In the week since the invasion of Russia began, Syrians who oppose President Bashar al Assad are perhaps second only to the Ukrainians themselves in following every horror of the war that Vladimir Putin’s regime is waging in Ukraine. The reason behind this curious situation should, of course, be quite obvious. Russia has occupied part of Syria since late September 2015, brutally supporting the Assad regime, whose top priority is to remain in power forever, even if the price is to subject the country to expansionist external forces such as Iran and Russia itself.
For six and a half years Russia has controlled an important military base in northwestern Syria, Hmeimim, where Assad is usually summoned when Putin or his defense minister visits their troops in the country. In 2019, Russia secured a 49-year lease of the Syrian port of Tartous, where its warships in the Mediterranean are now stationed. The Russian defense minister boasted that he successfully tested more than 320 different weapons from his military arsenal in Syria. Putin himself praised the field combat experience that more than 85 percent of Russian military commanders have gained in Syria.
Syria has been a testing ground for the Russian army, which here used phosphorus ammunition, thermobaric bombs and cluster bombs – prohibited by international treaties – against civilian structures, targeting hospitals, schools and markets. And he labeled all those who opposed the Assad regime as terrorists (just like Assad did). This simply means that their lives cannot engender grief; that killing them is not a crime. It is even a good thing that should be rewarded, at least with praise. Putin has in fact been praised by right-wing Islamophobic organizations in the West, and by supporters of authoritarianism everywhere, for his imperialist war in Syria, so far responsible for the deaths of at least 23,000 civilians.
Yet very few voices in the West have condemned Putin’s war in Syria. Because? The reason is the long and criminal “war on terror”, which has been the foundation of a broad international coalition against terrorists, ie the nihilist Sunni Islamic groups. In this coalition, the United States and the European Union are in fact allies of Russia, as well as of characters such as Assad, the Egyptian Abdel Fattah al Sisi, the Saudi Mohammed bin Salman, the Emirate Mohammed bin Zayed and, of course, the Israeli state and of its apartheid. This is not only a betrayal of the Syrians who have fought for democracy for two generations, but a betrayal of democracy everywhere in the world.
The war on terror has provided Putin with a golden opportunity to realize his imperialist ambitions of resurrecting the Russian empire, starting with Syria. Putin famously considers the fall of the Soviet Union a “real tragedy” as well as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”. Not out of communist sentiment, but because the Soviet Union was largely a Russian empire. And today, thanks to the legitimacy obtained in Syria at no cost, Putin wants to annex Ukraine, which according to him has never had “a true state tradition”.
This aggression is based on three contradictory pretexts. First, to “denazify” Ukraine, a goal that would make this war a continuation of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War against Hitler, rather than Putin’s expansionist wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and Syria. Second, “demilitarize” Ukraine, or destroy its armed forces and prevent it from ever joining NATO. And third is the idea that Ukraine is not a “real nation”, as Putin argues, but a part of Russia.
The story of Freud’s “pot” comes to mind, in which a man who had borrowed a pot from his neighbor returns it damaged. To absolve himself, he provides three arguments: the pot was not damaged when it was returned; it was already damaged when he had borrowed it; he had never borrowed the pot. This is the logic behind the uncontrollable desire for power of a dictator who cannot or does not want to limit himself as he wages his fifth war this century. But Putin’s three arguments have already collapsed. While it is true that there are far-right and ultra-nationalist groups in Ukraine, it is a minority with limited political power, and it is by no means they who are actually targeted by the invasion of Russia. If anything, Putin’s war gives Ukraine the full right to defend itself as best it can from its aggressive and overbearing neighbor. Ukraine is demonstrating its national legitimacy precisely through resistance to the Russian invaders.
Winners and losers
A Russian defeat would be a victory not only for Ukraine, but for the whole world. A defeat by Putin could also end his political career, which would be the best possible news for Russian Democrats who are bravely protesting aggression in their country’s name. It would also be good news for Syrians, as it would also weaken Assad’s barbaric and treacherous regime, as well as growing authoritarian tendencies across the Middle East and around the world. And although a defeat of our common enemy, Putin, would not necessarily be a victory for us Syrians, a victory of Putinism would be an even greater defeat for us, as it would diminish our already scarce opportunities to take back our country.
But even if Ukraine manages to push back Russia, the possible winners will be precisely those who have been complicit in submitting Syria, our country, to that very enemy. I mean the Western powers, especially the United States, the initiators of the war on terror. Putinist Russia is perceived as an aggressive invader on one front and as the energetic one to do dirty work on another. But it is an ethically despicable position, and a politically counterproductive one, as Ukraine is demonstrating.
We need a politics and justice against terror, not a war against terror. The word for this politics and this justice is democracy. Sacrificing democracy on the altar of the war on terrorism and the priority given to security is an amoral and self-defeating attitude, not only in Syria and the Middle East, but also in the West itself.
Imperialism and democracy are incompatible. It is as true for Russia as it is for the rest of the world. Imperialism has already generated a boomerang effect in Europe, embodying itself in Nazism, as Hannah Arendt argued in The origins of totalitarianism. And it is already having a similar effect in our time, in the form of right-wing populism, which has progressively normalized and rapidly moved from the far right to the acceptable norm. All in direct relation to the war on terrorism and the so-called migrant and refugee crisis.
We Syrians, as refugees, uprooted from our homes and spread across 127 countries, now represent a full-fledged international community. And as such we invite ourselves to intervene in every struggle on the planet.
Ukraine is a Syrian cause. And so is the world.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)