Syria: The Balkan scenario
First published at NLR Sidecar.
Syria’s future is uncertain following the ouster of Bashar al-Assad in a rebel blitzkrieg earlier this month. While millions are rightly celebrating the dictator’s fall, larger powers — most notably the US, Turkey and Israel — are vying to influence the new political settlement. The Salafist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has captured the central government, prompting tens of thousands of Shiites and other religious minorities to flee the country; Alawites in coastal regions are fearing retribution from the incoming regime; and Kurdish groups in the northeast are facing an onslaught from Turkish-backed militias. In this fraught landscape, one of the most plausible scenarios is a 21st-century version of the fate that befell the former Yugoslavia. There, state collapse paved the way for inter-ethnic conflict, which culminated in the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosniaks and the ultimate division of the erstwhile socialist federation along ethnic lines. Neoliberal structural reforms meanwhile drove economic stagnation, unemployment and depopulation, to the benefit of local and international elites.
Yugoslav historian Andrej Grubačić rejects the simple use of the term ‘balkanization’ to describe this process, since it implies an essentialist nativism which renders the peoples of the Balkan peninsula incapable of peaceful co-existence. Instead, he insists that this was a matter of ‘balkanization from above’: a Western-sponsored programme of population transfers and ‘humanitarian interventions’ which deepened regional enmities by creating a cluster of ethnic statelets. This gave rise to a model of ‘stabilitocracy’, in which Balkan strongmen achieved relative peace by ruling with an iron fist, while opening their economies to trade from both East and West. The EU helped to prop up these repressive governments, keeping them in perpetual subservience while denying them any real prospect of accession to the bloc.
Although the contexts vary, there is nothing uniquely Balkan about this model. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, which this year celebrated a quarter-century on the waiting-list for EU membership, is similarly allowed to repress the Kurdish minority within and beyond its borders as a quid pro quo for keeping the lid on millions of Syrian refugees and other migrants. Without stretching the analogy too far, one could view Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia as other paragons of ‘stability’, whose close ties to the West are used to whitewash their exclusionary identitarian regimes.
Today, that same buzzword is on the lips of Syria’s leaders. To safeguard the country’s putative stability, they are pursuing a policy of non-aggression toward the Israeli troops who are occupying fresh swathes of the south. They are pivoting away from Russia — suggesting it should withdraw troops formerly stationed in Syria in support of al-Assad — and towards Western powers, reestablishing diplomatic ties with the latter and lobbying effectively for sanctions relief. When the transitional Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir ran the HTS quasi-state in Idlib, between January and December 2024, he introduced a package of ‘modernizing’ measures including e-governance technologies and liberal planning laws. Now, his government is touting a shift away from protectionism towards a free-market model: ending restrictive import controls and legalizing dollar trading, to the delight of international investors, who are predicting years-long double-digit GDP growth. The regime is also promising to respect religious minorities, although it is taken for granted that they will still to be treated as second-class citizens.
As in the Balkans, though, dreams of neoliberal utopia are likely to be deflated. Under HTS, Idlib was a textbook case of crony capitalism: a monopoly system in which the political elite dominated oil imports, currency exchanges, the food market and even shopping malls, while cracking down on rival profiteers or political dissidents. The likelihood is that this system will now be scaled up to Syria at large, with the coterie around Jolani profiting from reconstruction funds while the state’s privatization agenda lines the pockets of regime-affiliated businessmen (as we saw during the fire-sale of public assets under Assad).
In this sense, HTS demonstrates the accommodation that has been forged between militant Islam and neoliberal economics. As Asef Bayat has argued, the socially-committed Islamism of the 1960s and 70s, which evolved in elective affinity with the communist movement, could not survive the transition to the post-Cold War era. It was gradually supplanted by a more identitarian strain which combined conservativism and sectarianism on the one hand with neoliberalism and globalism on the other. In the Western Balkans, ethnic or religious identity similarly served as a cover for the lack of meaningful social provision by the state. Autocrats often fanned populist anti-Western sentiment to distract their base from economic hardship, while at the same time implementing Western-backed neoliberal reforms.
Of course, there are clear discontinuities between US policy in the triumphalist 1990s and its approach to the present conjuncture. Following a period of maximalist interventionism, the hegemon’s appetite for bombing campaigns directly targeting its state rivals began to wane. The ‘shock and awe’ air wars under Clinton and Bush were replaced by an increasing reliance on diverse constellations of state and non-state proxies, from the Balkans to the Middle East. Under Obama, the Timber Sycamore and Train and Equip operations funneled resources to Syria’s so-called ‘moderate rebels’ but achieved few significant blows against Assad, with US-backed fighters rapidly overrun by HTS’s predecessor organization, Jabhat al-Nusra. Meanwhile, a US-led coalition lent support to the military wing of the Kurdish-led federation known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES) in the course of their war against ISIS. As ISIS was defeated, the number of declared US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria dwindled from tens of thousands to a mere 20 in 2022, and the US grew more reliant on Turkey and Israel to enforce its regional interests. It was therefore not the US air campaign, but rather the punishing blows inflicted by Israel on Assad’s key allies — Iran and Hezbollah — which paved the way for HTS to storm Damascus.
How will the US respond to the new situation on the ground? Its presence in the north of the country was always justified by citing the ISIS threat, but it had the additional function of preventing Iran from establishing a zone of contiguous influence from Tehran to the Mediterranean. Assad’s fall may have changed that calculus. Over the past two weeks, pro-Iranian forces have scattered, while Turkish-backed militias have advanced through DAANES territory west of the Euphrates and are hoping to finish the job in those eastern regions where the US is still stationed. Whether or not the incoming US administration will grant Turkey permission to extend its occupation throughout DAANES territory remains to be seen. The US had long reassured Ankara that its collaboration with the militant Kurdish movement was ‘temporary, transactional and tactical’. Trump tried to withdraw US troops in 2019, opening the door to a devastating Turkish invasion which killed hundreds and displaced hundreds of thousands. He has recently asserted that the US should have ‘nothing to do’ with Syria, although the neocons in his cabinet may beg to differ.
On its own, a US withdrawal would not allow Syrians to determine their fate. It is more likely to open up a new phase of the conflict, with US boots on the ground giving way to balkanization from above. As part of this process, larger powers may rely on regional stabilitocrats to do their dirty work for them — liquidating the Kurdish-led federation and dividing Syria between Israel, HTS, Turkey. With Russia reportedly hoping to maintain military bases on the Alawite Mediterranean seaboard and perhaps welcome the new Syria into the BRICs, Jolani might even be able to repeat the Western Balkan trick of playing Moscow and Brussels against one another. As in the Western Balkans, however, the outcome of this approach will likely be further inter-ethnic bloodshed. There will be calls to resolve it through population transfers, breaking up mixed communities which have survived the past thirteen years of civil war – and playing into the hands of sectarians like Jolani.
The trauma that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia meant that there was no realistic prospect for ‘balkanisation from below’, drawing on the region’s history of inter-ethnic cooperation to establish a new, pluralist federation. In Syria, however, DAANES’s inter-ethnic federation of some four million people — in which left-wing Kurdish militants and conservative Arab groupings peacefully coexist — may point to a possible way forward. HTS and DAANES have for the most part avoided conflict during the past fortnight of dynamic territorial changes. Might popular pressure forge some division of power between them? The chances are slim, and HTS’s neoliberal pragmatism likely means that it will choose the path of least resistance: allowing the West’s authoritarian regional partners to become the overlords of a carved-up Syria, and putting the very survival of the Kurdish statelet in question. But at this point, nothing is predestined.