Charles Glass’s book on Syria provides a fascinating, if horrifying, explanation of the impact of imperial interests on the country, from its foundation to the present, finds Kevin Crane

The collapse of the Syrian government at the end of 2024 came – to most people in the world – as a sudden shock. It had been well over a decade of a terrible war which has ruined the infrastructure of the country, killed around two thirds of a million people, and turned a further fourteen million people into refugees (around half of whom are internally displaced, and the other half fled to other countries), but it had been giving off the image of a bleak, hopeless stability. The dramatic winter offensive by Islamist rebels in the north of Syria prompted much gloating from the West, who see the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad as a great victory for their interests. Establishment fawning over the new government, headed by a former Al Qaeda warlord Ahmed al-Sharaa (also known by his nom de guerre, al-Julani) was instant and while right-wing politicians and neoconservative media figures queued up to meet and be photographed with him, you could quite forget he was a war criminal with Western price on his head.

Amongst the left, opinions were divided as to how optimistically to respond to the arrival of new government flying the old flag of Syria, with some making the claim that this represented an anti-colonial, or even revolutionary change to Syria. This somewhat flew in the face of the statements and actions of al-Sharaa, who was instantly announcing that he would establish a pro-Western and capitalist state, but it is really the continuation of violence in Syria that confirms that those of us who were expressing pessimism were right to do so. The new government has proved completely useless in protecting its claimed territory and people from military occupation and aggression from Israel and Turkey, but it is very capable of attacking Syrian communities it views as hostile to itself. So far, this has primarily been against two of Syria’s most significant minority groups: the Alawites along the country’s coast and the Druze in its southern mountains.

Western media coverage of Syria has been consistently bewildering for the past fifteen years, so it’s really quite hard to understand what the causes of this seemingly endless conflict are. For this reason, journalist Charles Glass has released a new update of his collection of essays about Syria and its history of political and military strife. This compendium, which follows his reflections on both the history of the country and the evolving civil war as it was happening, makes for pretty satisfying, if never very happy, place to start learning. Unlike most journalists who give only the most superficial reports about Syria, and an amorphous ‘Syrian people’ for whom the whole world seems confident to speak, Glass has spent decades visiting and learning about the country, and the appreciation of nuances and details of this deeply wronged country reflect these experiences strongly.

Neither whole, but less than the sum of its parts

One of the things Glass gets across very thoroughly, particularly in his earlier-dated essays, is that the state of Syria as we know it a classic example of post-imperial intentional dysfunction. Most readers of this website are probably aware that when the Ottoman empire lost the First World War, the modern countries of the Middle East were created with no recourse to what their inhabitants wanted, but according to the negotiations of the French and British empires in the infamous ‘Sykes-Picot’ agreement. In the Anglophone world, we tend to focus on the British side of this, not least because it is from the British-occupied zone that the Israel/Palestine conflict emerged, but the French project was no more benign.

‘Syria’ at this time, was understood by the peoples of the region to be the name of, well, the region, meaning most of the historic fertile crescent of the northern Middle East and extending southward down the coast and the river Jordan to include old Palestine (which then included what is now the state of Jordan). The British had already cut off this southern extension, but French colonial administrators had other arbitrary plans. They created further divisions in the western areas, parcelling the region of Hatay off to Turkey and creating a brand-new small state in Lebanon, where they sought to use the Francophilia of a specific sect of local Christians, the Catholic Maronites, to create a long-term client state. To the east, by contrast, they agreed with other powers to carve up the historic lands of the Kurdish people and force western Kurdistan into their new Syria. All these decisions were determined by the calculations of what benefitted French foreign policy, and they were foreshadowing a future in which its destiny would be determined for it by forces foreign and uncaring toward it.

The result was a country that was divided both inside and out. Syria’s ancient and historic cities like Damascus and Aleppo were venerable centres of trade, learning and religious and ethnic diversity, having far more in common with cities that they were now divided from, like Beirut and Antioch, than with the much more austere, traditional and avowedly Sunni-Arab rural provinces surrounding them. You then add to this the significant complicating factor of large minority blocks: the Kurds became arguably the largest nation with no state in the twentieth century, but just as important were the Alawite and Druze communities. These ethnoreligious groups both coincidentally emerged from schisms in Shia Islam, albeit two very different schisms resulting in rather different identities. The Alawites live along the coast of Syria (a minority of them having had Turkish citizenship foisted upon them in Hatay), and formed part of the trading and cultural elite. This is in stark contrast to the highly solitary and aloof Druze, continuing to stick to their mountain strongholds even after colonial intervention had divided them between Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

A puzzle no-one can solve

Glass argues that the highly artificial composition of the Syrian territory and population is what set the country up for a century of failed attempts at a national project, and points to a number of significant rhyming similarities between the Syrian revolt of 1925 and the failed revolution of 2011. For starters, both were locally triggered when a drought caused rural Syrians to protest their conditions, significantly inspired by recent rebellions in a North African country (Morocco in ’25 and Tunisia in ’11) and the excessive brutality of the authorities caused the protestors to turn into rebels. Both uprisings then saw escalation as more of the most marginalised Syrians began to unite around a more generalised uprising.

On the downside, both rebellions hit a lot of the same obstacles. Rural and provincial Sunni Arab rebels seemed like a rustic, even foreign, horde to city-dwelling Syrians in the 1920s, and it wasn’t a lot better in the twenty-first century. By 2011, worsening conditions in the countryside (somewhat exacerbated by climate change) had pushed many rural people into the cities, but they formed a new suburban poor, significantly in tension with the more affluent and highly multicultural populations in the cities. This resulted in a severe differential in support for any uprising against the government between the two groups.

Another, related and unpleasant, echo from one era to the other is that the divisions often resulted in any sort of nationalist or socialist sense of unity amongst the rebels being replaced with a religious sectarianism, which all too often took the form of Syrian Christians being subjected to severe violence against themselves and their property. These crimes, of course, then became propaganda for the government of the time to argue that only its own stability could assure safety for vulnerable members of minority groups.

Glass argues that a repeated process of fracturing has occurred whenever a popular force has tried to effect radical change in Syria, ultimately creating a bigger mess than the puzzle they were originally trying to solve. He sees the roots of this in the failure of any popular force to act as unifying leadership for the wider society. A particularly striking example of division triumphing over unity is given in a then-fresh account of the rebel seizing of Aleppo in 2012:

‘Outside the city, the rebels launched an all-out assault on the industries that kept Aleppo alive, burning and looting pharmaceutical plants, textile mills, and other factories.

‘While the urban unemployed had good reason to support a revolution that might improve their chances in life, the thousands of people who had jobs at the beginning of the revolution and lost them when the Free Army [a major rebel faction] burned their workplaces are understandably resentful. There are stories of workers taking up arms to protect their factories and risking their lives to save their employers from kidnappers’ (p.44).

This is striking negative evidence that without the unity of the working class, revolutionary change in society is basically impossible. The violence being described is essentially sectarianism among groups of workers, which could only ever give way to sectarianism of every other kind.

The long, slow death of Ba’athist Syria

The Assad dynasty’s dictatorship that the 2011 rebellion opposed, was, in its own way, also a failed project for taking Syrian society forward. The book isn’t primarily concerned with the Ba’ath Party itself, not least because Glass does not regard it as ever having been a particularly legitimate ideological or political institution. For him, Ba’athism was really just a thin veneer to cover up the dictatorship’s actual working.

Not long after decolonisation, Syria fell under the rule of an army clique that was maintained through violent force, patronage and kinship. Members of the Alawite minority, led by Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez, seized control of the apparatus via a series of coups and established the dictatorship that would last for six decades. Despite Ba’athism supposedly being a modernist, universal ideology, the Syrian state was run on explicitly sectarian lines, which maintained rather than resolved the deep divisions in the country’s society.

On its own terms, this was successful, particularly in 1982 – the country’s last serious uprising of the twentieth century – when the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood staged a rebellion. They ran up against the fundamental problem that their Sunni Islamism could not provide broad appeal to enough groups within society. The Brotherhood was isolated, and slaughtered by the state, in shocking scenes of mass violence that made the Assads into hate figures in much of the rest of the Muslim world.

The government in Damascus was, however, just as happy to play with divisions internationally as domestically. Its foreign policy was cynical by even the most extreme standards, seeing them zigzag between militant-sounding hostility to Israel, to support for the American war against Iraq, to a series of ideologically bereft changes of policy and allegiance in the conflict between Lebanese and Palestinian factions. Barely mentioned in the West was its role in America’s ‘War on Terror’ under the Bush administration: despite having been named as part of Bush’s axis of evil, Assad was quite happy to help ‘disappear’ political prisoners that the Americans captured and then delivered to him.

The three decades in the country after the 1982 rising were stable, but stifling. As the direct memory of mass violence faded in Syria, so too did frustration amongst many Syrians about the corruption of the elites, of the lack of dynamism and opportunity and the absence of the freedom to question anything. For a long time, chaos and strife in neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq played a major role in encouraging Syrians to value this stability over any prospect of change, but this also became less the case as the twenty-first century wore on. One particularly striking anecdote from 2005 that Glass teases out in Dera’a, a historic city of dissidence, is that some people remember that as youths they had started a campaign against smoking in public, more because they wanted to be able to express public opinions about something than because they were that concerned about the issue!

This generation formed the core of the ordinary Syrians who flocked to mass demonstrations in 2011, when it briefly seemed like Syria could have a mostly peaceful change of government, as had happened in Lebanon and Egypt. These hopes were dashed fast by the fatal divisions inside the country, and by 2013, Glass reports meeting many of that same generation who can only look back on the protest movement with the most bittersweet nostalgia:

‘“The demonstrations are finished,” said a young woman whose activism has given way to resignation “that was the good time”’ (p.59).

‘All the players play on us’

We all knew the Syrian civil war was chaotic, but Glass’s accounts really help you get a handle on what a storm of madness they were. The ‘official’ opposition of the Free Syrian Army never had a particularly stable command structure, and could never impose command on the Islamist rebels, who did not even place any particular value on organisational unity. Estimates as to the total number of individual groups ran into the thousands, and it is probably impossible to say exactly who was fighting for who.

On the government side, the loyalist army was bolstered by the use of paramilitaries recruited particularly from the Alawite community, but they in turn also increasingly recruited from other minorities. Government predictions that Islamists would attack Christians and other minorities were overwhelmingly proved true, forcing many to drop their previous hostility to the government. Glass notes that this acquiescence was often reluctant, with many Syrian Christians he spoke to reporting that they were aware that the Assad regime was using and manipulating them, but they felt they had been robbed of any way to avoid going along with it.

The devastation of Syrian cities is a terrible thing to read in this book, as formerly pleasant neighbourhoods become torn apart into hostile countries. The fighting factions devasted the people around them, with looting and extortion common on both sides. Ordinary people might reasonably have hoped that, in some reasonable timeframe, exhaustion might bring the conflict to an end. It’s the ‘international community’ that is to blame for ensuring that didn’t happen.

World powers flooded arms and personnel into Syria to ensure the war kept going, for reasons that, as Glass puts it, has ‘little to do with Syria, apart from happening there’ (p.188). Someone he knew in the country put it even more strongly:

‘“Syria is a stadium.” A businessman whom I have known for many years laments “We are the grass. All the players play on us: Russia, the US, Iran and Turkey”’ (p.261).

He could, of course, have added Israel to that list, still occupying the country and dropping bombs down on it, as it has done and continues to do. The point is absolutely crucial, though, Syria is a county born with scars from colonial meddling, and those same scars have been used as justification to continue to meddle.

The final, recent chapter of the book details how the war could, and should, have ended in 2017 at the latest. It was in that year that the majority of rebel factions had had enough never-ending fighting. The most brutal and effective Islamist group, Isis, had been pushed into hard retreat by the Kurdish resistance and US support, and the humanitarian and refugee crises had become far more terrible than any pre-war hardship. However, the great powers were far too committed to their own interests to allow a settlement. They kept brutal economic sanctions in place. Meanwhile, Israel and the US refused to relinquish their occupation zones, and Turkey doubled down, extending its war against the Syrian Kurds.

Together with a Syrian Islamist proxy force, Turkish troops ethnically cleansed Kurds out of the region of Afrin and set up a permanent occupation zone around the Idlib region that was integrated into Turkey’s economy, in stark contrast to the literally and figuratively starved rest of country (shockingly, Syria did not even make significant food imports before 2011!). Reconstruction simply never came, and then when a major earthquake imposed even more damage, life in Syria had simply to come to seem more hopeless than ever.

Glass argues that the fall of Assad in 2024 was the culmination of the state already having collapsed after years of destruction and neglect. The dictator’s own attempts to get up to his old, duplicitous tricks of playing rival allies against each other doubtless didn’t help, but ultimately his regime was non-functional, his Russian and Iranian allies were tied up with other major conflicts and, when tested by a renewed offensive by Islamists who’d been living in comparative leisure in Turkish-run Idlib, his army basically didn’t fight. The resulting scenes somewhat resembled the collapse of the Afghan Republic in 2021: this was a government already beaten.

Syria’s new rulers have pledged their own version of rebuilding and restoring the country, along with the usual platitudes about rights and freedoms. Perhaps, to an extent, they even believe this, although it is more likely that the CIA has been giving them very expensive media training. The reality is, however, that the Ahmed al-Sharaa ex-Al Qaeda government is enacting violence against minorities and internal opponents, coupled with their craven attitudes towards America, Turkey and – most of all – Israel during its genocide. Like the other attempts to fix Syria within the unjust framework colonialism imposed, we are likely to see a lot of repeated history. People on the left who argued for even more weapons to be sent into the country to solve its problems might do well to reflect on how good their judgement was, though I doubt those people would ever read this book.

Syria is available from O/R Books.