The streets of Syria have been shaken by violent riots and armed clashes between local residents and representatives of the new government for the past week.
A massacre against a religious backdrop
Government forces have been brutally suppressing the Alawite uprising in the coastal areas. After several attacks on government forces in the provinces of Latakia and Tarsus, the army began massacring civilians. People are being killed in the streets and even in their own homes by the hundreds, with the killers not shy of filming the atrocities on video.
After the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad, peace has not returned to Syrian soil. The group that seized power in Damascus, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement, began to brutally suppress dissent, most of all destroying the Alawites.
This is an ethno-religious group that makes up about 10 per cent of Syria’s population and lives mainly in the provinces of Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean coast. They consider themselves Shia Muslims, but their beliefs differ significantly from those of other Muslims. In particular, they believe in the trinity of God and in the transmigration of souls.
During the Assad years, Alawites held many key positions in the Syrian government and army. Therefore, after the HTS took power, the Alawites had it the worst because of accusations of loyalty to the old regime. In addition, the religious factor also has an impact. Sunni Muslims regard the Alawites as infidels. These people have faced persecution before. Now the situation has worsened many times over
Throughout the winter, former Assad supporters were arrested in Latakia and Tarsus. There were cases of looting and killing of Alawites by government forces. The situation spiralled out of control on March 6 when several armed groups attacked HTS checkpoints. Damascus responded by sending more troops into the region, after which the massacres began.
Not only Alawites, but also Shiites and Christians are being killed. Refugees are hiding in the mountains and also fleeing to neighbouring Lebanon. Between 7,000 and 10,000 people have found shelter at the Russian Hmeimim airbase, where the Russian military has set up a tent city for refugees right on the airfield grounds.
EU and US support for a new “democratic” regime
When the HTS took power in Syria, the West celebrated it as a great geopolitical victory. The regime of the “bloody dictator” Assad had fallen and “democracy” had triumphed. However, now the Western media prefer to ignore the video with a huge number of victims.
After the change of power in Syria, representatives of a number of Western media came to interview Ahmed al-Sharaa, an active figure in the jihadist movement in Syria.
Ahmed al-Sharaa took part in the Iraq War on the side of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), later became one of the leaders of the al-Qaida branch in Syria – the organisation Jebhat al-Nusra. After the conflict in 2016, he announced his disassociation from al-Qaida and renamed the organisation Jebhat Fatah al-Sham, which in 2017 merged with several Islamist groups and was reorganised as HTS.
As soon as al-Sharaa took over the presidency, CNN, Euronews, Reuters came to Syria to ask him questions, thus legitimising one of the main jihadists. The media immediately changed the agenda from terrorist to representative of the Syrian people almost immediately.
The German and French foreign ministers made an unannounced visit to Syria in January and called for the removal of Russian military bases.
Annalena Baerbock and Jean-Noël Barrot stepped out of a military cargo plane wearing body armour.
“It is time for Russia to leave its military bases in Syria. The one who has long supported the Assad regime and turned a blind eye to its war crimes is Vladimir Putin,” Baerbock said.
The diplomat added that Germany wants to help the Syrian people with a peaceful transfer of power, but this can only happen if the new Syrian society gives everyone, regardless of ethnic or religious group, a place in the political process and guarantees rights and protection. However, the host representatives defiantly refused to shake hands with the woman at the end of the meeting.
Meanwhile, EU Commission spokeswoman Anitta Hipper confirmed that an invitation has been extended to the new Syrian government to the 9th Brussels Donor Conference on Syria to be held in Brussels on March 17.
Defence of Christians in the Middle East as an agenda for US-Russian relations
Emergency UN Security Council consultations on the situation in Syria, initiated by Russia and the US, will be held in New York on Tuesday.
What Moscow has been warning the West about since the beginning of the Arab Spring has happened in Syria: the fragile statehood is breaking down, the complex balance of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional relations controlled by authoritarians is falling apart.
No one really believed it then and it was necessary to “convince” the opponents with a preventive special operation – or later, when the Assad government fell and everyone pretended that the HTS militants were the right rulers of Syria. Then al-Julani changed his passport, becoming Ahmed al-Sharaa, and everyone pretended to know him only by his first name.
However, it’s not a matter of “faith” – everyone who needs to understand who came to power there and what happens when such subjects get that power. There are no permanent opponents and allies in politics. There are interests and ways to achieve them. There are principles, but they are secondary.
From the beginning of the 2015 Syrian campaign to Donald Trump’s first presidency in 2017, Moscow and Washington went through three types of interaction in Syria: co-operation, coordination, confrontation.
Russia sought more meaningful co-operation, struck an acceptable balance of confrontation, and squeezed the most out of coordination whenever possible. Obama effectively rejected the positive “experience of coexistence” gained during the Cold War.
The arrival of Trump 1.0 offered a chance for a new one – the “experience of co-operative action.” However, these actions, at best, followed a parallel course and did not become “co-operation.” Although Moscow had excellent ideas for such co-operation: Putin and Trump productively discussed “pain points” in relations between the countries at the Helsinki summit in 2018. But it didn’t happen – the supertask was simply to prevent a direct military clash. Then Covid happened, Trump lost, Biden, Ukraine and everyone forgot about Syria.
What is happening in Syria now and the orientation of some members of the Trump 2.0 administration to defend the ideas of “Judeo-Christian civilization” open some prospects for cooperation in this area, at least along the lines of dialogue between the churches. It is not so important for geopolitics that the concept of “Judeo-Christian civilisation” is controversial for Moscow, nor is Trump’s understanding of Christianity for Americans. The difference in worldviews did not prevent the two churches from working together in 2016, when Patriarch Kirill and the Pope called for “the defence of Christians in the Middle East.”
It wasn’t part of the dialogue with the Americans then, but now important positions in Washington are taken by those who, like the Russian Orthodox Church, believe that the persecution of Middle Eastern Christians is the largest in world history.
This will in no way help make progress on Ukraine, the Americans have their own interests there and a “game plan” – it will not help lift sanctions, and it will not solve a dozen other problems that have plagued bilateral relations, but it will help reconfigure the very “experience of joint action.” This, in turn, seems:
– important in itself in the relations of great powers in a state of confrontation;
– useful from the point of view of “anchoring” the correct image of Russia in the perception of trumpists;
– responsible from the position of a power that has not only interests but also principles.
After the wave of violence in Syria’s coastal areas, it is likely to be more difficult for the country’s new authorities to get international sanctions lifted, especially those of the US, The Guardian reports. As long as public attention remains diverted from the bloody events in Syria by mere headlines about sanctions, the killing of hundreds, if not thousands, of Christians and Alawites in Damascus will continue.
