The making and breaking of state power in Syria

In May 2015, prominent al-Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansur sat down with Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, leader of the Syrian armed faction, the Nusra Front, for a lengthy discussion of the group’s worldview and military strategy. His face hidden from the camera, al-Jolani’s style of dress was similar to other veterans of the Salafist-jihadist military tradition.1 He professed his admiration for “Shaikh Osama Bin Laden”, but disagreed respectfully with the strategy of taking war to the West directly, instead arguing that Nusra’s sights were set on the goal of the Syrian opposition: power in Damascus.2 Nine and a half years later, dressed in Fidel Castro-style olive military fatigues, he would walk into the Umayyad mosque in the Syrian capital to deliver a victory speech following his forces’ lightning offensive against the regime of Bashar al-Assad as commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (Levant Liberation Committee; HTS). Within days, Ahmed al-Sharaa, wearing a sober blue suit and having shed his nom de guerre, met American diplomats, who may have privately wondered how it was that a man they had once interned in a detention camp and who still had a bounty of ten million dollars on his head, had become the de facto president of Syria.3

Fascination with al-Sharaa himself and fixation on HTS, however, risks obscuring the deeper processes at work in the downfall of the Assad dynasty. This article will argue that what happens in Syria is not merely of parochial or specialist interest but touches on major questions for our times. The success of HTS needs to be analysed in the historical context of cycles of making and breaking the Syrian state through military revolutions “from above”. It also must be situated in relation to wider processes of imperialist competition and class struggle, both within the borders of Syria itself and across the region as a whole.

The sudden collapse of the Ba’athist regime after more than 50 years in power likewise cannot be understood separately from the fate of the 2011 popular revolution. Far from simply achieving the goals of that uprising by military means, HTS grew in the space opened up by the launch of the regime’s counter-revolutionary war and the intensifying sectarianism it adopted in order to destroy the popular movement from below. Yet, the intensity and scale of the 2011 revolution and the fatal damage that the Ba’athist regime did to its own social base and institutions in suppressing it also mean that the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 is a delayed vindication of all those who risked their lives to take on his dictatorship in 2011. The sense of an arc of history turning towards completion was dramatised by the image of Muawiyah Syasneh, whose act of teenage rebellion—writing graffiti on a wall in Deraa with a small group of friends—triggered the 2011 revolt, returning, rifle in hand, in December 2024 to “finish the job”.4

In contrast to accounts focusing solely on either the external or internal contradictions that destabilised the Assad regime, this article focuses on the interaction between these different dimensions. It also analyses the prospects for the recovery of class agency at the bottom of society. I argue that movements rooted among the struggles of the poor and working-class majority for justice will be far better allies in the fight for genuine liberation from imperialism than any of the regional and global powers.

From al-Mezzeh to Camp Bucca and Idlib and back again

In December 2024, al-Sharaa made a surprise visit to the wealthy neighbourhood of al-Mezzeh, where his childhood home is located. He took photos with residents, got his hair and beard trimmed in the local barber shop and knocked on the door of his parents’ old apartment asking to look around. Al-Sharaa’s journey from the comfortable surroundings of his middle-class childhood in al-Mezzeh, to the presidential palace, which looms over the district from the top of the hill above, is full of intersections between the personal, political and social contradictions that have shaped both his life and the history of Syria.

Al-Sharaa was born to Syrian parents in the Saudi capital Riyadh in 1982, but his family returned to Syria in the late 1980s. His father, Hussein, an economist specialising in oil policy and state development had been headhunted for a job in the Ministry of Petroleum by prime minister Mahmoud Zuabi.5 Hussein was strongly sympathetic to the Iraqi branch of the Ba’ath (Resurrection) Party. Previously, he left Syria and the family’s home region of Quneitra in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights for Saudi Arabia because, at the same time, the regime was an increasingly hostile environment for someone with his politics. Rapprochement with the Assad regime did not last long: Hussein was reportedly forced out his job at the ministry for refusing to sign off on corrupt oil deals and opened an estate agent’s office and supermarket.

As a teenager, Ahmed would rebel against both his family and the Ba’athist state. After 11 September 2001, he began attending underground Islamist study circles and sermons run by radical preachers in impoverished suburbs of Damascus, such as Hajira, Sbeneh and Drosha.6 In 2003, by the age of 21, he left Damascus altogether for Iraq, where he joined a military organisation set up by Salafist activist Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi to launch the armed struggle against the US occupation. Captured by forces of the United States, al-Sharaa’s mastery of Iraqi dialect meant that his Syrian identity was not discovered and he was imprisoned in Camp Bucca, a detention facility for Iraqi insurgents. The prison camp became notorious for the role it played in helping radical Sunni Islamist military groups, including the Islamic State (IS), reform and regroup, and al-Sharaa would emerge from detention bound for a leading role in the IS—he became a key lieutenant of its leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Yet, a decade later, he underwent another transformation: from espousing a transnational Salafist ideology towards an orientation on seizing power in Syria.The eruption of a popular revolution in Syria in March 2011 had taken place while Al-Sharaa was still in Iraq, but he returned to Syria in August the same year with a small group of other fighters to set up the Nusra Front, which joined the growing armed insurgency against the Ba’athist regime.

Meanwhile, the military rise of IS was reaching its climax, with the seizure of large areas of northeastern Syria including Raqqa in January 2014, followed by a rapid capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June of the same year. Al-Sharaa and the Nusra Front had broken with the IS in 2013, following al-Baghdadi’s decision to suddenly announce their merger with the IS group in Iraq, under the banner of a new entity, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Al-Sharaa and his comrades promptly withdrew their allegiance to al-Baghdadi, swearing fealty instead to Ayman al-Zawahiri of al-Qaida (the Base). Al-Sharaa’s sights were by this time clearly set on the road to Damascus, and over subsequent years he would also reject al-Qaida’s brand of transnational struggle to focus solely on the national terrain of Syria.7

The final steps in his journey back to al-Mezzeh would be taken through the forging of military and political alliances with other armed groups in northwestern Syria by forming HTS and winning control over the rebel-held enclave of Idlib. It was in Idlib that al-Sharaa gained experience in wielding state power. He played a key role in knitting together the fractious Islamist armed rebel groups of the region into a more coherent military force and was a dominant behind-the-scenes figure of the “civilian” façade of HTS’s micro-state: the Syrian Salvation Government.8

In late November 2024, HTS’s military leadership seized the opportunity created by shifts in the balance of power between the Assad regime’s external enemies and supporters to launch an offensive in the countryside around Aleppo. By this time, the Israeli assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon had fatally undermined one of the last remaining effective military ground forces allied to the Syrian regime. Russia, which had provided vital air cover allowing the Ba’athist regime to barrel-bomb its way to a victory of sorts over the rebel factions by late 2016, was also distracted by the demands of the war in Ukraine. Within ten days of the launch of HTS’s offensive on 27 November, al-Sharaa was speaking to cheering crowds in the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus following the collapse of the regime and al-Assad’s flight into exile.

The foundations of authoritarian resilience under Assad

The lessons from al-Assad’s decades in power point to the centrality of converging class interests, not simply family ties or sectarian affiliation, in the reconstitution of a stable ruling class coalition to underpin the state. Moreover, it is never enough for those in power simply to agree rules for the management of their “common affairs”, they also have to find ways to persuade and coerce the rest of society to abide by those rules. The breakdown of those mechanisms for managing discontent—the point when ordinary people refuse to be “ruled in the old way”, as Lenin once put it—is one of the defining moments marking the beginning of a revolutionary process.9

Ba’athist rule under the Assads was therefore loosely defined both by a set of rules or principles governing the division of spoils among those closest to the state and techniques and practices for intervening among the common people. At the top of society that meant maintaining a particular configuration of social layers and economic policies: a political marriage of convenience between ambitious, upwardly mobile men of religious minority backgrounds (particularly Alawites such as Hafiz al-Assad himself) from rural areas and provincial towns as well as a section of the urban bourgeoisie drawn from Syria’s Sunni majority. Specifically, this refers to the Sunni bourgeoisie of the capital city, Damascus.

The economic content of this alliance between the provincial Alawite and Damascene Sunni segments of the ruling class, which congealed around the state after Hafiz al-Assad took control of it, was a hybrid form state capitalism. It included opportunities for private capital to develop alongside state industries and public services. The Ba’athist predecessors of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad’s father, had been more committed to using the state to break up the economic power of the old landowning and merchant ruling class; he, by contrast, wanted to make political and economic peace with at least some of them. In the world of the 1970s, this turned out to be a very forward-thinking approach. The Syrian regime’s version of infitah (liberalisation) underlines that neoliberalism was more than a set of “American” policies, imposed on the global economy: its broader precepts became inescapable points of reference for every ruling class. As Linda Matar notes, the infitah reforms ushered in after Hafez al-Assad’s takeover in 1970 “were characterised by being gradual, home-based, and tailored by the state bourgeoisie”, rather than being simply short-term responses to acute economic crisis.10 Piecemeal changes to investment policies in the 1970s were followed by the adoption of Law 10 of May 1991, which took matters a step further by strongly encouraging private Syrian and also foreign investors in areas previously reserved for the public sector.11

Matar rightly stresses how infitah was reflective of the shared class interests of the different segments of the Syrian ruling class, who were the beneficiaries of these policies. Their joint ventures in self-enrichment at the expense of the Syrian people were key to maintaining stability at the top of Syrian society:

It was through infitah that Hafez called on the new commercial bourgeoisie that formed the regime’s social base of support to trust his pragmatic moves. More important, he served the class interests of the state bourgeoisie who were keen to undertake private investment projects on their own or with the new commercial bourgeoisie.12

After Hafez al-Assad’s death in 2000, his son Bashar continued and deepened these partnerships. By 2008, he had overseen the creation of a private university sector (while cutting government funding for education) and the creation of a private banking sector, which had seen its funds swell from an estimated $30-50 million in 2000 to $3 billion eight years later.13 Privatisation in agriculture, through the sell-off of state-owned collective farms, accelerated the concentration of landownership and the emergence of huge agricultural estates while peasant farmers and poor rural workers saw their living standards collapse under the pressure of drought and increased levels of exploitation in agriculture.14 Property speculation, the proliferation of construction projects around the capital city and a burgeoning telecom business all created enormous wealth for those closest to the regime, such as Rami Makhlouf, Bashar al-Assad’s cousin.

The Ba’athist state under the Assads was, like all projects at similar levels within the global system, engaged in a delicate balancing act. The ruling family’s embrace of bourgeois self-enrichment alongside the Makhloufs was counter-balanced by the cultivation of new forms of religiosity and piety as mechanisms for interacting with society and diverting anger from below into channels which were safer for the regime. Hafez al-Assad’s political and ideological coalition-building activities with “traditionalist” sections of the Sunni ulama (men of religion) and the traditional Sunni bourgeoisie and middle classes during the 1970s was one manifestation of this tendency, as was his support for the traders of the capital’s central market, Suq al-Hamidiyya.15

Thomas Pierret suggests that from the 1980s onwards, the Ba’athist state in Syria instituted a system of religious “sub-contractors”, whereby the traditionalist Sunni ulama was encouraged to revive their networks and institutions with the blessing of the state.16 The status of the Assad family as members of the Alawite religious minority provided an incentive to cultivate support from the religious leadership of the majority. The rebuilding of Sunni institutions was an obvious counterpart to the economic partnership between the Alawite state bourgeoisie and the Damascene commercial bourgeoisie. Over the decades, shifts in the global regime of accumulation amplified and intensified these tendencies, investing them with material force as religious sub-contractors filled the spaces in social provision vacated by the state through charitable works in the fields of education, health care and welfare.

In the domain of religion, as in the sphere of production, some of these changes were masked by the overbearing presence of the authoritarian ruling party. The grotesque forms of personality cult around the dictator himself, complete with bizarre and extravagant ceremonies and iconographies which unashamedly borrowed from religious traditions, were nevertheless still combined with rhetoric about socialism, secularism and progress from an earlier period. The mobilising functions of the Ba’ath Party’s mass organisations, such as the regime’s trade union apparatus and its women’s and youth organisations, continued to play an important role in the maintenance of Hafez al-Assad’s power—interwoven with flourishing expressions of Muslim piety. This included Quran reading competitions, religious charities and mosque study circles.

Cycles of popular rebellion and state crisis

Regime stability and, with it, the conditions for the continuation of the dynastic rule of the Assad family, therefore relied on interventions at both the top and bottom of society. At an elite level, a kind of cross-sectarian class unity laid the foundations of the Assadist state. It was defined by the mutual interests of different sections of the Syrian bourgeoisie in enriching themselves through maintaining a friendly environment for capital accumulation. At the bottom of society, by contrast, the aim of Syria’s rulers was to prevent the emergence of class unity among the poor. In particular, they sought to bind the organised working class rhetorically and politically to the regime while playing games of sectarian divide-and-rule. Encouraging forms of religiosity and piety would leave the keys to Syrian society in the hands of the businessmen and religious leaders who were closest to the regime.

The regime’s gambit of enabling the traditionalist Sunni ulama to build their institutions and social influence did not always have the desired outcome. In the late 1970s, the regime faced a major challenge from a Syrian Islamist opposition movement that bifurcated between the reformist mainstream of the Muslim Brotherhood and armed groups such as the Fighting Vanguard. The latter believed that armed struggle was the only way to overthrow the regime.17 The Fighting Vanguard recruited extensively from the Islamic study circles set up by traditionalist ulama opposed theologically and politically to the Brotherhood’s modernist project of reforming the state. 18 The regime’s brutal response to the rising tide of political protest and armed actions culminated in the uprising in Hama in 1982, and the destruction of the city by regime forces.

Yet, the reason why the top-down strategies of religious sub-contracting started to fail both in the late 1970s and from the mid-2000s reflected the growing pressure of economic and social crises on the vertical social cleavages so carefully engineered by the ruling class. An account from 1982 highlights the sharpening social contradictions:

A parasitic new class, which feeds off of the public sector, has come into existence. Fortunes have also been made in a booming real estate market; prices in some sections of Damascus rose tenfold between 1974 and 1976. Housing costs in parts of the capital befit a major European city more than a country in which per capita GNP is still only $1,340 per annum, and many people still do not have access to clean drinking water and electricity.19

The political expression of these social pressures took contradictory forms. Frustration of the poor majority about the corruption of the elite powered the mass protests and city shutdowns in Aleppo and other towns in the north between 1979 and 1982. However, the Islamist leaders of the movement most commonly hailed from middle-class social backgrounds, including both the traditional urban petite-bourgeoisie (small-scale manufacturers, traders and retailers) and the modern professions, such as engineers, doctors and lawyers. For both of these sections of the middle class in northern Syria, their experience of social crisis was sharpened by a sense that the sectarian elements of the regime’s strategy blocked their access to advancement through the state, thanks to the relatively privileged position of Alawites from the coastal regions within the state institutions.20 Therefore, dynamics of uneven and combined development asserted themselves in complex social formations and the creation of explosive contradictions for individual men and women and their families, for specific towns and regions, and across Syrian society as a whole.

The years before the 2011 revolution saw a more intense set of social and economic pressures emerge due to the global economic crisis. These shared many similarities with previous contradictions. Just as in the late 1970s, for example, waves of rural-urban migration reshaped the major cities, partially driven by droughts in agricultural regions in the northeast. The poorer suburbs of Damascus and Aleppo swelled in size and rents soared. Public sector wages stagnated while health and education services decayed. In contrast to the crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, the crisis was more widespread geographically as demonstrated by the pattern of revolt at the beginning of the uprising in 2011. Throughout February and March, there were attempts to initiate protests, including several small-scale ones in Damascus, but it was the arrest and torture of Muawiyah Syasneh and his friends in Deraa around 6 March which triggered a major shift in the scale of the movement. On 18 March, security forces shot dead two young men on a demonstration in the town, launching a cycle of escalating protests, police killings and angry funerals which were quickly mobilising tens of thousands.

The contrasting fates of Egypt’s and Syria’s trade union structures during the 2011 uprisings highlights the divergent paths their societies took at a pivotal moment in their revolutions. Egypt’s popular uprising began on 25 January 2011 with mass demonstrations called by youth movements and loose networks of opposition activists. The scale of mobilisation in the capital and other major cities was like a dam breaking. In many city centres they established tented sit-ins in prominent locations, most importantly in Tahrir Square in the heart of downtown Cairo, which demonstrators seized from the police during an epic battle on 28 January.21

In desperation, the regime’s officials turned to the leaders of the Egyptian Trade Union Federation. Could the trade union bureaucrats, ruling party officials who had led a comfortable life in their air conditioned offices aiding and abetting the destruction of large parts of Egypt’s public sector industries and services, turn out counter-demonstrators to take the streets in president Hosni Mubarak’s defence? The simple answer was that they could not. Just a handful of trade unionists turned up, and the secret police had to assemble instead a motley assortment of small-time thugs who failed to break up the sit-in. Significantly, within a few days, a major strike wave was underway, as workplaces around the country walked out—including several important examples in public transport, manufacturing, communications infrastructure and public services in the capital.22

By contrast, when Bashar al-Assad’s regime called on its trade union officials to mobilise ordinary Syrians to come out and pledge allegiance to the dictator after the eruption of the popular uprising, it was far more successful than its Egyptian counterpart. This was not because the Syrian uprising lacked popular roots or legitimacy. Protests during early phases of the uprising clearly rejected the regime’s sectarianism and demanded a future where the rights of all Syrians would be respected equally by the state.23 However, unlike Egypt, there was no major strike wave by public sector workers before the revolution erupted. One reason may have been that the regime’s hybrid of neoliberal and state capitalist policies and institutions made fewer inroads into the basket of support provided to government employees by the official trade unions (such as public health services).24

The ability of the Ba’athist regime to fill the streets of Damascus and other major cities with thousands of pro-government protesters, mobilised through the trade unions and other regime mass organisations had profound consequences in the early stages of the Syrian uprising. It made it much easier for the regime to present the popular revolt as an uprising of the peripheries against the centre, a revolution of night-time protests, clandestine skirmishes and underground organising. As time went on, the regime was able to isolate and bombard recalcitrant suburbs and small towns while life went on as normal within the area it called “useful Syria” (suriya al-mufidah).

Fractured and layered sovereignties: the micro-state system

The regime’s tactics combined with the failure of organised workers to develop an independent role in the revolutionary process accelerated the transition towards a fragmented and armed insurgency. Deraa was the initial testing ground for the regime’s brutal response. The rebellious areas of the city were besieged, starved of food and then bombarded and reconquered by the regime’s forces. Over the following months and years, many other towns, cities and villages across the country would face the same fate.

This included brutal repression of Palestinian communities in areas such as the Yarmouk camp on the outskirts of Damascus. Yarmouk had revolted against the pro-regime Palestinian armed groups, which dominated the camp in June 2011 and continued over the subsequent year. Half its inhabitants were increasingly drawn into supporting the uprising. The regime besieged the camp, starving its remaining residents and destroying huge areas of housing. Tragically, Palestinian resistance movements such as Hamas, which did oppose the Ba’athist regime’s repression of the Syrian people, only announced their support for the uprising at a relatively late stage in the revolution’s development—long after the regime’s militarised strategy of repression was dragging the country towards civil war. 25

The collective punishment of whole districts had a powerful radicalising effect for those on the inside, and it also deepened contradictions within the Syrian army as soldiers and officers deserted in a desperate effort to save their home towns and families.26 The regime’s lack of interest in any kind of negotiated compromise meant there was little incentive for areas that had joined the rebellion to retain allegiance to the Ba’athist state.

The ferocity of the military onslaught also created a powerful dynamic towards the professionalisation of the conflict. Armed groups with ready access to weapons, funding and capable military leaderships were more likely to survive and prosper. Salafist armed factions, such as the Nusra Front, which was led by experienced fighters and connected to transnational networks, came to play a more prominent role in the military struggle with the Ba’athist regime as time went on.

Alongside conventional military operations, the regime made extensive use of paramilitary gangs of thugs targeting activists and orchestrated sectarian attacks. These shabiha were tasked with breaking unity and solidarity between ordinary people. During the first year of the revolution, they were often unsuccessful. Mostafa, a revolutionary activist interviewed in 2016, recalled how Syrians from all different religious background were engaged in revolutionary activity in his home town of al-Salamiyya, which has a large Isma’ili population:

Many from the neighbouring Alawite villages joined the protests in the town, and those were specifically targeted by the regime’s intelligence services, as they were the living negation of the regime’s rhetoric that accused protesters of being part of a Sunni Islamist conspiracy.27

Mostafa and some of his friends later fled to Douma, a largely Sunni suburb of Damacus, where they were welcomed and protected by locals. Meanwhile, al-Salamiyya provided refuge for Sunni residents of Hama fleeing the regime’s bombardment:

During Ramadan the regime’s shabiha gangs recruited among local thugs and petty criminals and armed with sticks and knives, surrounded the town’s main Sunni mosque during the prayers; the regime aimed at igniting a sectarian strife in a town that had largely rejected its divisive rhetoric. But ordinary people quickly organised to form a protective ring around the mosque, and the local Ismaili imam even took part in the prayers alongside the Sunni refugees.28

Yet, under the relentless pressure of the war, sustaining solidarity at the bottom of society became increasingly difficult, especially in a context where millions of people were internally displaced or forced to flee Syria altogether. Government forces, backed by international allies such as Russia and Iran, forced many rebel areas into “reconciliation agreements” and expelled thousands of civilian residents along with remaining opposition fighters. These deals were imposed piecemeal, reflecting the fragmented nature of the opposition armed groups.29 Muawiyah Syasneh, by this time father to a young family, was one of those forced to leave his home in Deraa in the South for the rebel-held enclave of Idlib in the northwest.30

Two years after the uprising, rebel forces held huge swathes of territory in the north, including most of the second largest city, Aleppo, as well as pockets of territory around the capital and some in the south. By late 2016, government forces had recaptured Aleppo after a terrible siege, but effective regime control of the rest of the country was restricted to a narrow corridor running from south to north linking the major cities. However, the regime’s opponents at this point were multiple micro-states, all competing to recruit men to serve in their armies, raise funding for military offensives, seize territory and resources. By this time, they included the Nusra Front and its allies, various Free Syrian Army brigades, the Islamic State and the Kurdish forces of the Autonomous Administration of North Eastern Syria (AANES) under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Initially, civil authority in rebel-held areas did not operate according to the same logic as military power, creating another set of fractures and layers in the complex mesh of overlapping sovereignties.31 The regime’s tactics of besieging towns and cities that dared to show their solidarity with the uprising in 2011 rapidly created situations of effective dual power because the Syrian government disavowed any responsibility for civilian populations in these areas. As Abdulsalam Dallal and Julie Hearn note, the regime sought to overwhelm their opponents with the need to provide for civilians at the same time as facing a massive military onslaught.32 Networks of activists, which had been coordinating demonstrations and organising the political mobilisations against the regime, were suddenly thrust into the role of miniature alternative governments. There was a genuine degree of grassroots self-organisation at work in many of these situations—and the achievements of local coordinating committees and local revolutionary councils in delivering services, affirming cross-sectarian solidarity and experimenting with democratic self-governance in desperate circumstances are an inspiring testament to the courage and resilience of ordinary people.33 Yet, their limited resources and the conditions of siege also pushed them towards dependence on outside sources of funding, particularly foreign non-governmental organisations, the United Nations and the international aid agencies of Western powers, leading to the depoliticisation and professionalisation of their leaders.34

The local councils growing out of the popular movement had contradictory relationships with the armed opposition factions. Some FSA brigades had a symbiotic relationship with local revolutionary councils, even if this was from time to time quite conflicted. However, the rise of Salafist military factions created a new threat to the local revolutionary councils, which were often led by activists with a secular political orientation and also included left-wing figures.35 Armed groups in the salafi-jihadist tradition were more likely to seek the unification of the military and political aspects of government within the framework of a new Islamic order, with the most radical positions being taken by the Islamic State. IS forces considered all forms of authority besides their own as hostile. They instituted not only their own court system, but they also took over local authority functions, creating, therefore, their own ministries and local police forces. This implied a brutal dictatorship over towns and cities.36 Other Salafist armed groups took different approaches: the Nusra Front and its successor organisations wanted to create forms of “Islamic” government in territories under their control but were prepared to be more pragmatic in the process of achieving it.

The Kurdish micro-state of AANES offers an important contrast when considering alternative forms of governance. It is crucial to recognise the importance of solidarity with the Kurdish struggle for national liberation while at the same time pointing to the enormous contradictions emerging as a consequence of the military and political strategies of its leaders. The denial of Kurdish aspirations to statehood as a result of the division of Kurdish populations between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran in the early 20th century and the racist wars and repression conducted by the ruling classes of all of these states against the Kurdish people demands unconditional solidarity from socialists for Kurdish struggles against oppression. Yet, the experience of AANES underscores, once again, that attempting to bargain with these states by playing them off against each other—or securing the support of the US by offering a military alliance—does not map out a route to genuine liberation. Instead, such strategies, even if they may provide temporary relief from the threat of repression, always risk the appropriation of the Kurdish movement for imperialist ends and have increasingly involved risks of Kurdish parties becoming complicit in oppression of vulnerable populations themselves.37

The key point of difference separating the AANES experience from the other examples of rebel governance in Syria is that in the Kurdish-majority regions of the northeast, there was a pre-existing well-organised political and military movement capable of asserting control over the territory. In the other examples above, alternatives to the Ba’athist state emerged organically and chaotically from the bottom-up. The Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Kurdish party linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is largely based in Turkey, had been founded in 2003 and enjoyed significant support among Kurdish populations in the northeastern and northwestern governorates of Syria. The PYD could build on decades of resistance to enforced “Arabisation” policies and attempts to repress Kurdish culture.

Regime forces withdrew from large sections of the northeast in 2011, and the PYD’s military forces, the People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel; YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin; YPJ), took over. They were able to create a new administration that, while formally aspiring to “autonomy” within a future federalised Syria, in effect functioned as an independent state. The model of government practiced by the Kurdish movement in Syria included many examples of popular participation. Women played significant roles in political administration and military leadership, and space for political critique and debate was far larger than elsewhere. Yet, decision-making was the result of the fusion of political and military power at the top of the movement, despite formal adoption of a language referencing socialist and anarchist thought.38

Shifts in regional and global dynamics of imperialism

Syria was not the only state targeted by this strategy; Turkey was also targeted. To strengthen its hand in negotiations with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies, the PKK leadership attempted to use the military success of the SDF and leveraged its alliance with the US in fighting IS.39 However, the SDF’s leaders also built on their experience of governing and defending AANES in order to negotiate a deal to enter the post-Assad Syrian state without giving up on the autonomy achieved by strength of arms. Turkish intervention in Syria therefore illustrates how the regional powers also contributed to the emergence of this complex field of competing micro-states in multiple ways. In an effort to weaken Kurdish control over areas along the Turkish border, Turkey’s rulers sponsored various militias under the banner of the “Syrian National Army” (SNA) and helped them create local administrations. These flew the Turkish flag alongside the Syrian rebel banner, used the Turkish lira as currency and used Turkish as a language of government alongside Arabic.40 The SNA’s militias were engaged in smuggling, extortion, kidnapping and generally brutalised local populations.41

As a result of the massive movement of Syrian refugees across the northern border, more than a decade of war in northern Syria reshaped Turkish society from within. Millions of Syrians fled to Turkey, where they formed a new layer within the working class and poor. Turkish factory owners were among the beneficiaries of this source of cheap and vulnerable labour, even as the ruling party and its right-wing allies engaged in racist scapegoating of Syrian refugees. However, the Turkish ruling class, like other regional and global powers, was not simply “sucked in” to the Syrian quagmire. Rather, Erdoğan’s moves within Syria also reflected a changing balance of power between the regional states and the intensifying competition between them. In Erdoğan’s case, desire to keep up with regional rivals was expressed in ambitious foreign policies, including the Mavi Vatan (Blue Homeland) maritime strategy, the Turkish intervention in Libya and increased interest in the oil and gas resources of the Eastern Mediterranean.42

The growing agency and activity of regional powers in the Middle East take place in the context of changing dynamics of competition between the biggest capitalist states at a global level. 43 A key structuring feature of this polycrisis at a global level is the interaction between the decline of the US as the global state system’s paramount power and the exhaustion of the neoliberal paradigm for managing capitalism, which has been dominant since the 1970s. This interaction is not an accident: the US ruling class and its allies’ adoption of neoliberal policies had the dual effect of temporarily restoring their profitability after the collapse of the postwar boom and speeding up the slow-motion death of the Soviet Union, the US’s nearest rival. The process of generalisation of the neoliberal model was both consequence and cause of the centrality of the US within global capitalism; the mechanisms of enforcement were located at the intersections between soft and hard aspects of US power. Each turning point in the collapse of the old paradigm and the consolidation of a new one was marked by swift alternations between levers of economic and military intervention. The 1991 US-led invasion of Iraq, which initially restored confidence in US military power through tactics of “shock and awe”, was followed rapidly by the roll-out of structural adjustment programmes designed to apply shock therapy in the economic sphere.

Within the context of the Middle East, however, there were specific regional dynamics at play. These included the catastrophic military and political defeat experienced by the US in Iraq after the 2003 occupation. The insurgency in Iraq incubated Syrian armed groups, including the Nusra Front. Just as significant was the growing influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran within Iraq, part of the gradual recovery of the Iranian regime after its defeat at the hands of Iraq. This, in turn, helped to cement the Syrian regime as a node in the “Axis of Resistance”, an alliance of states and armed groups opposed to the US and Israel, led by Iran and also consisting of Hezbollah, Iraqi Islamist movements, the Houthi movement in Yemen and Hamas. While the focus of the “Axis of Resistance” was meant to be military and political support for the Palestinian armed resistance, the Assad regime was able to rely on several of its members—including Iran, Hezbollah and Iraqi militias—in its battle with Syrian opposition forces. By contrast, Hamas faced severe repression by the Assad regime in revenge for the movement’s declaration of solidarity with the popular revolution in February 2012.

The relative constraints on US military action within the Middle East after the disastrous intervention in Iraq also created space for more expansionist policies by Israel. The deep integration of Israel’s hi-tech sector into the US military-industrial complex means that the state plays a more central role in the structure of US imperialism in the region than other allies of the US.44 Pressures within the Israeli ruling class to find a new paradigm for managing the Palestinian population under its control within historic Palestine had been building up for several years before 7 October 2023. The major problem facing Israel’s governments, across the whole of the Zionist movement, was that the apartheid system they had constructed—reliant on co-opting the historic Palestinian leadership of the PLO to run a truncated statelet in the West Bank—could not erase the Palestinian national movement. This failure was not simply about Hamas’s continued build-up of military capacity (catching Israeli forces off-guard with catastrophic results in October 2023) but also about varied forms of political resistance. This was demonstrated by the powerful wave of protests in May 2021, which spread within the Palestinian communities inside the territories seized at the creation of the Israeli state in 1948.45

The scale of Israel’s genocidal onslaught and acts of ethnic cleansing are only comparable to the events of the Nakba in 1947-8 and are likely to have similarly long-lasting effects on the states of the wider region. Despite the horror of the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza, and the expansion of Israeli military control in South Lebanon and Southern Syria following offensives between October and December 2024, the outcomes of this process will not automatically benefit Israel. Hamas’s ability to maintain its political and military organisation in Gaza, even if in a weakened form, points to the difficulty for any occupying power in overcoming armed resistance groups deeply rooted in their societies.46 An expanding and entrenched Israeli presence in the Golan Heights can mobilise the farmers and villagers of Quneitra against the occupation and likewise has the potential to develop its own logics of struggle.47

A recovery of working-class agency?

It is difficult to overstate the levels of destruction inflicted on Syria over the period of counter-revolution and civil war. The regime’s revenge on the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk, which it turned into a wasteland of splintered concrete and dust on a scale similar to the Israeli destruction of Gaza, is one example. Displacement, poverty and social collapse shattered the daily life of tens of millions of Syrians. The rebel-held enclave of Idlib gathered hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps but was reliant on UN aid to survive.

Yet, the years of stalemate between the warring parties also created the conditions for the partial revival of normal life and the rebuilding of shattered economies. Patrick Haenni conveys a fascinating account of this process in Idlib, where the leadership of HTS was involved in building up the economy, legal system and political structures of the Salvation Government.48 This included pragmatic compromises over questions of when and how to apply religious doctrines. Several HTS leaders invested in new shopping malls in Idlib (one of the most popular was called Disneyland), which created opportunities for mixing between men and women, smoking and listening to music. Another crucial aspect of the rise of HTS and other military forces associated with the micro-states is the embedding of their leaders in both “disaster capitalist” war economy sectors—as providers of mercenary services, construction magnates, logistics specialists and merchants (dealing in both licit and illicit goods)—and as beneficiaries of “peacetime” reconstruction.49

The pause in active conflict also created spaces for the revival of popular organising from below. One significant set of examples comes from the southern governorate of Deraa. The presidential elections of 2021 were met with a governorate-wide general strike.50 The rising cost of living triggered mass protests including large mobilisations in August 2023.51 A banner carried by protestors in Deraa summed up the mood: “Russia has the port, America has the oil, Iran has the border crossings, the gangsters have the bank and we’ve got each other”.52

A reviving class struggle in the form of strikes by teachers and other public sector workers was another remarkable feature of the years before the collapse of the regime in December 2024. These were concentrated in the areas outside regime control as organising openly within regime-controlled Syria remained very difficult, although there were examples of other strikes and demonstrations, for example in Tartous in July 2021.53 Although modest in scope, the waves of strikes led by teachers between 2021 and 2023 pointed to the potential to rebuild workers’ self-confidence. Teachers who organised strikes in the HTS-dominated Idlib region and in Western Aleppo were explicit that they were demanding to be paid for their work, after spending years as volunteers.54 In March 2022, a “Dignity Strike” by teachers in Deir Ezzor shut 470 out of 600 schools and involved 5,000 strikers, while 1,500 teachers and 200 schools took part in the same action in Hassakah.55 Some of these strike waves directly confronted the logic of war and militarisation. Hundreds of teachers in Raqqa went on strike against conscription into the SDF in March 2021, while teachers in the countryside east of Aleppo walked out to demand that Turkish-affiliated militias gave up control of school buildings. 56 Previous teachers’ protests against HTS and the Syrian Salvation Government sparked other demonstrations by university students, cleaning workers and media workers. Teachers’ demands on this occasion were not just for higher wages but also for free elections to an independent teachers’ union.57

The degree to which the same pattern of strikes resurfaced in town after town, despite the fractured sovereignties of the constantly shifting frontlines of the micro-states, is a powerful reminder of how the working class constantly remakes itself in struggle. Teachers in areas changing hands between militias affiliated with Turkey and the SDF carried on organising strikes with the same demands, regardless of whose flag was flying over the local town hall.

Assadism without Assad? HTS in power

Social protest from below had not spread to regime-controlled areas in an organised and coordinated way before the HTS-led offensive that toppled the regime. This began as a military operation, probably with limited aims but quickly developing enormous political momentum as crisis unravelled the top and bottom of the repressive apparatus of the Ba’athist state. An interview with Eyad, a conscript serving at the time of the collapse of the regime, gives a glimpse of the disintegrating morale within the army:

As soldiers we were convinced that the regime would collapse so we didn’t leave our camps, while in fact the officers left the base about a week before and went home. There was no such thing as an army when the regime fell.58

As HTS and its allies moved towards the capital, protesters were starting to take to the streets in some areas—in the south, for example, from where fighters made it to Damascus before HTS.59 “The popular uprising and mobilisation was what drove the battle and increased its pace”, a military commander of the southern opposition told Syria Direct.60 Yet, within regime-controlled areas, there was also a sense of shock and fear as well as hope: armed factions patrolled the streets and sometimes engaged in sectarian abuse of Alawite and Ismaili religious minorities.61

HTS and its allies established control of the top of the state apparatus and lobbied the US and European Union (EU) in an effort to end the proscription of HTS, potentially unlocking access to loans and aid for reconstruction. Yet, they also kept their options open, with al-Sharaa initiating a dialogue with Russian president Vladimir Putin, who facilitated the transfer of Syrian bank notes from Russia to the Syrian Central Bank, continuing an arrangement in place for several years before the fall of Assad.62 The Russian state’s relative friendliness towards the men who toppled their long-time ally is connected to the issue of Russia’s naval and air bases at Tartus and Hmeimim. 63

Initially, al-Sharaa took a non-confrontational attitude toward Israel, despite the aggressive expansion of Israeli occupation. This has included the seizure of Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon) and huge bombing raids, which destroyed much of the Ba’athist regime’s armoury in early December 2024. Months after Assad’s departure, Israeli air strikes were still pounding military sites inside Syria.64 The argument that HTS’s rise was “directly curated” by Israel and the US does not hold up to serious scrutiny.65 Israel’s leaders have made it very clear that they see both dangers and opportunities in the current situation. The presence of Israeli occupying troops beyond the 1974 armistice lines provides opportunities to extend their influence across the whole of southern Syria and the creation of a kind of “protectorate” bringing the Druze communities of the region into Israel’s orbit, despite the strong opposition of Syrian Druze leaders to this plan.66 This would, however, risk repeating the experience of southern Lebanon following the Israeli invasion of Beirut, which ended in humiliating withdrawal in the face of an insurgency led by Hezbollah. Israeli overtures to the Kurdish movement in northeast Syria have also increased in recent months.67 The elements of continuity in the new Syrian’s regime’s approach to dealing with regional and global powers are not hard to see. Just as both Assads, father and son, al-Sharaa is seeking a friendly regional sponsor—swapping Iran for Turkey—and manoeuvres between the US, EU and Russia while deferring conflict with Israel.

HTS’s approach to intervening within Syrian society also bears many traces of the recent past. The new regime launched an offensive against public sector workers under the cover of removing old regime supporters from their jobs. Large-scale purges of civil servants have been justified by the new government as removing up to 400,000 “ghost employees” from state payrolls. At the same time, the new regime is rolling out privatisation plans targeting state-owned companies.68 This is an intensification of processes that have been working their way out at the top of Syrian society for many decades, rather than reflecting a strong ideological commitment to neoliberalism.69

In these difficult circumstances, the modest revival of street protests and workers’ mobilisations challenging layoffs in the public sector are exceptionally important. Adil, a Syrian socialist activist, notes in an interview:

Struggles erupted with the fall of al-Assad and the reasons behind them have been multiplying. There have been demonstrations for women’s rights in Syria, driven by fear of oppression and extremist government. There have also been demonstrations demanding transitional justice and for investigation of the cases of missing detainees and those forcibly disappeared which the current authorities have been neglecting.70

The confidence of traditionalist and conservative Islamist currents to enforce reactionary ideas about policing women’s dress and role in public life has risen as a result of HTS’s military victory, but the disruption of the state’s police apparatus has created a space to resist this on the streets. Likewise, attacks on LGBT+ people have also triggered protests and a public solidarity campaign.71

Organised demonstrations by workers demanding an end to the mass purge of government jobs began on 15 February 2025 and brought protesters out onto the streets of Damascus, Latakia, Suwayda, Aleppo, Tartus and Homs. A new workers’ coordinating committee has been set up to push forward this campaign and lay the groundwork for the revival of independent unions.72 During its first days in power, the new government negotiated with religious and community leaders, offering reassurance, for example, that religious minorities’ ceremonies and rituals would be protected. However, as Hassan Shahin and Alain Alameddine point out, such an approach easily becomes a sectarian mechanism for managing Syrian society as an interlocking set of “components” (hermetically-sealed religious or ethnic communities) whose members engage with the state primarily through their group identity, rather than as equal citizens.73 Shahin and Alameddine argue that building a democratic state will require a clear challenge to the logic of identity politics, including to Israel:

[T]he Zionist project…is based on a claim of establishing “Jewish national rights” while fueling sectarian fragmentation around it. In other words, there is an urgent need for a secular project in every sense of the word, that is, a project that respects a person’s religious and ethnic background without reducing people to that identity and views society as a group of citizens and not as sects.74

Assadism dealt with Syrians through the prism of their sectarian and ethnic identities while the different segments of the ruling class collaborated in looting the country’s wealth. There remains the huge danger that elements within the new regime and opponents loyal to the old order will weaponise sectarianism in order to recruit supporters to their side. In early March 2025, the spectre of civil war hovered again over the largely Alawite coastal regions as incidents of sectarian violence escalated in the context of increasing clashes between armed groups loyal to the old regime and the new government’s troops. According to Syrian human rights organisations, these included massacres of potentially thousands of civilians by members of the new regime’s security apparatus. Figures associated with HTS were filmed in mosques around the country inciting crowds to travel to the coast in support of the new regime’s forces.75 The events of March 2025 underline the new regime’s weakness and internal instability as much as they highlight the powerful attraction of sectarianism as a mobilising ideology for what some of the armed groups operating under HTS’s umbrella regard as the unfinished business of civil war. The possible outcome could be a devastating dynamic of military competition to parcel out state resources, territory and populations, justified by sectarian rhetoric to recruit ordinary people for atrocities against their neighbours and fellow citizens.

The fragility of the regime’s apparatus of fear revealed during the final ten days of Assad’s rule will long haunt autocrats around the region, but also the state machine’s new masters. Building workers’ confidence and capacity to take action for their own interests and those of their class is essential. Although embryonic in form, the modest wave of trade unionists’ protests against the mass sackings of government workers in February and March 2025 points to possibilities of class unity as it mobilised demonstrations across the whole of the country with the same slogans and demands. On their own, such initiatives will not be sufficient to stop the engines of communal conflict—that requires also direct political intervention to challenge sectarianism. The generalisation and development of social struggles is the only way to create momentum towards class unity from below, rather than driving towards civil war. The realisation of liberal aspirations for a state that treats Syrians as citizens instead of as members of sectarian communities, will not depend on the goodwill of the “international community” or interventions by regional powers. It will depend on the degree of self-organisation and class consciousness of Syrian workers and wider layers of the country’s poor majority.

Anne Alexander is the author of Revolution is the Choice of the People: Crisis and Revolt in the Middle East and North Africa (Bookmarks, 2022). She is a founder member of MENA Solidarity Network, the co-editor of Middle East Solidarity and a member of the University and College Union.

Notes