Early yesterday morning, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled Syria for Russia. That was the clever selection, however unlucky from the attitude of coverage and justice. If he had remained, Syria’s new authorities may have reversed the nation’s refugee disaster in a single day, by asserting a lottery, free for any resident to enter, whose winner would get to take part personally within the judgment and sentencing of the deposed president for his crimes towards the Syrian individuals throughout the previous 13 years. I think that many of the 6 million he despatched into exile would return inside days, if not hours, for an opportunity on the massive prize.
The rebels who drove Assad out have introduced the tip of his regime, whereas remaining obscure in regards to the nature of the one to observe. May it’s extra squalid than the one it simply changed? I remorse that Syrians are too nicely acquainted with their very own macabre latest historical past to rule the likelihood out. However the reply should start with a recitation of the crimes of Assad. They return to the earliest days of Hafez al-Assad, father of Bashar, who repressed dissent viciously from 1971 till his demise in 2000. His most important rivals have been Sunni Islamists who resented rule by Hafez’s Alawite minority. In 1982, the elder Assad razed the town of Hama, and to today nobody is aware of what number of tens of hundreds of individuals have been buried and left to rot in its rubble. His first-born son, Bassel, spared the world his rule by dying in a automotive accident in 1994. That left Bashar, a watch physician skilled in London, to succeed his father.
When Bashar confronted an Arab Spring rebellion in 2011, the paternal genes kicked in. A number of the rebels have been jihadists (extra on that in a second), however Assad directed his malice universally—and, if something, extra violently towards non-jihadists, whose solely demand was freedom from Assad and his cronies. The Syrian civil warfare, as much as final week, was the tedious winnowing course of wherein the Assad authorities bombed, killed, and terrorized Syrians into both fleeing the nation or submitting to him. The cruelest weapon of this course of was the barrel bomb—a primitive air-dropped munition with which Assad annihilated complete crowds of civilians, to punish them for his or her area’s riot. His air drive dropped these bombs wantonly, as a boy drops a firecracker down the silo of an anthill.
Against this, the latest conduct of the rebels who’ve simply conquered Syria seems reassuringly civilized. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group most instantly liable for Assad’s overthrow, has introduced that victory shouldn’t be a license to wreck the establishments of the state, nor to provoke a wave of retribution towards Alawites usually. Day by day this steering is heeded shall be a rebuke to Assad’s supporters, who insisted that the choice to their rule was Islamic State–model mass killings and the institution of a bloodthirsty model of Sharia legislation. If the rebels maintain this merciful starting, and enshrine in legislation and apply tolerance and equal rights for girls, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Druze, and different teams, then they may deserve apologies from all who delayed their victory, together with Western politicians. They’ll deserve a Nobel prize.
Sadly, there are good causes to doubt that the brand new Syria will resemble this gumdrops-and-ponies utopia. HTS is led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. On Friday, Jolani gave an interview to CNN and sounded statesmanlike. However he’s the previous chief of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda that functioned as a barely less-evil twin of ISIS. Jabhat al-Nusra was, like ISIS, a Jihad-Salafi group—which suggests it adopted a literalist studying of Islamic texts in a Sunni custom, tended to deal with non-Salafi Muslims with hostility, and thought of it compulsory to advertise this imaginative and prescient of Islam by way of violence.
One of the best one may say about Nusra in its early days was that not like ISIS, it didn’t take into account theological variations grounds for fast demise. ISIS killed Shia the place it discovered them, delaying solely lengthy sufficient for its media groups to arrange cameras and lighting simply so, to seize the blessed bloodletting for a worldwide viewers. Nusra prioritized theology far much less. It however performed itself atrociously. It executed individuals publicly; it kidnapped; it tortured. Theo Padnos, a hostage held by Nusra from 2012 to 2014, wrote in his memoir that Nusra assigned youngsters to torture him. He was saved in a cell with 25 captured troopers and airmen from Assad’s regime, and he advised me by e-mail that Nusra handled all Alawites brutally—not as a result of they have been in Assad’s service, however due to their faith alone. That it did so in a much less hurried method than ISIS is barely a modest credit score to Nusra.
In 2016, Jolani cut up from al-Qaeda. This was primarily because of a want for institutional independence, nonetheless, fairly than any principled dispute with the mass murderers he was for years so proud to serve. “We thank the commanders of al-Qaeda,” he mentioned in a assertion asserting the choice. “Their noble stance on the advantages of jihad shall be recorded within the annals of historical past.” Eight years have handed since then, and dependable reporters and analysts have documented Jolani’s drift away from jihadism. Nusra fought towards the Islamic State, after which dismantled al-Qaeda’s presence in its territory. Final yr, Wassim Nasr, a France24 journalist, mentioned his latest conversations with Jolani in an interview with West Level’s CTC Sentinel. He mentioned that in Idlib, Jolani’s stronghold, he noticed unrelated women and men interacting in public, a severe offense in strict Salafi-run societies. Church buildings have been being rebuilt, Christians invited to return to their communities. Nasr got here to imagine that Jolani and his group “are now not dedicated to no matter is supposed by worldwide jihad.” Nasr arrived in Idlib anticipating to see a closely militarized society. As a substitute HTS’s leaders advised him that international jihadism had “solely introduced destruction and failure,” and that the one jihadism Jolani’s group meant was home, towards Assad and Russia.
I imagine in repentance, and I imagine that jihadism is, as Jolani suggests, self-defeating. However one doesn’t simply slip out of a totalizing ideology, and it’s affordable to ask Jolani to elucidate his repudiation in better element. (I might ask the identical of the assorted Assadists, in Syria and elsewhere, who will try and salvage their status now that the total extent of the regime’s crimes are past denial.) If I have been liable for a corporation that had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered individuals, I might not count on anybody to credit score my reversal till I had groveled for the forgiveness of those that had been tortured at my behest by elementary-school children with cattle prods. To my information, Jolani has by no means despatched that individual Hallmark card.
In Edmund Burke’s essay on the French Revolution, he means that sure types of freedom aren’t value their prices. Am I “significantly to felicitate a madman who has escaped from the protective restraint and healthful darkness of his cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of sunshine and liberty?” he requested. Within the grey daylight of the primary days of Syria’s freedom, its residents seem to this point to be behaving not like unrestrained madmen however like traumatized, respectable individuals worthy of their liberty, delivered even by an erstwhile jihadist. The photographs of liberated Syrians are as transferring as the pictures of Germans after the Berlin Wall got here down.
After the autumn of Hosni Mubarak, bizarre Egyptians introduced paint cans from residence to Tahrir Sq., to re-mark the curbs that had been flaked from years of presidency neglect, and abraded by tanks and flying bricks throughout the protests. I had by no means beforehand seen such heartfelt civic delight amongst Egyptians (and I assumed again usually to that scene, when an incompetent Islamist authorities, after which the restoration of authoritarian rule, broke these hearts quickly after). The newly free Syrians are rising from a for much longer, a lot worse nightmare. The photographs on social media present hope and solidarity. Up to now Syria has had 50 years of fascism and in the future of its reverse. If it could possibly string collectively extra such days—maybe a month, and dare one hope for even a yr—the earlier decade of resistance may have been value it.