Alastair Crooke On The Fall Of Assad And The Future

Alastair Crooke and Judge Nap had a typically interesting conversation this morning. I’ve done a partial transcript of the portions that I found particularly interesting and that provide insight into the events over the weekend—and what they mean for the future. Obviously the two big regional players concerned here will be Turkey and Iran.

Of most interest, I think, is Crooke’s reminder that Erdogan’s entire political career is based on his activism in the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Crooke alludes to the further fact, without being totally explicit, that Hamas is also part of the Muslim Brotherhood movement. Erdogan betrayed his agreement with Russia and Iran in order to remove Assad, whom he almost certainly regards as a heretic from a Muslim Brotherhood standpoint. Netanyahu may be smiling today, but will Erdogan pivot to help Hamas—his Muslim Brotherhood brothers?

A further point—and Crooke is not alone in this view: Crooke believes these developments will lead Iran to quickly develop a nuclear weapon, because no nation in the world can be safe from an American attack unless it has nukes. The destruction of Syria was a rude awakening for many nations.

Alastair Crooke: Turkey Turns on Russia.

I have a lot of questions for you but I want to start at the end, so to speak: Are we closer to World War today--or closer to a wider regional war today--than we were a week ago?

I think the answer to both is yes. Certainly Lavrov at the OSCE meeting on Thursday said this Cold War is turning into a Hot War very quickly. I think that's right. Look at the pressure that's going on. We've seen what happened in Romania, Moldova, Georgia--all those pressures on the elections, overturning Romania just like that. In the Middle East I fear what's happened may undo much of the settled life of the Middle East. Syria was a sort of hub, and when it blows up it'll set all sorts of ramifications starting across the board.

Churchill of course famously said that there are no lasting friendships, there are no lasting enmities, there are only lasting interests. How appropriate in this case when, correct me if I'm wrong, the new Syrian head of state is former al Qaeda who fought against the United States--now supported by the United States. Is that correct?

Absolutely correct. It's a a conglomerate--various groups together, some of them even somewhat secular, sponsored by various patrons--but the main one, the HTS, is a former member of ISIS and a former associate of Baghdadi in Damascus, in Baghdad. His group are now really taking control in Syria. It's mayhem, it's really chaotic. But I'm not surprised because, although there's a strong campaign across the West to try and say that he's reformed, he's changed, he's not what he was, he doesn't any longer cut off people's head, because they are Takfir, [heretics]. He doesn't do that any longer, he's really all for diversity and inclusion. Well I just don't believe it. Years ago when I was in Karbala [Shiite city in southern Iraq] I was taken by the authorities there to meet the inhabitants of Mosul who had been invaded by ISIS. At that time, probably at the same time, Jolani was in his ISIS stage, before he founded al-Nusra, which was ISIS's protege for Syria. The stories were just terrible, told to me by the families and children who'd watched their parents die and things like this. It was incredible. So I fear for what will be coming. It's already mayhem. ... This was entirely predictable, because this is what they did in Idlib [protected by Turkey]. They established a really brutal Wahhabist control--that is an extreme form of Islamist control--over Idlib when Jolani was in charge of it. Anyone who disagreed with him, woe betide them! And now he's in Damascus.

Paradoxically, for all of you who remember what happened in earlier times, he's sitting in the famous Umayyad mosque in Damascus, announcing that he is the ruler of Syria. I don't think it bodes well for the region and, no, it doesn't bode well for the next stage of the war, because even though this is far removed in a sense it's connected to Ukraine—it was always part of weakening Russia.

Is the fall of Assad a defeat for Vladimir Putin?

Not specifically, because he stood back from it. I think it was apparent to President Putin what was happening, because Russia some time ago--I think even back to 2018--had offered Assad to both re-equip his army and to provide training, and Assad said no. I imagine that was a surprise to Russia at the time, but the same thing has happened in this latter period when Iran has tried to support Assad--indeed, they came and warned him two months earlier that there was trouble brewing in Idlib and that he should take account of this. That this was very serious, and he refused to believe the Revolutionary Guard who brought this information. Then the former speaker Ali Larijani came to try again to persuade Assad to take the situation seriously. [Assad] wouldn't even see him to begin with, and when he did he dismissed [the reports].

Why did this happen? I think for complex reasons. First of all, let's talk about the Army. At the bottom of all this were sanctions, on the one hand, which had reduced Syria to absolute poverty. On the other hand the Kurds, America's forces that Centcom had created a little autonomous area in the northeast of Syria and given [the Kurds] all of Syria's oil reserves. So Syria had no oil reserves. Idlib on the western side was the industrial hub, and that was run by a Turkish Ottomanesque militia on behalf of, principally, Turkey. So there was nothing to sustain Syria. To give you a concrete example, a member of the army, Assad's Army, was being paid $7 a month. A general was being paid $40 a month. So of course the Army was demoralized, it was in poor shape, it hadn't done any training, there were units there that really didn't exist. There were the elite units but I think probably like what happened in 2006 many of these military leaders had been paid off. I know that the HTS were offering the Syrian Army something like $400 to give up their weapons. So the Army was in bad shape, the economy was in bad shape, people were desperately poor. I think there was a large element that had just lost hope.

But what caused Assad I think to change was something slightly different. I remember some years ago when Mohammed bin Salman [MBS] was first starting out on the political stage, MBZ [Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan] of the UAE was his protector and advisor. I know that he said to him, 'Listen, if you want to be Crown Prince in Saudi Arabia then the route to being Crown Prince is through Israel and through the Israeli allies in Washington. That's what you must do if you want to be Crown Prince.' I think in a sense what we saw in the last few years was that Assad was moving closer and closer to the Gulf States and away from both Russia and Iran. I think he was taking that sort of advice, perhaps from some of the Gulf leaders, that the route to his future and his protection lay in coming closer to the Gulf States and distancing himself from Iran and Russia--which he has been doing for about three or four years now. [Iran and Russia] saw that, they tried to assist, but were refused. At the end of it there was almost no alternative. I think they just said, 'I'm sorry, but the game's up.'

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Trump in his usual way said over the weekend that the reason Assad's government collapsed is because its benefactor, whom he named as Putin, deserted him. Is that a fair assessment?

No. To a certain extent Assad had deserted Russia and had deserted Iran in the hope that he could sort of normalize himself through getting closer to the Gulf States and move further away from the Resistance and Russia and Iran. So I don't think that is right at all. This was a strategic move [by Russia and Iran]. Assad went to Moscow on the day before that started. We don't know what Putin said to him. Possibly he just said to him, 'I'm sorry but I think you have to accept reality. We'll do the best to try and pull together something to keep the state more less intact,' but I'm sure, from the sort of statements that have been coming out from both Iran and Russia, they know quite well that this is not going to happen. The [Syrian] state is not going to remain intact. It's going to come apart quite quickly. Indeed a war is already apparent between the Kurds and Turkey--Turkey is trying to crush all the Kurdish forces, many of them trained by the Americans. The Americans used the Kurds against ISIS. It's a very dangerous situation because those Kurds in the Northeast have something like 50,000 ISIS prisoners held there, and it's quite likely if they're really pressed by Turkey they'll open the prisons and let out these large numbers of ISIS. Remember that of these HTS forces about 30% of them are not Syrians at all--they're Chechens or they come from Central Asian republics, Turkomen, Uzbeks. They're jihadists--professional jihadists who've come down to work with HTS.

This is why I think the idea that Erdogan clearly had has had a long gestation. I remember Erdogan was always pushing--I know this because I was in Damascus at the time-- and Erdogan was urging Assad to take the Muslim Brotherhood into his government, and he used Hamas as the vehicle, the head of Hamas, and said: 'You must have the Muslim Brotherhood'--I mean, this was an Ottoman Muslim Brotherhood coming in--and Assad said, 'No.' But this is what Erdogan believes. Actually Erdogan thinks he controls HTS, and I've always said: 20 years experience has told me that people think that they can control these jihadist groups, what we also call Salafist groups, because they're simple people who don't understand geopolitics, only to find out that they understand geopolitics only too well. They have their own names and they pursue their own agenda.

Did Turkey/Erdogan turn on Russia/Putin?

Yes, he betrayed him, because even a little over 10 days ago there was an Astana meeting. This is a sort of general meeting between Iran, Russia, and Turkey that originally agreed that the jihadis should be contained in Idlib under strict conditions. Turkey was a signatory to this. Erdogan was a guarantor, and of course he completely broke all the agreements with Russia and launched this insurrection against Assad and has now brought down Assad and brought down the Syrian state.

What role did MI6 and CIA play in the toppling of Assad?

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Will the toppling of Assad encourage Iran to accelerate its development of nuclear weapons or will it have some other effect on Iran, which obviously did not want to see this happen?

Well I think just on Wednesday the supreme leader is about to make an important statement. We don't know what it's going to say, but we're told it's going to be a very important statement which he makes on the 11th. Now I think you know Iran is playing a very careful game but it's a difficult one--it's balancing diplomacy and balancing deterence, and there's a big debate about this in Iran, whether the balance is right. It's shifted more recently under the present president Pezeshkian towards being more about diplomacy and less about ensuring the defensive capabilities and the deterrence that Iran has against any possible attack. It's not hard to see. I mean, really, it's not actually even about Iran at all. It is really about Israel and about Israel's capabilities to persuade America to do this. So [Iran’s security is] not really capable of a diplomatic solution, in some some respects because it is not just about the [Iranian] nuclear program--it's also about weakening Russia. On the one hand an attack on Iran weakens Russia. More importantly it fits in with Trump's insistence on energy dominance and energy control--control of America's own energy resources but control of the regional energy resources so that they can make sure that China's Five-Year Plan is not a success.