The throne atop a thousand fault lines

Business Recorder

3 days ago

Old timers in the Levantine press are not surprised at all that Israel chose this time to strike deep inside Syria. They warned – while the rest of the world was still digesting Assad's sudden exit – that Ahmad al Sharaa and his throat-cutting, suicide-bombing jihadist buddies from al Qaeda and ISIS would waste no time in going after Syria's many minorities.
Also that nobody would blink when they massacre Alawis across the Mediterranean coastline around Latakia, the Assad family's home town – indeed there were hundreds of summary executions, also by 'men wearing shalwar qameez', according to surviving witnesses. But Israel would step in when the Druze come under attack because unlike Latakia, their base Sweida hugs the Golan Heights – exactly the area Israel has been looking to envelop and fortify for more than 50 years.
Yet they are wondering if Erdogan is surprised. It's out in the open now that he was equal partners with Israel and the US in the project to throw out Assad; Turkey provided the hardware and Israel gave intelligence like only Mossad can, and together with Uncle Sam's blessings they were able to install an uneducated Salafi jihadi extremist, who's openly called for war with west, ethnic cleansing of Muslim minorities, and the imposition of medieval law, as head of one of the most secular countries in the world.
It seems the half-century of Assad family rule made the world forget how quickly careers, and often lives, of Syrian sovereigns can come to an end. Hafez al Assad was the longest serving ruler of Syria since the Ummayad caliph Muawiya, after all. And Bashar's time at the top is second only to his. For a throne that has sat upon a thousand fault lines for millennia, such stats matter.
Apparently al Sharaa fled to Idlib, where the Turks have built him a fortress, when the Israelis hit the outer wall of the presidential palace, a minute after bombing substantial portions of the main defence ministry building. But what if he had been killed? Or, what if he's assassinated – a likelihood closer to the norm than the exception in thousands of years of Syrian history. Who'd his jihadi deputies call for the line of succession? Ankara, Tel Aviv, or Washington?
Deep in Robert Fisk's earliest works you'll find references to 'old man Hafez' predicting that Syria would never fall to an invader, it would implode. And while Hafez was an ice veined master of the merciless, zero-sum politics that alone ensures regime, and self, survival in Damascus, his son Bashar was not cut from the same cloth. So Hafez crushed all rebellion, negotiated with all stakeholders, and positioned Syria as such a critical power broker in the Middle East that US presidents from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton indulged him. But his son did not have the same instincts and, when push came to shove and outside help was not coming, he could no longer keep a lid on the implosion.
In a way the dynasty's fate was sealed when Bashar's elder brother Basil, Hafez's original heir apparent, died in a car crash in 1994. They say when Hafez was told he quietly withdrew from a big meeting room and howled so loudly that it echoed across Damascus. Years later, when Sharaa's men celebrated victory by desecrating his grave, they only proved him right.
Syria had imploded.
Now, with a mullah regime whose existence is so antithetical to the secular DNA of Syria counting on some countries keeping other countries and their influences from destroying it, how far is Syria from another implosion? If Sharaa is killed, or destabilised (as he is already), how long before Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese influences, suddenly deprived of their own leverage, fuel more fires?
Whatever happens, Israel's creeping ingress into Syria will increase, and the Jewish state will be the only clear winner in all this, even though its big plan, so masterfully implemented with the destruction of Hamas, wholesale eradication of Hezbollah's command structure, and the historic fall of Damascus, couldn't quite come full circle when it went for the jugular of the ayatollahs in Tehran.
Israel did want the regime in Iran to fall — that was the final piece, of course. And it might have, if not for Iran's shocking resistance in the war, which stalled the advance and forced a recalibration. How that particular endgame plays out remains to be seen.
But it is clear that what remains of Syrian statehood is held together by a militia in borrowed robes, propped up by foreign actors who have neither roots nor memory in this land. And as usual, when the foreign calculus shifts, so will the sands under their feet.
The throne of Damascus has always been a temporary seat – sometimes for kings, sometimes for clerics, sometimes for soldiers. Never for long. Because this land has never tolerated stillness. It lies at the edge of too many fault lines, pulls at too many empires, and sometimes collapses too easily under its own weight.
So once again Syria sleepwalks into implosion; and it won't be the last time. Just another turn in a cycle that's older than the countries now playing their moves on its board.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025