Syrian civil war: How the West failed to factor in Bashar al-Assad's Iranian backers as the conflict developed

Five years ago, we were high on Arab revolutions, and journalists were growing used to 'liberating' Arab capitals

Just before I left Syria last month, a tall and eloquent Franco-Lebanese man walked up to me in a Damascus coffee shop and introduced himself as President Bashar al-Assad’s architect. It was his task, he led me to understand, to design the reconstructed cities of Syria. 

Who would have believed it? Five years after the start of Syria’s tragedy – and within six months of this, remember, the regime itself trembled and the Western powers, flush with dangerous pride after destroying Gaddafi, predicted the imminent fall of the Assad dynasty – the Syrian government is preparing to rebuild its towns and cities.

It’s worth taking that embarrassing trip down memory lane to the early spring and summer of 2011. The US and French ambassadors visited Homs to sit amid tens of thousands of peaceful demonstrators calling for the overthrow of the Assad government. EU diplomats were telling the political opposition not to negotiate with Assad – a fatal mistake, since the advice was based on the false assumption that he was about to be overthrown – and journalists were gathering with rebels in eastern Aleppo for the inevitable march of liberation on Damascus.

The Assad regime, came the message from the Washington think-tanks and mountebank “experts”, had reached – a cliché we should all beware of – the “tipping point”. La Clinton announced that Assad “had to go”. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius declared that Assad “did not deserve to live on this planet” – although he failed to name the galaxy to which the Syrian President might retire. And I complied with anIndependent request to write Assad’s obituary – for future use, you understand – and still it moulders in the paper’s archives.

Looking back, it’s not difficult to see where we all got it wrong. We were high on Arab revolutions – Tunisia, then Egypt and then Libya – and journalists were growing used to “liberating” Arab capitals. We forgot that their dictators were all Sunni Muslims, that they had no regional super-power support – the Saudis could not save Hosni Mubarak in Egypt but Shia Iran was not going to allow its only Arab ally, Alawite-Shia-led Syria, to fall. At first, the Syrian Baath party and the regime’s internal security agents behaved with their usual inane brutality. Teenagers who wrote anti-Assad graffiti on the walls of Deraa were tortured, the local tribal leaders abused – and a deputy minister dispatched to apologise for the government’s “errors”. But torture was so much an instrument of state power that the intelligence apparatus knew no other way to resolve this unprecedented challenge to the regime’s authority.

The government army was ordered to shoot down demonstrators. Hence the brief but ultimately hopeless dawn of the “Free Syrian Army”, many of them deserters who are now slowly returning to the ranks or drifting off home with the regime’s tacit permission. But there were signs from the very start that armed groups were involved in this latest manifestation of the Arab awakening. 

In May 2011, an Al Jazeera crew filmed armed men shooting at Syrian troops a few hundred metres from the northern border with Lebanon but the channel declined to air the footage, which their reporter later showed to me. A Syrian television crew, working for the government, produced a tape showing men with pistols and Kalashnikovs in a Deraa demonstration in the very early days of the “rising”.

This did not prove the Gulf-Turkish “terrorist conspiracy” which the Syrian regime now “revealed” to the world. But it did demonstrate that from the start – when ordinary Syrian families felt it necessary to defend their families with firearms – guns were available to the opposition. And once the government’s own loyal militias were given free rein to attack the regime’s enemies, the massacres began. In one Sunni village east of Latakia, a Western news agency reporter discovered that almost every civilian had been slaughtered.