Blowback
Bashar al-Assad's history of double-dealing has finally come around.
“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? There is more hope of a fool than of him.” - Proverbs 26:11-12.
Blowback. It’s a term for the unintended consequences of intelligence operations, made famous by the left-wing history podcast by the same name. The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria has bought back the term in popular discourse. After all, isn’t a case of militant Islamists taking over a country with U.S. backing? Might they attack America later?
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.”
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the current prince of the Syrian Islamist rebels, was a Syrian veteran of Iraq’s struggle. He crossed back into Syria in 2011, linking up with other Islamists released from Syrian prison to create a local branch of Al Qaeda. The new organization, which has undergone several name changes and paint jobs since then, proved to be a far more competent fighting force in the burgeoning civil war than the patchwork of disorganized militias and foreign-funded warlords that made up the rest of the opposition.
To an extent, the rise of Al Qaeda in Syria benefited Assad. Jolani’s organization both consolidated power over the rest of opposition and made it politically radioactive. The emergence of the Islamic State from Al Qaeda’s ranks then sucked a chunk of Syrian Islamists into a losing war against the entire world. But Jolani proved himself to be a clever operator, ruthlessly splitting from Al Qaeda and embarking on a state-building project in the last remnants of Islamist-held territory. Last month, the opportunity finally came for Jolani to unfreeze the conflict and overthrow Assad once and for all.
Throughout the civil war, Assad had relied heavily on the Iranian military and Iranian-backed paramilitaries to hold territory. During the later frozen stage of the conflict, when it looked as if Assad had finally won, he began looking for a way to dump his patron in favor of a richer one. Thus began the Arab normalization process, in which the Arab monarchies began welcoming the Syrian government back into the fold in order to weaken Iranian influence.
The bet seemed to pay off. Assad confiscated the Yemeni embassy in Damascus from the Houthi government, which is close to Iran, the day after the October 2023 war in Gaza broke out. Afterwards, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates opened their own embassies. Iran also began to suspect something darker was happening, that Assad was welcoming Israeli air raids against Iranian forces. Israel was certainly able to gain intelligence on Hezbollah and other pro-Iran militias through their presence in Syria, although it’s not clear whether Assad himself was selling information or his government was simply vulnerable to penetrate.
At the last moment, Assad blatantly tried to sell out Iran to save his own skin. According to Bloomberg News, he reached out the United States via the United Arab Emirates, offering to cut all ties with Iranian-backed paramilitaries in exchange for U.S. help stopping Jolani’s offensive. Iran, of course, could play the same game. The Iranian government reached out to Jolani, who agreed to protect Shi’a Muslim communities in Syria in exchange for Iran withdrawing without a fight.
Assad played everyone, and in the end, he was left with no one. His army melted away, and old Assad loyalists swiftly welcomed the new Jolani regime. The man himself slinked away to Russia, where he will likely have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life, given the short life expectancy of clients who annoy Moscow.
The double dealing with the Kurdish movement, Al Qaeda, and Iran are only a small sample of the Assad family’s Machiavellian schemes. The mass release of Syrian political prisoners brought back memories of all the people and movements Assad had stabbed in the back, from Communists to Palestinian nationalists. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that karma exists in this world, when evil gets away with so much. But a certain level of treacherous behavior will always end badly.
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