By Brahma Chellaney

With the dramatic fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s autocratic regime, the West may have achieved its objective in Syria. But the success could impose enduring costs on Western, and especially European, security.

Assad’s secular regime has been replaced by violent jihadist forces that Western governments regard as terrorists. On President Joe Biden’s watch, first Afghanistan and now Syria have emerged as jihadist citadels. As has already happened in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the victorious Islamist leaders in Syria have pledged to introduce a system based on Islamic law. 

The main insurgent group that spearheaded the lightning blitz to Damascus seeks to establish a caliphate and has had historic links to both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (or ISIS). Formerly known as the Al Nusrah Front, it was officially labeled a foreign terrorist organization by the United States in 2014. 

Yet by seeking to engage with its victorious leadership, including sending secret messages to it, Biden is making the same mistake he did following his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, when he drew specious distinctions between “good” and “bad” terrorists, in a bid to obscure both the significance of the Taliban’s takeover and his administration’s outreach to that terrorist militia.  

The current effort to portray this murderous band of terrorists as a reforming group that now cultivates an image of tolerance parallels the 2021 attempt, in the aftermath of Kabul’s fall, to rebrand the Taliban leadership as moderate. Washington is today considering removing its $10 million bounty on Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of this terrorist army, who is claiming to have turned over a new leaf. 

But just as the Taliban has turned Afghanistan into a terrorist super-state, Jolani could make Syria a breeding ground for transnational terrorists, who share the Taliban’s common ideology and commitment to violent jihad. Those waging violent jihad can never be moderate.   

Make no mistake: The surge of violent jihadism in Syria goes back to a multiyear CIA covert project to overthrow Assad — a $1 billion program that President Barack Obama initiated after seven months of NATO airstrikes toppled another secular dictator, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.  

The Syria project — the second largest in the CIA’s history after its 1980s’ covert operation against Soviet forces in Afghanistan — trained and armed anti-Assad rebels from 2012 onward, furthering the jihadist movement and helping spawn the Islamic State in the Syria-Iraq belt, before President Donald Trump shut it down in 2017, calling the program “massive, dangerous and wasteful.” He also stated that some of the U.S.-supplied weapons went to al-Qaeda, an organization that emerged from the CIA-trained Afghan “mujahideen.” 

More broadly, the destabilization of Libya, Syria and Iraq resulted in a major refugee influx into Europe — 1.1 million into Germany alone in 2015. This, in turn, led to a surge of radical Islamism in several European countries, with terror attacks in Munich, Nice, Brussels, Paris and elsewhere necessitating a slew of antiterrorist measures. The new challenges contributed to a resurgence of nativism, populism and antiimmigrant sentiment across Europe, transforming politics. 

Today, the Syrian Rebels’ victory represents a huge boost for global jihadism, including for enlisting new recruits. The Islamist arc extending from the Middle East to North Africa’s Maghreb region could pose a challenge to Europe in the way countries located next to the Afghanistan-Pakistan belt are paying a security price. 

The beleaguered Assad regime, economically and politically weakened by regional developments and the almost decade-long U.S. control of production from Syrian oil fields, fell to the Islamist militants without putting up a fight.

Assad, and his late father, Hafez Assad, ruled Syria for over half a century, forming the longest political legacy in the Arab world. But, as U.S. interventions have shown, when a secular autocrat is overthrown in the Muslim world, it the forces of radical Islam usually take over. This often leads to violent upheaval and societal transformation, including imposition of Medieval practices, with women’s status reduced to that of chattels.

This is what happened in Afghanistan after President Mohammed Najibullah was driven out of office in 1992, in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow in 2003, and in Libya when Qaddafi was ousted in 2011. Arab Spring “revolutions” elsewhere spawned new strongmen or civil war. Libya, meanwhile, remains a failed state.

Even in Bangladesh, the recent U.S.-supported regime change has led to an upsurge of Islamist violence, with jihadists seeking to Arabize Islam by targeting the country’s syncretic traditions.  

In multiethnic Syria, the seizure of Damascus by Sunni Islamist fighters is unlikely to end the 13-year-long civil war. The recrudescence of bloody sectarian conflicts and power struggles in Syria could send a new wave of refugees to Europe, including radicalized Muslims.

In fact, with the downfall of one of the last remaining secular, anti-jihadist rulers in the Middle East, the partition of Syria looks more likely.

To be sure, Ukraine, too, faces partition: a Trump-backed ceasefire in the nearly three-year war would leave one-fifth of Ukrainian territory under Russian control. But Syria’s partition will be along sectarian lines, as happened in 1947 when Pakistan was carved out of India. Syria could eventually be divided into four parts: A large Sunni state in the center, comprising more than two-thirds of Syria; a U.S.-backed Kurdistan in the northeast, a Druze zone in the south; and an Alawite strip along the Mediterranean coast.  

The West has won the battle against Assad and delivered a strategic setback to his patron, Russia, whose interest long centered on maintaining its several military bases in Syria for power projection in the Middle East. But, having forgotten the lesson of 9/11 to shun the path of geopolitical expediency and focus on long-term interests, the West risks losing the already-flailing global war on terror, especially as the war’s fronts multiply as an unintended byproduct of its own policies. 

The article was first published in The Hill on December 12, 2024.

Brahma Chellaney is an Indian geostrategist and columnist. He is a professor of strategic studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He was a member of India's National Security Advisory Board and an author of its draft nuclear doctrine. He is a regular columnist for Project Syndicate and writes for numerous other international publications.

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