By Richard Wood

It is not a coincidence that the Syrian Revolution, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, reached its climax in December of 2024, during the Israeli genocidal attack on Gaza. The Israeli genocide is undoubtedly the most profound political crisis in the Arab World since 1967 and perhaps exceeds the significance of the 1948 Nakba. The U.S. and Western European collusion in the annihilation of Gaza has laid bare the agenda of the West toward Arabs and Iran, that they must submit to Israeli domination and collude with it or face utter destruction. All of the rhetoric of restraint of Israeli aggression, expansion or even humanitarian assistance to Palestinian and Lebanese civilians has melted away. The West has made it perfectly clear that the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians is acceptable.

The Syrian Revolution could not have been possible without the devastating Israeli assassinations of Hassan Nasrallah and other major leaders of Hezbollah. Nor is it a coincidence that Iran’s timid response to the U.S. assassination of Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 and the Israeli and U.S. attacks on their nuclear sites on June 22, 2025, demonstrate the severe limitations on what Iranian resistance can muster in the face of a U.S./Israeli bombing offensive. The Syrian Revolution also succeeded due to Russia’s preoccupation with its trench warfare in eastern Ukraine, in which it has reportedly suffered as many as a million casualties and perhaps 250,000 dead. If Hezbollah, Iran and Russia had not been preoccupied with their own conflicts, they might have found a way to shore up Bashar al-Assad’s faltering Syrian Arab Army and maintain control of Damascus and other major cities in Syria, as they had for over a decade. Similarly, without the assistance of Turkiye’s military intervention in Idlib Province in Syria from 2018-2024, HTS could not have launched an offensive that shattered Assad’s 25-year reign.

Regardless of all of the political dynamics that made it possible, Syria’s Revolution was historically significant as one of the region’s longest and most notorious dictatorships collapsed and was supplanted by a militant movement of Islamic mujahidin that had weathered thirteen years of war to emerge victorious in the first successful overthrow of a national government since the Arab Spring began in late 2010. Nearly half a million people had been killed in the war against Bashar al-Assad’s regime since March of 2011. Syria’s population is nearly 30 million (with up to seven million in exile since 2011), roughly five times the population of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and the country lies at the heart of the Arab World. Iranian, Russian, and Hezbollah support for the Assad regime was a cynical political calculation that disregarded the interests of the Syrian people and has seriously damaged their reputation in Syria and beyond. Assad’s indiscriminate barrel bombing and destruction of Syrian cities, as well as the horrors inflicted on Palestinians in Yarmouk Camp, just five miles from the center of Damascus were met with indifference by most international institutions and commentators and thus provided a blueprint for Israeli action in Gaza, after the October 7 attacks, especially with U.S. and Western European support or passivity. Assad’s total war in Syria and the failure to oppose it except among mostly Islamic militants paved the way for Israel’s genocide.

The leader of the HTS, Ahmad al-Sharaa, as well as other major figures in the new government have repeatedly expressed their support for the Palestinians’ struggle against Israel in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as having stated that the Second Intifada against Israel was one of the inspirations for their decision to travel to Iraq and resist the U.S. occupation there from 2003-2008 and until U.S. forces were withdrawn in December of 2011. HTS has made it clear that they support Palestinians and that they do not trust the Israeli government. In fact, both HTS and Hamas share a Sunni Islamic orientation that is committed to the liberation of Palestine and Syria and the establishment of an Islamic society that would forge an alternative to the Arab states that have for so long colluded with Israeli hegemony and U.S. military domination in the region. Hamas withdrew its offices from Assad’s Syria in 2012 and maintained that separation until 2022, just before the Arab League formally re-admitted Syria in May 2023. Hamas leaders openly congratulated the Syrian people on their achievement of their “aspirations for freedom and justice” on December 9, 2024, after their victorious offensive which overthrew Assad.

That being said, Syria’s new government has the urgent task of avoiding the fate of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Yemen, in having major figures in its leadership assassinated and maintaining its ability to continue functioning as a government and fighting force, and not being destroyed by the Israel and U.S. war machines, that have effectively dismantled both the threat of deterrence and the effective resistance that these governments mounted to Israel for so many years. For Syria to engage in armed conflict against Israel under these conditions today would be an act of national suicide. It would give Israel the rationale to occupy more land in Syria beyond what it has already seized and to divide Syria into regional units that could be far easier to control in the future. In the July-August crisis over the Druze-Bedouin sectarian conflict in Suwayda Province, in southern Syria, Israel expanded its occupied territory near the Golan Heights, supported Druze leaders who openly requested Israeli intervention and threatened and bombed Syrian armed forces and structures in Damascus and Homs. The military threat Israel poses to the new Syrian government is serious and unrelenting. It is obvious that Syria must respond to these multiple provocations (as well as the violence and sectarian crisis in the Alawi regions of the northwest coast and in Kurdish lands in the northeast).

Recent criticism of Syria’s new government, including the articles of Robert Inlakesh in The Palestine Chronicle, al-Mayadeen, RT, and elsewhere are based upon the assertion that HTS is openly collaborating with Israel by not attacking them in southern Syria, where they are expanding their control of lands near the Golan Heights. Inlakesh made no such demands on the Assad regime, which he long supported, when it was attacked by Israel. Inlakesh also claims that the HTS leadership’s decision to negotiate with Israel, as it has been doing in Paris, in Doha, and possibly in New York at the ongoing U.N. 80th session. These negotiations have thus far produced no results since Israel has been demanding the cession of the Golan Heights in exchange for acceding to Syrian governmental control of southern Syria. Syrian officials have repeatedly stated that they have no partner in these negotiations that will recognize Syrian sovereignty.

After his historic speech at the UN on Wednesday, September 24, it is clear that al-Sharaa and his revolutionary government "stand firmly with the Palestinians in Gaza" and that they believe that "Israel cannot be trusted" as a negotiating partner. Al-Sharaa stated unequivocally that Syria will not participate in the Abraham Accords because, unlike the Gulf States, Israel still occupies the Golan Heights. He stated that Syria will abide by the 1974 Disengagement Agreement that Syria signed with Israel following the 1973 War. Syria's decision to negotiate with Israel is obviously not a form of collaboration, since Hamas and Hezbollah have both negotiated with Israel. Negotiations with one's political opponents is not collaboration.

Syria has refrained from attacking Israeli forces which have been expanding their probes into southern Syria and now arming the Druze forces of commander Bahaa al-Jamal, and religious leader Shaykh Hikmat Salman al-Hijri of Qanawat, after clashes between Druze and Sunni Bedouins began in April and May. The Syrian government has also refrained from attacking Israel after its attacks on Syrian military bases and the Defense Ministry in Damascus. Clearly, HTS is exercising maximum caution in dealing with Israel, while trying to encourage the U.S. to recognize its sovereignty and pressure Israel to relent. Whether this caution can or will last much longer is doubtful, since there are increasing calls from Syrians, Palestinians, and others to defy Israeli aggression and defend Syria’s borders from flagrant violations and provocations. Of course, Iran and Hezbollah have also exercised extreme caution after suffering dramatic losses from Israeli attacks in recent months. Yemen’s Ansarallah has continued its attacks upon Israel but is also being hit with highly disproportionate attacks. If HTS decides to respond to Israeli provocation, it will certainly lose much ground in its efforts at national unity, forming a coherent government and sustaining unified military leadership and capable armed forces, planning for future elections, curbing the sectarian tensions among the 75% Sunni majority population and the Alawi, Druze, Shi’i, Christian and Kurdish minorities, reconstruction of state infrastructure and housing, and an economic recovery that requires foreign investments which could offer employment to millions of people. These would be daunting challenges for any new government, all the more for one facing Israeli threats from the extremist Netanyahu government to Syrian sovereignty, in the midst of a regional war with unparalleled violence and destruction.

Robert Inkalesh, who has supported the Palestinian struggle in his writing, admirably for the past five years, never once in his published work criticized the Assad regime for its horrendous violence against Syrians and called reports of the chemical attacks in eastern Ghouta propaganda. Russian bombing of Aleppo and Idlib never gave him pause. Hezbollah and other Shi’i militia (from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan) attacks on Syrians and their support for Assad has never caused Inkalesh the slightest concern, at least from what I can discern from his articles and podcasts.

Inkalesh has also attacked HTS for fomenting sectarian conflicts in Syria, while never once criticizing the sectarian politics of the Assad regime or its reliance on Alawi personnel to staff the upper echelons of the state. He claims there has been no change in the rampant corruption inside the state, while having ignored Assad’s corruption. Inkalesh conveniently blames the HTS armed forces for the deadly serious ethnic conflicts in Latakia and Tartus, when those conflicts were initiated by Alawi elements aligned to Assad. He blames HTS for the deaths of Druze people in Suwayda, when the origins of the Suwayda conflict lie in the rivalry of Sunni Bedouin and Druze that long predate HTS power in Damascus. This does not excuse those Sunni armed forces that did engage in sectarian violence and killings against Alawi and Druze in 2025. Such attacks cannot be defended and must be thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators brought to trial and punished for their actions. HTS has promised to do so, although the Syrian criminal justice system has not been functioning for over a decade and will take years to be reformed and rebuilt in a way that could possibly satisfy the Syrian public.

Among the Druze, Shaykh Hikmat Al-Hijri supported the Assad regime until 2021. He refused to agree to the disarmament of Druze forces in January 2024. In March, he called al-Sharaa’s government ‘extremist’. After conflicts erupted in July, al-Hijri requested that Trump, Netanyahu, Muhammad bin Salman, and Jordanian King Abdullah II intervene and “save Suwayda”. Druze leaders Shaykh Hammoud al-Hinnawi and Shaykh Yousef Jarbou, of the Druze religious Authority and Suwayda City’s Ain al-Zaman Shrine, who at first assisted HTS in reaching a ceasefire on July 19. Following the withdrawal of government forces, al-Hijri’s militia killed 50 Bedouin, and the crisis erupted again. The more moderate Druze shaykhs have also now broken with HTS and oppose cooperation with them. Sunni Bedouins have fought with Druze and have since fled from Suwayda into Daraa Province where Sunnis are the majority. Druze constitute 3% of Syria’s population and remained neutral during the 14-year revolutionary war. Similar developments have occurred in the northwest after Alawi militias and civilians were killed by HTS supporters who exceeded reasonable responses to insurrection and attacked people based only on their ethnic identity. These sectarian dynamics have been sustained in Syria for decades and will take many years to be resolved. HTS deserves criticism for its inability to control all of the armed forces aligned with it, after a decade of bitter fighting and horrific atrocities, but it also deserves an opportunity to establish itself and not be judged by social conditions it did not create. Sectarianism in Syria is centuries old and will not be eliminated quickly. Still, HTS and those involved in the new Syrian government have much work to do to restore or initiate trust among the ethnic communities who fear a new Sunni ethnic hegemony and a government that exacerbates it, not one that seeks true national reconciliation and justice.

Many Muslims and anti-imperialists around the world have mistakenly believed for many years that Syria was being defended by Iran and Hezbollah (and Russia) from American and Western plots to overthrow an Arab nationalist government that was engaged in active resistance to Israel. These absurd delusions about the Assad regime and the nature of the Syrian opposition to it continue to plague the discourse on the Syrian Revolution. Robert Inlakesh, despite his support for Palestine continues to nurse this flawed analysis of the Syrian Revolution. HTS and its newly established partners in Damascus are not perfect and they must make serious efforts to address the criticism and distrust of their critics, from across the political spectrum. The task is immense, and the obstacles are formidable. It does no service to Syria or to Palestinians to denounce them as collaborators with Israel or proponents of sectarianism (which they adamantly deny), within ten months of their successful revolution, unless you are working consciously to undermine them on behalf of those who have already betrayed Syrians for far too long.