Peter Harling is the founder and director of Synaps, a Mediterranean research organization that provides in-depth analysis to find practical solutions to the problems of the day. Previously, Harling worked at the International Crisis Group for almost a decade, and has almost 30 years of experience in the Middle East, living in Damascus between 2006 and 2014. Diwan interviewed him in early May to get his perspective on the evolving situation in Syria, especially the relationship between the current Sharaa regime and the country’s minorities in light of recent sectarian tensions in the country.
Michael Young: Can you give us a broad-brush view of how the Assad regime from the time of Hafez al-Assad dealt with minorities, and compare this to what we are seeing today in Syria, under the new Ahmad al-Sharaa regime?
Peter Harling: It’s a mistake to simplify this question, as if the former regime’s approach to minorities had been straightforward. Although it was often perceived by sympathizers as “protecting minorities,” it was far more ambivalent. It both coopted the Druze and repressed them, notably in a brutal crackdown in 2000. It manipulated and contained the Kurds. It sheltered Christians while promoting forms of Sunni activism that terrified them. And while it relied on the loyalty of Alawites, it undermined their community’s internal structures to consolidate their dependency, ultimately treating such Alawite supporters as an army of slaves. Likewise, today’s emerging power structure is likely to “engineer” a set of complex, ambivalent, shifting relations with different communities, rather than adopt a single, unified approach.
MY: You have written that the attacks involving the Druze last week are quite different than the massacres on the coast in March involving mainly Alawites. Yet you also have made the point that one should not analyze such rounds of sectarianism separately from each other. What did you mean and why is this the case?
PH: The anti-Alawite pogroms could be rationalized as collective punishment for the community’s association with the former regime, absent any transitional justice mechanism. The violence included other elements too, such as extensive looting in a starved economy on the part of armed groups who have only superficially been folded into the state. The question, for other minorities, was “would it stop at the Alawites?” The showdown with the Druze has shown to all that it wouldn’t.
This latest incident wasn’t limited to violence. The fighting was accompanied by a shocking outpour of spontaneous sectarian animosity on social media: The Druze have been accused of colluding with Israel, of aligning with former regime loyalists, of attacking the security services unprovoked. Such arguments are driven by emotions and reflect a purge mentality which is surprisingly widespread on a popular level—an instinctive desire to fix Syria, somehow, by suppressing this or that social group seen as standing in the way of a successful transition. We’ve now seen two bouts of frenzied attempts to quell a community as a whole, and we can expect more, as the focus moves on. Syria’s current leadership has sought to translate such rounds of violence into political arrangements, but nonetheless these clashes are tearing at the foundation of trust which Syrians must have in each other for the transition to succeed.
MY: Since perhaps 1966, Syria has been under a leadership in which minorities, particularly the Alawite minority, have played a leading role in the country, despite the former Baath regime’s desire to accentuate the country’s Arab nationalist identity. How will this legacy play out as a more explicitly Sunni regime asserts itself?
PH: Historically, the regime grew out of a much broader base than the Alawites. It formed an alliance of the provincial fringes, which included other minorities but also Sunnis from Hawran, Raqqa, and Idlib. Prior to the 2011 uprising, the Syrian Interior Ministry was known for being stacked with Idlibis, while Alawites were a majority within the security services. Bashar al-Assad also cultivated relations with the Sunni business class, in Aleppo for instance. But he neglected the regime’s historical base, which explains in part why the uprising centered in the early stages on areas, Daraa for example, where the Baath Party had originally been very strong.
The notion that the regime was minority-based is therefore wrongheaded and distracts from an essential aspect of Syria’s transition: the diversity of identities and interests within the Sunni “majority” itself. Indeed, there is no such thing as a Sunni community in Syria. Sunni tribes in the east have little in common with the conservative urban underclass, which shares even less with the traditional trading elites, not to mention Sunni seculars. Cities such as Aleppo and Damascus, Homs and Hama, at best ignore each other, at worst compete. The balance of power between armed groups from Idlib and elsewhere, such as Douma, is extremely precarious, and could quite easily give rise to clashes like the ones we’ve just seen with the Druze.
So, the Assad regime’s legacy really is three things: a fragmented territory where all social groups have repeatedly been played against each other rather than being pulled into a unified national identity; a state whose institutional capacity is extraordinarily weak, given the fact that keeping the country whole was almost entirely the responsibility of the security services; and an economy on its knees, shackled with layers of sanctions, an obstructive bureaucracy, and a laissez-faire mentality in lieu of public policy.
MY: There appears to be a clear intention by Israel to fragment Syria and replace it with sectarian or ethnic entities, which has contrasted with a Turkish intention to bolster Syrian unity. Do you think that a project of fragmentation, or partition, can work, and what do you see as the outcome of the Israeli-Turkish rivalry in Syria?
PH: Israel also has a clear intention to make 2 million Gazans somehow disappear, while denying accusations of genocide. It is going through an extremely destructive moment of hubris, in which all sorts of fantasies are coming out: Israel will end the Palestinian question, bomb all resistance into oblivion, finish off the so-called Axis of Resistance, break Syria apart, push millions into Jordan, normalize with the Gulf and Lebanon, reshape the region, rewrite history, you name it. Most importantly, it won’t concede anything, will get away with it all, and can achieve these results without so much as a plan.
Forging alliances with the region’s minorities, in Syria and beyond, is just one of these old and worn-out Israeli tropes. They reflect a lack of novel, realistic thinking. More than a policy as such, Israel today presents us instead with a dangerous imaginary, which has tragic consequences on the ground. The Turks will have far more traction in Syria, because their posture, however intrusive, heavy-handed, and self-serving, is also practical, intelligible, and transactional. It gives Syria’s leadership something to negotiate. By contrast, everyone currently is at a loss when it comes to negotiating with Israel, because it wants it all and for free. And it has been led by its Western partners to believe that it can have it.
MY: Can a Syrian revival, or even a Lebanese revival, take place if Syria fails to reach some sort of settlement with its various sectarian and ethnic communities? Or do you see Syria going back to being a country at the center of regional rivalries, as outside states seek to exploit communal divisions and discord?
PH: Unity tends to be a mantra in the modern Arab world, as if divisions were shameful, catastrophic, and irreparable. They are, however, the natural state of any society, in this region as elsewhere. Politics consist, precisely, in organizing such differences so that they might peacefully coexist, rather than attempting to erase them. A political transition like the one Syria is going through will inevitably put on display all sorts of disagreements. Sectarian and ethnic tensions tend to be particularly taboo, but they are just a facet of far more complex identities. What about class, or the redistribution of national wealth? The many shades of Sunni Islam? The role of tribes in today’s polities? The relations between center and periphery? Because of this obsession with unity, even something as straightforward as administrative decentralization brings up fears of disintegration.
I hope that Syria will set a new precedent in that respect, with a system that recognizes and represents differences politically, to break with this false alternative between oppressive unity and destructive factionalism. The regional context isn’t particularly helpful, but it isn’t at its worst either. We’re far from the level of external intrusions that pulled Iraq apart post-2003. In Syria itself, a foreign-funded civil war has occurred already. Despite Turkish and Israeli encroachment, we now see few signs on the part of anyone of a desire to arm proxies. Yet, although Syria is not a battleground anymore, it’s not a building site either: External players have little interest in investing resources to stabilize the country. That means that any stabilization will flow not from some influx of cash but from internal politics. It raises the stakes and risks in this transition, but in the best of scenarios it could also produce more solid outcomes.
