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Join the conversation: What next for Syria? [1]

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Date: 2025-01

Welcome to openDemocracy’s weekly reader comments round-up. We receive so many carefully considered messages about our work that it seems a shame to keep them to ourselves. Send us your thoughts for next week’s round-up by replying directly to any of our emails or commenting on our articles or Instagram posts.

These comments are edited for clarity, accuracy and length, and don’t necessarily reflect openDemocracy's editorial position.

The overthrowing of Assad I applaud, but we must now allow the people of Syria time to make their own decisions. The West should not interfere or force anything onto them.

–Alan Royston

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Assad's flight to Russia could indeed lead to full democracy in Syria. Though the struggles we’re having here in the UK to hold onto our own democracy – with the Tories having removed right after right and Keir Starmer in a dictatorial mood sacking MPs who disagree with his slightest pronouncement! – suggest it could be an uphill struggle.

Syria will need the support of the UK, the US and every other right-thinking nation to steer its way to, as it were, authorised democracy. But the main thing is that it must be allowed to find its own way. The UK and above all the US mustn’t rush to interfere. They did that in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and look how well that turned out!

Rebel leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, now the de facto leader of Syria, seems an OK kind of guy, not reckless but thoughtful and clearly out to do all he can to help Syrians achieve peace and calm after 50 years of the most brutal dictatorship, where repression, torture and death were the order of the day. He's talking reprisals against Assad-ites and has no mercy for them, but I don't think he or anyone else would get away with anything less, after all that Syrians have endured for decades.

So yes, Syria could achieve democracy, but it'll have to fight bloody hard to get there! I hope and pray for their success, and wish them every joy in their newfound (and not-to-be-relinquished) freedom.

–Val Gaize

There is no hope for democracy when those great champions of, erm, ‘democracy’, Türkiye, the US, Israel and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, the rebel militant group now leading Syria, which has links to Al-Qaeda) are busy carving up different parts of the country between themselves. None of these parties wants to stabilise the country under a democratically elected government.

A reasoned prognosis might well conclude that the medium-term outcome will involve several regions of Syria being under the control of different vested interests with varying agendas – all of which will probably be eyeing each other with deep suspicion. In the long term, something will likely cause oppressed local populations to rise up against their new masters and the Middle East merry-go-round will once again start spinning out of control.

–Mick Miles

It would seem that where terror has been used to seize control from an oppressive government, they have trouble escaping their roots. In a complex country such as Syria, where the population is split into different demographics, ethnicities and religions, tensions can run especially high. Each group vies for power and feels entitled to take the lead in exercising the power as it is distributed.

Northern Ireland provides a model for demilitarisation and power-sharing. Yet even this is far from perfect, with sectarianism simmering not far from the surface despite the veto power handed to each of the constituents of government.

So what does Syria need? A secular and proportional government largely run at a local level, with oversight from a ruling council to protect the rights enshrined by the UN. Regular free elections, whose results can be accepted as the pivot point needed to create a country that wants to disarm and to work within and between neighbouring communities. To be largely free from outside interference, religious and racial intolerance, and corruption.

Syria has a long history on which to build a future, but it will need to understand where it has come from – including the Assad era – to know how to get where it is going.

–Stephen Shawcross

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Israel lost any good reputation it had a long time ago, in my book. Palestinians, whether in the Gaza Strip (the world’s biggest prison camp) or the West Bank (where settlers murder Palestinians with impunity and bulldoze villages to make way for their own settlements) are clearly deemed less than human. This has been the case ever since Israel’s inception in 1948, the year of my birth. Yet it’s Israel that’s the cuckoo in the Middle Eastern nest, Palestine is the nest forcibly occupied.

And that the UK should be happy to support such regimes and count them as our allies dismays and disgusts me. We should be expressing the outrage and dismay that many of us feel – that everyone who was horrified by the Holocaust (or tales thereof, since it was so long ago) should feel. There's no difference between the two cases.

It's more than time that the UK caught up with reality and condemned Israel as the rogue state it is.

–Val Gaize

We need to put this abortion debate to bed once and for all.

A man can have a one-night stand without using contraception. The next morning he can walk away guilt-free. If we are all equal, shouldn’t a woman have the same privilege? Why must she carry the burden of not knowing whether one mistake has led to an unwanted pregnancy?

If we are all equal, women should have a guilt-free option to terminate a pregnancy at the earliest opportunity.

–Steve Jones

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