The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria, an event met with jubilation by most Syrians, has opened up an unprecedented new chapter in the country’s modern history. For the first time in generations, Syrians, whose nation suffocated under nearly six decades of dictatorship, have been given a chance to shape their own destiny and build a new political order with the capacity to represent all the country’s citizens.
Yet as difficult as the brutal, decade-plus war to depose Assad has been, this new phase may prove at least as challenging. Forging a new state out of the wreckage of civil war is a daunting task even under the best of circumstances. Syria, whose economy, social fabric and infrastructure have been utterly ravaged over the past decade, also faces a skeptical international community, with global and regional powers veering between caution and hostility toward the new regime, and expressing deep suspicions of its current leaders.
Neighboring Iraq, which shares many features of Syria’s history — and has also faced the challenge of reconstituting itself politically after decades of dictatorship — could offer lessons in how to navigate a path toward stability and democracy.
Three stand out: embracing federalism and consensus-based decision-making to hold the state together, avoiding the creation of a new charismatic leadership cult to fill the vacuum left by a dictator, and focusing on practical matters of economic development and good governance over grand ideological projects and involvement in regional conflicts.
The experiences of the two countries are not identical. Whereas the Assad regime collapsed primarily at the hands of Syrians themselves, Iraq was invaded and occupied by the United States, and its democracy was midwifed with foreign support. Iraq’s path to relative stability has also not been easy. The early years after Saddam Hussein’s fall were marked by mass bloodshed, occupation, corruption and crippling political infighting. Crises like the emergence of the Islamic State group, which nearly drove Iraq to collapse, have also marred the country’s experiment with democracy.
Yet despite these challenges, Iraqis have managed to create a reasonably functional democracy after the overthrow of Saddam. While not normally thought of as a state with good governance, Iraq has built a representative system that includes the views of all stakeholders in Iraqi society. This is no small feat after generations spent under the suffocating authoritarianism of Baathist dictatorship — an experience that has deeply marked both Iraqis and Syrians.
The principles underlying Iraq’s politics have included power-sharing, decentralization and coexistence based on a new social contract: a democratic constitution. After the brutality of Saddam’s regime, the U.S. occupation and sectarian civil war, Iraqis have continued to look to those principles as guideposts to shore up their democratic institutions. In the face of crises that have brought their state to the brink of collapse over the past decade, Iraqis have succeeded heroically and often against the odds at keeping their nascent democracy afloat.
Syria shares similar historical, socioeconomic and political circumstances to Iraq, making it a useful institutional comparison. The two countries, which share a lengthy border, experienced numerous military coups in the 20th century before both coalescing around Baath Party dictatorships. The Baath Party in each country was minority-led, with an Alawite-dominated regime ruling Sunni-majority Syria and a Sunni-dominated regime in Shiite-majority Iraq.
Despite frequent political tensions between the Baathists in Syria and Iraq, both groups remained grounded in the party’s original ideals of nationalism, socialism and secularism. This shared ideological inheritance would be fateful for both countries, creating difficult relationships with non-Arab minority groups like Kurds, and even shaping the perspective of hostile Islamist parties who rejected Baathism, yet often retained its principle of ethnic chauvinism.
A free Syria now faces the challenge of holding together its contingent parts and winning the support of Kurds, Christians, Alawites and other minority groups for the new state. The new Syrian regime, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has suggested that it is at least willing to reconsider the Baath Party’s ethnocentric conception of statehood — even going so far as to state in a recent communication that “diversity” is a strength of the Syrian nation that they will seek to protect. This welcome rhetorical gesture would need to be institutionalized, however, within a political system that protects the rights of other groups.
In Iraq after the fall of Saddam, representative power was granted to every sector of Iraqi society through a free parliament. Iraq has also used the tool of federalism to navigate contentious issues of identity and autonomy for groups like the Kurds. Today, northern Iraq is governed as an autonomous Kurdish entity that remains part of the Iraqi state. This compromise solution, which denies independence to Kurds but grants them broad powers of self-governance, has won the buy-in of most Kurdish parties, which continue to adhere to the Iraqi Constitution and prize their role inside the country as long as they are able to maintain cultural, security and political autonomy over their own territory.
Federalism does not only benefit minorities. The Kurds’ role as an autonomous entity within the Iraqi body politic has helped stabilize the country as a whole at critical junctures and prevented would-be dictators from emerging. When former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki commenced a crackdown on Sunni leaders and revealed his authoritarian ambitions to Iraqi society, the influence of Kurdish parties operating within the federal system helped compel him to step down. Maliki nearly brought about the destruction of Iraq, inasmuch as his actions contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. But in a diverse federal system where other parties like the Kurds could exert an influence, he was eventually contained.
Notwithstanding periodic disputes and an ill-fated independence referendum in 2017, the example of Iraqi Kurdistan has demonstrated to both sides that the path to stability and defusing ethnic conflicts lies in a formula of federalism, while eschewing separatism.
Syria’s Kurds, who now control territories in the northeast of the country under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces, now find themselves in a similar position of needing to negotiate a new arrangement with Damascus. They have already forsworn separatism, seeking only self-governance within a Syrian state — similar to that which exists in Iraq — to protect their cultural identity and prevent the unhappy experience of the Baathist era, when they found themselves effectively disenfranchised within the Syrian nation. Any form of Kurdish self-rule in Syria’s northeast would also include the strong participation of Arabs, Turkmen, Assyrians, Circassians and Yazidis, since Kurds are a smaller part of the population in Syria than they are in Iraq.
Another shared experience of the two countries has been rule by charismatic strongmen who depicted themselves not just as political leaders but fathers of their nations. Hafez al-Assad and Saddam both created cults of personality centered around themselves, with their images becoming ubiquitous around the country. This cult became a pillar of Baathism, only ending in Iraq upon the U.S. invasion. Syrians continued to live under the cult of Assad for decades longer, however, as Hafez passed down the mantle to his son, Bashar. Right up until his flight from the country in December, Bashar served as a living embodiment of Syria’s nationhood, and Syrians lived under a fanatical ideological movement centered around revering him.
Today, amid a general outpouring of relief and jubilation over the fall of Assad, another charismatic cult is in danger of being created around the person of Ahmed al-Sharaa. Popular depictions, both domestically and in the broader region, have quickly emerged casting Sharaa as another father figure for the Syrian nation, with the Saudi publication Okaz going so far as to depict him as a new Bismarck — the iconic leader who united Germany and set it on the path of socioeconomic reform. The emergence of Sharaa as a new symbolic hero like Saddam or Bashar would be a clear sign of democratic backsliding. The cult of the leader was a major factor aiding the suppression of real democracy in both Syria and Iraq during the Baathist period.
Despite its challenges, Iraq has not allowed the cult of a strong, charismatic leader to reemerge within its body politic since the fall of Saddam. No Iraqi leader has replicated the former dictator’s quasi-religious personal stature, and the institutions of the country have likewise forestalled the possibility of other leaders building similar cults around themselves.
Sharaa has so far seemed ambivalent about these depictions of himself, and has instead made gestures toward the importance of “institutions” and governing by consensus in the new Syria. Yet constraining him, or any other leader who attempts to define the state around his own personality, will remain a major challenge without the types of democratic institutions that Iraqis have built to ensure that their country does not lapse into the familiar ideological habits of the Baathist era.
A useful example of one such constraining institution came in the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A year after the occupation began, the new interim Iraqi authorities, working under U.S. supervision, established a body called the Iraqi Governing Council. This body was created to represent the views of all Iraq’s major ethnic and religious groups as well as tribal leaders in the country. In many ways, the governing council helped build the foundations of an inclusive new Iraq, giving voice to Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians and other members of Iraq’s diverse social fabric who had previously been mere subjects of the Baath Party. No single individual or group could emerge to dominate the political scene, because a chorus of diverse voices would be there to balance their influence.
The governing council eventually helped steer Iraq through its democratic development. A year after its creation, an Iraqi interim government was established, which gave birth to a transitional national assembly and set the stage for the drafting of a new democratic constitution for Iraq. In October of 2005, the Iraqi people finally voted for this new constitution after months of public deliberation.
Remarkably, that constitution succeeded in breaking with the past and moving Iraq away from both strongman dictatorship and its prior Arab nationalist dispensation, transforming it into a state that formally recognized all its constituent ethnic and religious communities as stakeholders in the country. While Iraqis disagree on many issues today, the vast majority continue to uphold this constitution as the guarantor of the security and stability of a unitary Iraqi state.
Syria’s transition has so far not followed the example of this relatively successful project of consensual institution-building. Instead of convening a governing council representing the diversity of Syrian society, Sharaa has centralized decision-making around himself and his associates in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. Sharaa’s pragmatic statements, which have been widely lauded in the press, have so far not been put into practice in reality.
Syria today does not have an inclusive political transition body in place that is able to achieve the consensus of diverse segments of its population. The new Syria cannot be a one-man show, nor can it represent only the views of one party — even if that party led the military offensive that toppled the regime. Until and unless Sharaa takes seriously the need to create such mechanisms for winning the buy-in of other sectors of Syrian society, particularly its minority groups, the new Syria that is being built is unlikely to develop the same durable constitutional order that has allowed Iraq to survive the turbulent two decades since it was freed from Saddam.
Syria has other reasons to tread carefully in charting its path forward. Unlike Iraq, Syria is not blessed with abundant oil resources to help flesh out its budget, nor does it have foreign friends that it can count on to provide security guarantees should crises emerge. The threat of the situation, now jubilant, devolving back into infighting and instability is real and present. Even with the relative advantages they enjoyed, Iraqis suffered tremendously in the years after the fall of Saddam, learning only through painful trial and error, and with the guidance of an often brutal foreign occupation, how to create a sustainable modus vivendi inside the country.
Despite the many pitfalls they have encountered since taking control of their own country, Iraqis have not repeated the mistakes of neighbors such as Iran, which has been turned into an ideological project of perpetual revolution and regional aggression. A pragmatic inward focus has been a hallmark of post-Saddam Iraq, which has put handling economic, environmental and political problems above quests to remake the region or influence the affairs of its neighbors. Syria’s leaders would be wise to follow this example and should continue reassuring surrounding countries of their intentions.
A decisive moment may be on the horizon, as foreign countries like Turkey press for the dissolution of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The dismantling of this group, which was key to the fight against the Islamic State, rather than integrating it into the new Syrian armed forces, would deprive the new regime of a powerful tool for preventing a resurgence of militancy in the country. In Iraq, the Kurdish Peshmerga were incorporated into the constitutional order of the country and now cooperate with the Iraqi military. There is no reason that the same model cannot be used to defuse a looming showdown now on the horizon.
Syria’s new leadership has inherited a destroyed country in which over 90% of the population lives under the poverty line. The infrastructure of what had once been an aspiring middle-income country has been reduced to subsistence levels, with most citizens living without basic services like reliable energy and water supplies. This devastation will take years to repair and will require careful and pragmatic management of all sectors of Syrian society to win their support.
But as Syrians set out on their own path to sovereignty and independence free of dictatorship, it is worth looking at Iraq’s example for helpful signs along the road. Pragmatic, inward-looking and technocratic government has been a net positive of Iraq’s democratic experiment. No new Saddam has emerged, and old conflicts with minority groups have been settled durably with power-sharing agreements.
Having achieved the heroic task of ending a cruel dictatorship, Syrians are now setting out on the long and complex road toward rebuilding their nation. In that journey, they could do worse than taking lessons from their Iraqi neighbors, who started out on the same hard path two decades before them.
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