The day after Assad

By Hanna Ziadeh

Cairo
“Assad is leveling Syrian cities to the ground. He bombs civilians who are queuing up in front of bakeries. We must first remove him by all means and whatever comes after him. It's you in the West who are exaggerating the danger from a radical Islamist takeover after Assad's fall.”

This categorical statement does not come from a militant rebel leader but from Syria's most renowned artist and symbol of the revolt, cartoonist Ali Ferzat, during a meeting in Cairo. Ferzat, who fled Syria after the regime's henchmen kidnapped him and broke his hands so he could no longer "use them against his master", is otherwise the most peaceful Syrian one can encounter.

“It may well be that the Western media exaggerates jihadi Islamists danger, but it does not help that we underestimate them," I replied.

“I myself was in Aleppo, where jihadists have now declared their Islamic state, and I sat with Islamic insurgents there who discussed openly the usefulness of killing Christians like me and other unbelievers to receive support from rich Islamists in the Gulf" I added. I concluded "was it to conduct sectarian revenge and create an Islamic state that the Syrians rebelled against Assad? And why should the West support an armed Islamist-led takeover in Syria? "

The conversation reflects the gap in understanding what to do in Syria between the exiled Syrian opposition and Western governments. A gap which is widening for each day the conflict continues. The regime's escalation of repression have radicalized and militarized the democratic revolt.

The militarization and radicalization have also led to a situation where the conflict resembles less a popular uprising against a dictatorship and more a sectarian civil war between Alawite minority and a Sunni majority. It has also led to greater distance between opposition politicians who gather in fine hotels outside of Syria and the warlords leading the street battles in the devastated rebellious areas.

While the exiled opposition has learned to present to the West an acceptable political program based on democracy and the protection of minorities, the warlords are moving away from the revolt’s original values and increasingly aligning themselves with jihadi ideology that sees the rebellion as a fight against the heretical Alawites.

The ritual Friday demonstrations still come out as before from the mosques, they are fewer now but most importantly the demonstrators no longer sing and dance but instead carry jihadi black flag and declare their commitment to the jihadi group al-Nusra Front. The worst is that these warlords carry out assassinations of captive supporters of Assad, revenge attacks on Alawite villages and systematic lootings of homes and shops.

The exile opposition claims that the Islamist surge is a fleeting phenomenon that will disappear after Assad's fall, when the Syrians are free to choose their representatives. Exile opposition insists, moreover, to their Western sponsors that they are the genuine representatives of Syrian people. Both assertions are contradicted by facts and experience. Reports from war journalists and published Western intelligence reports confirm the growing power jihadists in Syria.

Experience from other Arab countries do not show that Islamists are weakened after the fall of the regimes. On the contrary, the experience from Libya - where the population exhibits the greatest gratitude for Western support during the rebellion against Kaddafi, a support which failed to materialize against Assad - shows that Islamic militants become entrenched in the post-revolutionary society and conduct painful attacks against Western interests. It is these facts and experiences that feed the Western governments’ fear and passivity. A fear of a revolt that will replace a secular, stable dictatorship they know with an unstable, unknown Islamic rule. Or even worse, chaos.

The strategy of the exile opposition has been to highlight Assad's atrocities to force the Western governments into action by exhibiting the immorality of their passivity. In vain. Western governments do not base their policies on moral considerations. They require what Henri Kissinger describes as “a plan for the day after the fall of the dictators.”

Unless the opposition comes with a realistic plan that convinces the Western governments that they have built a common command between the political leadership in exile and the many moderate insurgent groups in Syria, the suffering Syrians should not expect anything but the same Western indecision. A indecision which paradoxically helps to enlarge the West's dilemma as it helps to radicalize the Syrian revolt, as the fighters are mainly supported by jihadi groups in Iraq and Libya and the conservative governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all sponsoring militant Islamists.

With over 60 thousands dead, 100 thousands wounded and millions displaced the revolt against Assad has been the bloodiest battle any Arab people has made against their dictators during this protracted and freezing Arab Spring.

But despite the fact that most Syrians cannot imagine how their hell can get worse than it is already, it still can. Assad exhibits a deadly determination to retain power even if it means a protracted sectarian civil war which will not only threaten Syria's survival as a state but also the survival of the Alawite community itself. Unless the opposition builds a credible, inclusive alliance of both exiled politicians and rebel leaders in Syria, an alliance that can effectively govern after Assad and an alliance which the West can count on to guarantee its interests, curb jihadis and prevent a sectarian civil war, not only will the West's failure to act will persist, but the Syrian bloodbath will, if possible, become worse.

The Syrian tragedy is caused equally by the Western inaction due to the governments' cynical considerations and the Syrian opposition's inability to present a viable alternative to Assad.