the scenarios after the victory of the rebels – L’Express

It all started with a tag, written by children on the walls of Deraa in February 2011. The dictator Ben Ali has just fallen in Tunisia, followed by his alter ego Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Syrian teenagers write: “Ya alek el ddor ya doctor”, “Your turn will come, doctor.” They are arrested by the regime, tortured for days. The Syrian people are rising up in turn.

Nearly fourteen years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, “doctor” Bashar al-Assad’s turn has finally come. The trained ophthalmologist – a specialty he had chosen because he could not bear the sight of blood – fled his capital Damascus on the night of Saturday to Sunday, abandoned by his troops and surrounded by rebel groups. Destination Moscow for the fallen dictator; unknown destination for the shattered country he leaves behind. “The Assad regime has fallen like a ripe fruit, illustrates Fabrice Balanche, lecturer at the University of Lyon II and specialist in Syria. Its allies, Iran and Russia, did not see fit to defend, because they knew the game was lost. The calamitous state of the Syrian economy, widespread corruption and the isolation of the country despite its reintegration into the Arab League made the regime extremely vulnerable.

A recomposition through negotiations… or through blood

Barely ten days were enough to bring down a tyrannical dynasty in power since 1971. The father, Hafez el-Assad, seized power through a military coup, then strengthened it for nearly thirty years in invading Lebanon and eliminating all forms of internal opposition. He remains in the history books as the instigator of the Hama massacres in 1982, during which his regime laid siege to the city for a month and executed tens of thousands of civilians in cold blood in response to an offensive of the Muslim Brotherhood. A purge that his son Bachar took inspiration from throughout the civil war, causing more than 500,000 deaths in thirteen years and throwing 12 million Syrians onto the roads. Few will cry over the fate of the “butcher of Damascus”.

The relief of seeing a bloodthirsty dictator fall, however, should not blind us. A glance at the future of Syria is enough to make one dizzy. The rebel groups which took power in a few days do not share the program of the Syrian National Coalition, a heterogeneous and moribund opposition political body in exile, which has been negotiating the future of the country with international actors for ten years. Conversely, these rebel squadrons, often Islamist, engaged in a real race against time during these last days of the Assad regime, in order to seize as much territory as possible and present themselves in a position of strength for the great recomposition. of the country that is coming. Obviously, this can only be done in two ways: in negotiations or in blood. “The Syrian opposition remains particularly divided and all these factions do not share a coherent vision for the future of Syria, warns Nicholas Heras, Middle East specialist at the New Lines Institute in Washington. Syria risks meeting the fate from Somalia [NDLR : victime d’une guerre civile perpétuelle] if these opposition forces do not find an agreement to govern the country. Not to mention the threat from Daesh, which remains major and hovers in the background of the current conflict.”

The big winner of the sequence is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group better known by its acronym HTC, which led the rebellion to take Aleppo, then Hama, Homs and Damascus. Former branch of Al-Qaeda in Syria, supported by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, these nationalist Islamists are setting themselves up as the future rulers of the country. Their military offensive was coupled with a charm offensive among international opinion, in order to gain legitimacy and respectability abroad. Their leader, Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, however, remains the object of all suspicion.

Former member of the Islamic State of Iraq group, this 42-year-old jihadist founded the Al-Nusra Front terrorist organization in Syria, before pledging allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2013. In recent years, Al-Joulani has carried out a in-depth work with the international media to soften its image. He broke with Al-Qaeda in 2016 and now claims to fight terrorist groups such as Daesh. The Islamist leader readily explains, for example to CNN the day before the capture of Damascus, that he has long turned away from international jihad and that he is preventing the territories under his control from being used to commit attacks in the West. In Idlib, the city he ruled for five years, Christian masses were tolerated and the Kurdish or Druze minorities were apparently not mistreated.

The most likely scenario: the carving up of Syrian territory

Caution obviously remains in order. And maximum. Al-Joulani remains on the US wanted terrorist list, with a $10 million bounty on his head. A warning for the future of the country. “HTC sees itself as the vanguard of the Syrian revolution and will try to have as much power as possible over the future Syria,” says Nicholas Heras, who has been studying the scenarios of post-Assad Syria for more than ten years. But HTC remains an authoritarian organization which prefers to act behind the scenes, behind the king’s throne. It is a model which worked very well in north-west Syria, but which is difficult to transpose to the whole country. many Syrian actors hate HTC and have no confidence in this organization, which means that, unless there is massive foreign support, HTC will have great difficulty ruling the whole of Syria.”

The most likely scenario would consist of dividing Syrian territory into administrative zones, with very different entities to govern them. Even in the firmament of the Assad regime, in the 1990s, local power remained preponderant in Syria. The thirteen years of civil war accentuated these divisions. “The populations have fallen back on primary solidarity (clan, tribe or community) and it will be difficult to reconcile everyone, especially since the country is divided between different armed entities,” explains Fabrice Balanche.

In the north, militias supported by Turkey took advantage of the chaos to relaunch their fight against the Kurds; to the south, Israel acts preemptively on its border by striking jihadist groups and bombing arms factories that could fall into their hands; in the east, the Islamic State network still exists in large desert territories, in which the terrorist organization is biding its time. “Daesh will probably wait a little longer before fully reconstituting itself, estimates Nicholas Heras. The group hopes to be able to take advantage of even greater chaos in this environment of post-Assad Syria.” Already, while the regime’s prisons are emptying, hundreds of jihadists are being released into the wild alongside innocent civilians. With no one to control them.

The most precarious – and most decisive – situation is undoubtedly playing out in western Syria, on the Mediterranean coast. There, the last bastions loyal to the Assad regime remain. Russia still has its naval base in Tartous and its air base in Khmeimim, even if troop movements have been noted in recent days. It is in this region that a large part of the Alawite minority lives (12% of the Syrian population), a branch of Shiism to which the Assad clan belongs. Since the start of the civil war, the Alawites have remained loyal to the dictator, mainly out of fear of reprisals that would follow his fall. “After more than fifty years of collusion with the Assad regime, the Alawites risk being considered collectively guilty of the regime’s abuses,” says Fabrice Balanche. “Until now, we have not seen scenes of revenge, but How can we imagine that after thirteen years of a civil war of incredible violence, we are witnessing a peaceful transition? Their fate will say a lot about the future of Syria, and that of regional security.