Whither Syria?


Rebels have overthrown the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian Socialist Baathist Party. Whether that’s an unalloyed good depends on what happens next.

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan and an expert on Arab and Muslim history in the Middle East. I’ve followed his blogging for 20 years. He has an excellent post up today on the Syrian revolution.

“The tip of the spear of the revolution was the fighters of the Levant Liberation Council (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS), a hard line fundamentalist organization that had run the province of Idlib in an authoritarian manner in recent years. It is not ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), though that is one path the victors could take if they were so inclined. So far, their behavior in Aleppo has presented a mixed picture, with some killing of Kurds but less turmoil, including for Christians, than some had feared.”

The history of revolutions in Arab states during the past 20 years has not been encouraging. And Syria has large numbers of Kurds, Alawites, Christians and secular nationalist Sunnis. Cole doesn’t sugar-coat things. But he concludes with this:

Today, let the Syrians bask in the overthrow of a horrid dictatorship that tortured 10,000 prisoners to death, kept thousands of prisoners of conscience locked up, and killed hundreds of thousands of people with indiscriminate fire and barrel bombs, and sometimes chemical weapons. Syrians are better off with the possibility of social evolution than with being locked in a political iron cage, even if the ride may turn very bumpy.

https://www.juancole.com/2024/12/syrians-pitfalls-democracy.html

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