Syria: Why the fall of the Assad regime is also a defeat for France

What nerve it took for France’s deputy representative to the United Nations to deliver such a pretentious speech and so far from reality. “For thirteen years, France has stood alongside the Syrian people in their fight for freedom and against barbarism. It has continued and continues to support the Syrian political opposition, which has a central role to play in the political transition underway in Damascus. France will continue to stand alongside the Syrian people in this phase of hope which is opening up for them » said Jay Dharmadhikari before the Security Council on December 17.

Did France really support the Syrian people?

Has France really stood alongside the Syrian people over the past 13 years? The French representative’s speech ignores the many sudden changes that French diplomacy has experienced depending on the twists and turns of the situation on the ground and depending on the perfidious game of the great powers in the conflict.

Faced with the peaceful revolution of the Syrian people in 2011, France, like the other Western powers, condemned the repression and demanded democratic reforms but instead of listening to the pulses emanating from Syrian society, it tried to spare the goat and the cabbage.

And when the regime’s savage repression pushed insurgents to take up arms, Western powers, including France, began to arm the FSA (Free Syrian Army made up mainly of defectors from the regime).

Worse, Western intelligence services, including the French services, have encouraged and helped armed Islamist groups supported by Turkey and the Gulf petromonarchies.

But when things started to get out of hand, the Western powers changed their tune. The war against Al Qaeda and the “Islamic State” having become the priority, Western services gave a new reprieve to the Syrian regime and began to arm the Kurdish militias in the north-east of the country.

Better still, these same services showed a curious complacency in the face of the intervention of Lebanese Hezbollah and other Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alongside the Assad regime.

Russia’s intervention in 2015, which saved – for a time – the Syrian regime – as part of a deal with the United States and Israel, saw Europe and France, in particular, completely change diplomatic line. The fight against terrorism was clearly worth all the compromises.

Even Russia’s war against Ukraine did not change their minds. The neutrality of the Assad regime in the face of the genocidal war waged by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023 has been another decisive factor in the complacent conduct of Western capitals, whose priority attachment to the security of Israel is known.

And to hell with human rights which have just curiously been summoned by Western capitals the day after the fall of the tyrant of Damascus!

Surprised and stunned, like most Western capitals, by the meteoric advance of the Syrian rebels who took the capital in less than two weeks and by the equally rapid fall of the Assad regime, Paris is seeking to get back on track.

But she will have difficulty finding the place she believes is hers in the region. Indeed, the fall of the Assad regime is also a blatant defeat for France.

The Assad regime, which ruled Syria with an iron fist using Arab nationalist rhetoric that never really worried Israel and its Western allies, was a military and clan regime that did not hesitate to rely on the Alawite minority (around 10% of the population) to perpetuate itself over the last five decades.

The policy of mandatory France: Divide and rule

The Alawite minority, long marginalized and persecuted in a predominantly Sunni cultural environment, took its revenge thanks to the policy of mandatory France which applied the old motto “divide and rule”.

From 1923, France created, on the ruins of Ottoman Syria, four distinct political entities: the State of Aleppo, the State of Damascus, the Alawite State and the State of Greater Lebanon (without forgetting the experience short-lived Druze state).

In this policy of fragmentation of the Syrian political space, France has of course favored the Alawites in Syria and the Maronite Christians in Lebanon. It is from this period that the mass entry of Alawites into the Syrian army formed by the mandatory power dates.

When Syria gained independence in 1946, the Alawites held a preponderant status within the army. To counter the Sunni majority, they will use the ideology and clandestine organization of a party which advocates a “secular” and “progressive” Arab nationalism, of course taking a lot of liberties with these qualifiers reduced on occasion. in empty slogans which could hide neither the clanism nor the terror erected as methods of government.

Today that this regime has fallen and the Syrian people can begin to hope to build a future without oppression and fear and where all Syrians can enjoy equal rights, France is discovering that there are minorities who must be protected .

Of course, in the context of the new Syria, the question of protecting individual and collective freedoms is fundamental and it will be up to Syrians to decide on the legal modalities guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens without discrimination.

But it is not by stoking interfaith and interethnic distrust and demonizing Sunni Islam, as France is doing, that the rights and freedoms of all Syrians will be respected.

Turkey now essential in Syria

Beyond the moral and political defeat of France, which sees the confessional system that it established a century ago shattered, France will also have to worry about its loss of influence in the face of another power that really has aces up its sleeve: Turkey.

The latest statement from Donald Trump, who recognized that it is Turkey which holds the keys to the situation in Syria after praising Erdogan, whose intelligence and strength of his army he praised, has without doubt doubt gave French leaders a cold sweat.

To redeem itself, what will France do? Will she continue to bet on the losing horse of minorities and FSA mercenaries? Or, to save its interests in the new Syria and in the region, will it accept for a time to swallow its Islamophobia and retrain its Islamologists and its Muslims in service as part of a new “great game” of which the DGSE has the secret?