On the menu today: Let me tell you about my trip to Syria these past few days. Yes, you read that correctly.
Apparently, a nearly two-week stretch in Ukraine — including trips to the north and east, considerably closer to the front — wasn’t exciting enough. My traveling companions managed to talk me into traveling to Syria to check in on how the new government is taking shape, after dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed like a Jenga tower back in December. (Yes, I realize the U.S. State Department’s travel advisory for Syria is basically a flashing neon sign that asks, “What are you, crazy?” None of this is going to help me deter accusations that I’m going through a midlife crisis.)
On the Ground in Syria
The opportunity to visit a country three months after it toppled its dictator and is in the process of putting together a new government doesn’t come often. Syria may well have had the worst past 15 years of any country on earth. The Syrian civil war began in 2011 and waxed and waned over nearly a decade and a half, never really stopping — and it included not just terrorist attacks and wholesale slaughter of civilians, it also featured at least 336 chemical weapons attacks by February 2019.
Remember that massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, in August 2020, which was the largest non-nuclear blast in modern history? An estimated 2,750 tons of unsafely stored ammonium nitrate exploded. Former Assad regime officers have reportedly admitted that they were smuggling ammonium nitrate in through Beirut for the Assad regime’s “barrel bombs” — barrels filled with explosives and pieces of scrap metal — low cost, high-casualty weapons.
The Assad regime transformed Qasioun Mountain in Damascus, “a restricted area for civilians, into a barrel bomb production facility during Syria’s civil war,” and dropped nearly 82,000 barrel bombs in nine years, killing 11,087 civilians, including 1,821 children. As of March 2024, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights had documented the names of 507,567 people who have died in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011.
When a regime’s air force — along with an estimated 34,000 combat sorties from the Russians — drop bombs on rebel forces, and the rebels have no air defense, you get results like the Damascus suburb of Jobar. (Keep that in mind when the question of whether to send additional Patriot missiles to Ukraine comes up.) There’s nothing left. It’s just block after block, mile after mile of destroyed buildings — husks, a ghost of a community that had thrived, and that once featured a synagogue founded in the eighth century. Now it’s just acres and acres of rubble — wiped off the map.
Lots of countries have problems, but Syria had catastrophes that tore it to shreds.
When Assad fled to Moscow, Trump declared on Truth Social that “this is not our fight.”
And that is correct, but the fight is over. There’s a new government in place. There are some positive signs — for the reasons described above and more, lots of Syrians are thrilled that the Assad regime is gone, and the man who ruled their country with an iron fist is now freezing up in Moscow.
But there are plenty of signs that the new government has a long and difficult road ahead. Right as we arrived, the nascent government and leaders held a two-day “national dialogue conference” designed to begin charting the path ahead. The best news of the conference is that just about every faction in Syria showed up, other than the Kurds, and everyone is exhausted from war and wants to see a unified, stable, prospering Syria. The bad news is that no one is all that impressed with the early start. Setting the goal is the easy part; achieving it is harder.
The nascent government grew out of the force that toppled Assad, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sha, commonly referred to as “HTS.” The Counterterrorism Guide of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence described HTS as “a coalition of northern Syria-based Sunni Islamist insurgent groups that evolved from Jabhat al-Nusrah, or ‘Nusrah Front,’ al-Qa‘ida’s former branch in Syria.” (That assessment predates the arrival of Tulsi Gabbard, who insisted Assad was neither an enemy of the United States nor a war criminal.)
The leader of HTS was Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, and up until late December, the U.S. government was willing to pay $10 million for information about his location. On December 20, the U.S. dropped the bounty; al-Jolani is now known as Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa and is the new president.
Sharaa must be one of the very few modern heads of state who has been held in U.S. custody; he traveled to Iraq in 2003 to join al-Qaeda; he did so, and was captured and held at Camp Bucca. He formed the Nusra Front in Syria at the start of the civil war, as an affiliate of ISIS. But in 2013, Sharaa (then called Jolani) had a falling out with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the Nusra Front split off.
Sharaa has sat down for interviews with CNN and The Economist. He told The Economist, “The next phase of five years will revolve around rebuilding the state on new and modern foundations. It is going to promote justice and counseling, and it is going to be based on the participation of all segments of society in running the country.”
He also criticized the Assad regime’s influence in Lebanon and Hezbollah: “Its intervention in Lebanon was not right. As a result, when it left Lebanon, it left Hezbollah behind, which controlled Lebanon in a negative manner until things escalated to full-fledged war in Lebanon.”
He also said he foresees elections in Syria . . . in 2028 or 2029 or so:
Therefore, in order for Syria to have free and fair elections that have integrity, it needs a census, the return of the people living abroad, opening the embassies, and restoring legal contact with the people. Moreover, many of the people who were internally displaced or in camps located in neighboring countries are also not registered with refugee commissions, and so on.
Therefore, this process needs time, and I have asked the experts, and they said we need at least three to four years to complete this process. Meanwhile, we are developing the election law, the constitution, and the laws that will regulate the country. We are working on them thoroughly and in consultation with the experts and the United Nations, as well. Hence, when these things are ready, we will have the elections that have integrity.
The Economist: And will there be elections for the presidency?
Ahmed al-Sharaa: Of course.
In December, Sharaa said, “We are not about to engage in a conflict with Israel.” This is not because he and his army have any particularly warm or fuzzy feelings toward Israel, but because Syrian society and the rebuilding Syrian military are simply in no shape for a fight with the Israelis.
Many Americans are likely to be skeptical that Sharaa has genuinely turned over a new leaf from his terrorist days.
In December, Lewis Libby and Nick Danby wrote here at NR, “We, too, share the dream of a free, inclusive, and prosperous Syria. But HTS’s membership rolls and track record do not inspire confidence in such an outcome. As policymakers weigh their options, they must remember the lessons of prior Islamist movements turned political regimes: they talk about progress before dealing out repression.”
Our Andy McCarthy was even more blunt: “There was and remains nothing for us in that hellhole, where for over a dozen years America’s enemies have been pitted in a savage war against America’s enemies.”
But one factor does seem indisputable: Vast swaths of the Syrian people are absolutely exhausted from war and have no interest in fighting another one. They just want to rebuild their lives and live in peace.
As much as Americans — and the Trump administration — might want to wash their hands of Syria, the country isn’t going anywhere. It’s still strategically located, smack in the middle of Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. And there are already several forms of cooperation with the new government, or forms of cooperation that continued despite the regime change:
- We’re sharing Intelligence with the Syrians. We hate ISIS, and HTS hates ISIS, and so when we hear ISIS is up to no good, we give HTS a heads up. “In at least one case, the U.S. intelligence helped thwart an Islamic State plot to attack a religious shrine outside Damascus [in early January].”
- We’re still bombing terrorist targets of opportunity on Syrian soil. “On Feb. 15, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) Forces conducted a precision airstrike in Northwest Syria targeting and killing a senior finance and logistics official in the terrorist organization Hurras al-Din (HaD), an Al-Qaeda affiliate.”
- As of December, there are approximately 2,000 U.S. troops deployed to Syria, with a mission “to counter ISIS and to support our local partners on the ground, the Syrian Democratic Forces, to ensure that ISIS can never reestablish a safe haven there.”
- The Syrians are still guarding thousands of ISIS prisoners in a vast camp called al-Hol. Some of the money to run those camps comes from . . . the now-departing U.S. Agency for International Development. (Get all your “we’re throwing money into a Hol” jokes out of the way.)
The Syrians desperately want to get out from the current sanctions regime, and they have a fair point that the sanctions are in place for the actions of the old regime they just toppled, not the new regime. The European Union eased some sanctions recently.
Also, if we’re not involved in building a relationship with Syria’s new government, China and Russia will be.
Russia had close ties to the old Assad regime, and Syria was home to two key Russian military facilities. The first is the naval base at Tartus, which my traveling companions and I attempted to visit and were, unsurprisingly, told no, a group of American journalists cannot enter the facility and look around.
There’s a large white pilotless blimp floating high in the sky over the Mediterranean Sea, presumably conducting electronic surveillance over the area around the naval base. I’m not an expert on aviation, but it looked an awful lot like this image of the “Peresvet,” a “multi-purpose mobile aerostatic complex” that is “capable of solving tasks including: a) providing long-range radio communications b) monitoring large areas c) reconnaissance, including visual, infrared, radio and radiological monitoring d) serving as a long-range radar, and e) electronic warfare.”
We then drove a little further north up the coast, to the entrance to the Russian Khmeimim Air Base in Latakia. The Syrian guards outside were surprisingly friendly fellows, telling a bunch of visiting Americans that there are about two thousand to three thousand Russian troops still at the base, that they are confined to their part of the base, and are only allowed to go to the Russian Naval base and back, escorted by Syrian forces.
The Trump administration has a slew of tough calls to make. Do we recognize the transitionary government as the legitimate rulers of Syria? Do we reopen our embassy, which has been suspended since 2012? Do we allow the Syrians to reopen their embassy in Washington? Do we keep the current sanctions in place? Do we continue intelligence-sharing on ISIS threats? And in light of reports that the Trump administration is preparing plans to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, are we sure we don’t need any military presence in Syria? We’re not going to wish we still had one at some point down the road?
When the force that toppled Assad is so heavily jihadist, it’s going to be a long, tough road to building any trust with the U.S. government. Libby and Danby urged U.S. policymakers to go beyond Ronald Reagan’s old maxim, “Trust but verify.” “Don’t trust, verify. Then verify again,” they advised.
But the Syrian people have been so hammered by malevolent forces for so long, we probably ought to see if there are any areas of common interest with the new Syrian government, and inch toward better relations.
ADDENDUM: Over at Ricochet, Eustice writes I am the right kind of NeverTrumper in response to a pretaped edition of the Three Martini Lunch. To clarify some questions in the comments, yes, I can accurately be called a NeverTrumper, as I have never voted for him. I also think that question is moot now; Trump won the 2024 election fair and square, and barring some health issue, he will be president for the next four years. Regardless of whether you think Trump ought to be president, he is president. You can argue about what should have been done in the 2016 or 2024 Republican presidential primaries, but what’s done is done.
I think you should praise the president when he does stuff you like and agree with and criticize him when he does stuff you oppose. And much like the Three Martini Lunch podcast, with Trump you always get the good: Check out these Customs and Border Protection numbers!; the bad: Look at that projection of the GDP numbers for this quarter!; and the crazy: “We should spend less time worrying about Putin.”