Hold the champagne. Ugly and brutal as it was, the Assad regime may have been the lesser evil for Syria, the Middle East region and the rest of the world. The last time an extremist Sunni fighting force – called Islamic State (IS) – exerted control over large swathes of Syria and northern Iraq, their rule proved to be even more brutal and oppressive than the Taliban in Afghanistan. IS then became a global magnet for externists, and a springboard for anti-Western violence. People were killed in Parisian cafes and nightclubs by IS recruits.
As with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Islamic State’s original funding and training can be traced directly back to Saudi Arabia. Eventually, Islamic State were defeated – partly by Russian and US air power, but crucially, also by fighters from Hezbollah and Iran who (along with the Kurds) did most of the fighting (and dying) on the battlefield that finally defeated the would-be caliphate.
The West – dominated by the US-Israeli mindset – has never acknowledged the vital role played by Hezbollah and Iran in the defeat of Islamic State. Out of deference to Turkey, the West also quickly sold out the Kurds. Now, and thanks to the recent weakening of Hezbollah by Israel (who, besides bombing Lebanon, also targeted Iranian /Hezbollah positions inside Syria) the Sunni extremists in Syria have seized their chance, and have made a successful comeback. The West may come to regret this development.
No one will shed tears for Bashir al-Assad, now in exile in Russia. But this resurgence of the same ultra-violent, fanatically anti-Western forces of misogynist bigotry has to be another round of bad news for the Syrian people, the Middle East and the wider world.
The End Game
In the joint strategising of Saudi Arabia and Israel, the fall of Syria has always mainly been a means to an end. Their ultimate goal is the encirclement and destruction of the Shia theocracy in Iran. (Israel is not the only Middle Eastern country with enemies on its borders.) Under the tyrannical but relatively secular rule of the Assad dynasty, Syria served as a kind of buffer zone for Iran, protecting it somewhat from its Sunni enemies.
Hafez al-Assad, his son Bashir and much of the Assad regime’s key figures came from the Alawite minority, whose religion is a relatively liberal variant of Shia Islam, in which women are not required or even encouraged to wear the hijab. (The Houthis in Yemen belong to yet another branch of Shia Islam.) The fall of the al-Assad regime is likely to usher in a Taliban-like era of repression for Syrian women.
The main rebel force Hyat Tahir-al-Sham (HTS) is led by a former Al Qaeda fighter called Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, who used to be a close associate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State until he killed himself in October 2019 during a US raid on his stronghold in Idlib. At al-Baghdadi’s urging, al-Jawlani had broken with Al Qaeda in 2016 and formed the al-Nusra Front, which became a zealous and effective fighting force at the height of the Syrian civil war. HTS is the new name for the al-Nusra Front.
It was HTS that broke out of Idlib and led the offensive in Aleppo that quickly spread to other cities like Hama, Homs and now Damascus. Amid the celebrations at Assad’s downfall, it is worth keeping in mind that Hyat Tahir al-Sham is designated as a terrorist organisation by the UN, US, Turkey, and many other countries – including New Zealand. As the BBC reports:
For some time now, HTS has established its power base in the north-western province of Idlib where it is the de facto local administration, although its efforts towards legitimacy have been tarnished by alleged human rights abuses. It has also been involved in some bitter infighting with other groups.
Its ambitions beyond Idlib had become unclear. Since breaking with Al Qaeda, its goal has been limited to trying to establish fundamentalist Islamic rule in Syria rather than a wider caliphate, as IS tried and failed to do.
So…HTS doesn’t appear to want to set up a new global caliphate. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan it just wants to impose its own fanatical brand of Islam on all of Syria – including presumably in Rojava, the relatively liberal Kurdish autonomous region located in north-eastern Syria. Turkey would be delighted to see this bastion of Kurdish independence snuffed out by HTS.
As mentioned, let’s hold the champagne over Assad’s downfall. His successors may be even worse.
Dylan on Film
Just after Christmas, the Bob Dylan dramatized film biography A Complete Unknown will be released, with Timothee Chalamet (best known for starring in the recent Dune films) as Dylan. The film has been directed by veteran director James Mangold and co-written by him and Jay Cocks, the former Time magazine critic and regular Martin Scorsese collaborator. The screenplay has been based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald.
The film begins with Dylan’s arrival in New York City as a 19 year old from Minnesota and ends with Dylan’s fabled rock band set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, an event long shrouded in myth. Did the crowd boo him or cheer him, or (maybe) a bit of both? To the extent there was booing, was this because of (a) the volume (b) the shitty sound quality or (c) the brevity of the set, and were the boos being directed at Dylan or at the confused and intrusive MC Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame? Accounts vary.
Backstage, Pete Seeger has been unfairly cast as the villain of the piece who (supposedly) was trying to stop the show – in some versions of the myth, by taking an axe to the sound cables. In reality Seeger’s role appears to have been limited to urging the sound operator to try and reduce the distortion. To the extent there were any backstage forces at Newport strongly opposed to Dylan’s new musical direction, this hostility seems to have been limited – in its entirety – to the musicologist Alan Lomax, the Sing Out! magazine editor, Irwin Silber, and the musician Ewan Maccoll.
The film will give its own version. Any fuss – such as it ever was – seemed weirdly overblown and out of date, even at the time. After all, Dylan’s Newport performance happened on July 25, 1965. The half-electric album Bringing It All Back Home and its rock music single “Subterranean Homesick Blues” had been released four months earlier, in March 1965. The “Like a Rolling Stone” single had been released five days before the Newport gig.
Meaning: Dylan turning up at Newport with a band to do a plugged -in set of some of these songs would not have been a revelation to his fans, or even to the hard core folkies opposed to this evolution. Sure, some in the audience may have felt a rock band to be out of place at the Newport shrine of acoustic folk music, but such was Dylan’s career momentum at the time, most of his fans would have followed him anywhere. And they did, for the next decade at least.
Finally, and if one wanted to be pedantic, there had even been a fine electric version of “Corinna Corinna” included on Freewheelin, Dylan’s breakthrough album released over two years before the Newport event, in March of 1963. But as they said in a different movie, when the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend.
For the film, Mangold was determined to cast actors who were game enough to sing the classic songs. Here’s Timothee Chalamet’s version of “Girl From The North Country,” with Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez.
And even more ambitiously, here’s Chalamet’s version of “Like a Rolling Stone…”