The Fall of The House of Assad

An excerpt from, “Blowback” by Matthew Petti, December 8, 2024:

Hypotheticals aside, Assad’s fall is already a clear case of blowback — just not on the part of the United States. The Assad family was one of the most cynical actors in the modern Middle East, having dealt with and backstabbed almost every major player in the region. And many of those double games came back to bite Assad at the last moment.

Of course, the social rot of the old regime, U.S. economic pressure preventing reconstruction, and broader geopolitical shifts were important structural factors that brought down the Syrian state. But the specific actors that brought down Assad — breakaway Al Qaeda and the Kurdish-led democratic confederalists — were both ones that the Assad dynasty had played footsie with. And the curious lack of support from Assad’s most important patron, Iran, was likely the result of more backstabbing.

The democratic confederalist movement exists today because Assad’s father had helped Kurdish exiles from Turkey settle in Lebanon in the 1980s. In order to gain leverage in Syrian-Turkish border disputes, Syria backed a variety of Turkish and Kurdish dissidents. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) first trained with Palestinian guerrillas, then set up its first headquarters in the Syrian-occupied Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.

It’s a history that is well known and often brought up by Syrian nationalist opponents of the Kurdish movement and their American sympathizers, who portray the PKK and its offshoots as stooges of Assad. Of course, these opponents speak less about Assad’s falling out with the PKK. In 1998, as part of a Syrian-Turkish normalization agreement, the Syrian government expelled the PKK, allowing for Turkey to capture its leadership, and stepped up its repression of Syrian Kurds.

That crackdown ended up awakening a sleeping giant. Their peace with the Syrian state broken, local Kurds founded the underground Democratic Union Party to fight Assad’s regime. (The 2004 soccer riots between Arabs and Kurds in Qamishli were a particularly important turning point.) Once civil war broke out, the Democratic Union Party took control of the situation in Kurdish towns and swiftly booted out government forces. The party later became the core of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which conquered a third of Syria, including some of the country’s most valuable natural resources, and welcomed in a U.S. military presence.

Around the same time that it was cracking down on Kurdish aspirations, the Syrian government opened its territory to Iraqi guerrillas fighting the U.S. occupation, including Al Qaeda in Iraq. Assad likely believed that he was killing two birds with one stone: raising the cost of U.S. regime change efforts while getting restive dissidents killed in a foreign struggle. In the words of writer Rob Ashlar, “AQI took the aid since it viewed the regime as fools whom it would later betray. The regime thought it was being clever. It wasn’t.”