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Episode: What’s the future for Syria’s divided north?

Author: BBC World Service
Duration: 00:22:59

Episode Shownotes

When protests against decades of rule by the Assad family were crushed by Syrian government forces in the spring of 2011, opposition groups took up arms and the country descended into civil war. The conflict drew in Syria’s Kurds, jihadi groups including Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the international community.13

years on President Assad controls around two thirds of the country, but northern Syria remains out of the regime's grip and is highly volatile. Internal divisions, international influences and a worsening humanitarian situation may be about to further destabilise the region, with potentially serious consequences for Syria and the world. So, in this episode of The Inquiry, we’re asking ‘What’s the future for Syria’s divided north?’Contributors Dr Burcu Ozcelik, Senior Research Fellow for Middle East Security at the Royal United Services Institute. Charles Lister, Director of the Syria and Countering Terrorism & Extremism programs, Middle East Institute. Qutaiba Idlbi, Director of the Syria Initiative at the Atlantic Council. Emma Beals, Senior Advisor at the European Institute of Peace and a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington.Presenter: Emily Wither Production: Diane Richardson and Matt Toulson Broadcast Co-ordinator: Ellie Dover & Liam Morrey Editor: Tara McDermott Technical Producer: Cameron WardImage credit - NurPhoto via Getty Images

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_04
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00:00:06 Speaker_08
Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service.

00:00:11 Speaker_07
A year ago, the libertarian Javier Mele became president of Argentina. Wielding a chainsaw, he promised to slash government spending and to create the world's freest economy. I'm Charlotte Pritchard.

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00:00:39 Speaker_00
Welcome to The Enquiry, with me Emily Wither. Each week one question, four expert witnesses and an answer. Peaceful protests erupted in Syria in the spring of 2011, They were against four decades of rule by the Assad family.

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Bashar al-Assad, who'd initially been seen as a reforming president, crushed the protests with staggering violence.

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Shots ring out in the southern city of Deraa, which has become the epicentre of unrest. On Friday, more than 10 people were reported killed here.

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Opposition groups took up arms, and the country descended into civil war.

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Syria became a battlefield for regional geopolitical rivalries, and the conflict drew in Syria's Kurds, jihadi groups including Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and the international community.

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President Assad has clung on to power with the help of his allies Russia and Iran, And today, the war that once grabbed headlines for its shocking brutality has settled in to a tense stalemate.

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But 13 years on, northern Syria remains out of the regime's grip and highly volatile.

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Escalating regional tensions, a new US president and a whole host of local problems may be about to disrupt the delicate status quo, with potentially serious consequences for Syria and the world.

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So this week on The Enquiry, we're asking, what's the future for Syria's divided north?

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Syria is bordered on the east by the Mediterranean Sea, but sits in the heart of a volatile region, surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

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It's now believed widely that the Assad regime controls up to two-thirds of Syrian territory.

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And what that means in practice is that it shares that control or claims to be able to assert that territorial control over its own territory with the backing of Russia and Iran. In the North, we have further divisions.

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Our first expert witness, Dr Burcu Özcelik, is a senior research fellow in Middle East security at the Royal United Services Institute. She explains we can view the balance of power in Syria as falling into four distinct areas of governance.

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President Assad controls central and southern Syria, but he's lost control of the north. The northwest is run by an Islamist group, the northeast by Kurds, and then between those two areas lies land held by Turkey.

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The Euphrates River has become sort of a natural dividing line, a barrier between various factions. So now in the northeastern part, we have the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, or the SDF.

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Further west and west of the Euphrates, there is the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army. And this is the area that has been sort of carved out or the product of Turkish cross-border military operations.

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And further north-west we have the area known as Idlib, the Idlib governorate, that's controlled by the rebel group HTS, which is a Salafi Islamist movement.

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Birju says those in power in northern Syria have little in common apart from... They are united in

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their opposition to the Assad regime. But in terms of a consensus on what the future of Syria might look like, the divisions far exceed what unites these groups.

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And the local dynamics are complicated by the various interests and priorities of external actors like Turkey, Iran, Russia, and the United States.

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Early on in the war, northwest Syria became a heartland of opposition, and millions fled through this region to neighbouring Turkey, as fighting was at its most intense.

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It's seen as the last remaining rebel-controlled area. that's in opposition to the Assad regime.

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It's an area that's also heavily reliant on aid, densely populated, and still bombed by regime forces and their ally Russia. These days, the Northwest is run by HTS, a merger of Islamist militias and opposition factions.

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The Northwest is governed by more socially conservative Islamist ideas that adhere to and borrow from various understandings of Sharia law, HTS in Idlib is far more fundamentalist, restrictive in its interpretation of political Islam.

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And this is very different from the model that's been set out by the SDF in the Northeast.

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So in the Northeast, the SDF, or Syrian Democratic Forces, are an alliance that were formed in 2015 by the United States to defeat the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS. The SDF is led and dominated by Kurds.

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Syria's Kurds have deep grievances with the Assad regime dating back years. For starters, they lack formal legal status as citizens, and they've used the conflict to slowly take over territory and declare an autonomous region.

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The Turkish government considers the Kurdish militia that dominates the Syrian Democratic Forces to be an extension of the PKK, which has fought for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey for decades.

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The PKK is viewed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, but also by the U.S., by the European Union, by NATO member states. Turkey views the SDF as an extension of this terrorist group. The United States has claimed otherwise.

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That's how Turkey came to run one of the four areas of control.

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Turkey sees its presence in northwestern Syria as essential, as existential, in terms of meeting its national security objectives.

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But despite Turkey's concerns about the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the US believes they're playing a key role in containing ISIS in the northeast.

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Part 2. Down but not out.

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Well, I would say ISIS is a shadow of its former self... ...but ISIS remains alive and kicking in north-eastern Syria in particular Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute... ...focussed on Syria and counter-terrorism

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It's certainly got at least several thousand fighters still present in the field.

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It also benefits in the long term from the presence of nearly 10,000 of its most battle-hardened fighters currently sitting in a network of 26 makeshift prisons in northeastern Syria.

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And nearly 45,000 of their family members currently reside in secured camps for displaced people.

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The Islamic State group exploited the conflict and by 2014 had entrenched itself in Syria. At their height, the Sunni extremist group held about a third of the country.

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But despite the loss of its territorial caliphate in 2019, Charles says they're on the rise again.

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ISIS has turned a corner in the last 12 months or so. In fact, ISIS is on track to nearly triple its rate of attacks in northeastern Syria. So that is a huge and very consequential localized resurgence.

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The resurgence began in the Syrian central desert, which at least on paper is controlled by the regime, but very minimally so. The last 12 months have seen that spill over into the northeast of Syria in a very dramatic way.

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We are still a long way away from where we were 10 years ago in 2014, but the early seeds of a very serious resurgence are there. It is dedicating far greater numbers of fighters to individual attacks.

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The attacks themselves are growing more sophisticated, they're growing more deadly.

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He explains ISIS are recruiting again and extorting money from the locals at a scale not seen in nearly a decade.

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it is common that every month ISIS fighters are going out at night and distributing bespoke invoices to local businesses that demonstrate that ISIS is aware of the almost exact monthly revenues

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of a dentist, of a local shop, and are thus issuing them with these bespoke 5% tax invoices. If they are not paid, ISIS follows up by throwing grenades into those buildings as a punishment, as a kind of enforcement measure.

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Keeping a watch on thousands of battle-hardened fighters would be no easy task in any country. But Charles says the Syrian Kurds who make up the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, are trying to pull it off with limited security and resources.

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He explains there's just one well-funded prison.

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The other prison facilities are totally makeshift, and those are just unbelievably vulnerable to ISIS attack. And then the camps, on the other hand, they routinely are infiltrated by ISIS.

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In fact, the Kurds just conducted a major week-long operation that arrested nearly 100 ISIS operatives inside al-Hol camp, which is the main big one. The women in the camp, many of them are similarly loyal to the ISIS cause.

00:10:34 Speaker_04
They continue to discover schools that these women are running to indoctrinate children, particularly young boys, to be the next generation of fighters, the so-called Cubs of the Caliphate.

00:10:46 Speaker_00
But the SDF are not totally alone. They're still being supported on the ground by around 900 US forces.

00:10:52 Speaker_04
They are there to partner with, to train and equip, to advise the Syrian Democratic Forces.

00:10:57 Speaker_04
And they are also there to conduct both joint operations against ISIS in partnership with the SDF, but also occasionally unilateral US actions to push back against this ISIS resurgence.

00:11:08 Speaker_00
Following the US elections, there are concerns that a Donald Trump presidency will threaten those boots remaining on the ground. Trump's health secretary nominee says the president-elect still wants US troops out.

00:11:21 Speaker_04
Well, the last time Donald Trump was president, he tried to withdraw from Syria at least twice. Both of those decisions were ultimately rolled back for a number of reasons that had mostly to do with the opposition he faced from within the U.S.

00:11:34 Speaker_04
government, from within the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence apparatus. And I think there is no doubt that Trump himself would like to see the U.S. withdraw from Syria for real this time.

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On the other hand, he has also made a variety of appointments, particularly in the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State positions, that would seem to indicate those individuals would not support a hurried withdrawal from Syria, if a withdrawal at all.

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Turkey is taking the opportunity to put pressure on the US to reconsider their alliance with the SDF and America's presence in Syria.

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Turkey's president says he's also considering a fresh offensive into northern Syria to create new safe zones along its border.

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Turkey's the big elephant in the room in this whole subject.

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This is an extraordinarily complicated and extraordinarily sensitive dynamic between the US and Turkey, which has obviously resulted in successive Turkish military incursions into northern Syria in the past and could potentially result in another one.

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So how does President Assad fit into this picture?

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there was a kind of unsaid agreement that the regime would prefer northeastern Syria to be governed by the Kurds than they would by the Syrian opposition.

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Now, that kind of somewhat friendly relationship has soured to a point now where they're not necessarily hostile, but they are rivals. There is a tussle going on here in parallel.

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Who is going to be able to curry favour with the Turkish government here? Is it going to be the US and the SDF or is it going to be the Syrian regime with some significant Russian backing?

00:13:10 Speaker_00
To help explore those diplomatic questions, it's time for our next expert witness.

00:13:20 Speaker_07
Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service. A year ago, the libertarian Javier Mele became president of Argentina. Wielding a chainsaw, he promised to slash government spending and to create the world's freest economy.

00:13:35 Speaker_07
I'm Charlotte Pritchard. Join me to find out how Mele is changing the lives of Argentines.

00:13:41 Speaker_08
Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

00:13:52 Speaker_05
Part 3. Forgive and forget.

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Let's hear from Kotaiba Idlibi. He's the director of the Syria Initiative at the Atlantic Council. He explains how the international community are working on normalising relations with President Assad for their own domestic motivations.

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Turkey has shifted its goals in Syria from supporting the opposition to push for a political transition in Syria to actually focus on addressing the emerging national security threat for Turkey.

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Qutaiba grew up in Damascus. He's watched Turkey's relationship with Assad go full circle, sliding from friends to foes and back again, with President Erdogan now actively engaged in a process to normalise ties with Damascus.

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He's asked Assad's ally Russia to help.

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The economic situation in Turkey continues to deteriorate. A lot of the blame was pushed on Syrian refugees in Turkey.

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So the second priority for Turkey became to limit any further refugee waves coming from Syria, but also to focus on returning a lot of those Syrian refugees who are currently in Turkey.

00:15:07 Speaker_00
Turkey is following in the footsteps of the Arab League. After more than a decade out in the cold, Arab leaders warmly welcomed Assad back into the fold last year. Koteba explains why.

00:15:18 Speaker_02
It was an attempt to turn the page on the project of the Arab Spring and regime change and political transition across the region. But also it is focused on addressing narcotics trade that is originating in Syria and going across the region.

00:15:35 Speaker_02
It's very much focused on refugee return to allow Syrians in refugee in Lebanon to go back to Syria. And the third one,

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Arab members of the Arab League, they want Syria and the Assad regime to address the use of Syria by Iran as a runway to send militias to infiltrate countries in the region.

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Some European countries are tiptoeing back to President Assad too.

00:16:01 Speaker_02
The third process is a European process, which is led by a group of eight European countries that has officially called for the EU to change its foreign policy approach to Syria.

00:16:13 Speaker_02
The main topic related to normalization for the E8 countries is mainly refugees. A lot of countries in Europe are worried about continued waves of Syrian refugees coming to Europe.

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but also wants basically to set up a place where they can hopefully send some of the populations of Syrian refugees who are currently in Europe back to.

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Syrians living in the north are nervously watching this diplomatic thaw.

00:16:40 Speaker_02
In northeast Syria, there is definitely a fear that a deal between Turkey and Assad would mean on one hand, allowing Turkey to go in a military operation and control Kurdish communities, leading, of course, eventually to pushing U.S.

00:16:57 Speaker_02
forces out of that region. In northwest Syria, I think the fear is mainly that normalization would allow Assad's control over parts of that region. That would mean they will have to surrender to the Assad regime, the Syrian government,

00:17:13 Speaker_02
which will result in another cycle of violence, of disappearance and torture against Syrian communities there.

00:17:20 Speaker_00
For the regime, returning refugees may simply add to their financial pressures. Nearly all of Syria's oil and gas reserves lie in the north-east, and trade with neighbouring Turkey goes through the north-west.

00:17:34 Speaker_02
The Assad regime, it doesn't have the oil resources that it used to have access to.

00:17:38 Speaker_02
But also Iran and Russia have limited the amount of support that they are giving the Assad regime because they feel since the situation is militarily stable, that they don't need to spend a lot on the economy itself.

00:17:52 Speaker_02
And that's actually reflecting in very bad economic conditions for people living in regime controlled areas. We're talking about electricity hours on average between one and two hours a day. We're talking about lack of jobs.

00:18:08 Speaker_02
Meanwhile, relatively, there are more economic opportunities increasing in northwest and northeast Syria.

00:18:15 Speaker_00
Koteiba says normalisation has strengthened the hand of President Assad in any negotiations over the future of Syria.

00:18:22 Speaker_02
They've actually empowered Assad or boldened Assad's position to not really give any concession.

00:18:28 Speaker_02
And in a sense, Assad is seeing that strategic patience is key here, that if he waits long enough, that all countries will come back to him, to Damascus, give all the concessions they want, and then it is up to Damascus to decide what they would want to give back.

00:18:45 Speaker_00
But our next expert witness warns of the danger of leaving the north of the country out of the discussions.

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Part Four. Fragmented Reality.

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As things sort of just slowly start to normalise, they start to normalise toward the party in power and then we start to forget about those other territories and also the reasons for their grievances.

00:19:14 Speaker_00
Emma Beals is with the Middle East Institute in Washington and is a senior advisor at the European Institute of Peace.

00:19:21 Speaker_06
People have short memories. People start to sort of forget the atrocities and the violence and the reasons that people went to the North. And we see that in the conversation about refugee return and all of these kinds of things.

00:19:34 Speaker_06
So those really legitimate fears and traumas and injustices that the people in the North continue to live with every day, and so do people in the regime areas, are increasingly forgotten in the policy conversation. And so,

00:19:51 Speaker_06
They may be pressured or refugees may be pressured into policy solutions that don't actually take any of what has happened into account.

00:20:02 Speaker_00
Emma explains it's also hard for donors to fund long-term projects in northern Syria due to the political uncertainties coupled with concerns over the various groups controlling the territory.

00:20:14 Speaker_06
The humanitarian needs are enormous across northern Syria because there hasn't been the ability to do things like reconstruction of infrastructure, and I don't mean, you know, the big fancy infrastructure, I mean

00:20:27 Speaker_06
water treatment plants or electricity grids or basic hospitals and so forth. What we've also seen is a lot of people living in half-built buildings, you know, people living in tents, being expected to live in this long-term uncertainty.

00:20:43 Speaker_06
They're not able to do so in a way that meets their basic needs, which adds to the dangers of this situation.

00:20:51 Speaker_00
There's no serious peace process underway in Syria. As we've heard, regional diplomatic efforts are focused more on reintegrating Assad. Emma says any formal discussions taking place don't factor in the reality on the ground.

00:21:07 Speaker_06
The UN peace process doesn't really address the fact that there's four territories of control. You have the Arab League who are in negotiations primarily with Assad and are kind of ignoring the Northwest, the Northeast as well.

00:21:24 Speaker_06
And then Turkey, you know, having their conversations with Assad.

00:21:28 Speaker_06
And so what you don't have is really any path forward or any work stream or any active discussion that takes into account the fact that there are these four territories of control more or less. And so

00:21:41 Speaker_06
You really just have this holding pattern where people are being forced to live in an unstable situation with huge humanitarian needs that continue to grow.

00:21:50 Speaker_00
Emma warns that the shaky balance of power in northern Syria will potentially be threatened by international players taking decisions that the Syrian people have no say over.

00:22:03 Speaker_06
whether it's the Americans making choices about what happens with their troops, whether it's further normalization between Turkey and Assad, which would have consequences, whether it's either a pulling back or a pushing forward of the League of Arab States, whether it's Iran, who obviously are involved across a whole range of regional countries,

00:22:25 Speaker_06
Or just that one of these infractions that's going on, whether it's the Northeast versus the Northwest, Turkey sort of versus the Northeast, ISIS has been on the rise as well. You're talking about millions of people here.

00:22:38 Speaker_06
Millions of people with nowhere to go, with significant trauma from the conflict. And so I think that that's the real danger we face in Syria, is that if we ignore it, at some point the bill will come to, at some point,

00:22:55 Speaker_06
the situation is going to change, the table is going to get flipped over and it won't be in a good way.

00:23:03 Speaker_00
So let's return to our question. What's the future for Syria's divided north? There's no straightforward resolution in sight.

00:23:12 Speaker_00
Islamic State is resurgent in the region and there's fears that an emboldened Assad might seek greater control over this oil-rich lost territory, leading to more violence.

00:23:25 Speaker_00
Much depends on the continued presence of US forces and what concessions Turkey can elicit when it comes to its domestic security concerns over the Syrian Kurds from either a Trump administration or from normalising ties with President Assad.

00:23:42 Speaker_00
Let's hear from Emma one last time.

00:23:44 Speaker_06
Any one of those things could reach a point where it goes from just a bubbling increase in violence to a flashpoint that then sets off a series of reactions in this environment that continues to be very unstable.

00:24:01 Speaker_00
The Inquiry was presented by me, Emily Wither, produced by Diane Richardson and Matt Tolson. The editor is Tara McDiarmid, and it was mixed by Cameron Ward.

00:24:13 Speaker_08
Available now on the documentary from the BBC World Service.

00:24:18 Speaker_07
A year ago, the libertarian Javier Mele became president of Argentina. Wielding a chainsaw, he promised to slash government spending and to create the world's freest economy. I'm Charlotte Pritchard.

00:24:29 Speaker_07
Join me to find out how Mele is changing the lives of Argentines.

00:24:34 Speaker_08
Listen now by searching for the documentary wherever you get your BBC podcasts.