Bashar Al-Assad and the curse of inheritance

The Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has repeatedly said that he is fighting “terrorism.” Therefore, the most important condition for a solution in Syria, according to him, is the elimination of such terrorism. Fine, but even if we assume Al-Assad’s words are true and accurate, the question remains: Why has he failed to confront terrorism for the past six years, let alone defeat it? He will reply that foreign interventions help such “terrorism” and supply it with power, hence making its defeat almost impossible.

However, Al-Assad, before anyone else, has undermined his own vision because he has called on external parties to help him and protect him. Why is it different in his case? Al-Assad is standing on the head of an authoritarian hierarchy that has been characterised throughout its history with unprecedented brutality and violence against the Syrians. The victims of such violence and brutality after the revolution have been the people, cities, and neighbourhoods across Syria, not terrorists. Hence, Al-Assad and his regime is close to state terrorism that lacks the legitimacy and acceptance of the people by choice, not by force.

The irony in Al-Assad’s rhetoric is that the vast majority of those he considers terrorists are Syrians, not foreigners. Meanwhile, the foreign forces (fighters, militias and equipment) that stand with him are all non-Syrian. Who is defending Syria and its people in this case? The foreign troops did not come to protect the people, but to protect the president from the people.

Al-Assad’s claims that he resorted to the Iranians and their militias, and then the Russians due to the legitimacy that he and his regime supposedly represent, does not change anything. A legitimacy that cannot protect itself without external intervention to confront its own people either did not have true legitimacy in the first place or has lost this right to rule due to the actions it has taken against the people. If the regime, with the president’s history and behaviour conducts itself in this way, then it is primarily responsible for the emergence of terrorism in Syria as a response to the terrorist acts of the state and its use of foreigners to this end.

Bashar Al-Assad’s predicament, and Syria’s conflict with him is due to the fact that he has completely lost touch with reality. He acquired this separation with his inheritance of the regime and therefore this divide preceded the revolution. At the same time, this is a conscious break up and deliberate deception under the pretext of protecting the political system and he cannot gain acceptance from the people. Instead, he forces them to co-exist with him and get along by means of security tools, intimidation, and terror.

How long can he impose a security equation like the one he is imposing without having a political framework for it? This method cannot work without having a political policy to back it up? However, the need for support and integration requires masking the truth that the regime is an Alawite system of rule that adheres to having an Alawite family dominate the governance of the country where the overwhelming majority of the population is Sunni, along with other Muslim and non-Muslim members.

The biggest irony is the fact that the leadership, especially during the time of Al-Assad Jr., could not believe that the Syrian society had any real objection to having an Alawite as a president, just as there was no objection to the first president after independence, a protestant Christian, i.e. Fares Al-Khoury. The origin of this disbelief  stems from the minority mentality of dominance. This explains why the regime and its leadership has lost touch with reality and the people and therefore their survival is now dependent on foreign fighters.

Given the situation, Al-Assad cannot admit that there is an uprising and the brutality and violence of his regime existed, even before the unrest, and its foreign alliances are causes of the revolution. After the equation of co-existence and progression collapsed due to fear, there was a need for terror. Recognising the revolution is an acknowledgment of the end of Al-Assad and the regime he inherited from his father. Failing to recognise this has driven Syria to civil war and this is something that no one, not least Al-Assad himself, knows when it will end.

Surprisingly, despite everything that has and is happening, Al-Assad imagines that his survival is the only way out of the crisis. He wants to hang on to the resourcefulness of the people and on the ruins of their cities and villages that he turned upside down. Is this possible? This question no longer has any meaning, especially since Al-Assad is insistent on continuing his violent destructive approach and implementing the concept of collective punishment against the Syrians who he wants to rule over. He fantasized about the possibility of turning back the hands of time to the period before the revolution, as if nothing happened.

According to the same logic, he pretends that he has not lost control over the course of the war and the proposed political solutions. The truth is, his armed forces which was known as the Syrian Arab Army, has, given up to divisions and alliances with foreign fighters and militias, lost its national and doctrinal structures and turned into another militia without a purpose or morale motivating it towards a national goal.

In the midst of the jungle of militias and fighters, this militia has lost its capability and perhaps even motivation to protect Al-Assad. This is something the Russians say publically and the Iranians say behind the scenes. Does Al-Assad deny such fragmentation consciously or is he unaware of reality? It is likely that the brutality of war and its bitterness, as well as the transfer of control to the foreigners has made this a mixture of both for the president.

The man is resisting being overthrown. He knows that the foreign fighters, and not the Syrian people are the only thing between him and this fate. He is trying to escape the fate of being the first and last heir to his father’s regime. If he is destined to live, Al-Assad will realise that the timing and means by which the regime was bequeathed to him, as well as the goal behind it, was a curse in the form of a political process.

Inheritance of the Syrian state has weakened it and put it in within the doctrine of sectarianism in the region. This is a losing game for the Syrian regime and the revolution has revealed this, especially due to his lack of wisdom in dealing with the crisis. It is also a losing game because the heir had no history or experience and that further escalated the weakness, and he resorted to Iran and Hezbollah to compensate for this. That made him the first Syrian leader and even the first Arab president to link their survival on a foreign militia after that militia’s survival was once dependent on Syria.

Translated from Al-Khaleej Online, 27 March 2017 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.