The capture of Damascus on December 8th, 2024, by the HTC (Hayat Tahrir al-Cham, Levant Liberation Organization) rebels, after a wild twelve-day race that took them from the Turkish-controlled pocket of Idlib to Aleppo, then Hama, then Homs, then the Syrian capital, is an event in the Middle East comparable in geopolitical importance to the fall of the Berlin Wall in1989 in Europe.
The big winner in this affair, which has taken Middle East observers by surprise, is the Muslim Brotherhood that has presided over Turkey since the beginning of the 21st century. Not only have its proxies (foreign auxiliaries) driven out those of Iran in the control of neighboring Syria, but it will now be able to indulge unhindered in its favorite sport: the repression of the Kurds, this Muslim but non-Arab people, who aspire to freedom, independence and secularism.
To be fair, it has to be said that Recep Tayyip Erdogan sincerely tried to find a diplomatic way forward. In the summer of 2023, the Turkish dictator reached out to his former friend Bashar al-Assad, even inviting him to come and spend a holiday along the magnificent Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor, like the good old days before the Arab ‘springs’ and civil wars.
Erdogan proposed a political and economic pact to Assad, which had the advantage of bringing Syria out of its regional isolation. The only thing the Turkish president asked of his Syrian counterpart was that he agree to gradually take back his refugees. The four million Syrian refugees in Turkey were beginning to pose a serious domestic political problem for Erdogan.
Bashar al-Assad, who did not want these Syrians, whose loyalty to the Ba’athist regime was inevitably fleeting, began to procrastinate. He mistook himself for the political fox that was his officer father, who exercised undivided power in Syria from 1970 to 2000, fascinating the French Presidents Mitterrand and Chirac, even after he had the French ambassador to Lebanon, Louis Delamare, assassinated in Beirut in 1981.
Did Bashar believe that his soldiers, whom he paid 20 dollars a month, would really be killed for the sake of the Alawite dictatorship? Did the Syrian president imagine that the support of his Russian and Iranian allies was unwavering and eternal? Moscow and Tehran had, however, discreetly encouraged him to accept the Turkish proposal.
The false fox had made the mistake of not accepting another generous, albeit secret, offer – the one hatched by Ron Dermer, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs since 2022. With the tacit support of Russia, Dermer had organised, with the help of his Emirati friends, massive support for the reconstruction of Syrian territory, on the sole condition that Bashar agreed to turn his back on Iran. But Bashar did not. In geopolitics, a good deed is often severely punished. Tehran did not hesitate for a single second to let go of Bashar. Iran, whose Lebanese base and air defences were ransacked by Tsahal, could no longer afford to continue investing politically and financially in a regime as worm-eaten and indecisive as that of the Assad family. In the Shiite axis, only Nasrallah proved worse than Bashar. It was by making the gigantic mistake of bombing Galilee on October 8th, 2023, that Hezbollah triggered the movement that would ultimately destroy the Shiite axis between Iran and the Mediterranean.
During the Arab Spring of 2011, President Erdogan, with a strong neo-Ottoman spirit, tried to get his hands on Egypt, Libya and Tunisia by encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood. Except in Tripolitania, this strategy has failed miserably. Now it has the incredible opportunity to offer a third round to its neo-Ottoman strategy – the second having been the success of its Azerbaijani allies in their war of aggression against the Armenians in September 2020.
In Rojava (the autonomous Kurdish territory in northeast Syria), the Peshmerga of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) enjoy the support of 900 American soldiers, based in particular near the town of Deir-ez Zor. These green berets are there to help the Kurds of the FDS as well as the non-Islamist Syrians of the ALS (Free Syrian Army) to fight ISIS. On December 8th, 2024, American and Israeli air forces, in perfect coordination, bombed what remained of ISIS jihadists in the Syrian desert. But Trump has already warned that he wants to disengage America from the region.
Joulani, the new boss of Syria, presents himself as a nationalist, respectful of the rights of minorities. The naive have the right to believe it. Personally, I find it hard to believe that a man who went back and forth between Al Qaeda and ISIS is really an activist for religious tolerance. He may have changed, but not beyond the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which has also been that of the Turkish president since his youth.
Napoleon demanded that his generals be lucky. Undoubtedly, Erdogan is lucky.
