The overturning of statues of former Syria president Hafez Al-Assad in Damascus this week in the aftermath of the ouster of his son and successor former president Bashar Al-Assad after the blitzkrieg led by the armed opposition group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham across the country recalled similar scenes in neighbouring Iraq in 2003 when Iraqis celebrated the end of the regime led by then president Saddam Hussein after the US-led invasion of the country.

Like Saddam Hussein, Hafez Al-Assad and to an extent also his son Bashar ruled with an iron fist for decades and were responsible for major violations of human rights, not just against the political opposition but also against various ethnic groups. Their atrocities included the use of chemical weapons against their own people and the bombarding of entire neighbourhoods, killing tens of thousands of people and intended to quell any contestation of power.

Both Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq from 1979 until 2003, and Hafez and Bashar Al-Assad, who ruled Syria from 1971 to 2024, subscribed to Baathist ideology, at least nominally or during their first years in power. This was a Pan-Arab ideology, or so it was claimed, said several diplomats who served in Baghdad and Damascus under Saddam Hussein and the two Al-Assads.

In parallel with the escalation of Jewish immigration into Palestine, and only one month prior to the first Arab-Israeli War that started in May 1947, the Arab Socialist Baath Party was launched in April 1947. The co-founders of the party, Michel Aflak and Salaheddine Al-Bitar, embraced an ideology of Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism, and socialism in order to lead to an Arab “renaissance” (baath) in the face of continuing colonialism.

The Baathists took power first in Syria and then in Iraq. However, according to the diplomats who served in Baghdad and Damascus at different times over the past five decades, it would be hard to say that they necessarily observed Baathist ideology, or at least not for long.

Beyond paying lip service to the conflict with Israel and giving Iraqi support to the Egyptian and Syrian armies in the war to reclaim Sinai and the Golan Heights that were seized by the Israeli military in the 1967 War, these diplomats said that there was little identifiably pan-Arab in the foreign policies of Saddam Hussein or the two Al-Assads. During his last year in power, Bashar had opened channels of communications with Israel through several third parties, particularly the UAE, they said.

“In the early 1990s, Hafez Al-Assad, supposedly a Baathist, joined the US-led Coalition to liberate Kuwait from the Iraqi invasion of August 1990,” said Abdel-Rahman Salah, a former Egyptian diplomat. Moreover, the eight-year Iraq-Iran War that started in 1980 implicitly received the consent of the US.

Bashar Al-Assad, according to diplomats who served in Washington during the second part of his rule, was willing to find a settlement with Israel to end its occupation of the Golan Heights, but otherwise did not take military risks against Israel and was open to establishing secret and not so secret channels with the US.

The consensus of the diplomats, who shared their experience in Damascus and Baghdad with Al-Ahram Weekly, was that in reality the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the two Al-Assads were “just” dictatorial-military regimes that used excessive powers both in their own countries and against neighbouring countries to ensure their own survival.

The 1976 Syrian invasion of Lebanon to act against opposition Lebanese and Lebanon-based Palestinian political forces and the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait are “clearly of no pan-Arab significance whatsoever,” one of the diplomats noted. Instead, they were meant to serve the interests of the respective regimes and use regional influence as a bargaining chip with the international powers.

There was thus no genuine baath for the peoples of Syria and Iraq, “although Saddam Hussein was particularly invested in the educational and military sector, but this was a matter of control rather than anything else,” according to a former UN officer who worked in both Iraq and Syria.

“There were social services for the public, but that was about it, and beyond that there were no signs of any real social contract of the type that one could find in the concepts of Aflak either in Iraq or Syria,” the officer added.

“These were not socialist or pan-Arab regimes. These were brutal dictatorial regimes, and this is not something that most people in either country would contest, even if we are talking about those who did not come directly under the brutal fists of these regimes,” she stated.

END OF FEAR: In Syria and the Syrian Diaspora today, there is a great deal of rejoicing at the fall of the Al-Assad regime.

“It is impossible not to be happy when we see an end to a regime that forced us to leave our country out of fear at being targeted by its killing machine simply because we supported the Sunnis in Hama,” said Ammar, a Syrian physician who fled Syria for Egypt in 2012.

Ammar said that his family was not associated with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which was crushed by the Syrian Air Force in 1982 by Hafez Al-Assad in the wake of political protests. However, he said that his family was not unfamiliar with what the Al-Assad regime did at that time.

The rule of Bashar, Ammar argued, was no less brutal. What Bashar did, “with the help of the Iranians and Hizbullah to quell the democracy protests [of the Arab Spring in Syria] was no less criminal” than the Hama Massacre of 1982 when close to 40,000 people were killed and wounded, Ammar said.

In 2012, in the midst of the Arab Spring, Bashar sent his troops along with pro-regime thugs (shabiha) to kill civilians in the village of Al-Qubeir near Hama. Then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon qualified the attack as “barbaric”. One year later in 2013, the Al-Assad regime used chemical weapons against opponents at Al-Ghouta near Damascus, killing civilians including women and children.

In 1982, the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq also committed a massacre against the Shias in the country, claiming that with the support of Iran they were involved in an assassination attempt against the Iraqi president. Six years later in 1988, Saddam Hussein launched a chemical attack against the Kurds of Halabja in Iraq.

“When the Saddam Hussein regime fell, it was clear to everyone that it came as a result of the US-led invasion that Iraqis for the most part would not have otherwise welcomed. However, given the level of brutality of the regime, and the level of poverty that came with the UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq [after the invasion of Kuwait], it was only to be expected that Iraqis would rejoice,” said the UN officer.

According to Amin, an Iraqi who fled his country in the 1980s to Kuwait and then to Egypt after the Iraqi invasion, the day of “the fall of Baghdad was very hard emotionally.”

“To see American troops in the city was very hard, especially as we knew that the Americans were not invading Iraqi to bring democracy to the country. However, at the same time it was hard not to feel joyful at the end of this brutal and blood-sucking regime.”

What came after the elimination of the Saddam Hussein regime, and later of Saddam Hussein himself, was a different story, however.

ABU GHRAIB AND DE-BAATHIFICATION: “Nobody can deny the chaos that came to Iraq with the US invasion and the fall of the regime. Nobody can deny the ethnic conflict and brutality that dominated in Iraq for at least a decade after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein,” said the former UN officer.

Ultimately, she added, the Saddam Hussein regime that ruled under the tag of pan-Arabism could be blamed for this, given the fact that “it was in essence a highly sectarian regime that allowed only those who subscribed to the Sunni sect, and carried a Baath membership card, to be in positions of power and to benefit from the wealth of Iraq.”

The Baathist regimes in both Iraq and Syria were discriminatory in terms of sharing benefits, more so in the case of Iraq than of Syria. The criteria of who was a good and committed Baathist and who was not were also never fully liberated from ethnic associations.

However, she said that with the “de-Baathification” that was forcibly introduced by the US after the invasion, there was never any thought given to the fact “that Iraqis were almost forced to join the Baath Party as a tool of social mobility or simply to get access to decent life,” she said.

It was “a destabilising scheme that disintegrated the Iraqi state,” she added. “It is true that this establishment was corrupt, but it was operating somehow. One simple example is very telling. Since the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, Iraq has not been able to conduct a proper census.”

Meanwhile, the sectarianism that was one of the most devastating features of the Saddam Hussein regime “got more entrenched” beyond the scenes of civil fighting that dominated the country between 2005 and 2015.

The chaos in Iraq has not yet come to an end despite some progress. “In reality, Iraq is still trying to recover” both from the regime of Saddam Hussein and “equally, and I have to say equally,” from the subsequent systems, “including the American Paul Bremer, the pro-US regimes, IS, and others.”

Moreover, she argued, the elimination of Saddam Hussein and his regime did not bring an end to the brutal human rights violations in Iraq, with those inflicted on Iraqis who resisted the US-led invasion in the Abu Ghraib Prison being “something that is hard to forget.”

More than two decades after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, she said, Iraqis are still trying to put together a functioning system.

THE DAY AFTER IN SYRIA: According to the former UN officer, “there are signs that the same mistakes will not be replayed in Syria after the ouster of the Al-Assad regime.”

“I think nobody is going to go for extreme de-Baathification, because this comes with a loss of technical capacity,” she said. Some of the officials who were involved in drafting democratisation proposals during the “Damascus Spring” of 2005, when Bashar Al-Assad briefly opened up to ideas of political inclusion, could be included in the transition.

Moreover, according to this UN officer and to former diplomats who have served in Damascus, the ideology of the Baath Party had already mellowed during the rule of the second Al-Assad.

“The control of Al-Assad had already cracked over the past decade, and when he regained territories in 2016 with the help of the Russian military intervention, Damascus had to coordinate with the new effective rulers in various towns and villages,” she said.

The future of Syria, according to the same UN source, relates more to reconstruction, “given that it does not have the resources of Iraq.” There is also the question of transitional justice, “and how it can operate away from vindictive claims that are bound to pop up.” There has to be a new political regime that has to be inclusive of the country’s diverse ethnic groups. Some regional players support some of the ethnic groups and oppose others.

According to a former Turkish diplomat, “establishing a balanced government in Syria that is accepted by everyone inside the country and by all the regional players will not be easy, but there is a certain will to do so in all the concerned capitals, including Ankara, Washington and Paris.”

“Nobody wants to see Syria fall into the hands of IS, and nobody wants to see Syria fall into disintegration,” he said. There are a lot of diplomatic consultations underway to decide on a process that will be inclusive. He referred to “a clear openness from the West, including Washington,” to talk to the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham leaders and to have them removed off the terrorist list.

Some ethnic groups might have better luck in post-Al-Assad Syria than others, however, the sources agreed. The Kurds, who today control a militant faction in the north of the country (the Syrian Democratic Forces), might have to agree on a coalition that represents them in the new regime and the region.

“The Kurds played a crucial role in the war against IS, and they received considerable support from the Americans in order to avoid having American troops in Syria and because Turks declined this role,” the diplomat Salah said.

He argued that there are some Kurdish elements that could be accepted by Turkey and that it is likely that the future of Syria will see better Kurdish representation, “especially as, unlike the Kurds of Iraq, the Kurds of Syria were not after independence.” However, he said that the expected improvement will not reach the level of quasi-independence, as in the case of Iraqi Kurdistan in Iraq.

The different factions of Political Islam are likely to overcome the marginalisation that was imposed on them during Al-Assad rule. “If the [US satellite channel] CNN interviewed HTS leader [Abu Mohamed Al-Jolani], then we should expect considerable Islamist integration,” he said. “If Al-Jolani, who is now talking a more moderate language, becomes president of the country, then the Islamists will have a much bigger share of power.”

The group that is likely to have a harder time, several diplomatic sources agreed, consists of the Shia militias that were associated with Iran and Hezbollah. According to the UN officer, there are also question marks about the situation of the Alawites, the group to which the Al-Assads belonged and that had exceptional privileges for over 50 years.

The risks are still not small, argued Amal Mourad, a former diplomat. She explained that those risks include a scenario of unsmooth democratic transition. “Obviously, democratic transitions do not happen overnight and they take a while to deliver but one cannot ignore the fact that it will not be easy to assemble a democratic central regime for a country that is so ethnically diverse and layered as Syria,” she said.

“Ultimately, we cannot overlook the chances of conflict in Syria and there are historic precedents that should make one really cautious about the day after,” she stated.

Mourad is equally apprehensive about the possible spillover effect of any scenario of instability in Syria onto the neighbouring and influenceable Lebanon which is having its own risks of unrest. “Traditionally, the Lebanese political forces have their way of averting conflict but these means could be put to a serious test if things do not go well in Syria,” she argued.

The question of pan-Arabism is now facing perhaps its most existential problem, not just with the fall of its last self-proclaimed bastion in Damascus, but also with the failure of Damascus prior to the fall of Al-Assad to stand up for Palestinian rights during the genocidal Israeli war on Gaza.

“I think the ideology of pan-Arabism as it was formulated in the 1950s has failed the exam,” said Amr Al-Shobaki, a commentator at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

However, he added that the idea of collective Arab objectives with regards to cooperation, a Palestinian state, and maybe some form of integration, “something along the lines of the European Union rather than old school Pan-Arab slogans or Baathist ideology,” could still be possible.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly