Understanding Syria's Rich History Amidst Ongoing Conflict

No question the Middle East will be reshaped by recent events, but that has been true for the last 2,000 years. Our America’s Editor, veteran foreign correspondent and Middle East specialist William Dowell, writes for his Tom’s Paine column.

This independent analysis was first published as part of William Dowell’s: A Different Place on Substack. The sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime in Syria might look like just another demonstration of unpredictability in Middle East politics, although at least for the moment, the results appear to be fairly positive.

Taking a deeper historical perspective, what is happening in Syria today looks very much like yet another aftershock from the tectonic shift caused by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the period immediately following World War I.

The Ottomans may be largely forgotten today, but the effects of the collapse of an empire that once rivaled Rome, continue to influence global events. Peter Fromkin delivers a detailed account of what actually transpired in his magisterial book, A Peace to End All Peace, which should be required reading for anyone who seriously wants to understand the Middle East today.

The empire began in the 14th Century when a local tribal Turkoman leader, Osman II, began expanding a minor principality in northwestern Anatolia. In 1453, the Ottoman sultan, Mehmet II, conquered Constantinople, changed its name to Istanbul, and effectively put an end to the Byzantine Empire.

At its peak, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the coast of North Africa to incorporate the entire Middle East, much of Central Europe, and the Balkans as well as the coast of North Africa, reaching to Morocco.

Throughout most of the 17th and 18th Centuries, the Barbary Pirates, nominally vassals of the Ottomans, attacked Mediterranean shipping and raided Europe’s southern coastline, as well as England, Ireland and Iceland, all of it in search of Europeans who could be sold as slaves. A raid in 1651 against the Irish harbor village of Baltimore in County Cork, resulted in almost the entire village being sold into slavery. Algiers was said to have 20,000 slaves.

After American independence, the United States Navy was created largely to deal with the Barbary Pirates. Thomas Jefferson commissioned the construction of six American frigates for the purpose. The opening of the U.S. Marine Corps anthem commemorates the subsequent battle in the lines: “From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli…”

By the end of the 19th Century, the Ottomans were in decline, largely because of having missed the Industrial Revolution and having failed to react to accelerating change fast enough. Their fatal mistake was to ally themselves with Central Europe and Kaiser Wilhelm at the outbreak of World War I, which spelled the end of several empires.

The Treaty of Sevres, signed in August 1920, partitioned what was left of the Ottoman Empire as spoils of war, assigning virtually all its territories to the victorious allies.

The Treaty of Sevres ran into immediate opposition from a budding Turkish nationalist movement, and especially from a dynamic Turkish Army officer, Kemal Ataturk.

Ataturk had already played a prominent role in defeating British forces during the 1915 Battle of Gallipoli. The British had failed to take the Ottoman Sultan’s forces seriously. Gallipoli turned out to be a catastrophic miscalculation on the part of Winston Churchill, then England’s Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill was convinced that Gallipoli had effectively ended his political career.

Refusing to accept the Treaty at Sevres, Ataturk announced that the Ottoman Empire no longer existed, and he declared that it had been superseded by the new Republic of Turkey, with its capital in Ankara. The Allies sent an expeditionary force to force Ataturk to toe the line. Ataturk easily defeated the Europeans. He also saw to it that the Sultan’s envoys who had signed the Treaty of Sevres were stripped of their nationality and permanently banished. After considerable negotiations, the Treaty of Sevres was replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923. That treaty effectively established the borders of today’s Turkey. Ataturk, who emerged as one of the world’s more effective statesmen, went on to create the new Turkey, laying the foundation for the powerhouse that it is today.

The rest of the Ottoman Empire was divided among the Allied powers according to decisions agreed to by the League of Nations, the precursor to today’s United Nations, The winners in what amounted to a land grab by the world’s then-leading colonial powers were France and Britain.

France, which was already extending its colonial control over large sections of the planet, was given a “mandate” to manage, and, if it so desired, plunder what is today Syria and Lebanon. France already controlled much of North Africa and West Africa.

Britain, also a leading colonial empire–“on which the sun never set”– was awarded control over Palestine, Jordan and Iraq.

Both victories turned out to be poisoned gifts. The Ottomans may have been brutal at times and technologically backward, but they were masters at manipulating local diplomacy. They were sensitive to and understood the local cultures they were dealing. In contrast, the French and British insisted on imposing their political systems on local populations who naturally saw them as foreign intruders. Under the Ottomans, although Islam was preferred, most other religions were free to co-exist. Syria had a large Christian population and a large Jewish community.

The decision to partition what had once been an empire into smaller, self-contained units, introduced ethnic and religious competition for what were now limited resources—the difference between living in a large, loosely unified empire or an isolated, smaller piece of that empire.

Under the Ottomans, Beirut had been a largely Maronite Christian enclave. The French expanded Beirut to include all of Lebanon, tossing Shia Muslims in the South in with Maronite Christians and Sunni Muslims in the North, not to mention the Druze. They then created a fragile parliamentary structure that tried to award each ethnic and religious group its own preserved territory. Instead of a unified structure in which Istanbul established universal rules, it was a much smaller world in which every man competed for himself.

As for Syria, it existed largely as a compromise that was cobbled together by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Looked at historically, the territory had been the crossroads for the Crusades for centuries. It still had an ethnic diversity that was mind-boggling. To this day, Syria’s dominant feature is a string of Crusader fortresses, each a day’s ride on horseback from the next. When I spent time in Syria, I was particularly impressed with Malloula, a village an hour’s drive outside Damascus. Until recently Malloula was famous because its inhabitants still spoke a version of Aramaic, the language in which much of the Bible’s New Testament was written.

Both the British and the French tried to impose their own political systems on the different ethnic groups that they now found themselves responsible for governing. With the Ottomans gone and Europeans seen as foreign interlopers, governing these territories would have been hard enough. World War II rendered it impossible.

The war not only devastated Europe, but it also led to an abrupt end to Britain and France’s colonial empires. Huge swaths of the planet that had previously been denied any opportunity to manage their own affairs for centuries, were suddenly called on to develop functional political structures. The Third World began to emerge and it was largely chaos. .

Arabs. who had lived for centuries under Turkish Ottoman domination, were suddenly called on to assert their own political identity. Most had no practical idea of what that really meant.

In 1946, the French ended their mandate in Syria. There was no transition. They simply left and went home. In 1947, three Syrians, Michel Aflaq, an orthodox Christian, Salah al-Din al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim, and followers of Zaki al-Zuri, an Alawite Shia Muslim, announced the creation of the Baath political party.

The Party’s ideology turned out to be an ad hoc cocktail of Arab nationalism, anti-imperialist sentiments, and an overwhelming desire to see all Arabs as belonging to a homogenous group with a single national identity.

The anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist bent was easy to understand given that French and British colonialists had seen Arabs as inherently inferior, and Europeans looked at the region mostly as an opportunity for profit.

Any thought that Westerners genuinely cared about Arabs evaporated when it was decided to inject hundreds of thousands of foreign holocaust survivors into an already volatile environment. Natural paranoia fueled the conspiracy theory that If colonialism couldn’t keep Arabs down, flooding the region with Jewish refugees might have the same effect.

The Baathist attempts to create an ideology quickly spawned satellite movements in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt and Yemen. In 1958, the Syrian wing of the party briefly tried to merge with Baathists in Egypt. That is about as far as pan-Arabism ever got. The hoped for pan-Arab union lasted less than three years. While the Arabs tried to see themselves as a unified nation, no one could agree on which part of the newly divided region was going to call the shots. Syria was not going to let Egypt tell it what to do, nor was it going to cede control over its destiny to Iraq.

The Baathist difficulties were compounded by the fact that the ideology had been created by urban intellectuals who had little or no connection or knowledge about the semi-educated, mostly disenfranchised masses who were struggling just to survive.

Any effort at forging a genuinely pan-Arab identity seemed to evaporate when Haffez al-Assad, a Syrian army officer, assumed dictatorial powers in 1970. Assad’s father had been a professional wrestler, going from village to village and challenging local champions for money. Assad was a smoother article, but not by much.

In Iraq, what had started as a Baathist movement, was finally overthrown by Saddam Hussein. Both Syria and Iraq had opted for dictatorship as the easiest way to rule. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar, Saddam and the others did not set out to torture their populations. They simply passed the job of silencing dissent to sadists who took pleasure in doing their worst. If you want a population that is easy to control, fear is the most accessible silencer.

While covering the Middle East for TIME in 1992, I participated in an interview which TIME’s editorial director and foreign editor had with Haffez al-Assad. When the interview started, I was still smarting from having been excluded from a brief, off-the-record chat that preceded the interview. After a few anodyne questions had been put to Assad, I reminded him that Jordan’s King Hussein had said that it might be time for democracy to spread in the Middle East. “Do you think,” I said,”that there will ever be a time when ordinary people in Syria can say what they actually think without you putting them in prison?” There was an edge to my voice, and it was clear that I was angry, although not at Assad. On the face of it, the question seemed fair enough, but Assad’s aids turned ash white. They clearly expected an explosion from Assad. Surprisingly, Assad took the question in stride. “I want to answer,” He said and then proceeded to spend the next forty minutes explaining why, in Syria, controlling free speech made sense, at least if you intended to stay in power.

The substance of the exchange was not particularly important. What impressed me, however, was that after that moment, each time one of the editors asked Assad a question, he would turn to me and direct the answer toward me. Assad, I realized, responded to force. He was a street-smart politician, but you could also sense that he had limitations.

Whenever I went to Syria, I would hire a car in Amman and drive to the Syrian border where my visa was waiting. The chief of police at the border knew me and we had a more or less relaxed relationship. “We torture journalists,” he would laugh, and then turn suddenly serious. “So be careful.” After these pleasantries, he would invite me to share a cup of tea. Everything in Syria was slightly surreal but could suddenly turn real. When I bought a carpet at a little shop in front of Damascus’ Mosque of the Ummayads, I offered to pay the shop owner a hundred dollar bill. “U.S. dollars,” the shop owner exclaimed, “America, freedom, better than anything in this damned place!” I watched him silently. You never knew who was listening or what kind of entrapment might be planned.

Assad planned to pass the government to his son, Bassel, who was unfortunately killed in an auto accident. Bashar was never part of the plan. He was elevated to power, mostly by the desperation on the part of Assad’s inner circle to continue with the system that kept them in power. It’s probably safe to say that Bashar’s flight to Moscow ended both the Alawites claim to power as well as any lingering remnants of Baathism.

What comes next will be the next phase in the divided pan-Arab search for a sense of national identity. It won’t be easy. “When we are Egyptian we do fine,” a Jabalia shirt salesman once told me in Cairo’s Khan-el-Khalili Bazaar, “Whenever we are Arabs, we get in trouble.”

French Arabist, Francois Burgat , who spent a lifetime studying Islamic movements, notes that when colonialism collapsed, the region tried to imitate the European parliamentary approach. It didn’t work. Flirting with Marxism turned out to be equally disappointing. Tyranny and dictatorship haven’t worked either. Islam is a natural part of Arab culture, so why not try that?

The experiment has produced mixed results, but the same can be said for Western Christianity. At least we’ve learned to no longer burn people at the stake or boil them in oil because of doctrinal differences, even if it took us a thousand years to figure that out.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the group that has just seized power in Syria, was once affiliated with al-Qaeda and was formally labeled a terrorist organization. The group’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani appears to be trying to distance himself from Al Qaeda’s violent past. There have been notable moments in history when former terrorists have evolved into respected leaders. A prime example is Menachem Begin who led Israel’s Irgun movement in the early 1940s. At the time, the Irgun definitely qualified as a terrorist organization. It had engaged in more than 60 bombings and assassinations. The targets were mostly Arabs but also included British nationals. Begin, nevertheless, went on to be elected Israel’s prime minister and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to engineer Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt in 1979. Not every terrorist becomes a statesman, but it is worth reserving judgment until we can see where al-Jolani is really headed.

Nothing is predictable in the Middle East—at least partly because critical decisions are still made by individuals who often refuse to listen to reason and whose motives can be opaque. Eventually, however, they usually find a way.

Veteran foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Insights Magazine’s America’s editor based in Philadelphia where he writes his regular Tom’s Paine column. He is also a contributing editor to Who,What,Why. Dowell has worked for ABC News and other news organizations, including TIME Magazine in Hong Kong, Cairo, and Paris. He has reported from five continents – most notably the War in Vietnam, The Revolution in Iran, the Civil War in Beirut, Operation Desert Storm, and Afghanistan. He also taught Literature of Journalism at New York University.

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Understanding Syria's Rich History Amidst Ongoing Conflict

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