Guest column: Syria’s future unlikely to include democracy

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By: Gwynne Dyer

They’re still celebrating the miraculous fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, but what are the odds the man whose fighters brought down the regime, Ahmed al-Sharaa, can bring peace, prosperity and even democracy to Syria?

Sharaa, until recently known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, is an Islamist who started out in al-Qaida. He is therefore still listed as a terrorist, which he is not, but as an Islamist he would normally reject modern forms of Islam that permit abominations such as democracy and equal rights for women.

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That would not endear him even to Sunni Muslims (70 per cent of Syria’s population). Sharaa is Sunni himself, but most of them would see his Islamist doctrines as extreme. And he really frightens the 30 per cent of Syrians who belong to various religious minorities: Alawites, Ismailis, mainstream Shia Muslims, Christians, and Druze.

To make matters worse, one of the Muslim minorities, the Alawites, has effectively run the country for the past 53 years under the Assad family, father and son. The other minorities tacitly backed Alawite rule because they feared Sunni domination and during those years hundreds of thousands of innocent people, mostly Sunnis, were tortured and murdered.

Now, an explicitly Islamist Sunni force called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) has overthrown the Assad regime. Sharaa promises the rights of all minorities will be respected and the new Syria will be democratic, but he would say that at this stage, wouldn’t he?

One might also mention the country’s ethnic diversity (Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Druze), the fact Syria has been through a 13-year civil war that has left half the population refugees either at home or abroad, and the presence of foreign troops (Turkish, Russian, Israeli and American) on its soil, all with blood on their hands.

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Israel has just destroyed the Syrian air force in more than 300 air strikes and seized land across the Syrian border, and the Turks are carving out Syrian territory along the border for a buffer zone.

So what is Syria’s biggest problem? It is the fear that HTS will try to turn Syria into a radical religious dictatorship like Afghanistan.

That would terrify not only the Americans, the Russians, and the various Shia countries and minorities of the Middle East, but also all the non-extremist Sunni states in the region. Syria would be isolated and stigmatized as a terrorist state, its people would start fleeing again, and the killing would doubtless also re-start before long.

The best insurance against this disaster would be a secular democracy where religious beliefs are a strictly private matter, but it’s unlikely HTS will permit that. So, what’s the least bad available option? Perhaps some version of the old Ottoman millet system, where every religious group ran its own affairs but Sunni Turks made the big decisions.

In the Syrian case, it would be Sunni Arabs making the big decisions, while the other religious groups (and also an ethnic group, in the case of the Kurds) would have broad autonomy in matters closer to home.

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Even this kind of compromise will be hard for Ahmed al-Sharaa and HTS to accept, however, because fundamentalists of any variety have a big problem with secular states. If they truly believe in their version of God, then they should do what he wants and what he wants, in the Islamist and most other fundamentalist versions of God, is not a secular state.

Not to do God’s will, when it is in your power to do it, is definitely a sin.

Even if Sharaa can talk himself into accepting a democratic and secular state, it’s an open question whether the men around him can. (They are all men, of course.) What Syria needs is another miracle.

Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London, England.

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