The Syrian regime’s collapse was sudden. After years of relative inaction, opposition forces stormed major cities across Syria — Aleppo, Homs, Hama, and then Damascus — and Bashar al-Assad fled. For two decades, Assad had headed the regime he inherited from his father and had ruled the country with a suffocating grip, often presenting himself as a defender of Palestine and the Palestinians. Now, his departure and replacement by a motley of opposition forces led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) raises crucial questions about the region.
The Assad regime’s collapse came on the heels of a ceasefire between the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah and Israeli forces and as Tel Aviv continues its more than year-long campaign to annihilate what’s left of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. One crucial question revolves around whether Syria’s new leadership will abandon any commitment toward confronting Israel and will instead submit to the demands of Washington and Tel Aviv. Will the new Syria concede the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights — Syrian territory, according to international law — and sign a peace agreement? Will the new Syria ditch the country’s longstanding commitment to oppose the Palestinian people’s annihilation?
Historical Bonds
For Palestinian armed factions and refugees in Syria, concern is mounting over an increasingly grim situation. The relationship between Syria and the Palestinians stretches back to a time well before the regime came to power when Hafez al-Assad seized control in 1971. In the 1930s, the Syrian sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam rallied Palestinians to fight both British mandatory rule and Zionist colonization. During a long shootout in 1935, British police killed al-Qassam.
Al-Qassam’s death sparked widespread outrage among Palestinians, in part fueling a three-year popular uprising against British colonial rule and efforts to establish a Jewish ethnostate in historical Palestine that began in 1936. Yet, he wasn’t the last Syrian to fight or die for the Palestinian cause — in the decades since his death, many have joined that struggle.
Complex Relationship
Still, the relationship between the Syrian regime and the Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of whom live across the map of Syria as refugees, has always been complex. The Assad dynasty always insisted that it supported the Palestinian struggle, but throughout decades of its rule, it was as quick to oppress and kill Palestinians as it was to shed Syrian blood.
Still etched into the collective memory of Palestinians, tensions between the Assad regime and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat often boiled over into wanton bloodshed, especially during the 15-year Lebanese civil war that began in 1975.
The Assad dynasty always insisted that it supported the Palestinian struggle, but throughout decades of its rule, it was as quick to oppress and kill Palestinians as it was to shed Syrian blood.
During the summer of 1976, for instance, Hafez al-Assad dispatched the Syrian military to join Lebanese Christian militias laying siege to Palestinian fighters in the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in northeastern Beirut. By the time the siege ended, the fighting had killed between 2,000 and 3,000 Palestinians. Throughout the 1980s, the Syrian regime fought to impose its control over Palestinian armed factions in both Syria and Lebanon, in part hoping to prevent any pretext for an Israeli invasion. Between 1985 and 1988, the Syrian regime and its allies besieged Palestinian camps in Beirut and southern Lebanon. Known as the War of the Camps, that series of battles led to the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians.
Civil War
This pattern of cruelty and cooptation continued throughout the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. The following year, Hamas broke its decades-long relationship with the Assad regime and proclaimed its support for the Syrian uprising. Aknaf Bait al-Maqdis Brigades, a Hamas-aligned armed group, faced off against Syrian regime forces and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) alike.
Aknaf Bait al-Maqdis set about liberating Palestinians camps across Damascus, its outskirts, and in the province of Daraa. Similarly, it joined forces with rebels taking the fight to the regime in eastern Ghouta as early as 2012.
Despite this resistance, regime forces besieged and destroyed Palestinian camps across the country, much like it did to any community that leveled opposition to its rule. Throughout the last 13 years, the regime and its allied militias eviscerated Palestinian camps in Daraa, Khan ash-Sheikh, Sbeineh, and Khan Dannun.
Yet, few places symbolized Bashar al-Assad’s willingness to kill the Palestinians it purported to defend as much as Yarmouk, the Damascus-area camp that was once known as the capital of the Palestinian diaspora. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians had resided in Yarmouk before the war, but years of siege, bombardment, and barrel bombs sent most of its residents fleeing.
Malnutrition, Starvation, and Resistance
As thousands upon thousands of people took flight from Yarmouk, the government-imposed siege, coupled with the invasion of ISIS fighters, turned the camp into the site of mass death and widespread starvation. By March 2014, more than 60% of those who remained in the camp were suffering malnutrition. Access to medical care was sparse. Months passed with residents unable to get their hands on fruit or vegetables. Some residents were reduced to eating poisonous plants or dog meat. Hundreds of children and elderly residents died of starvation.
As thousands upon thousands of people took flight from Yarmouk, the government-imposed siege, coupled with the invasion of ISIS fighters, turned the camp into the site of mass death and widespread starvation.
From 2012, Hamas-aligned factions had controlled much of Yarmouk, where it fought alongside Syrian opposition groups and fended off an ISIS invasion until the camp fell to the hardline group in 2015. Following that collapse, Hamas-aligned fighters withdrew from the southern Damascus area to Idlib alongside Syrian opposition groups.
The fight continued, but there in Yarmouk and elsewhere, the Syrian regime’s security apparatus detained thousands of Palestinians, executing untold numbers of them, throughout the bitter years of the civil war. Even as rebels open the prisons, only a few dozen of the more than 3,000 imprisoned Palestinians have been found alive.
Uncertain Future
That regime is gone, but it’s still too early to know what its collapse will mean for the future of the country’s Palestinian refugees and armed factions. Instability is widespread, and although rebel groups have taken control of Damascus, the exact contours of the next regime have not yet been determined.
During these critical, early days, HTS has successfully unified the ranks of the Syrian armed opposition. The new ruling factions have vowed to ensure a peaceful transfer of power, preserve state institutions, protect minorities from potential retaliation, respect human rights, and mold Syria into a country that embodies the hopes and aspirations of all Syrians.
Meanwhile, the lack of clarity about the new leadership’s stance toward the Israeli occupation is troubling. Israel has occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since the 1967 war, and since Assad fled to Moscow, Israeli forces have launched airstrikes across the country and invaded Syrian territory, seizing the strategically critical area of Mount Hermon and villages stretching from Quneitra to edges of the rural Damascus countryside and Daraa governorate. Tel Aviv has already ordered the fortification of these newly occupied areas, claiming a 1974 armistice agreement had collapsed and announcing its intention to create a buffer zone.
Exploiting the chaos of the moment to penetrate deeper into the country, Israeli forces are now alarmingly close to Damascus. Israeli airstrikes have decimated the remnants of the Syrian military, also targeting intelligence sites and scientific hubs across Syria. Israeli assassinations have killed a growing number of scientists and experts. These attacks amount to a full-blown campaign to dismantle the Syrian military’s future potential, but they also signal a concerted effort to establish a new balance of power across the Middle East.
Understandable Silence?
Amid this campaign of destruction, the new Syrian leadership has not issued a public statement clarifying its stance vis-à-vis Israel — despite the fact that Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani, hails from the occupied Golan Heights. The silence might be a symptom of the fact that HTS and other opposition factions, already facing immense internal and external pressure alike, have yet to fully consolidate control over the country’s entirety. No less burdensome are the new regime’s security and logistical challenges, including managing basic services amid the complete collapse of living conditions.
Meanwhile, Palestinian armed factions and the Palestine Liberation Army, the militant wing of the PLO, recently convened at the PLO’s Damascus headquarters. That meeting led to a statement that celebrated the Syrian people’s freedom from the Assad regime, called for Syrian unity, condemned the spate of Israeli assaults on the country, and urged Syria to continue supporting the Palestinian cause.
For its part, Hamas has leveraged its ties to Turkey and the Syrian opposition in order to further an effort to play a key role in preserving Palestinian factions’ right to continue their operations in Syria. Some Turkey-based opposition factions have offered reassurances that Palestinian groups will not face persecution or have their offices shuttered.
Mixed Signals
Yet, in Syria itself, opposition forces have recently entered the offices of some Palestinian outfits that supported the Syrian regime, including the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC), Fatah al-Intifada, and as-Sa’iqa. The opposition forces confiscated documents, equipment, and weapons.
When Syrian rebels set about freeing prisoners from regime lockup, the general leader of Aknaf Bait al-Maqdis and dozens of the group’s fighters were liberated from Sednaya, one of Assad’s most infamous prisons and a place known for the most brutal forms of torture.
The opposition’s reassurances to Palestinian armed groups don’t represent an official commitment from the new Syrian leadership, but they could serve as positive starting point for establishing a constructive relationship that ensures the protection of the Palestinian presence in Syria.
Hope for Palestinians of Syria?
If Palestinian groups have any hope of continuing their fight, this future relationship will need to preserve the political and social integrity of the Palestinian camps in Syria. The camps, which hold the symbolic promise of return for the refugees who reside in them, will need to be rebuilt — the integrity of the Palestinian camps was enshrined in a 1956 law that preserved Palestinian rights to live and work in the country without compromising their national identity as Palestinians.
On top of those commitments, the new Syrian leadership ought to take a firm stance against Israel’s decades-long occupation of the Golan Heights and the Israeli military’s blatant violations of Syrian sovereignty through the recent uptick in bombings.
Led by the United States, Western countries are already exerting intense pressure on the new Syrian leadership to abandon any commitment to confronting Israel — including threatening to keep HTS on the terrorism list and to leave intact the suffocating sanctions that would make it impossible for the country to rebuild and recover from more than a decade of civil war.
The US plays an integral role in the region through its far-reaching military presence and the pressure it exerts on its allies — Jordan and the Gulf states, for instance — to marginalize any pushback to Israel’s expansionist policies. The Israeli military is fresh from conducting a devastating war on Lebanon, and its military assault on the besieged Gaza Strip shows no sign of slowing down, even as the number of dead and injured reaches unimaginable heights. The new Syria shouldn’t cave to American and Israeli demands to dismantle Palestinian resistance, a concession that would amount to full submission to Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s designs on the region.
