Hate To Say I Told You So

Syria's descent into a fresh round of ethnic cleansing was very predictable

“Durka, durka, durka, Mohammed, Mohammed, jihad!” “Durka, durk, Allah, Mohammed, Mohammed, jihad!”

You’ll have to forgive me: my Arabic isn’t quite what it used to be. In any case, it doesn’t really matter what the men in the video are babbling. It matters what they’re doing—or, rather, what they’ve just done.

What they’ve just done, as far as we can tell, is to massacre a group of Alawites, an Islamic minority that mostly inhabits the western coastal region of Syria, on the Med. Bashar al Assad and his clan are all members of the Alawite minority, and many of them maintain a strong loyalty to the deposed leader, mainly because he was their only protection in a place—the Middle East—where being a member of a religious minority threatens at any moment to turn into a death sentence.

The young men who killed these people, proudly gurning for the camera and uttering their mindless rote phrases about God’s goodness, are Sunni Islamist fighters aligned with the new Syrian regime of Ahmed al-Sharaa, a man who was on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorists until very recently, until it became convenient for him not to be.

The video in question is one of many that have made their way onto social media in the last two days, after the resumption of fighting in Syria. They make for grim viewing and presage a very dark future for the country and indeed the wider region: a future of ethnic cleansing, changing borders, occupation and, of course, the dismal handmaiden of all these things—mass migration out of the region towards Europe and maybe even America.

Some of us knew this would happen if Bashar al Assad was removed. None of us were or are possessed of unusual foresight or the gift of prophecy. Those who didn’t know can only be described as ignorant or wilfully blind, indifferent to the plight of the Syrian people.

Here’s what we know about the fighting so far. Hundreds have been killed since Thursday, as Alawite groups battle government forces. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that at least 180 people have been killed in the Alawite region of the country, including more than 20 men in the town of Muktareyah alone. A prominent Alawite cleric, Sheikh Shabaan Mansour, aged 86, is also reported to have been killed.

President al-Sharaa has blamed the hostilities on forces loyal to Assad, and said that his government is committed to rooting out “remnants” of the old regime.

“We will continue to pursue the remnants of the fallen regime,” he said.

“We will bring them to a fair court, and we will continue to restrict weapons to the state, and no loose weapons will remain in Syria.”

The President also claimed that anybody found to be persecuting civilians or committing massacres would face swift justice.

So: The new government is simply attempting to maintain the peace. It’s mopping up what remains of Assad’s military forces and attempting to do so in a way that minimises civilian casualties and prevents atrocities. Got it.

Forgive me, but I’m not convinced. I’ve seen what happened in Iraq. We all saw what happened there, first during the US occupation, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, as Sunni and Shia turned on each other in a brutal civil war, and then in the dark days of Islamic State, which unleashed an orgy of rape and slaughter on the minorities of the region, including the Yazidis. Mercifully, President Trump brought an end to that wretched caliphate, but now elements of Islamic State are part of the Syrian government, although they call themselves a different name—so, yeah, I’m not convinced this is just an exercise in law and order.

One person who will be feeling a grim sense of vindication as she watches these events is Tulsi Gabbard, the newly appointed Director of National Intelligence. For the better part of a decade, Gabbard warned against the consequences of toppling Assad. In 2017, she actually travelled to Syria to meet him, and when she came back to the US, she said there was “no difference” between the “mainstream” rebels fighting Assad, who received US backing, and Islamic State.

Tulsi Gabbard was right. She told us exactly what would happen.