I know a person from Syria who runs a café in Dorchester. They left before the war came — they did not see it, only heard it, the way you hear something terrible happening to someone you love from very far away. After everything that happened they still hope for peace — which tells you something that no geopolitical analyst can quite tell you, which is what it feels like to have lost something from very far away and still want it to turn out well.
I had been hearing about Syria from the other direction — from people who talk about head-choppers and proxy wars and outside actors pulling strings. They are not wrong. But this person is more qualified than they are.
Syria is a country that outside powers have been rearranging since before most of us were born. The first rearrangement was the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 — a secret deal between Britain and France to carve up the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire between themselves, drawn up while the British were simultaneously promising the Arabs independence in exchange for rising up against the Ottomans. Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot sat down with a map and drew lines that made sense to them. The people living on those lines were not consulted.
France got Syria and Lebanon. Their strategy for keeping it was straightforward: divide and rule. They deliberately elevated minority communities — particularly the Alawites and Christians — into administrative and military positions, creating a class of people whose privilege depended on French protection and who therefore had every reason to fear what Arab nationalist majority rule might bring. The Alawites had historically been a poor, marginalised rural people, looked down upon by the Sunni majority — and not only politically. Alawite theology is a hybrid of Shia Islam, Christianity, and older Syrian traditions. They celebrate Christmas, drink wine, and keep their core doctrines secret. Orthodox Sunni scholars, from the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya onward, have ruled that Alawites are not properly Muslims at all — apostates at best, heretics at worst. The hardline Gulf position has never fully departed from this view. The French recruited them heavily into the military. They were useful. When France finally left in 1946, the Alawites had a disproportionate foothold in the officer corps — and the sectarian resentments that the French had carefully cultivated were left behind like a slow fuse.
What looks like ancient hatred is often quite recent engineering.
In 1970 Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite air force general, seized power in a coup. The minority was now running the country — a ten percent community ruling a seventy percent Sunni majority, with Kurds, Christians, Druze and others making up the rest. It should not have worked. It worked for fifty years. It worked because the other minorities — the Christians, the Druze, the Kurds — calculated that Alawite rule, however brutal, was preferable to what a Sunni Islamist government might do to them. He may have been a monster, but he was a monster who kept the lid on. The lid stayed on through torture, disappearances, and chemical weapons used on his own people. This is not a comfortable fact. It is still a fact.
Then came the pipeline. In 2009, Qatar proposed a gas pipeline running from its vast North Field reserves through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria to Turkey and on to Europe — a project that would have broken Russia's stranglehold on European gas supplies. Assad vetoed it, reportedly at Moscow's request. Whether this pipeline was the secret cause of everything that followed is disputed — serious scholars point out that Western covert action against Syria had begun years earlier, and that the pipeline story may be too neat to be true. But within forty-eight hours of Assad falling in December 2024, the Turkish energy minister was publicly calling for the pipeline to be revived. Whatever the causes, the beneficiaries were not slow to show themselves.
The outside actors did not wait. Qatar and Saudi Arabia began funding and arming opposition factions within months of the 2011 uprising — backing different groups, often working against each other, but united in wanting Assad gone. That the Alawites running Syria were regarded by the most extreme Gulf donors as not properly Muslim at all — as apostates whose deaths required no great justification — was not incidental to the speed and recklessness of the funding. Sectarian contempt and geopolitical interest arrived together. Turkey opened its borders and let the weapons flow. Iran moved in the opposite direction, sending Revolutionary Guard advisers almost immediately and Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon from 2012 onwards, determined that Assad would not fall. Russia had always backed Assad diplomatically, but in September 2015 began direct military intervention — airstrikes ostensibly aimed at ISIS but falling mostly on other opposition groups. The United States worked covertly through the CIA from at least 2012, backing selected rebel factions. Every significant regional and global power had a stake, a proxy, and a cheque book. The Syrian people had a war.
When the end came it took eleven days. That requires some explanation. The Assad regime had not been defeated so much as it had already rotted from the inside. The regular Syrian army had been hollowed out over decades — Assad preferred to rely on elite units packed with loyal Alawites and Iranian-backed militias rather than an army that might one day turn on him. When those props were no longer there, ordinary conscripts, unpaid and demoralised, simply went home. Iran had been badly degraded by Israeli strikes in Lebanon in 2024 and could no longer provide the backbone it once had. Hezbollah was licking its wounds. Russia was in Ukraine. Nobody came. HTS, meanwhile, had spent years quietly building something that actually functioned in Idlib — a disciplined military force and the skeleton of a government. When they moved, they were pushing against a door that was already open. The eleven days were not a conquest. They were a confirmation.
It is worth pausing on who actually won. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — HTS — the group that now governs Syria, grew out of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda's Syrian franchise. Its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, was on the United States' terrorist list until the week Assad fell. Western governments had spent years bombing his organisation. Then he took Damascus, and within weeks the diplomatic delegations began arriving. Sanctions were lifted. Hands were shaken. The head-choppers of 2013 became the cautious reformers of 2025. Nothing had necessarily changed except the geopolitical convenience. Whose sonofabitch is HTS? Primarily Turkey's — Erdoğan backed them throughout and is now the dominant outside power in Syria, with pipeline dreams and reconstruction contracts to show for it. Qatar's too. And now, with only a little embarrassment, the West's. The speed of the rehabilitation tells you everything about what the intervention was always really for. It was not for the Syrian people. It was never for the Syrian people.
The proof arrived quickly, in the form of the people Assad had protected, however brutally, and who now had nobody.
In March 2025, three months after Assad fell, government-aligned forces carried out massacres in the Alawite coastal heartlands — Latakia and Tartus, the communities from which Assad had drawn his inner circle. More than fifteen hundred people were killed. The new government called it counter-terrorism. It looked like revenge. The Alawites had made a calculation for fifty years — that sheltering under a monster was better than the alternative. They had now discovered what the alternative was. The West, which had spent years demanding Assad go, said little. The rehabilitation of HTS required not looking too hard at what HTS was doing once it had won.
The Druze are a different story, and a more complicated one. About seven hundred thousand of them live in Syria, concentrated in the southern province of Suwayda — a community that had largely sat out the civil war, refusing to fight for Assad but unwilling to join rebels they did not trust. When Assad fell, Suwayda became a power vacuum. The new government in Damascus could not control it. What filled the gap was a tangle of Druze armed factions, Captagon smuggling networks left over from the Assad era, and Israeli strategic interest: there is a large Druze population inside Israel, many of whom serve in the IDF, and Israel decided early on that it had a duty of solidarity. Netanyahu struck Syrian military positions to stop Damascus sending forces into Suwayda. Israel wanted a demilitarised buffer on its border, which meant, in practice, an area Damascus could not govern.
In July 2025 it boiled over. A Druze vegetable vendor was kidnapped and tortured by Bedouin tribesmen on the Damascus highway. In the reprisals and counter-reprisals that followed, Druze militias ambushed and killed Syrian army soldiers; government-aligned forces were accused of executing Druze civilians. More than a thousand people died. Israel bombed Syrian military convoys and struck targets in Damascus itself. The province remained ungoverned and ungovernable.
Jordan's response was to bomb it too — but for different reasons. The Captagon trade that flourished under Assad did not disappear when Assad did. The factories and smuggling routes in Suwayda were still running, still pushing cheap amphetamines south across the Jordanian border. Jordan has been striking these networks for years. But Jordanian commentators were also clear about the second message: that Israel's backing of the Druze was effectively creating a separatist mini-state on Jordan's border, and Amman was not going to accept it quietly. Three outside powers — Israel, Jordan, Damascus — all now operating in the same small province, for entirely different reasons, while the people who live there get bombed from multiple directions. Syria's south is not post-war. It is a different war.
In the north and east, the Kurds of Rojava had built something that nobody expected: a functioning autonomous region, with its own government, its own courts, schools taught in Kurdish for the first time in decades, and a military — the Syrian Democratic Forces — that the United States used to defeat ISIS. The SDF did the dying. American special forces provided air cover and intelligence. Between 2015 and 2019, the Kurds lost eleven thousand fighters driving the Islamic State out of its territory. When ISIS was broken, the Americans pulled back. Trump had announced the withdrawal once before, in 2019, and the Turks moved in within days. The Kurds had learned not to trust the guarantee.
After Assad fell, Rojava's position became impossible. Turkey — which has fought a war against the PKK for decades and regards the SDF as simply PKK by another name — demanded that the new Damascus government dissolve the autonomous region. Al-Sharaa, whose movement Turkey had backed and armed, obliged. In January 2026, Syrian transitional government forces attacked Kurdish neighbourhoods in Aleppo, then swept east through Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. The SDF was forced to surrender all territory west of the Euphrates. In the Kurdish heartlands people came out into the streets of Qamishli armed with whatever they had. Elderly men who could not walk sat in their beds with rifles. The United States, under Trump, made clear it would not intervene. The Kurds had served their purpose.
The pattern is consistent. Every outside power that entered Syria — Russia, Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States — entered for reasons that had nothing to do with the Syrian people and left, or is leaving, with those reasons either satisfied or abandoned but with the Syrian people still paying the bill. The Alawites sheltered a monster and are now being killed for it. The Druze refused to take sides and are now being bombed by three armies simultaneously. The Kurds fought the West's enemy and are being handed to their own. HTS, al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, runs the government and hosts diplomatic receptions. The pipeline question is back on the table. The arms dealers are moving on.
A person from Syria who runs a café in Dorchester told me, not long ago, that they hoped things were going to get better now. They had left before the war came — they did not see it, only heard it, the way you hear something terrible happening to someone you love from very far away. After everything that was done to Syria, and everything it was done for, that sentence is either the most naïve thing you can say or the most dignified. I have decided it is the most dignified.
David Partridge, Bridport. mail@stpd.net · stpd.net
This site is updated when something stupid needs saying. Started February 2026. For what might actually work, see snsbl.org