The end of a 13 year nightmare

Yesterday morning, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled Syria for Russia. It was a wise decision, but unfortunate from a political and justice perspective. If he had stayed, the new Syrian government could have reversed the country’s refugee crisis overnight by announcing a lottery in which every resident could enter for free and whose winner would personally participate in the judgment and conviction of the deposed president for his crimes against the government Syrians could take part in the last 13 years. I suspect that most of the 6 million he sent into exile would return within days, if not hours, for a chance at the big prize.

The rebels who ousted Assad have announced the end of his regime but remain unclear about the type of regime they will follow. Could it be dirtier than the one it just replaced? I regret that Syrians are too familiar with their own macabre recent history to rule out this possibility. But the answer must begin with an enumeration of Assad’s crimes. They go back to the beginning of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, who brutally repressed dissent from 1971 until his death in 2000. His main rivals were Sunni Islamists who resented the rule of Hafez al-Assad’s Alawite minority. In 1982, the elder Assad destroyed the city of Hama, and to this day no one knows how many tens of thousands of people were buried and rotting in the rubble. His first-born son, Bassel, spared the world his rule by dying in a car accident in 1994. That left Bashar, a London-trained ophthalmologist, as his father’s successor.

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When Bashar faced an Arab Spring uprising in 2011, his paternal genes came into play. Some of the rebels were jihadists (more on that in a moment), but Assad directed his malice generally—and, if anything, even more violently—against non-jihadists. whose only demand was the freedom of Assad and his cronies. The Syrian Civil War until last week was a protracted process in which the Assad government bombed, killed and terrorized Syrians into either fleeing the country or submitting to it. The most cruel weapon of this trial was the barrel bomb – a crude air-dropped munition that Assad used to destroy scores of civilians to punish them for the uprising in their region. His air force dropped these bombs wantonly, like a boy dropping a firecracker into the silo of an anthill.

In contrast, the recent behavior of the rebels who have just conquered Syria appears reassuringly civilized. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group most directly responsible for Assad’s overthrow, has said that the victory is neither a license to destroy the state’s institutions nor to unleash a wave of retaliation against Alawites in general. Every day that this guidance is heeded will be a rebuke to Assad’s supporters, who insisted that the alternative to their rule was Islamic State-style mass killings and the imposition of a bloodthirsty version of Sharia law. If the rebels maintain this merciful beginning and enshrine tolerance and equality for women, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Druze and other groups in law and practice, then they deserve an apology from all who delayed their victory, including Western politicians. You will deserve a Nobel Prize.

Unfortunately, there are good reasons to doubt that the new Syria will resemble this gummy bears-and-ponies utopia. HTS is led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. On Friday, Jolani gave an interview to CNN and sounded statesmanlike. But he is the former leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda that served as ISIS’s slightly less evil twin. Jabhat al-Nusra, like ISIS, was a jihadi-Salafi organization – that is, it followed a literal reading of Islamic texts in a Sunni tradition, tended to treat non-Salafi Muslims with hostility, and considered it obligatory to do so Promoting the vision of Islam through violence.

The best that could be said about Nusra in its early days was that, unlike ISIS, it did not view theological differences as grounds for instant death. ISIS killed Shiites wherever they found them, delaying the act only long enough for its media teams to set up cameras and lighting precisely to capture the blessed bloodshed for a global audience. Nusra gave far less priority to theology. It still behaved cruelly. It publicly executed people; it kidnapped; it tortured. Theo Padnos, a hostage held by Nusra from 2012 to 2014, wrote in his memoirs that Nusra hired children to torture him. He was held in a cell with 25 captured soldiers and airmen of the Assad regime and told me via email that Nusra had brutalized all Alawites – not because they were in Assad’s service, but simply because of their religion. That it did so less hastily than ISIS is only a modest achievement of Nusra.

In 2016, Jolani split from al-Qaeda. However, this was primarily due to a desire for institutional independence rather than a principled disagreement with the mass murderers he had so proudly served for years. “We thank al-Qaeda’s commanders,” he said in a statement announcing the decision. “Her noble stance toward the benefits of jihad will go down in the annals of history.” Eight years have passed since then, and reliable reporters and analysts have documented Jolani’s departure from jihadism. Nusra fought against the Islamic State and then destroyed Al-Qaeda’s presence in its territory. Last year, Wassim Nasr, a journalist from France24, discussed his recent conversations with Jolani in an interview with West Point’s CTC Sentinel. He said that in Idlib, Jolani’s stronghold, he saw unrelated men and women interacting in public, a serious offense in strict Salafi-run societies. Churches were rebuilt and Christians were invited to return to their communities. Nasr came to believe that Jolani and his group “no longer feel committed to what that means.” International jihad.” When Nasr arrived in Idlib, he expected a heavily militarized society. Instead, HTS leaders told him that global jihadism had “brought only destruction and failure” and that the only jihadism Jolani’s group intended was domestic, against Assad and Russia.

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I believe in repentance, and I believe that jihadism, as Jolani suggests, is self-destructive. But one does not simply slip away from a totalizing ideology, and it is reasonable to ask Jolani to explain his opposition in more detail. (I would ask the same of the various Assadists in Syria and elsewhere who will try to salvage their reputations after the full extent of the regime’s crimes becomes undeniable.) If I were in charge of an organization that kidnapped, tortured, and murdered people, I would not expect anyone to acknowledge my setback until I had secured the forgiveness of those who had been tortured with cattle prods at my behest by elementary school children. To my knowledge, Jolani never mailed this particular Hallmark card.

In Edmund Burke’s essay on the French Revolution, he points out that certain forms of freedom are not worth the price. Should I “seriously congratulate a madman who has escaped the protective restraint and soothing darkness of his cell and regained the enjoyment of light and freedom?” he asked. In the gray light of Syria’s first days of freedom, so far its citizens appear to be behaving not like unrestrained lunatics, but rather like traumatized, decent people worthy of their freedom, even liberated by a former jihadist. The images of the liberated Syrians are just as moving as the images of the Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

After the fall of Hosni Mubarak, ordinary Egyptians brought cans of paint from home to Tahrir Square to re-mark the curbs that had become chipped from years of government neglect and worn away by tanks and flying bricks during the protests. I had never seen such heartfelt civic pride among Egyptians (and I often thought back to the scene when an incompetent Islamist government and then the restoration of authoritarian rule soon after broke those hearts). The newly liberated Syrians are waking up from a much longer, much worse nightmare. The images on social media show hope and solidarity. So far, Syria has experienced 50 years of fascism and one day of the opposite. If we can string together several such days – perhaps a month, and one might hope even a year – the previous decade of resistance will have been worth it.