There was a time in the beginning of the revolution where intervention was not needed beyond diplomatic pressures. But as the situation deteriorated, and as [Syrian President Bashar] Assad used, really, a tremendous, an overwhelming force against civilians, it became important. It was important to have that neutralized in order to be able to contain the process of degeneration and devolution. When that didn´t happen, and now we´re dealing, effectively, with a failed state intervention is really not as easy. And we cannot simply say, “Oh, yes, there should be a no-fly zone and that´s it. Arm the rebels. That should be enough.”
The reality is right now, we need a variety of things to be happening. But there will come a time when we need to sit down – around the table to negotiate with, if not with anyone on the Assad camp in order to be able to bring in the Alawite [a religious sect with roots in Shia Islam] community, the Christian community. We need to negotiate with the Kurds [an ethnic group with a historical homeland situated in parts of modern day Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey] to bring them into an agreed vision of the state. So there needs to be a political process as well and a vision for that political process.
When the international community today calls for a political process, a lot of people in Syria envision or a lot of opposition people try to put it as an attempt at circumventing the revolution. The reality is, in my opinion, the revolution already succeeded. The regime has been toppled. It´s no longer. It doesn´t control the country. Assad has become a sectarian militia leader. And he´s one of many now in the country.
So in a sense, then we don´t really have a centralized power structure that´s worthy of the name. And a political solution is just an attempt to save the country now. We have already seen clashes between Islamist groups and Kurdish groups, so another potential for civil conflict developing in a different part of Syria that was quiet up until recently. We have seen clashes basically between secular and Islamic groups among the rebels.
We´ve seen the emergence of a strong Sunni [the largest branch of Islam] identity that´s making the Syrian National Council [a body created to unite diverse Syrian opposition forces] more as an interlocutor for Sunni identity rather than for a Syrian identity. And that only encourages the process of fragmentation inside the country. So we do need a political process to be introduced by the international community in order to bring all these different groups together and save the state from collapse.
If there is no immediate intervention on this level, we could find ourselves in a drawn-out process, a la Somalia [a sub-Saharan African nation] where, you know, you can hold, you know, where the central government controls nothing beyond certain neighborhoods in a certain area. And the rest is really controlled by warlords. So the international community has to look at all of the tools under its disposal. Some support of the rebels is needed.
Neutralizing Assad´s air power is needed. But at the same time, we need to create a platform where all of these sides can come and negotiate a way out of this. And whether this is seen as some people would see it, at an emotional level, as a victory for Assad because he´s now part of the negotiation or whatever, or he´s being legitimized or whatever, this is, on an emotional level, it hurts. But on a rational level, it´s a failure.
Assad has been brought down to size. He is now is going to be forced to negotiate one way or another. And he is never, is never going to be a president or a legitimate interlocutor on the international scene. Syria is going to have to we´ll become a new country, or it will become a failed state. These are the choices we have.
Leaders have to be rational as well and have to realize and look at the overall picture. And you look at the overall picture, we really have succeeded in this revolution at a tremendous cost, at a tremendous cost. It´s now to cut down our losses. And it is time to begin to chart a path for the future.
Failure to do so is going to consign this country to civil war for decades to come. And we know from the experiences in places like Afghanistan and Somalia that going down the path of complete devolution and state failure is not easily reversible at all, and that even great countries, when they want to, you know, to start again and help you, they can end up spending billions of dollars and still end up nowhere. And we are that close to this disaster, that close from crossing that point of no return. And it´s only a matter of weeks, in fact. Unless we manage to take a brave, principled stand now I think Syria is, as a country, it´s going to be lost and lost forever.
Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian human rights activist who in 2003 founded the Tharwa Foundation, a grassroots organization that enlists local activists and citizen journalists to document conditions in Syria. In response to his activities, the Syrian government subjected Abdulhamid to repeat interrogation and threats. In September 2005, he and his family were forced into exile in the United States. From his home in Maryland, Abdulhamid remains one of the leading bloggers and commentators on events in Syria through the Syrian Revolution Digest.
Follow Ammar Ahbdulhamid on Twitter @Tharwacolamus and on his blog, Syrian Revolution Digest.
The Syrian Arab Republic originated as a secular, socialist state dominated by the Ba’ath party, an Arab nationalist movement. The state has since evolved into an autocracy headed by a single family and dominated by members of the minority Alawite sect, a branch of Shia Islam.
The Ba’ath Party took power in Syria in a series of coups d’état in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the leaders of those coups, Hafez al-Assad, became president in 1971 and led the country until his death in 2000. Under Assad, Alawites assumed control over the state security forces. In 1982, Assad’s forces stormed the city of Hama to brutally suppress a Sunni rebellion, killing thousands of civilians.
Following the death of Hafez al-Assad, his son, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president by a referendum in which he ran unopposed, officially garnering 97 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 2007, again with 97 percent of the vote.
The Syrian government is one of the world’s most brutal and restrictive. From 1963 to 2011, the government operated under an “Emergency Law,” which suspended many constitutional protections of civil liberties. The government continues to use arbitrary detention and torture against political opponents, and operates through an extensive internal security apparatus, including secret police. The government controls most of the country’s media outlets, and access to the Internet is permitted only through state-operated servers. The minority Kurdish population has been continually discriminated against and repressed.
Influenced by movements in Egypt and Tunisia, large opposition protests took place across Syria in 2011. The government responded with a harsh crackdown. Security forces fired on protestors, killing thousands. The crackdown led the Arab League to suspend Syria’s membership. The Assad regime attempted to appease dissenters through a series of low-level and largely inconsequential reforms in 2011 and 2012. However, the conflict has escalated into full-fledged civil war with both liberal and Islamic militias being formed to fight against the Assad regime. The Assad regime has continued to attempt to defeat the opposition using air strikes and heavy artillery to attack rebel-held neighborhoods. Freedoms of association, assembly, and the press were restricted even further as the government attempted to quell the uprising. Over a million people have been either internally displaced or fled the country as refugees.
In the summer of 2013, it was confirmed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons to attack civilians. Over 600 people were killed in one such attack in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus using a nerve agent confirmed to be sarin. The Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons drew international attention and resulted in a renewed international focus on the nation and its civil conflict.
Freedom House rates Syria as “not free” noting that conditions even prior to the 2011 uprising and subsequent civil war were, at best, abysmal. It earned the worst possible ratings of seven in both the political rights and civil liberties categories. Conditions since the 2011 uprising have only deteriorated, and civil freedoms are restricted under the fear of violence. Freedom House has also expressed concern over rising sectarian tensions and massive displacement.