Syria after the fall of Assad: Will Islamism replace Baathism, tyranny?

Anyone who remembers the Arab Spring knows that things can always get worse. Especially when Islamists rise on the trailblaze of “freedom.”

It is fitting to reflect that with Bashar al-Assad’s government finally collapsed, the governing ideology known as Baathism will likewise undergo a massive setback – though whether Baathism will fade away without a trace is something we can doubt.

Baathism is one of the last of the grandiose revolutionary ideologies of the mid-20th century – an ideology like communism and fascism in Europe (both of which exercised a large influence on Baathist thinking), except in an Arab version suitable for the age of decolonization. Its champions came to power not only in Syria but also in Iraq, and the consequences were not of the sort that leave people unchanged.

In Iraq, the Baathists ruled for 35 years, chiefly under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, and this meant repeated military campaigns and acts of extermination against Iraq’s Kurdish population. In Syria, the Baath has ruled for half a century, usually more shrewdly than Hussein. And yet, in Syria, too, a permanent crisis has been the norm – the unending emergencies that derive from the Syrian Baath’s repeated wars against Israel and from the proxy wars using guerrilla armies and terrorists in Palestine and Jordan, together with the Baathist intervention in Lebanon. And there is the history of Baathist mass executions and civilian massacres within Syria itself.

The chief theoretician of the Baathists was a philosopher from Damascus named Michel Aflaq. His Baathism emerged in Syria in 1941, in response to a coup d’état in Iraq. The coup overthrew a pro-British government and installed in power the Iraqi nationalist Rashid Ali Al Gaylani, who right away aligned his new government with Germany and the wartime Axis.

Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Julani, in Damascus on December 23, 2024. (credit: AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS)

His theme was Arab weakness in the modern world:

Today we stand witness to a conflict between our glorious past and shameful present. The Arab personality was in our past unified in one body: there was no divide between its soul and its intellect, no divide between its rhetoric and its practice, its private and its public codes of conduct ... In contrast, in our present time, we witness only a fragmented personality, a partial, impoverished life ... It is time we removed this contradiction and return to the Arab personality in its unity, and make whole Arab life once again.

This was going to require a purification. “We must remove all obstacles of stagnation and degradation so that our pure blood lineage will run anew in our veins.” And what was this pure blood lineage? It was the blood line that got started with the divine revelations communicated to the prophet Muhammad. In other words, modern Arabs needed to adopt the prophet Muhammad himself as their model. Baathism then claimed a pure blood lineage to the origins of Islam and, at the same time, invoked the mid–20th century ideals of socialism.

Aflaq’s Baath staged its coup in Syria in 1963, only to discover that after a while, the Baath Secret Military Committee was running out of patience for the Baath’s civilian leaders. Aflaq himself, a mere schoolteacher, fled into exile. And who was the Secret Military Committee? The leading personalities turned out to be not just members of Syria’s Alawi minority but people from a single village, belonging to a section of a single tribe and, in the inner circle, to the family of colonel Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar.

The political and cultural landscape of the Middle East, post-Baath, is marked by blighted zones that might otherwise have been a prosperous Iraq and Syria, if only the Baathist doctrine had not destroyed those countries. A cloud of intellectual bafflement and paranoia hovers overhead, consisting of the confused thoughts of Arab intellectuals across the region who, in the past, talked themselves into supposing that Baathism was a good idea. As was the case in both Syria and Iraq. Something in the Baathist doctrine is insane, and this is worth emphasizing. The Arab Baath Socialist Party has slaughtered more Arabs than any other institution in modern history.

And more than visible now is the triumphant zeal of Baathism’s principal rivals in the matter of grandiose revolutionary ideology – the champions of the singular Middle Eastern millenarian doctrine still standing.

The Islamists

In the political psychology of the region, the era of decolonization has somehow not yet come to an end. The questions that Michel Aflaq worried about in 1943 are the questions that Islamist authors still worry about today, as if, in the minds of masses of people, nothing has changed.

As historian Simon Sebag Montefiore notes: “It has been impossible to watch the fall of the brutal tyranny of the House of Assad without feeling joy, but this is the Middle East. Anyone who remembers the Arab Spring knows that things can always get worse.” Especially when Islamists rise on the trailblaze of freedom.

What will be the future of Syria with Salafi Jihadist Ahmad al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), at the helm? Should he take power, it is too early to tell if Julani will keep his word and ensure the safety of minority religious groups under his rule. Previous examples of Islamists taking control of a country are hardly encouraging, and that is precisely because of the nature of Islamist governance.

In 2020, after the US withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban – much like HTS – promised to allow girls and women to attend schools and universities. Nearly four years later, girls are banned from attending school beyond the sixth grade, and women are no longer allowed to speak in public. The Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan, in other words, have sent Afghan women back to another dark age. None of this has stopped CNN from describing Julani’s journey as “from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing ‘revolutionary.’” Let’s see about that.

You see, once you have come into power after spending years manning a machine gun on behalf of God and vowing resistance to the end, your ability to work up more thoughtful habits of mind is bound to become a little circumscribed. A capacity to weigh evidence, a feeling of curiosity about other people, and a spirit of tolerance are all the traits that are necessary for good governance and will always be absent in the mind of jihadists.

Perhaps Julani will defy the grim precedent, maybe he will break away from Salafi jihadism and break the cycle that has consumed countless others.

Or, maybe, the cult of resistance – a movement that thrives on perpetual hysteria – will, as it has so often done, devour the very adherents who carried it to power.■

The author is a writer and political researcher. He works at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI).