The news that insurgent forces have launched an energetic and apparently unexpected campaign against regime forces across northern Syria has come as an early Christmas present to the renewed cohort of liberal hawks in the West. 

Whilst liberal opinion in the West has been firmly opposed to Assad throughout the war, in earlier stages of the conflict, their attention was usually focussed on humanitarian aspects of the war. However, their degree of investment in the kinetic phases of the Russo-Ukraine war have turned many progressive internationalists into armchair open source intelligence analysts. 

As the boys of the Hayat Tahir Al-Sham close in on Aleppo, I find that it is I who cannot share … glee at a loathsome tyrant apparently coming undone

In some ways, it’s heartening to see our liberal friends come to enjoy the simple pleasures of a bit of war. As a schoolboy, I always felt a bit sorry for them that their assorted humanitarian qualms and hangups meant that they couldn’t enjoy the ground invasions of Afghanistan or Iraq as I did; it was as if they’d never got over Vietnam. Couldn’t they at least try to appreciate it as they might have a particularly one-sided cricket match that we couldn’t lose?  However that has all changed now. As the boys of the Hayat Tahir Al-Sham close in on Aleppo, I find that it is I who cannot share their glee at a loathsome tyrant apparently coming undone. 

Before I go any further, I will clarify that I share much if not all of the liberal consensus around Bashar Al-Assad. Unlike others on the Right I do not regard him as somebody who could have been bolstered to preserve stability in the long term. Like all of the regimes established across the Arab world by his father’s generation of secular dictators drawn from religious minority groups, that regime was living on borrowed time and its end was always going to be bloody. Like Saddam’s regime in Iraq, the Ba’athists had created a political and religious pressure cooker in Syria, and when it blew, the West’s priority should have been to try to make its overthrow play out as fast as possible. 

Like most of the West’s failures in the Middle East over the last 20 years, the botching of our response to the uprising against Assad flows from the unhappy consequences of the Bush Administration’s terrible decision to disband the Iraqi Army in 2003. It was this that created a huge pool of unemployed and resentful manpower and leadership for Al Qaeda aligned Sunni militia groups in the region, and also created a vacuum for Iranian-aligned Shia militia groups to fill. After 201, Syria became their playground. The ongoing existence and increasing brutality of the regime and its Russian backers, pushed an ever greater number of Syria’s remaining population toward support for increasingly extremist Sunni militancy, leading to the conflagration of ISIS. 

The subsequent war to destroy ISIS led the West, under the hapless leadership of Barack Obama, to simultaneously support a coalition that had pro-regime, Iranian-aligned Shia groups doing the bulk of the fighting on the ground, at the same time as continuing to support radical (but nominally non-ISIS) Sunni groups in their war against Assad. It was a catastrophic example of path-dependent muddle, in which nobody on the Western side had the moral fibre to step back and take a hard decision about what the range of plausible outcomes at that point might be, and which one we would reluctantly have to support. 

The aftermath left the remnants of the regime atop the leadership of a broader but far more sustainable coalition of interest groups than it had been before 2011. This included many elements that had fought bitterly against the regime in the early phases of the civil war; they did not forget the terrible crimes committed by Assad, but by this point, so much brutality had been experienced by and from so many sides, that those who were left had little choice to but to come to terms with the least worst of the available options. So many others were dead, or in permanent exile. Assad remained in power simply by being the last plausible man standing. 

The formation of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham itself tells the story of the Syrian civil war. As an organisation, it contains traces of the DNA of each of the dozens of radical Sunni Islamist groups that were formed across the country between 2011 and 2014. The explosion of ISIS across eastern Syria in 2014 triggered a wave of splinters, mergers and disappearances of these groups as they struggled to maintain their independence and identity in the face of the onslaught. These groups included the Al Nusra front (Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), which broke off from Al Qaeda, as the events of 2014 suddenly made that association far less useful. Others were hastily cobbled together in alliances of convenience, such as the marriage of a group of Moroccan fighters with a small band of local Salafists that went under the name of Ansar al-Din. Most of the groups emphasised their autonomy, and their position of neutrality with regard to other groups opposed to Assad; however almost all of them cooperated with ISIS on various occasions, particularly during the siege of the Kuweiris airbase which included many different Sunni factions at different periods. 

In 2017, the defeat of ISIS and the entry into much of Syria’s territory of large, well-equipped Iranian aligned Shia militias, manned mainly by Iraqis, triggered another wave of consolidation among non-ISIS Sunni jihadists. HTS was formed at this time, officially from the merger of six different groups including Ansar al-Din and Al Nusra; but among its members it counted men who had fought with a far greater number of Salafist organisations over the course of the war. One of these groups was the Haraka Nour al-Din al-Zenki, who had controlled the rural areas to the west of Aleppo earlier in the war, and which HTS has re-taken during November 2024 — although this group later splintered off from HTS and went to war against them. Each of these groups has stood accused of war crimes, including abductions, the killing of journalists and the beheading of people suspected of fighting for groups to whom they opposed. Each of them adheres to exceptionally austere Salafist religious doctrines that are completely opposed to democracy and to the kind of values that Western liberals typically support — and each of them insists on the total exclusion of non-Sunni elements from the areas they control. 

Now, another wave of Sunni insurgency is underway in the Northwest, and Aleppo once again looks vulnerable. I find it very difficult to imagine how any humanitarian-minded Westerner, no matter how implacably they detested Bashar Al-Assad, could possibly see that as anything other than a complete disaster. 

Are people still so deluded that they imagine organisations like Hayat Tahir Al Sham (HTS) are anything other than sectarian fanatics who will make life unbearable for anybody who doesn’t share their ethnicity and very narrow religious perspective?  Do they still imagine that there is any significant element left in Syria with the numbers to fight for something even vaguely resembling a democratic or liberal vision? 

It’s poor practice as a writer to pose a long series of rhetorical questions to the reader, but the position of progressive humanitarians seeing something to cheer in the HTS breakout leaves one with so many questions, there is little one can do but ask them. Even if Aleppo falls, do they believe these militants can take the whole country? If they do, what happens to anyone who isn’t a Sunni Arab? If they don’t, do they see a return to high intensity conflict as preferable to the current settlement? If HTS take Aleppo and leave it at that, do they imagine that the regime, after everything it has come through, will allow them to establish their own Sunni Islamist statelet in the Northwest? Is that something that they’d even want, if they stopped to think about it for five minutes? 

A resurgence in the fighting in Syria will come as a terrible blow to communities that have only recently started to rebuild their lives

It’s important to ask these questions, because they highlight a complete absence of any kind of strategic approach to Syria from Western liberals (who will remain the dominant faction in the west’s diplomatic and foreign policy establishments, even after Trump takes office). And its important to bear in mind that the Syria conflict has been going on so long now that we’ve almost forgotten the time when it began, back in 2011, when liberals were still largely highly critical of neoconservative overreach in the Middle East; hence Obama’s reluctance to intervene significantly in the first place. 

The most charitable perspective, possibly, is that the Ukraine war has given them such a sharp friend-enemy distinction that they are able to see through all of the flaws and failures of HTS; “Assad is with Russia, and Russia is the enemy. Therefore HTS are our friends, and we will work through whatever problems we have with them after they’ve won”. In many ways, this has become for them the kind of sports fixture that neoconservatives naively imagined Iraq was going to be all those years ago. 

A resurgence in the fighting in Syria will come as a terrible blow to communities that have only recently started to rebuild their lives and homes after many years of war. The Syrian conflict has already blown away all previous assumptions about how long an upper-middle income country could sustain a civil war for. Radical Sunni Islamists taking hold of Aleppo will do nothing to help the people of Ukraine, no matter what aid Assad is forced to beg from Putin. The rebels stand little to no chance of unseating Assad, and seems very unlikely that the people of Syria would be better off if they did. This latest bout of violence should bring absolutely no cheer at all to anybody with a humanitarian bone in their body.