Will the West Miss a Secular Syria?

My enemy is your enemy.

In the past two weeks, as the world has celebrated the overthrow of Syria’s longtime dictator, I keep returning to the message that Bashar al-Assad gave me in 2015.

Our exchange occurred during a conversation in Damascus. I was then working at Foreign Affairs and had requested an interview with Assad two years earlier. After 20-plus months of radio silence, I’d received a call from his office inviting me to talk in five days. I cleared the trip with my editor, the State Department, and my then-pregnant wife, then flew to Beirut and drove overland through the Bekaa Valley, across the border, and down into Syria’s capital city.

I was the first U.S. journalist to have met with Assad in years, and it was a surreal experience. At the time, the Syrian government was losing the war (this was before Russia sent its air force to bail them out); the rebels controlled as much as 55 percent of the country, and the front line was less than 15 kilometers (9 miles) from downtown Damascus.

A note on the desk of my hotel room suggested closing the curtains to deter snipers, and each night after dark, the windows would rattle with artillery blasts. During the daytime, however, the sidewalks were thronged with well-dressed shoppers and schoolgirls with their hair uncovered; families holding picnics filled the parks.

The interview itself was even more bizarre. Though his country was in flames and his troops were butchering civilians, Assad greeted me casually, with a smile, at the door of his private office; after asking about my family, he offered me a cappuccino and ushered me inside. A big iMac sat on the desk in his modern study; drawings by his children hung on the wall, and a wooden model of Westminster, complete with Big Ben, stood on a sideboard. (Before becoming a war criminal, Assad had studied ophthalmology in the United Kingdom.)

Our conversation took place at a moment when the Obama administration was reportedly reconsidering its Syria policy and debating whether, instead of demanding Assad’s ouster (as it had previously), it should work with him in its fight against the Islamic State, which was then rampaging through eastern Syria and Iraq.

So I figured that the most useful thing I could do with the interview was to try to figure out whether Assad was really someone with whom the West could do business.

It took just a few minutes of listening to his lies and his blithe denials of his government’s atrocities for me to conclude that the man was living in a different reality. He was too deluded—or too mendacious—to ever serve as a reliable U.S. partner.

But that left me with another question: Why had Assad (or his staff) picked me for this chat?

After many subsequent discussions with U.S. diplomats, intelligence officials, Middle East experts, and Syrian exiles, the consensus that emerged was that Assad wanted to send a message to the White House. He couldn’t do so directly, because the United States and Syria had severed ties. So Foreign Affairs, long seen as the mouthpiece of the Washington establishment, seemed to be the next best venue.

And it’s the substance of Assad’s message that’s preoccupied me recently, ever since the rebels seized Damascus on Dec. 8. The gist of it was this: You in the West and I in Syria should not be enemies. We are both secular members of the modern world. We’re both fighting the same people: Islamist terrorists. The idea of a moderate opposition, he told me, is a “fantasy,” because “you can’t make extremism moderate.”

The Syrian opposition amounted to “al Qaeda, ISIS, and al-Nusra,” he said, and how “can you negotiate with al Qaeda?” So let’s join forces against those scary, bearded theocrats, he argued. Because they threaten you as much as they threaten me.

Now that Assad has fallen and the rebels have seized Damascus, the veracity of his argument—its rightness or wrongness—has become the question of the moment. And here’s what we know.

First, it’s true that Assad’s regime was indeed secular, and (for example) afforded women lots of freedoms—say, to work, drive, and dress however they wanted. But it was also a corrupt and repressive autocracy run by a minority sect (the Alawites) that marginalized Syria’s Sunni majority (men and women), imprisoned and tortured dissidents, and used barrel bombs and chemical weapons against its own civilians.

Nor was the regime ever very cooperative with the West. Assad’s biggest outside sponsors were Russia and Iran, and Syria’s foreign policy—which included dominating (and destabilizing) Lebanon and waging multiple wars against Israel—hardly aligned with Washington’s.

As for the rebels: So far, the main group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and its leader, Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, have said and done the right things. They have promised to respect the rights of Syria’s many ethnic and religious minorities and to grant its regions autonomy. Sharaa has called for the rule of law, instructed his troops to avoid retribution, and promised amnesty for low-level members of Assad’s army and police while also pledging to bring the dictator’s cronies to justice. He’s even told his men not to celebrate victory by firing their guns in the air, lest they frighten civilians.

But Sharaa—also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—is a former member of al Qaeda who did prison time in Iraq for working with the insurgency there. HTS started out as an al Qaeda offshoot, and it is still on Washington’s terrorist list. Its record governing Idlib, in Syria’s north, is mixed. The group delivered key services, largely kept the peace, and seems to have been relatively uncorrupt. But it also banned music and tobacco and, at least briefly, sent religious police into the streets to punish any breach of Islamic piety.

Sharaa claims that that he and his followers have since reformed. But have they really, or is this just a tactic meant to win over their critics and alleviate Western concerns? Is the rebel leader right about the nature of Syria’s new rulers—or was Assad?

Syria’s former president showed that secularism in governance does not guarantee virtue. By the same token, religiosity does not guarantee vice—or repression, or an anti-Western outlook. Of Washington’s four main adversaries today—Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran—the first three are totally areligious.

Meanwhile, the United States’ key partners in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and even Egypt—all incorporate some degree of religious law and include theocratic elements in their governments. Assad’s binary is too simplistic to offer much guidance. It turns out that you can, sometimes, “make extremism moderate.” The world contains both religiously minded government that support their citizens’ liberties and the rules-based global order (take Indonesia, for example) and many secular regimes that do the opposite.

Still, while I’m cautiously optimistic about Syria’s liberation, I’m also tempering my elation. No country that experienced the Arab Spring has successfully made the transition to liberal democracy. The Biden administration remains skeptical enough that it’s keeping HTS on its terrorist list for now.

A brutal tyrant has fallen, and his replacements seem to be headed in the right direction. But they face enormous challenges, and we won’t know whether they’ve genuinely reformed until they start to deal with them in the weeks, months, and even years to come.