Syria: will it prove the empire's final quagmire?

Key Markets update for Monday, 9 December 2024

FROM ZERO TO DAMASCUS IN 10 DAYS!

Yesterday we woke up to the most surreal news: the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria is no more. From the day the new-and-improved Jabhat al-Nusra, now renamed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), launched their attack on Syria (Wednesday, 27 November at 7:50 AM) to yesterday morning - barely over 10 days' time - Damascus has fallen and president Assad fled to Russia. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) offered next to no resistance and HTS-and-friends, which included the U.S./Turkish proxy Syrian National Army (SNA) drove through Syria almost unopposed. Allegedly Russian forces launched bombing and missile attacks causing some 400 casualties and that was that. More bizarrely still, among Syrian civilians and SAA troops casualties were reported in "dozens."

All of a sudden and seemingly out of nowhere, the already strategically defeated Western empire suddenly scored a brilliant victory and everything changed in barely 10 days' time. The media and social networks are chock-full of stories about how this happened and explanations of why it happened this way but for the life in me I can't make any sense of it. The same Syria and its army under the same Bashar Al-Assad fought and resisted a concerted attack by Al Qaeda, ISIS, al-Nusra, Khorasan and other moderate head choppers supported by Turkey, US, UK and the whole Arab league and resisted from 2011 until 2015 when Russia finally came to their rescue. The same Bashar al-Assad refused to flee Damascus back then. By December 2016 SAA, helped by Hezbollah and the Russians entirely freed Aleppo. Since then, they had 8 full years to regroup, rearm and reinforce their defenses against the incursion which was fully expected.

A surprise they didn’t expect?

Not only, in those past 8 years the circumstances changed quite substantially: today, Syria was facing a much weaker West, a fractured Arab street (the Arab League, with the exception of Qatar was at least overtly supportive of the Assad regime). In 2011, Russia and Iran had a cold-to-hostile relationship but today they are in a close alliance and both fully supportive of Syria. Furthermore, Iran and Saudi Arabia are no longer enemies. And the insurgency brewing under Turkish protection in Idlib wasn't exactly secret either. HTS's leader Mohammad al-Golani (or al-Jolani, or al-Julani, or al-Jawlani) made no secret that HTS's objective was not only Aleppo but Damascus itself. According to US reports, HTS-and-friends have been attacking Syrian positions almost constantly since 2022 and SAA had heavily fortified positions capable of containing attacks from Idlib towards Aleppo. But they offered almost no resistance.

Zero urban warfare?

SAA's best forces were concentrated in Hama, but when HTS attacked, Hama fell without a fight. With any urban warfare, even a weak SAA might have resisted for weeks or even months inflicting heavy casualties on HTS. So why did all of Syria fall without a fight? I suspect that all the knee-jerk explanations circulating at present could prove wrong and if I were sitting on the (currently) winning side, I'd be highly suspicious by now: the only place you walk into this easily is a trap.

Time will tell, but here are a few dots that might make a coherent strategy if connected. First off, the conflict in Syria is part of the same conflict that's also being fought in Ukraine. On 29 November in Astana (two days after HTS launched their incursion into Syria), Vladimir Putin said the following with regards to war/peace in Ukraine:

"Let me underscore the key point - the essence of our proposal is not a temporary truce or cease fire, as the West might prefer, to allow the Kiev regime to recover, rearm, and prepare for a new offensive. I repeat: we are not discussing freezing the conflict, but its definitive resolution."

And what is Putin's definitive resolution? It's nothing less than the creation of a new security architecture between the "heartland and the rimland" to use Halford Mackinder's terminology.

Squashing British geopolitics

Syria (and Israel) make part of the rimland, or the "arch of crises" which the empire arranged from the Mediterranean to the Koreas in order to keep the Pivot Powers (primarily Russia) constantly at war. That's a very ambitious objective and one that the empire will resist even at the cost of nuclear war against Russia. In that context it could make sense to draw the empire into its final quagmire in Syria. The brilliant victory the west now scored might reduce the panic in the ruling establishment enough to draw their fingers away from nuclear triggers and to pile assets into Syria to secure and defend the unexpected prize. After all, this is how the West destroyed the Soviet Union in the 1980s: not through a frontal war, but by drawing the USSR into a quagmire in Afghanistan. It was clever, though not rocket surgery - and it worked.

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Best regards,

Alex Krainer