Veterans of Arab uprisings warn Syrians of perils ahead

As jubilant Syrians celebrated the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad this week, dire warnings proliferated across Arabic social media: that this joyful moment could lead to a bleak future.

That the end of the Assad dynasty came at the hands of an armed Islamist group with former links to al-Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, deepened alarm even among Arabs well aware of the blood-soaked record of Assad’s regime.

“The people who are optimistic for the future of Syria, have they not been with us during the past 14 years?” Ezzedine Fishere, an Egyptian political science professor at Dartmouth University in the US, wrote on Facebook.

Another Egyptian social media user posted: “Isn’t what happened in Iraq, and after that the Arab uprisings [of 2011] enough to be terrified of what’s coming?”

In 2011 a wave of popular uprisings swept across the Arab world, toppling despots in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and igniting hopes of democratic government and economic prosperity — hopes that were subsequently shattered by new autocracies or civil wars. Syria’s uprising began at the same time, but its government has only fallen 13 years later.

Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist who moved to London in 2017, said warnings she received from Tunisian and Egyptian friends were “simplistic and did not take the Syrian context into consideration. It is as if they are saying: ‘Those poor people are happy but they don’t know what awaits them’.”

“I am a bit hopeful,” she said. “We Syrians are aware of our own failures even more than we are aware of those of others. I hope we will learn not just from the lessons of others, but also from our own experiences.”

For Syrians, this is a moment of intense hope, even if that is tinged with apprehension. Many Syrians are experiencing the same elation others in the region felt when they shook off their oppressors in 2011.

When Hosni Mubarak, the autocrat who ruled Egypt for 30 years, stepped down in 2011 after 18 days of peaceful protests, ecstatic crowds poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, chanting: “Hold your head up high, you are Egyptian.”

The Muslim Brotherhood subsequently won parliamentary elections, and in 2012 Mohamed Morsi, one of the group’s leaders, was elected president with a slim majority. His brief rule alienated many, including pro-revolution groups. Secular parties, elites from the Mubarak era and a range of Egyptians alarmed by the rise of the Islamists agitated against his rule.

That gave Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, then defence minister and now president, opportunity to oust Morsi in a 2013 coup with broad popular support. Since then, Egypt’s democratic experiment has been curtailed, demonstrations are banned and there is little space for dissent.

Hisham Kassem, an Egyptian publisher and critic of the Sisi regime, said the transition failed because the Islamists “had been trying to hog the situation, and the economy was not taken seriously”.

“The military had been standing on the sidelines and were not really prepared to give up power, but failure was largely due to the bad performance of the country’s political forces,” he said.

After its own uprising, Tunisia’s fledgling democracy survived for a decade, but collapsed when Kais Saied, a democratically elected populist president, in 2021 shuttered parliament, rewrote the constitution to concentrate power in his hands and began jailing critics.

The autocratic shift was welcomed by Tunisians fed up with chaotic politics, falling living standards and ineffective government. In October Saied won the latest presidential elections with 90 per cent of the vote after jailing the more credible of two candidates allowed to run against him.

The lesson from Tunisia, said Olfa Lamloum, a political scientist in Tunis, is that “democratic freedoms cannot survive without the basics of a dignified life.

“Protests in the past 10 years by the unemployed and others have been about social and economic rights,” she said. “People have to see that their lives are changing for the better.”

After an uprising in Libya ousted Muammer Gaddafi in 2011, the country split under two rival governments. They fought a civil war in 2019, in which Russia and regional powers armed and backed different sides.

Rival ruling elites have since settled into dysfunctional coexistence, funding themselves by siphoning off Libya’s oil revenues.

Syria’s trajectory seems unlikely to retrace the steps of other so-called “Arab Spring” countries, analysts said. Its fragmentation under different armed rebel groups, coupled with a mosaic of minorities, means the challenges will be different.

Also the collapse of the Assad regime followed a 13-year civil war in which half a million people were killed, mostly by the regime, and millions became refugees.

Assad’s ferocious repression of peaceful demonstrations in 2011 transformed the Syrian revolution into an armed uprising in which Islamist factions ultimately became the strongest groups. Assad invited in foreign allies: initially Iran and Iranian-backed militants including Hizbollah, then Russia, whose air force bombed rebel-held areas.

Following Assad’s fall, Isis still has active cells in parts of Syria; US-backed Kurds have set up an autonomous enclave in the north east; and Turkey, which controls pockets of northern Syria, backs other rebels to keep Kurdish militants in check. Ankara views Syrian Kurdish militants as an extension of its separatist Kurdistan Workers’ party, PKK, which has fought the Turkish state for four decades.

Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, leader of the Sunni HTS, has sought to rebrand himself as a moderate Islamist who will not trample on the rights of Syria’s minorities, including Christians, and the Alawites who formed the bedrock of the Assad regime. The Assad family were themselves Alawite, an offshoot of Shia Islam.

But he has not promised a democracy or outlined a vision of the future, while the US designates both him and his group as terrorists.

Yassin Haj Saleh, a Syrian writer and political dissident who spent 16 years in prison, wrote on Facebook that the “new Syria” could not be a state “ruled by an Islamist Sunni Assad . . . in which people remain followers without political rights and public freedoms including the freedom of religious belief”.

There are also fears that Jolani could fail to unite the country, leaving rebel groups fighting over the spoils of Assad’s wrecked state, reigniting conflict and drawing in foreign interference.

Paul Salem, vice-president of the Middle East Institute in Washington, said that while Syria’s future was likely to be “bumpy”, it was a positive sign that the Syrian state has not melted away, unlike the Libyan state after Gaddafi’s fall.

“Notice also that opposition forces are protecting all government offices, all public institutions. They are not attacking any of them,” he said.

Salem said Syria’s neighbours including Turkey “have no interest in a failed state” on their doorstep. While the presence of US-backed Kurdish militants and a self-governing Kurdish enclave could become an issue, it could be managed by “good diplomacy between Washington and Ankara”, he said.

“It’s definitely the case that removing a tyrant, while welcomed and celebrated, that’s very different from actually having a transition to something better,” said Salem.

“But in the Syrian case [because of] the extreme evil of the Assad regime, you can’t blame Syrians. He had to go.”