The sudden collapse of the Syrian Arab Republic is one of the most inexplicable political events of the modern era. Though the regime was structurally unsound from over a decade of war and severe sanctions, by all accounts Bashar al’Assad’s government had more or less won the war five years prior; they just weren’t able to take back some peripheral areas because they had foreign protection, most notably terrorist-controlled Idlib governate.
Then, despite having survived so long in much worse circumstances, the Syrian Arab Army gave up when jihadists broke out of Idlib. An army that previously held fast in the face of certain death offered no resistance as their enemies marched towards Damascus, taking the capital that had withstood them for eight years of hot war without a fight. None of this is easy to make sense of. Part of that is because we aren’t privy to any deals made behind closed doors, but even that knowledge would only give a partial view. The bigger reason we don’t understand is because we don’t understand the forces which control history, as Leo Tolstoy explained in War and Peace.
War and Peace may be considered one of the most famous books of all time, but it would seem that few have read it and fewer still understand it. It is hard to think of a more famous book that has had less of an impact, insofar as no one considers Tolstoy’s philosophy of history, which is the point of the text. I cannot name a single well-known academic work which can be said to be influenced by Tolstoy’s views on history. As Tolstoy uses fictional characters to tell the story of the Napoleonic Wars, what he shows the reader is that we don’t understand it at all. In a way, nothing in history makes sense because it is profoundly irrational that another person should convince you to go off and kill other humans, or that this should somehow be considered noble because you were told to and there happens to be a flag involved. More importantly, most of what we think we understand about history is a result of our human need to feel like we understand, so knowing the end result we then look at a number of events which seem to lead to that conclusion, ignoring all of the different things which happened that were contrary to the ultimate endpoint.
Where does this leave us for understanding Syria? Historians would tell you that in December 2010 a young street merchant in Tunisia got tired of the government shutting down his cart and set himself on fire. Somehow, this resulted in Salafist jihadists taking control of the ancient city of Damascus unopposed just days under fourteen years later. How those two events could be connected is not obvious. In the intervening time governments have been overthrown, states have collapsed, and Syria has spent years in a brutal war funded and participated in by cynical actors from across the world.
What were the participating groups trying to accomplish? The United States wanted to prove a point about “human rights,” or more accurately prove that they’re the ones who get to make this judgment. Israel wanted its neighbor neutered. Turkey wanted to weaken the Kurdish minority and its leader seems to have a bizarre obsession with praying in the Umayyad Mosque, despite that under peace he could have visited and done so at any time. Iran and Hezbollah wanted to keep a pathway between them open. Russia wanted to maintain bases in the Mediterranean and show that it can support allies. The Islamic State wanted to start a caliphate. I frankly never figured out what the Gulf monarchies were supposed to be doing, but for a time they considered opposing Assad very important. The Syrian people wanted to survive this conflagration. Somehow it is an Al Qaeda leader named Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who everyone agreed was a terrorist a month ago and may well agree is a terrorist a year from, who walks into Damascus unopposed and for some reason is saluted as the new leader of Syria.
During those fourteen years men were conscripted by the hundreds of thousands and told to kill or die trying. Other men flowed out of Syria to avoid the conflict, replaced by men crossing the sea to kill still other men they had never met, not by any compulsion but by choice. A fake government arose outside of the country and claimed it was the real ruler while other countries who had no business being involved in Syria claimed the actual government in Damascus wasn’t the real government of Syria. Weapons came in from all directions. All sides tried to create stories to justify their actions, though at times it didn’t seem as if they understood why they were doing this either.
The result of all of this was mass death and carnage. Fields went unplowed, homes destroyed, the water and sewer lines which make desert city life possible became unusable. Vast wealth was poured into munitions to destroy things which consumed vast wealth to be built, including the destruction of irreplaceable antiquities. The amount of man hours wasted is incalculable, as are the numbers who died and thus will never work again.
This went on for several years. With the help of allies Syria appeared to have won. Assad was let back into club the Arab despots, and again recognized as the rightful ruler of Syria by those rulers. However, others who seemed to have lost didn’t accept this, protecting other factions that controlled the country’s periphery. A wound remained festering in the state, an infection waiting to flare. Suddenly it happens, and the same army that would once fight to the death gives way, barely firing a shot. Were they given orders to stand down? No one knows. Even so, why would they listen to him when he told them to surrender instead of replacing him with someone willing to fight? Assad never addressed the public either way, refusing even the pretense that he controlled the situation.
It’s said that Russia knew the Syrian Arab Army wasn’t fighting and already had made a deal, but that they were bombing the advance to appear to be doing something. What does that accomplish if two days later they knew this was happening? Others say Assad was trying to reach a deal with the United States to remove the presence of Iran and Hezbollah in return for staying in power, and when that didn’t happen he was done. Many believe he decided to give up well before Damascus fell, but have no explanation of why he fled at the last minute, leaving many of his personal items in his palace.
When you step back and think, it is much stranger that men were once willing to kill for Assad and his government than that they stopped doing so. At the same time, it’s stranger still that Wahabi religious doctrine should cause men to leave their homes and risk their lives in order to behead other men for praying differently. It is outright nonsensical that the United States should spend twenty-three years in a Global War on Terror only to be joyful when their supposed primary enemy in said war takes over an entire state. All of these men are playing a role in a grand drama, but the ones who think they understand their role are even more irrational than the ones who don’t care and are just trying to survive until the next day.
As we learn more about what happened, the human instinct will be to attribute causes to the events we have seen, just as every man could give a different reason why a leaf falls off a tree. Historians may come up with a thousand reasons to explain why Syria had fourteen years of war and then suddenly collapsed, but from start to finish this conflict makes little sense. Tolstoy was correct that we do not understand the causes of human events and the rules by which history functions.
