The Syrian nation is occupied

Just as the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance are battered but resilient, the occupied Syrian Nation is down but not out.

Syria is not dead, it is occupied. The two biggest NATO militaries, the Israelis and their Al-Qaeda styled terrorist proxies occupied one third of the country before 8 December 2024, now they occupy 100%. The “transitional” government led by UNSC listed terrorists, has a way to go before it receives either local or international approval; and armed and civil resistance have already emerged.

The HTS (Jabhat al Nusra, Al-Qaeda) regime has no revolutionary or democratic mandate and its sponsors are scrambling to rebrand it (HTS is still listed by the UNSC as a banned terrorist organisation) as democratic and inclusive. No doubt they will find some token collaborators. Many Syrians are reinventing themselves to survive and, in some cases, find a role in the new regime. Yet according to the UNHCR, after the HTS offensive, another million people have been “newly displaced” while few of those who fled the dirty war are returning.

Yet in face of the tragedy of the Al-Qaeda takeover, there is a revival of Syrian values, a phenomenon neither reported by the Anglo-American media nor its media allies in Turkiye and Qatar. As with the Israeli crimes in Gaza, we have to turn to social media to find detail of (1) the crimes of the al-Qaeda regime (2) more fake and exaggerated propaganda against the fallen Assad regime, used to justify the foreign occupation, and (3) the emerging civil and military resistance to the occupation. It is precisely this resistance which tells us that the Syrian nation is still alive.

Assad is gone and it is inconceivable that he will return. Many who were close to him remain bitter about the manner of his rapid exit. He surrendered – under what circumstances we still do not know – leaving a vacuum into which the foreign occupation moved rapidly.

It is clear that there was a failure in the Syrian Army command, including its commander in chief, though not necessarily in the will of Syrian Army soldiers. Some groups of Syrian soldiers have already resorted to guerilla style attacks on the sectarian terrorists. It is sheer ignorance to label these brave soldiers simply regime or Assad “loyalists”. They are defending an independent and inclusive Syria and its constitution, which is now under serious threat.

There has been much speculation about the role of Russia and Iran in the collapse of the Assad government. Some otherwise quite sober analysts refer to Putin “backstabbing” Assad. I cannot see evidence of any such betrayal, except to the extent that Russia’s support for the Syrian Army’s fight against proxy armies always had the limits of not directly confronting “Israel” or Turkiye. Iranian explanations for the collapse of the Assad government run along these lines: Iran warned Damascus about the threat since September and offered direct help, but Assad declined such help, wanting to distance himself from Iran and gain some sort of economic breakthrough with the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf.

He may have been misled by false promises but, in any case, he did not call for Iranian help. In those circumstances, uninvited, Iran could not fight in place of the Syrian Army. Sources close to the Syrian Army told me that Assad made some inexplicable changes in senior commanders, sidelining some of the more capable generals. Certainly, Syria had been under tremendous economic pressure, and that must have weakened its capacity to resist. Yet in the end, there was a failure of the Syrian command leading to Assad’s surrender. By the same reasoning, as regards Russia, I tend to agree with Helena Cobban’s first proposed explanation: that “Putin decided he could not save the Assad government if it could not save itself.”

While Syrians now adapt to survive under HTS rule, many hoping that their lives will be “free” or go on as normal, there can be no doubt that a great tragedy has fallen on them. Never mind the sustained propaganda war against Assad, an al-Qaeda led regime propped up by predatory foreign powers is the worst of all outcomes for the Syrian people. The Israelis, battered in Gaza and Lebanon, have had a “free kick” in Syria, racing in to occupy large parts of the south and bombing all the major defence infrastructure of the country. The fall of the Assad government was thus also a major setback for the Axis of Resistance, the only real ally of the Palestinian and Lebanese Resistance.

In the first few days, while the Western media reported that sectarian violence was “less intense than feared”, there were dozens of sectarian murders across Syria. The crimes of the HTS regime began in a sporadic rather than a systematic way, as Jolani and his henchmen tried to brush up their image, for their sponsors. But the sectarian character of HTS had not changed. While in early 2011 sectarian terrorists chanted “Christians to Beirut, Alawis to the grave”, in December 2024 the pro-Jolani crowd chanted, “Homs is for Sunnis, Alawites must get out”

Western think tanks like the Washington based CSIS prepared the ground for the rebranding back in 2023, saying that “HTS’s status as a terrorist group … grows increasingly complex”. After the fall of Damascus, France 24 observed that the “West” was looking at “normalisation” with the UNSC listed terrorist group, as it was regarded as having become more “moderate”. Certainly, in helping topple the independent Assad regime, the group was serving the interests of the US, Turkiye and the Israelis.

Syrians looked for some hope in the new rhetoric which claimed that, despite its bloody history, the HTS regime pledged “tolerance” for minorities and women. Many Syrians waved the new flag, as a form of protection, while former Syrian soldiers rushed to seek an amnesty from the new regime, fearing reprisals. Many were arrested and jailed.

Yet HTS crimes were filmed and published, like the sectarian murder of two soldiers who were called “Nusayri [Alawi] pigs”. There are now social media accounts documenting the crimes of the HTS regime and others documenting acts of resistance.

https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/the-syrian-nation-is-occupied