Steven Sahiounie, journalist and political commentator
In 1980, the Swedish pop group ABBA released a hit song, “The winner takes it all”. As of December 8, 2024, the armed coalition headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, might be singing that song.
In every conflict, there are winners and losers. On a scale from 1 to 10, the various factions involved in the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2024 are rated below.
The US and Israel are rated a 9 out of 10 win in the downfall of the Assad regime. In 1996, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commissioned a paper written by Richard T. Perle, a dual US-Israeli citizen. The title was “A Clean Break.” The plan called for a US military attack on several Middle Eastern countries, including Syria and Iraq, to provide greater security for Israel. Perle presented the paper to President Bill Clinton, but Clinton passed on the proposal.
After the 9/11 attack on the US, by Saudi Arabian covert teams, the Perle paper became a working project. For Perle’s contribution to the project, he was appointed as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, which was the chief architect of the US attack, occupation, and destruction of Iraq resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq, but no WMD.
In early 2011, the plan for regime change in Syria was put into motion by a covert CIA program ordered by President Barack Obama, to remove Assad to provide greater security for Israel. The Obama plan, inspired by the Perle paper, failed, and by 2017 President Trump had ordered the CIA program shut down. By 2020, the Syrian battlefields fell silent, but the status quo imposed by the various international players failed to bring peace or recovery to Syria.
Israel was the greatest winner, and once the Assad regime fell on December 8, the IDF wasted no time in a land grab that brought the Israeli border to within hiking distance of Damascus. Netanyahu argues the land is a security buffer zone because the new administration in Syria is armed Islamists, which presents a security danger to Israel. Had the current administration in Damascus been free, secular, and democratic, we might have rated Israel with a clear 10 out of 10 win.
The next big winners are Turkey and Qatar with an 8 out of 10 win. Both countries had participated in the Obama-led US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change from the earliest days of 2011. Turkey and Qatar were a perfectly suited tag team in the conflict; both are Muslim Brotherhood supporters, and the Syrian opposition was almost wholly comprised of Muslim Brotherhood agents, on both the political and armed wings of the fight. The 3 million Syrian refugees flocking to Turkey were a liability, which tempered its full success.
Qatar was also hit with being ostracized by the oil-rich and politically powerful Arab Gulf over their support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, which is seen in most Arab countries as a banned terrorist group.
The big losers are Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and the Iraqi resistance group, the Popular Mobilization Forces with a 0 rating. Israel brought Iran to its knees in Gaza and Lebanon, and hammered the nails into its coffin in Syria; resulting in a complete evacuation of all Iranians, including their diplomatic and military assets. After the fall of Assad, Iran has no presence or influence in Syria and a previously diminished presence in Lebanon.
Israel knocked the wind out of Hezbollah’s sails after a series of exploding pagers and walkie-talkies, invasion, and an extensive airstrike campaign. With the leadership killed, weapon storages degraded and without a partner in Syria to transit weapons to Hezbollah, the resistance group appears to be ‘out for the count’.
The Iraqi resistance group had wanted to send troops to confront the HTS when they took Aleppo on November 29. The Iraqi Prime Minister Sudani brought the issue to the parliament and said he would order the fighters to cross over the border to Syria to support the Syrian Arab Army in its fight against recognized terrorists. Members of the parliament disagreed and blocked the move. They felt that the battle in Syria was something best left to the Syrians to struggle with alone. With several thousand US troops still in Iraq, although scheduled to withdraw in the future, US officials may have conveyed messages to the various Iraqi parliamentarians to block Sudani and stay out of Syria.
Now we come to the biggest loser in the fall of Assad: the Kurds. The US Pentagon had partnered with a paramilitary group, SDF and YPG, in Syria to fight ISIS. The Kurds of Syria are a small minority, but they dreamed of their homeland carved out of Syrian territory. Using American training, funds, and weaponry, the Kurds went on an ethnic-cleansing campaign that culminated in a Communist semi-autonomous administration in northeast Syria and held about 25% of the Syrian territory. Although the Kurds dreamt of independence, their partners in Washington, DC. had never promised them that. On December 12, the US Pentagon officials ordered the SDF and YPG to stand down, and in doing so they ran up the new flag and accepted defeat at the hands of the HTS who had successfully driven Assad and his family out of the country and had defeated the national army.
In 1976, ABBA released a song, “Fernando”, written by ABBA members Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. Ulvaeus said the song came to him while lying under the stars on a summer night. He envisioned two revolutionaries, wounded and elderly, reminiscing about their fight for independence.
One day in the future Ahmed al-Sharaa might sing a similar song, remembering his days of fighting to establish an Islamic State in Syria. Although al-Sharaa has now said he is a moderate, and no longer an extremist. We can envision him as an older, retired revolutionary. However, the man who should be singing with him is dead. Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, also known by his nom de guerre, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was the first head of ISIS.
Al-Sharaa and al-Baghdadi were cellmates in an American Army prison in Iraq. There they planned their future goals after release. Al-Baghdadi stayed in Iraq and formed ISIS, while al-Sharaa went to Syria and formed Jibhat al-Nusra, which became named Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
After ISIS was defeated in Iraq and Syria, al-Baghdadi fled to Idlib, which was under the control of his old friend, al-Sharaa, the current leader of HTS which drove out Assad. On October 27, 2019, in the village of Barisha, on the outskirts of Idlib, an American commando group, on orders of President Donald Trump, attacked al-Baghdadi and he killed himself with a suicide vest.
The winners and the losers are well known, and their motivations for fighting. The Syrian people are split between the winners and losers. There is a minority segment satisfied and overjoyed at having an Islamic State in Syria. However, most Syrians want a secular democracy, with equal rights among all religious and ethnic communities. Most Syrians want a job, to see refugees come home, and to experience a political climate where everyone has a voice to be heard. If the HTS, and the future Syrian government after the transition period cannot deliver what the majority of the population wants, then the period culminating on December 8, 2024, might become known as the first revolution.
Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist.
