The Struggle for Syria

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha visited Damascus December 30, 2024, meeting Syria’s new de facto leader, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, amid expressions of hope for a strategic partnership and achieving diplomatic recognition. The end-of-year visit coincided with an extensive interview Sharaa gave the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya that touched on key diplomatic relationships and expected timelines for the political transition and elections.

The Ukrainian visit is part of a deluge of foreign visitors that have descended on Damascus since the December 8 fall of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Key visitors have included Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Barbara Leaf, the Jordanian foreign minister, the Libyan minister of state for communications and political affairs, the Qatari minister of state for foreign affairs, and United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen.

Outside of visits, there have been other important diplomatic developments. On January 2, Turkey’s Defense Ministry released a statement indicating intentions to establish strategic ties with Syrian counterparts. On January 1, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shibani and newly appointed Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra visited Riyadh, the first foreign visit by senior officials of the new government. In late December, there was a phone call between Shibani and United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan. There have been reports of a possible visit to Damascus by Egypt’s foreign minister in the coming days. Further, the interim government expressed gratitude for eight countries resuming diplomatic activity at their embassies in Damascus, including the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman; and Qatar and Turkey reopened their embassies in Syria in mid-December.

Leadership Comments on Diplomatic Activity

Beyond visits and ramped up diplomatic activity, Shibani expressed gratitude to Riyadh for the recent “positive” statement of support for the transition in Syria and noted the impact the Saudi view was having in helping stabilize the situation. Sharaa also went out of his way, as he has done in earlier interviews, to underscore Saudi Arabia’s importance for Syria. He noted Riyadh “has a major role in Syria’s future,” signaled its major investment opportunities in the country, and emphasized that he “took pride in everything” Saudi Arabia has done for Syria. In terms of personal biography, he reminded viewers he spent his early childhood in Riyadh. As he has in past public comments, he insisted Syria aspired to be a force for stability in the region and particularly for the Gulf.

Other comments from the Syrian leadership focused on the U.S. diplomatic visit have been significantly more measured, with a statement noting that Syria’s leaders had indicated to the Americans “that the Syrian people stand at an equal distance from all countries and parties in the region” and that Syria wanted to contribute to regional peace and rejected any efforts at “polarization.” After her meeting with Sharaa, Leaf noted he came across as pragmatic and clarified that the U.S. Rewards for Justice bounty on Syria’s de facto leader would not be pursued, even as the U.S. terror designations of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its leader remain in place. Addressing the somewhat limited impact of the meeting indirectly in his Al Arabiya interview, Sharaa expressed hope that U.S. President-elect Donald J. Trump would lift U.S. economic sanctions imposed on Syria.

Lengthening the Transition Timeline by Years

Perhaps recognizing the dangers of a fraught handover of power implicit in the initially promised three-month timeline established for the interim government, Sharaa made clear in the Al Arabiya interview that the transition would extend significantly. He noted that preparations for elections would take four years and that drafting and getting approved a new constitution would take three years. While it gives the interim government a longer runway for organizing Syria’s political transition, it is likely to invite criticism from skeptics in Syria and the international community who wonder about HTS’ commitment to hand over power. It also provides a broad time frame for parties in the region and others to vie for influence and shaping control over that process and ultimate sway in Syria.

In this extended period, the government will need to establish control over large parts of the country. Sharaa addressed this issue by emphasizing that armed militias outside state control would not be permitted. Qualified elements would be absorbed into the national army, he insisted, pointing among other targets at the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, partner forces with the United States in the northeast in the fight against the Islamic State group. Regarding the presence of Russian military bases, Sharaa was measured and cagey, underscoring the reality of deep and strategic interests shared by Syria and Russia while implicitly leaving the door open for a managed withdrawal of Russian forces. Meanwhile, there have been reports that the Russian military has been removing significant amounts of equipment and withdrawing personnel since the December 8, 2024 collapse of the Assad regime.

The Struggle for Syria Begins

The recent diplomatic developments and related statements reinforce the perception that the post-Assad struggle for Syria is now on, in earnest. It is a struggle that will play out both internally and externally. It will be a struggle internally because the father-son Assad dictatorship used violent repression, kleptocratic levels of corruption, and one-party Arab-focused nationalist appeals, all melded into a potent security apparatus, for over 50 years to control the disparate social, ethno-sectarian, and political forces that constitute Syria. Whatever remnants of that control, which had been seeping away over the course of Syria’s decade and a half civil war, collapsed definitively on December 8.

In his famous work “The Struggle for Syria,” British journalist Patrick Seale catalogued for a previous generation the key political forces that Syria’s leadership in post-independence years sought to master. Times – and the particular forces – have obviously changed since the book was published, at the dawn of the Assad family’s influence in Syria. But recent developments point to the stubborn salience of a few of the dynamics Seale described:  Most important is what he called “the two-way interaction between the internal power struggle and conflicts on the wider stage,” with the region’s jousting for control of Syria, in efforts also shaped by great power rivalry. All the recent diplomatic maneuvering and statements of intent, appreciation, and warning constitute the opening round in that renewed struggle for Syria. While the influence of Egypt and Iraq no longer loom over that struggle quite as they did in Seale’s account, that of Turkey and Saudi Arabia (with other Gulf states) is forcefully emerging. A key corollary that Seale pointed to also resonates today: Syria’s internal strains and struggles “were at once exported to her neighbors” who “courted, subverted, manipulated, and intrigued against” the country’s independence.

It’s doubtful that Syria today is the geostrategic prize it represented in the pre-Assad epoch Seale sought to describe. Shifts in the region and a catastrophic civil war have seen to that. But the contest – inside Syria and over Syria – with neighbors onlooking and interfering to shape internal dynamics, for their own interests, will likely play out with similar dynamics.

For now, the transition in Syria is barely underway. With good instincts and almost certainly some helpful suggestions from Turkey, the transitional government has not made serious mistakes. Consequently, ideological battle lines, regional power competitive drives, and internal struggles to try to dominate and take control of Syria remain relatively undefined. With the long election timeline, that might remain the case for an unexpectedly extended political honeymoon for Syria. If retribution instincts can be curbed and the efforts to fold militias into a national army can take place with dialogue, negotiation, and horse trading rather than fighting, that peaceful interim could extend well into the new year or longer.

The Arenas Where the Struggle Will Play Out

But eventually, the serious struggle to control Syria will intensify and be fought in skirmishes over constitutional drafts, electoral rules, political party development, census politics, control of the economy, and dozens of other arenas for rivalry and contestation. Outside players will intervene and inject money to shape views and outcomes, further escalating the struggle. External events, not yet discernible, will impinge the process. Great powers will seek to work through partners in the region to emphasize their priorities. Assuming the current, interim rulers let the transition process play out, without abrupt intervention to snuff it out, it would be a fraught, turbulent, process under the best of circumstances (and subject to distortion by the interim government). Given Syria’s decade and a half of war and suffering and its five decades of autocracy and stunted political and economic development, such ideal conditions are hard to imagine. Syria is also unlikely to receive all of the many tens of billions of dollars in reconstruction assistance and investment it will need to rebuild. And unlike neighbor Iraq, which is emerging after a long, painful transition of its own, it will not have massive oil reserves to help finance and shape the transition. If HTS or whatever form it shape-shifts into, ideologically and bureaucratically, intervenes to short-circuit Syria’s political transition, the struggle over Syria will not cease. It will perhaps merely take an abrupt change of direction that all parties, internal and external, will absorb and quickly adapt to. For now, tempered optimism, with concerted efforts to support Syria’s transition, is the only choice Syria’s friends can reasonably make to be helpful.

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