The West must stop Syria from becoming a failed state

The images are reminiscent of the worst of history’s crimes against humanity, and the stories of sadism, sexual violence and murder perpetrated in the Sednaya prison in Damascus are almost beyond belief.

The “human slaughterhouse” has been giving up its 1,500 prisoners trapped underground, the remains of countless others, babies born of rape victims, and more of its grisly secrets. Yet, horrific as it is, Sednaya is but one – albeit the largest – of the gulag-style network of detention centres used by the Syrian regime, during its long reign of terror, to crush dissent.

Bashar al-Assad, who once worked as an eye doctor in Marylebone, grew into a tyrant on a scale rarely seen even in the Middle East after he succeeded his father, himself a byword for barbarity, in 2000.

Clearly, Assad, along with his British-born wife Asma and his associates, should be placed on trial for crimes against humanity. The cronies he left behind in Syria will soon enough face rough justice from the country’s new rulers. Assad himself can only pray that Vladimir Putin’s reign in Russia will last as long as the Assad dynasty did in his homeland, and that he will be able to fulfil the dream of every dictator: to die in his own bed of old age.

What matters now, however, is not the immediate fate of Assad and his gang, but the future of the Syrian nation. There is a need to avert what took place after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Like Assad, these were both long-established dictators with a casual attitude to human rights, and were hated by their own people – but when they went, there was nothing to keep their countries together.

These precedents don’t offer much hope for Syria. Indeed, the country has already had to endure an off-on civil war since the “Arab spring” uprisings in 2011 that left it divided, traumatised and impoverished, with its government pathetically reliant on patronage, military muscle, and money supplied variously by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah.

More than most other nations emerging from a long civil war and the rule of a violent brute, Syria is perilously close to becoming another chaotic “failed state” – one that is more or less permanently at war with itself. It has the kind of ethno-religious tensions common to the region, but with heightened potential for their ignition.

As has been the case elsewhere, the vacuum left by the collapse of Assad’s dictatorship could be exploited by local warlords, and by ambitious neighbouring states, often sponsoring their own factions for their own ends.

Syria, in other words, could quite conceivably fall victim to the fate that befell Yemen and Lebanon, for example. They became tragic battlegrounds in proxy wars conducted by neighbouring regional superpowers – which, in the case of Syria, are Turkey, Israel and Iran, with America and Russia each watching their own allies warily.

A glance at the post-Assad map of Syria reveals a kaleidoscope of such fiefdoms. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – now in control of the west of the country, including the capital – is the nearest thing to a government, but is not yet in control of the nation as a whole. Its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has made conciliatory noises both at home and abroad, but he doesn’t give cause for optimism; he and his group grew out of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terror cult, and he is undeniably an Islamist.

Meanwhile, the Kurds have retained much of their de facto autonomous territory in the north, but have been pushed back by Turkish troops and the “Syrian National Army”, also sponsored by Turkey. Other, smaller groups, are in control of pockets in the south, and much of the centre of Syria has no functioning government at all.

The Israelis, never missing an opportunity to protect their interests, have advanced into the buffer zone next to the Golan Heights, an area Israel has illegally occupied since 1967.

To complicate matters still further, there is even an American base in the southwest, close to the Iraqi border, and there are Russian air and naval bases on the Mediterranean coast. HTS have told the Russians – currently hosting the exiled Assad clan – that they can keep their bases, but who knows for how long, and on what conditions?

The attitude of the West thus far has been that the future of Syria is a matter for the Syrian people – a laudable democratic sentiment. But in the short run, there will need to be more aid, to help those who are struggling to live in the war-ravaged country as well as those in the surrounding states, which are ill equipped to deal with another influx of hundreds of thousands of terrified civilians.

The West, too, will have to face the political challenge of offering asylum to some of those fleeing the fighting. Which is all the more reason for Western governments to try, urgently, to extract a commitment from Syria’s neighbours – Israel, Turkey and Iran – to keep out. In fact, for their own good, they should do as much as they can to stop the fighting and the flow of weapons to favoured groups.

Syria has, it hardly needs saying, suffered more than enough. If its misfortunes are not to spread across its borders, then it needs all the help it can get to return to some sort of peace and stability.