of them Kurds, some Sunni Arabs, most of them having little in common ideologically.
Still, HTS remains a Salafi Jihadist group, and the United States and U.K. still consider it a “terrorist organization,” meaning it cannot be given assistance. President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, told CNN on Sunday that he won’t “cry over the fact that the Assad government—backed by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah—are facing certain kinds of pressure,” though he added that there are “real concerns about the designs and objectives” of HTS.
Whatever HTS’ ultimate motives, the great number and variety of anti-Assad rebel groups complicate the stakes and contours of this chapter in the civil war. Turkey is aiding Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, in part in order to weaken the Kurds, who are regarded as terrorists and territorial rivals by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Israel, which has been bombing Syrian military targets for the past year, has stepped up its attacks in hopes of further weakening Assad—though Israel’s interests would also be served if the past week’s assaults simply mired Syria in deeper chaos, thus paralyzing Assad’s ability to strike Israel. The U.S., which has backed the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces as well as a brief CIA-funded group called the Free Syrian Army, is—as Sullivan’s remarks suggest—ambivalent. How President-elect Donald Trump will act—whether he engages in the conflict at all—cannot be reliably predicted. He may be inclined to stay out entirely, if that’s possible.
Yeats wrote his poem, called “The Second Coming,” in 1919, a year after the end of World War I. After his bleak description of “mere anarchy” and the “blood-dimmed tide,” he foresaw “some revelation … somewhere in the sands of the desert,” asking, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Is HTS the “rough beast,” coming to inflict more terror but also to impose some new order? A few years ago, some who sought contemporary resonances in this poem saw al-Qaida, ISIS, or Hamas as a likely candidate.
But no force of order, benevolent or otherwise, seems slouching along the horizon toward Bethlehem or any other once holy site.
Fawaz A. Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and author of several books on the region’s conflicts, said in a New Yorker interview published Tuesday that Assad’s government controls only about 60 percent of Syria’s territory, meaning that, in a real sense, “Syria is no longer a sovereign state” and its army is only “the biggest state militia”—and, as the HTS assault revealed, much weaker than anyone had thought.
The assault, though “a military earthquake,” might also mark “the reigniting of the Syrian civil war,” and on a larger scale than before—a war not only between Assad and HTS, but also between HTS, the Kurds, and other rebels, some of them proxies of larger powers, including Turkey and the United States, though Russia and Iran, while sidelined for the moment, shouldn’t be counted out from the conflict either.
“The tragedy of the Middle East,” Gerges said, “is that you have a ceasefire in one place and another war zone in another place”—and, since he made these remarks, the ceasefire zone, in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, seems wobbly as well.
The “blood-dimmed tide” is likely to persist a while longer.
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