Deep Dive into Assad's Comeback: Middle East's Changing Dynamics

It's been over a decade since protests broke out in Syria against President Bashar al-Assad. As in many other Arab Spring countries the protests didn't end in democratic reform but rather in a long and bloody civil war lasting over a decade and costing hundreds of thousands of lives. Thanks to help from Russia and Iran, 12 years later Assad still controls the majority of the country, and the Middle East has recently begun to re-engage. So in this article we'll take a look at how Assad won the war, his diplomatic return and what the West should do about it.

So to understand this story, we need to go back all the way to 2011, when ordinary Syrians, inspired by Arab Spring anti-government protests in Tunisia and Libya began protesting against Bashar al-Assad, who'd been in power since 2000, when Assad succeeded his father who had himself been president since 1971, he promised democratic reforms and multi-party elections. But somewhat unsurprisingly, this didn't happen and by the time the Arab Spring kicked off Assad had established himself as a ruthless autocrat. Within a year of coming to power, he was already jailing dissident politicians and critics. And in 2005, a UN investigation concluded that members of the Assad family had directly supervised the assassination of former anti-Syrian Lebanese President Rafik Hariri.

Anyway, the protests were originally mostly peaceful and focused on democratic reforms, but spiraled into a civil war after Syrian security forces staged a violent crackdown. The war quickly took on a sectarian dimension, pitting Syria's Sunni majority against its Shia minority, including Assad, who were mostly concentrated in the densely populated north west. While the West helped train and supply the rebels it didn't really intervene in the first half of the war, both because David Cameron lost a vote on intervention in the Commons and because, despite saying that the use of chemical weapons would be quote, a red line when Assad fired sarin filled rockets at rebel strongholds in Gouda in 2013, Barack Obama didn't intervene and instead decided to get Russia an Assad ally, to pressure Assad into joining the chemical weapons convention. The Syrian civil war really became internationalized in the second half of the 2010s when both the West and Assad's allies, most notably Iran and Russia, stepped up their involvement to beat back ISIS ,n 2014.

At its peak, ISIS controlled about 40% of Iraq and a third of Syria, including the northern city of Raqqa. The US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, decided that Kurds in northern Syria had the best chance of beating back ISIS, so they supported them with training and airstrikes. The intervention was successful in so far as it basically killed off ISIS, who had lost 95% of their territory since 2017. But it didn't go down well in Turkey. Turkey had always been anti-Assad, but Erdogan was worried that Kurdish separatists trained and supplied by the US might spread out into eastern Turkey. For context, Kurds account for a majority in eastern Turkey, and the Turkish state has been dealing with a Kurdish separatist insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers Party since the 80s. Anyway, this is why from 2016 until 2019, the Turkish army intervened in northern Syria at least three times, occupying significant amounts of Syrian territory that now act as a sort of buffer zone between Turkey and the Kurdish occupied bits of Syria.

Today there are basically three states within what used to be Syria, a Kurdish state in the north east, where locals have ditched Arabic for Kurdish and used the US dollar as their main currency. A Turkish state in the north west and a bit in the north east where locals use the lira, civil servants are paid by the Turkish state and electricity comes from southern Turkey's electricity grid. And then the rest of the country, which is basically ruled by Assad, who reasserted himself with the help of Russia in the late 2010s and now controls about 60% of the country. While there was some hope amongst rebels that Russia's involvement in Ukraine would undermine Assad, and there have been some anti-Assad protests recently. Assad's grip on power is pretty solid, and it seems like most Syrians have tacitly accepted that stable, autocratic rule is better than civil war.

This is one of the reasons why many Middle Eastern countries recently have started re-engaging. Last year, Assad paid a visit to the UAE, his first trip to an Arab country since 2011, and this year he was invited both to the Arab League summit and even Saudi Arabia. This is part of a larger diplomatic salvo by the Saudis, who've been repairing relations with everyone from Iran to Israel in an attempt to forge a more peaceful Middle East. But there are at least two more reasons why other Middle Eastern countries are normalizing relations with Assad. The first is drugs. In part thanks to Western sanctions, Syria's formal economy has completely collapsed and by far and away its largest export and source of foreign currency. Today is Captagon, a synthetic opioid that's allegedly being mass manufactured by the Syrian state and Sold on to its neighbors. Authorities seized over $3 billion worth of Captagon last year, and the UK government estimates that the entire industry is worth nearly $60 billion.

For context, Syria's largest legal export is olive oil worth about $100 million a year. This has provoked some anxiety amongst Syria's neighbors, who've seen an uptick in drug usage amongst their youth and many of them hope to convince Assad to end his drug dealing by normalizing relations. The second reason is refugees. Since the Civil War, some 6 million Syrians have fled to neighboring countries, while some countries, especially Turkey and Lebanon, have been impressively accommodating after a decade of war in Syria. Sympathy is waning. This was apparent in Turkey's recent election when both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu tried to capitalize on anti-refugee sentiment by promising to return at least some of Turkey's 3 million or so Syrian refugees. In this context, the recent earthquake provided the perfect excuse for many countries to re-engage with Syria without annoying the US. They genuinely wanted to mitigate the humanitarian damage, but they also hoped that by providing aid to affected areas, they'd reduce the odds of another wave of Syrian refugees.

The Middle East's re-engagement has put pressure on the West to follow suit. But as things stand, the US has shown no sign of withdrawing its extensive sanctions and officially maintains that it expects Assad to abide by UN Security Council Resolution 2254, which calls for a new constitution and free elections. Nonetheless, while the West's reluctance is understandable, there is a humanitarian case for re-engaging with Syria. Syria today is extraordinarily poor. The Syrian pound has lost 99% of its value. Gdp is down 80% and 90% of the 16 million or so people in Syria live in poverty. Even relaxing the sanctions could provide some economic relief to a country that's been essentially ruined by 12 years of constant war. But so far, they're not yet to re-engage.