Syria Threatened by Something More Serious than Division!

Author: علي حبيب الله

The regime of the fallen Assad has been waging a war against its people since 2011, enduring for more than ten years, only to collapse in ten days. At a time when no one expected Assad's fall... Syrians erupted in joy last December, having learned more from whom they were liberated than from knowing who liberated them. This was enough to grant most Syrians, both inside and outside Syria, their trust in the new regime and their fears of it simultaneously.

Sheikh al-Ashari inherited a state from Assad that no longer exists. The state that Assad's father built, centered on the unity of its territory and its role as a regional actor, has disintegrated over the years, amidst the revolution against Assad’s son and subsequent civil strife that turned Syria into a battleground for regional and international calculations in recent years. Just as those years revealed the fragility of Assad's son’s regime, which only saw security crackdowns as a solution for its survival, it has been proven exactly the opposite. The months following Assad under the leadership of Sheikh al-Ashari also revealed the fragility of the idea of state in the national sense among the new regime and its supporting elements from Syrians.

Since the fall of the Assad family regime last December, the specter of dividing Syria looms over the region due to two considerations: the disintegration and fragmentation of Syrian society over the last decade along sectarian and ethnic-regional lines. Secondly, the uncertainty of Syria's future in light of the ambiguity surrounding the direction and political identity of the new Damascus regime. Considering that Syria, in its current state, is situated between two countries suffering from institutionalized sectarianism under political systems that have existed for decades, namely Lebanon and Iraq. Moreover, in these two countries are forces that played a significant role in sectarianizing the political map of Syria after their political and military interventions in favor of Assad’s regime. Adding to this is Israel, an occupying state with colonial intentions towards Syria, including the option of dividing it.

In March, what was known as the "Syria Coast events" erupted, where most members of the Alawite sect, considered loyalists to the former regime, are concentrated geographically. These events resulted in hundreds of casualties among Alawites, yet the reaction, or let’s say sympathy, towards them appeared less, as most Arab media stood behind the Damascus regime’s narrative claiming that remnants of the fallen regime were behind the events on the coast.

However, the events in Sweida last month revealed the magnitude of the sectarian catastrophe in Syria and the factionalism of the ruling regime in Damascus, in terms of the slogans and practices that were undertaken against the Druze in Sweida, who were not against Assad's regime in its revolt—at least. Furthermore, Sweida was a refuge for many supporters of the revolution against Assad’s regime, such as in Daraa, for example. More importantly, Sweida was the one who revived the spirit of the original peaceful Syrian revolution throughout last year—the year of the fall of Assad’s regime—through the Dignity Square movement against Assad's regime, after the fervor of the Syrian revolutionaries had died down in recent years.

The most dangerous outcome of the events in Sweida was Israel’s blatant interference by bombing the capital Damascus and then empowering the separatist movement in Sweida led by Hikmat al-Hijri at the expense of the unification current led by Laith al-Balious, to the extent of openly declaring separation and raising the Israeli flag in the squares and streets of the city of Sweida recently. This confirms the failure of the Damascus regime led by Sheikh al-Ashari not only in the Sweida test but also in the fundamental question of building Syria as a national state for all its components.

This is to say that it is not division that threatens Syria as one might initially think due to the current Syrian phase, for dividing Syria into independent entities based on regional-sectarian considerations is impossible, as proven by colonial experience since France’s attempts to divide Syria into sectarian and regional entities in the 1920s.

When the French established what was known as the Alawite State on the coast and the Druze State in the south in the early 1920s, they themselves retracted the idea of an independent Alawite state, not because all Alawites did not welcome the separation into an independent state from the mother Syria, but because the French found an Alawite state run under colonial administration was staffed by non-Alawites, Sunni Muslims and Christians from the urban middle class in Latakia and Tartus at that time.

This means that Syrians, regardless of their sectarian and social references, have been and continue to be geographically intertwined more than what political sectarian fractures would suggest. Even Sweida, which has recently seen a rise in separatist rhetoric for an entity independent from Damascus, is not entirely Druze, nor is the identity of southern Syria certainly so. If we take into consideration the eastern Euphrates controlled by the "SDF" (Syrian Democratic Forces), which presents the most serious case concerning the possibility of its separation as an entity independent from Damascus, the Arab-Kurdish overlap on both geographic and social levels is intertwined to the extent that it is difficult to imagine a politically independent entity of an ethnic nature connected to the Kurds, for example.

Unless we mean by the division of Syria the current societal fracture and regional-geographic disintegration that has worsened in recent months more than it has in the past. What is now referred to as "minorities" in Syria are not homogeneous components, either politically, socially, or geographically. Let alone with respect to Sunnis in Syria, who cannot be sectarianized in this particular context.

What threatens Syria more dangerously is further fragmentation and civil strife, which will not lead to the division of Syria but rather call for external intervention that does not exclude military invasion of Syria by regional powers, already present and deeply rooted in Syrian territory: Turkey in the north and Israel in the south... and most dangerously for Syria, specifically Israel, with the deteriorating situation in Sweida that has broadened its base of separatists from Damascus. One should not underestimate the scenario in which the occupation army invades southern Syria through a comprehensive ground military operation reaching to Jabal al-Arab, to plant a blue flag raised there already.