Photo by Ivan Hassib via Pexels
Welcome back to this bi-weekly installment of What Just Happened?!, a semi-comical digest of the most important news from the UK, US and the World. Look out for us every now and again, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
When we started What Just Happened in 2020 the core concept was to summarize the difficult to digest and boil down complexity into nuanced and well presented facts; perhaps no event has deserved that treatment more than the last three weeks of Syrian history, so here we go…
The World
The Road to Damascus
We have to set the scene with Hafez al-Assad, the ruthless dictator of Syria from 1971 until his death in 2000. Hafez was instrumental in a series of military coup d’etats that eventually led to him assuming leadership of the Ba’athist socialist government. Over the following years he consolidated power into an effective autocracy with his cult of personality at the centre. He aligned Syria with the then Soviet Union in return for support against Israel, links which remained in place until the fall of the House of Assad.
Fast forward to the late 90s, and Hafez was forced to consider his succession as his health deteriorated. His initial preference, as far back as 1980, had been to hand the reins to his brother Rifaat, but that chance was blown when Rifaat attempted his own coup and weakened his brother’s government. Second choice was his first son Bassel, but he died in a car crash in 1994. It’s widely believed that Hafez’s favourite child was his daughter Bushra, but as a woman she was ineligible, although there is some suggestion she considered mounting her own coup. This left Bashar al-Assad as the successor. At this point the West were tentatively excited; Bashar was seen as somewhat of a speccy little nerd, he had held military roles, but largely showed a total lack of interest in politics. He studied postgraduate ophthalmology in London (yes, we have no issue educating the families of autocrats) and was thought of as a “geeky I.T. guy”. Shortly after his father’s death, he married a British investment banker Asma Akhras.
It’s important to note at this point that Syrian society is made up of an immensely complex range of religions and sects, mostly spanning Islam and Christianity, but 79% of Syrians are Sunni Islam making up a clear majority. The Assads are Alawite, a small sect of Shia Islam that represented a small fraction of the population, but which over the last 30 years had, by Assad senior’s careful strategy, come to dominate the seats of power in government and the military.
When Bashar assumed the office of president, the months following were known as the Damascus Spring; activists made cautious but positive progress. There were large-scale amnesties of political prisoners, and the infamous Mezzeh prison was closed.
This transitioned rapidly into the Damascus Winter: concessions were rapidly rolled-back and Bashar tightened his grip on control, increasing censorship, arresting intellectuals and artists, and exiling or re-imprisoning many who had just been released.
Long story short: Bashar turned out to be a ruthlessly oppressive autocratic leader, using indiscriminate violence and chemical weapons (in violation of international law) to control his own people. His wife Asma became the economic powerhouse behind the al-Assad family, using their state control to widen corruption, including controlling the banking and telecommunications sectors in Syria which were, naturally, awarded state contracts. She also had direct control over the bodies which funneled international aid into the country, all of which we’re sure was used well (/sarcasm).
“Almost 60,000 people were tortured and killed in the prisons run by Assad, UK-based monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said” source: BBC
Skipping forward to 2011, following the Arab Spring, and an uprising was fomenting across Syria. The brutal crackdown on this unrest led to a fresh wave of international sanctions against Syria (largely spearheaded by Obama), and the situation rapidly escalated into a full-blown civil war.
The war was a slow, attritional grind, and by 2015 Assad’s forces had managed to retain control of most of Syria’s population centres, with the notable exception of Aleppo, whilst large chunks of the country were in the control of various rebel groups, a swathe of the North was controlled by Turkish-backed Kurdish rebels and Islamic State/Daesh had established a solid foothold in some of the more rural areas of the country.
Assad’s chances of long term survival looked poor, and Russia sensed an opportunity, starting a direct military intervention in September 2015 that relatively quickly stabilised Assad’s regime. This gave Russia a number of powerful advantages: Assad himself became somewhat of a puppet leader and continued to echo Kremlin talking points on the international stage for the rest of his rule, whilst the Russian military secured full control of Syrian airspace as well as their invaluable air and naval bases on Syria’s western mediterranean coast. It also catapulted Russian mercenaries into the global spotlight as the now-infamous Wagner group helped Assad regain control of large chunks of territory, and fight off IS, in return for shares of mineral rights (most notably oil) across the country. Russian military bases were seen as the conduit for Russia and Wagner to build their military operations across Africa.
To complicate matters, different parts of the country contained a mish-mash of different foreign forces and proxy conflicts: Iran backed Assad by providing Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, the US and Turkey backed the Kurdish rebels in the North, whilst a coalition of Western nations alongside Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia contributed to airstrikes against Islamic State. The US established a “deconfliction zone” (DCZ) and military base in the south of Syria within territory controlled by the Free Syrian Army.
The human impact was devastating: total deaths are believed to be around the 600,000 mark, whilst over 12 million were displaced, about 6 million externally and 6 million internally. Whilst all this was happening a series of parallel events took place which have now become vitally important. An Islamist fighter called Abu Mohammed al-Julani travelled from Damascus to Iraq in 2003 to oppose US occupation. He was imprisoned by the US, then subsequently released. He was then tasked with establishing the ‘Al-Nusra Front’ which would be al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria, coordinating with the ‘Islamic State of Iraq’ (ISI) to expand al-Qaeda’s control in the area.
In 2013 ISI became ISIL, the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’ as its leader al-Baghdadi demanded the al-Nusra Front be merged into ISIL. Al-Nusra, al-Julani and al-Qaeda denounced his move and a war of words soon descended into full-blown violence and infighting between the groups. Ultimately al-Julani cut ties with both ISIL and al-Qaeda, rebranding the al-Nusra Front as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, later becoming Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, now styled as HTS.
HTS were considered terrorists by the international community and accordingly proscribed. The following years would see various phases of stability and hostility, but ultimately their interests continued to conflict with those of the US within the region.
It appears that during those years HTS, under al-Jubani, was making preparations for a much larger-scale military campaign, and sought the backing of Turkey. But Erdogan appeared to believe that Assad’s regime was more stable than it was, and discouraged al-Jabani from wider military action, instead seeking diplomatic concessions from Assad.
Which brings us to an epic confluence of events in November 2024. Russia has been engaged for some time in its full-blown war in Ukraine which has sapped its resources and strength. It also seems to have mistaken how strong Assad’s forces were and/or have mistaken the strength of the various Syrian rebel forces, most notably HTS. Meanwhile Wagner Group had changed significantly, with activity in Syria last most recently reported in 2021, and their mutinying leadership was killed (most likely by Putin’s gangsters) following their ill-fated march on Moscow in June of 2023. Iran appears to be cowed after taking a beating from Israel’s air strikes, whilst it has more or less entirely lost its Hezbollah proxy forces after Israel’s campaign in Lebanon.
In late November HTS began rapidly taking control of Northwest Syria and by December 4th had taken most of the Aleppo region, alongside the Idlib Governorate. Not only were they moving rapidly, but they created a unified operations room in southern Syria from which to coordinate a tentative coalition of around 25 different rebel groups. By December 5th they took Hama and moved on to take Homs. By December 7th it was over for Assad, as Damascus swiftly fell to the US-backed Free Syrian Army and HTS’s combined ‘southern operations room’.
In just a few days a regime which had been widely considered to be weak but unlikely to fall had been absolutely wiped out. Bashar al-Assad and his inner circle fled to their immense hidden wealth in Moscow, whilst Iran and Russia both look, frankly, bruised. Currently Moscow maintains forces in a fragile truce with the new Syrian regime at its military bases whilst they discuss the way forward, but the loss of this strategically significant ally is a real slap in the face.
Israel in turn has used the opportunity to move its military into the long-contested Golan Heights, a move which it says is temporary for its defensive purposes, whilst also announcing that it aims to double its civilian settler population in the area, settlements that have long been considered illegal by the wider international community. It has also launched an astonishing assault on the former Syrian Army’s assets, sinking navy ships, while blowing up arms storms and research institutes in the name of preventing Islamists forces from utilising weaponry.
Al-Julani, having dropped his nom de guerre and rebranded with his birth name Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, has appeared as the de facto leader of Syria. It remains totally unclear what sort of leadership Syria will now be under, and whether his leadership will be contested by any of the many parties that were involved in the uprising, but it now turns to the international community to see how they will react. In just the last couple of days both the US and the UK have announced they have commenced diplomacy with HTS, which is something not technically allowed whilst the group is still designated as a terrorist organization. It would also appear that the $10 million bounty on Al-Julani’s head has been dropped with the relevant “reward for justice” page (https://rewardsforjustice.net/english/muhammad_al_jawlani.html) now showing “page can’t be found”.
For his part al-Sharaa has promised to rebuild the Syrian government for all sects and not to take reprisals against the Alawite community, while there are queues at the borders of those who fought on behalf of Assad’s government who fear violent retribution.
The UK
Czech Please
The British national postal service (which was privatized in 2013), Royal Mail, has had its £3.6 billion ($4.5 billion) sale to Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský’s EP Group approved (in principle, as shareholders will still need to approve the final deal) by the UK government. The UK government maintains a “golden share” in the organization that requires their approval for major changes of ownership, attempts to move the headquarters or tax residency. The government has been greatly concerned about keeping the Postal Service Headquarters in the UK, just in case you were wondering how Brexit was going…
The British Office of Communications, Ofcom, have been aware of the need to modernize the Royal Mail for a number of reasons; since 2011 the number of letters being sent has approximately halved, while parcels have become more prolific. The challenge is maintaining the Universal Service Obligation (USO), whereby every letter costs the same amount and deliveries occur 6 days a week, while maintaining an affordable cost for the Great British Public.
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