Earlier this month, Syrian opposition forums were filled with rumours that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has been killed or hurt. Others claimed that Al Assad was preparing to tender his resignation and leave the country, along with his family and relatives. Indeed, these rumours turned out to be more of a wishful thinking than real. Since then Al Assad has engineered several TV appearances to assure loyalists and foes alike that he is well and does not intend to leave any time soon.
Regardless of the ongoing psychological war between the regime and the opposition, at this stage of the conflict the Al Assad departure is very unlikely to put an end to the Syrian saga. Post-Al Assad scenarios in Syria vary widely but none of them looks very bright.
The Syrian opposition groups, both the armed and the political, are divided to the extent that one can hardly talk about an alternative that can hold Syria together or restore order in the post-Al Assad era. Even the Muslim Brotherhood, which is more often described as the most organised amongst all opposition groups, is not in a position to rule the country. Decades of dictatorship, cronyism and corruption have left Syrians with no real practical background in politics, governance and democracy. Alas, in today’s Syria, combat capability has become the real metric of status and success; with opposition to Al Assad proving the only real element of unity amongst the myriad opposition brigades and battalions.
Having said that, no one can really predict which group or leader will survive, gain power or be able to lead Syria to the shores of safety once Al Assad falls. The first few years after the collapse of the Al Assad regime will therefore be marked with a bloody struggle for power and wealth. Most Syrians would want to have a future wherein human rights, democracy, and the rule of law prevail once the current regime leaves. In practice, however, the odds strongly favour years of instability compounded by social fragmentation, widespread conflict, a crippled economy and outside interference.
The only thing that is now predictable is that the longer the Al Assad regime lasts, the worse things are likely to get in every possible dimension. Every current element of the present conflict is steadily having a more crippling effect and is more polarising, both within Syria and the region around it.
At this stage of the conflict one can hardly talk about a good option in Syria. No matter what happens; the division between Sunnis and Alawites will take a decade or more to heal. The war has already spread to involve Lebanon and Iraq, unleashing a rebirth of sectarian tensions and conflict in each country. Worse, it has become linked to a religious war within Islam that increasingly pits Sunnis against Shiites, and religious extremism against mainstream Islam, across the entire Islamic world.
It has led to Qatari, Saudi, Turkish and Jordanian intervention in terms of providing money, training, and weapons to the opposition, and to quiet — but increasingly active — covert support of some of these efforts by the US, Britain, and France. Iran, Russia, and possibly China have supported Al Assad along with Hezbollah. The end result is a proxy war that is likely to continue even after the collapse of the Al Assad regime.
In the short and medium terms, increased foreign interference will lead either to a long civil war wherein the regime and the opposition find themselves in a violent equilibrium, with neither having the forces available to remove the other; or to Balkanisation. This latter scenario could result in two equally bad outcomes: A relatively orderly disintegration of the state into mini-states defined mainly on sectarian lines; or complete collapse, wherein the current power structure disintegrates before an alternative political and internal security bodies are in place to manage an orderly transition to a successor Syrian regime.
Either way, the human cost will be immense. A massive refugee problem has already developed in neighbouring countries, and no one has a meaningful count of the internally displaced people within Syria or the Syrians who have become the equivalent of destitute and insecure “refugees” in their own homes. There is no practical way to estimate the cost in terms of immediate economic suffering or the future impact on development in every possible area of economic activity and the costs in laying the educational and institutional groundwork for the next generation. Simply put: Syria is experiencing an unprecedented human disaster that makes all the talk about opposition or regime victory mere nonsense.
Dr. Marwan Kabalan is the Dean of the Faculty of International Relations and Diplomacy at the University of Kalamoon, Damascus.
