Early yesterday morning, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled Syria for Russia. That was the wise choice, but unfortunate from the perspective of policy and justice. If he had remained, Syria’s new government could have reversed the country’s refugee crisis overnight, by announcing a lottery, free for any resident to enter, whose winner would get to participate personally in the judgment and sentencing of the deposed president for his crimes against the Syrian people during the past 13 years. I suspect that most of the 6 million he sent into exile would return within days, if not hours, for a chance at the big prize.
The rebels who drove Assad out have announced the end of his regime, while remaining vague about the nature of the one to follow. Could it be more squalid than the one it just replaced? I regret that Syrians are too well acquainted with their own macabre recent history to rule the possibility out. But the answer must begin with a recitation of the crimes of Assad. They go back to the earliest days of Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar, who repressed dissent viciously from 1971 until his death in 2000. His main rivals were Sunni Islamists who resented rule by Hafez’s Alawite minority. In 1982, the elder Assad razed the city of Hama, and to this day no one knows how many tens of thousands of people were buried and left to rot in its rubble. His first-born son, Bassel, spared the world his rule by dying in a car accident in 1994. That left Bashar, an eye doctor trained in London, to succeed his father.
When Bashar faced an Arab Spring uprising in 2011, the paternal genes kicked in. Some of the rebels were jihadists (more on that in a moment), but Assad directed his malice universally—and, if anything, more violently toward non-jihadists, whose only demand was freedom from Assad and his cronies. The Syrian civil war, up to last week, was the tedious winnowing process in which the Assad government bombed, killed, and terrorized Syrians into either fleeing the country or submitting to him. The cruelest weapon of this process was the barrel bomb—a primitive air-dropped munition with which Assad annihilated whole crowds of civilians, to punish them for their region’s rebellion. His air force dropped these bombs wantonly, as a boy drops a firecracker down the silo of an anthill.
By contrast, the recent behavior of the rebels who have just conquered Syria looks reassuringly civilized. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group most immediately responsible for Assad’s overthrow, has announced that victory is not a license to wreck the institutions of the state, nor to initiate a wave of retribution against Alawites in general. Every day this guidance is heeded will be a rebuke to Assad’s supporters, who insisted that the alternative to their rule was Islamic State–style mass killings and the establishment of a bloodthirsty version of Sharia law. If the rebels sustain this merciful beginning, and enshrine in law and practice tolerance and equal rights for women, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Druze, and other groups, then they will deserve apologies from all who delayed their victory, including Western politicians. They will deserve a Nobel Prize.
Unfortunately, there are good reasons to doubt that the new Syria will resemble this gumdrops-and-ponies utopia. HTS is led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. On Friday, Jolani gave an interview to CNN and sounded statesmanlike. But he is the former leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda that functioned as a slightly less-evil twin of ISIS. Jabhat al-Nusra was, like ISIS, a Jihad-Salafi organization—which means it followed a literalist reading of Islamic texts in a Sunni tradition, tended to treat non-Salafi Muslims with hostility, and considered it obligatory to promote this vision of Islam through violence.
The best one could say about Nusra in its early days was that unlike ISIS, it didn’t consider theological differences grounds for instant death. ISIS killed Shia where it found them, delaying only long enough for its media teams to set up cameras and lighting just so, to capture the blessed bloodletting for a global audience. Nusra prioritized theology far less. It still conducted itself atrociously. It executed people publicly; it kidnapped; it tortured. Theo Padnos, a hostage held by Nusra from 2012 to 2014, wrote in his memoir that Nusra assigned children to torture him. He was kept in a cell with 25 captured soldiers and airmen from Assad’s regime, and he told me by email that Nusra treated all Alawites brutally—not because they were in Assad’s service, but because of their religion alone. That it did so in a less hurried manner than ISIS is only a modest credit to Nusra.
In 2016, Jolani split from al-Qaeda. This was primarily due to a desire for institutional independence, however, rather than any principled dispute with the mass murderers he was for years so proud to serve. “We thank the commanders of al-Qaeda,” he said in a statement announcing the decision. “Their noble stance on the benefits of jihad will be recorded in the annals of history.” Eight years have passed since then, and reliable reporters and analysts have documented Jolani’s drift away from jihadism. Nusra fought against the Islamic State, and then dismantled al-Qaeda’s presence in its territory. Last year, Wassim Nasr, a France24 journalist, discussed his recent conversations with Jolani in an interview with West Point’s CTC Sentinel. He said that in Idlib, Jolani’s stronghold, he saw unrelated men and women interacting in public, a serious offense in strict Salafi-run societies. Churches were being rebuilt, Christians invited to return to their communities. Nasr came to believe that Jolani and his group “are no longer committed to whatever is meant by international jihad.” Nasr arrived in Idlib expecting to see a heavily militarized society. Instead HTS’s leaders told him that global jihadism had “only brought destruction and failure,” and that the only jihadism Jolani’s group intended was domestic, against Assad and Russia.
I believe in repentance, and I believe that jihadism is, as Jolani suggests, self-defeating. But one does not just slip out of a totalizing ideology, and it is reasonable to ask Jolani to explain his repudiation in greater detail. (I would ask the same of the various Assadists, in Syria and elsewhere, who will attempt to salvage their reputation now that the full extent of the regime’s crimes are beyond denial.) If I were responsible for an organization that had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered people, I would not expect anyone to credit my reversal until I had groveled for the forgiveness of those who had been tortured at my behest by elementary-school kids with cattle prods. To my knowledge, Jolani has never sent that particular Hallmark card.
In Edmund Burke’s essay on the French Revolution, he suggests that certain forms of freedom are not worth their costs. Am I “seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty?” he asked. In the gray daylight of the first days of Syria’s freedom, its citizens appear so far to be behaving not like unrestrained madmen but like traumatized, decent people worthy of their liberty, delivered even by an erstwhile jihadist. The images of liberated Syrians are as moving as the images of Germans after the Berlin Wall came down.
After the fall of Hosni Mubarak, ordinary Egyptians brought paint cans from home to Tahrir Square, to re-mark the curbs that had been flaked from years of government neglect, and abraded by tanks and flying bricks during the protests. I had never previously seen such heartfelt civic pride among Egyptians (and I thought back often to that scene, when an incompetent Islamist government, and then the restoration of authoritarian rule, broke those hearts soon after). The newly free Syrians are emerging from a much longer, much worse nightmare. The images on social media show hope and solidarity. So far Syria has had 50 years of fascism and one day of its opposite. If it can string together more such days—perhaps a month, and dare one hope for even a year—the previous decade of resistance will have been worth it.
