Some people went mad when Ahmed al-Sharaa (you might know him as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the commander of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the now de facto leader of Syria) refrained from shaking the hand of Annalena Baerbock, the foreign minister of Germany, when she visited Damascus this week.
Not shaking hands with a woman! Al-Sharaa is the same jihadist he always was!
Another story which fixates westerners: the bars in Damascus – the centrepieces of the Assad regime’s propaganda tours, where journalists and vloggers were made pleasantly drunk within earshot of concentration camps – do they still serve their favourite poison? If they don’t, my oh my, it’s a terrible sign…
Islamist law often means austere law
Every Syrian I have spoken to or whose words I have read cannot believe this is what the world wants to talk about. They are incredulous. The previous regime operated torture chambers for 50 years, it invaded Lebanon and assassinated its former prime minister. It killed a million in a civil war marked by the constant use of chemical weapons. Syrians liberated themselves. What does any of this have to do with the shaking or not of hands, the availability of Jack Daniel’s at the Four Seasons hotel?
But even if the issues on which journalists fixate are trivial, there are questions still to ask about the future shape of the Syrian government.
HTS has, in its day, fought rebel groups, the former regime, everybody. After it fell out with al-Qaeda, it drove AQ loyalists out of Syria. It split with the Islamic State and did its members in. There are stories of some activists, like the great reforming Raed Fares, who was killed by an unknown attacker in 2018– he had said things critical of HTS. Did one of its number kill him? So far, we don’t know.
When Bashar al-Assad fled, things were theoretically done by the book. The former prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali remained in office for a day or so after the flight of Assad, and was given HTS bodyguards. He handed over to a caretaker, Mohammed al-Bashir, who had been the prime minister of the Salvation Government backed by HTS in Idlib, in Syria’s north. They did it all with the appearances of legality.
Who are these men? Al-Bashir is, for a prime minister, quite young – he’s 41 – and he had been leader of the Salvation Government for less than a year. But the province of Idlib, which his people ran, despite being under siege from the south, under constant artillery and air bombardment, and having 3.6 million people crammed into space which before the war accommodated just over 1.5 million, was actually quite well run.
There was more electricity than much of regime-held Syria. Salaries were higher. Building and public works were being done. There were improvements to health care (Idlib handled the pandemic, for instance, far better than regime-held Syria). Hundreds of thousands of Syrians are already returning from neighbouring countries. They’re an industrious bunch. They tell passing TV cameras they’re home to rebuild.
Islamist law often means austere law and it can easily devolve, as it has done in Afghanistan, into gangsterism disguised as justice. The Taliban appears not to care at all about Afghanistan’s economy, if it can pursue its goal of squeezing women from every aspect of life. HTS, when it ruled Idlib, did not do these things. But it’s possible they might, now – although there’s no evidence for this so far.
We’ve heard a lot of claims about massacres of Christians. No evidence of that either. The people who spread these stories are mostly influencers and podcasters in the United States who appear to want these phantom mass-killings to happen for the benefit of their media careers.
Footage has emerged which the verification organisation Verify-Sy says depicts Shadi al-Waisi, caretaker minister of justice, overseeing the execution of a woman for adultery in Idlib several years ago, when he was an HTS judge. Many Syrians have already called for his dismissal. If he is soon out of office, this will speak volumes about how willing the new administration is to restrain harsh religion to appease foreigners and other factions in Syria. Just as al-Waisi still being in the job in a month would send precisely the opposite message.
No one knows what will happen in Syria in the four years the current caretaker government says it needs to hold elections. The French and German foreign ministers said that if sanctions are to be lifted on Syria, it will only be if HTS respects minority rights.
HTS, meanwhile, says that the militias will have to be disarmed, and local fighters absorbed into a new ministry of defence. The future is undefined.
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