Nikolaos van Dam's Reading List

"That’s what people say, but I don’t think it’s correct. Patrick Seale was my great inspiration for studying Syria. I started with one of his earlier books, which I used at university, both when I was studying and when I was teaching. He is one of the few people who can write in such a way that it is both high quality in terms of content and also attracts a lot of readers. He’s both a very high calibre academic and a high calibre journalist. You can read this book from page one to the end, not only as an academic book but also as a thriller. The book is part of a trilogy which also includes The Struggle for Arab Independence and The Struggle for Syria . Seale has this way of interweaving personal things with the wider context of history. So the book alternates. It’s not just a theoretical history, but also highly personal about the [former] president. Patrick Seale is I think the only writer, or one of very few writers, who had personal access to Hafez al-Assad. When the book was just published, I saw the criticism that he was a little bit biased – but I didn’t see that at all in the book. Having spoken with the president on various occasions just means he had better information, it doesn’t mean he was less critical. Usually it’s called Assad’s biography, but it interweaves the wider historical context. It’s a history textbook on quite an important episode of Syrian political history, in which Hafez al-Assad was president, and also the time before he became president. It looks at things that happened in very critical periods, for example during the October [Arab-Israeli] War in 1973 and how the views of [former] President Assad conflicted with those of [the then Egyptian president] Anwar Sadat. Sadat made a separate peace treaty – and the word separate is very important – with Israel. President Assad’s line was that only by having a united front towards Israel would there be a solution. Patrick Seale, also in a more recent article, referred to the disaster of Camp David. And we’ve seen that. There has been peace between Egypt and Israel, but it didn’t lead to any other real peace, even though it was in 1979, already more than 30 years ago. Exactly. This is what you see in all of Seale’s books. There are a lot of eye-openers in them. On several occasions, in his latest book [ The Struggle for Arab Independence ], I came across things which were a real surprise. It’s not at all a dull history but a real eye-opener, not only for people who know very little but also for people who have dealt with the Middle East, including Syria, for a long time. It’s less the case than it was, but it is a framework that exists in people’s minds. The area was divided up by the French and the British, who created artificial boundaries and artificial units. Under the Ottomans in that area, there were no boundaries. People could cross easily from Damascus to Haifa, or to Beirut, or they could go from Aleppo to what now is southern Turkey. There were no such borders, and the communication between Aleppo in northern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq was, for instance, more intense than between Aleppo and Damascus. And these people still have a lot in common – their Arabic is very similar. With Lebanon and Jordan, there are borders now, and the military may wear different uniforms. But the people are very close to each other. They don’t see it that way. Lebanon is also a very specific case. These two countries are very much bound together through history, and the Maronite Christians in Lebanon play a role in this. Patrick Seale calls Syria a truncated body. It used to be much bigger, but its limbs have been cut off – Lebanon and the former Palestine, Jordan or even southern Turkey. It has a new shape. That’s also the reason why there was no strong Syrian identity, in the sense of an identity linked to the territory of today’s Syria. It was either a broader Arab identity, or much smaller than Syria – a provincial or tribal identity."

"This is the next best book, after Seale’s, which is why I’ve put it at number two. It gives you a very rich multi-dimensional picture of what Syria really is. The peasantry and the descendants of lesser rural notables are the people who are now in power. Both the former president and the present president are descendants of peasants, people from the countryside. The book gives a very varied picture. Not all peasants are the same – you have peasants with land, without land, belonging to a certain clan or tribe, living in the lowlands or in the highlands. But they are very much represented in the regime and that’s why Hanna Batatu wrote this study. I should mention that he also wrote what I consider to be the best book on Iraq. His Syria book is shorter, it is about a third of the size of the one on Iraq, but it is almost like an encyclopaedia of the complexities of Syria, of the countryside, of people within the Ba’ath Party, the background of the Alawite officers et cetera. No, it’s much wider, it’s about all the peasantry, and about the whole of Syria. It’s about certain politicians, like Akram al-Hawrani, who was the first to bring in the poorer people, the lower middle class from the countryside, into politics and recruited people for the military who happened to have that background. It’s a tougher book than Seale’s, but for people who are really interested in Syria it’s a highly interesting book. It hasn’t been given the place among Syria books which I think it deserves. He was a Palestinian from Jerusalem. He died in 2000. He proudly showed me, at the time, in Beirut, his manuscript of the book on Iraq, which was published later. This sequel book about Syria, is really for the fine tasters. It’s not just about the Ba’athist period, after 1963, but also a long time before – he gives a deep perspective on the time of the French Mandate, and of the Ottoman Empire. Also if you want to get to know something about the earlier history of Syria, it’s a very good book to read."

"Yes I do, because generally the subject of sectarianism/tribalism/regionalism is a taboo subject in Syria. People in general, and the regime certainly, react very negatively to any talk about it, saying that it’s untrue, that it’s all polemic. They banned my book, but when the Arabic version was published in Cairo they brought big quantities with them from Cairo to Damascus and copied them. I see it as a compliment, because as Fisk says, it’s a highly critical book. The fact that they – and their opponents – took it seriously is a good thing. If you were to officially ask them they would not admit that, of course. My book has, by the way, also been used as obligatory literature in universities all over the world. Yes, in the greatest detail. In fact, it’s almost 5,000 pages, in five volumes, and we’re still waiting for the sixth. But you’ll never find another book which is such an insider’s account of all the things that have happened in Syria under Ba’athist rule. There is one thing that he doesn’t deal with in his book – the massacre of Hama in 1982, probably because it was too painful to write about it – but he deals with almost all the other important happenings and he’s quite honest about all kinds of other developments. You would never find that anywhere else. He also writes very well. It’s not dull, he describes quite a few amusing things and it varies from the very serious to sometimes the trivial, even. But for those who really want to study the inner workings of the regime, this is an unmissable book, together with Muhammed Ibrahim al-’Ali’s My Life and Execution . The “execution” is because he was supposed to be executed on 9 March 1963, and so the coup of the Ba’athist officers was brought forward a day so they could rescue him. He is still at the top of the regime, having been a member of the Ba’ath Party Central Committee for more than 25 years. What I found really interesting is a story in 1984, when the brother of Hafez al-Assad, Rifaat al-Assad, wanted to take over power. He wanted to use his reliable defence platoons, where he had some 3,000 Alawites of the Murshidiyin sect in key positions. But according to both Talas and Muhammed Ibrahim al-’Ali, Hafez al-Assad persuaded them to refuse any orders from Rifaat al-Assad, and from one moment to the next, the brother of the Syrian president was left toothless. The Murshidiyin military left their units, as a result of which Rifaat’s tanks and other armoured vehicles could not move into action. This was an inside story that I didn’t come across in any other books. It shows that sectarianism, or relying on certain groups within, in this case, the armed forces, can give you strength, but at the same time if all those people join you, they may also be induced to leave you."

"Yes, I wanted to choose a varied range of books so my last two are a bit different. This is a novel I happened to read which fascinated me. I didn’t know, before I read it, that Hanna Mina was one of the most well-known Syrian authors, so I was not coloured by the idea that it had to be a really good book – I was authentically really fascinated by it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Mina is describing his youth, in circumstances of poverty which I hardly imagined could exist. He was living in the area of the former Syrian territory of Iskenderun, in what today is part of southern Turkey, and his father worked day-to-day but was not very fortunate. I think he had two left hands, and almost never came home with money. For a long time, the family lived under a fig tree on a very dusty roadside. That’s where they had to stay all day, under a tree in the harsh sun. His mother worked in the countryside. The farmers raised silkworms, which the landlords would give to them. They would be very careful with them, because they were very, very expensive. Then, at the end of the season, they would give the landlords the end-product. When the silkworm industry collapsed because of modern technology, the farmers’ lives were deeply affected. These people were so poor that often they had to borrow money from the landlords, indebting themselves further and further. They were almost like slaves. This miserable picture of Hanna Mina’s mother and children under a tree really stuck with me. You can put a cloth on top of the fig tree to protect yourself from the sun, but you have to move it all the time as the sun moves. They had so little to eat that his mother instructed him that he should not eat before the shade reached a certain point. They had to divide what little food they had, if they had any at all. He describes the whole story of how this family is embedded in the countryside, working for the landlord, and all kinds of intricacies, including hospitality. But it was the bare necessities and the harshness of life that really struck me. He was born in 1924 in Latakia, and died in 2018 at the age of 94. The story starts when he was about eight years old, so in the early 1930s. Later on, one of his sisters complained that by writing all these personal things he had exposed them. They found it very shameful to be known to have been in such difficult circumstances. So this is a book from the early 20th century, but it’s fascinating. It’s an eye-opener, and he writes very well. It’s hardly imaginable that you could live under such circumstances. I think most people were a little better off. But now things have changed. The position of the farmers – and you can read about this in the Batatu book [on the peasantry] – has improved substantially. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t still many poor people, but they are not being exploited by landlords. Some of them of course exploit their own people, just like elsewhere in the world. But it is less extreme. People are better off. But the kind of poverty this book describes is good to know about, not only as a story but as a reality."

"That’s right. Because if you walk around it – as I have done very frequently – there are very beautiful monuments. But if you go down the side streets, they are rather grey and you don’t have the faintest idea that behind those blind walls you can find the most beautiful houses. She, in a way, contributed to making that more public. Of course the traditional Syrians were aware of these houses, but many of them had deteriorated. What is new now in Damascus, and also in Aleppo in northern Syria, is that many of these old houses have been renovated and restored, and sometimes also changed into hotels. When you stay there it gives you an idea of living in that atmosphere, which is very nice. You go through a very dusty street, not even the door is at all luxurious, and then all of a sudden you enter into a kind of oasis of beautiful decoration, mosaics, stonework and so on. So she and the photographer, Tim Beddow, opened this world up to the public. It’s a general book, but it has good descriptions of these houses and the families who owned them. Oh yes! I think many people would be amazed. In Damascus you have many historic places, the wonderful souqs or traditional markets. The same is true in Aleppo. Aleppo has the most beautiful traditional markets, 12 kilometres at least of covered streets where you find all kinds of small shops. I find it fascinating walking through these streets, soaking up the local atmosphere and smelling the rich aroma of oriental spices. Then you have the older cities like Palmyra or Afamia and the crusader castles. I think many people wouldn’t have the faintest idea of what kind of beautiful things Syria has to offer. This book about Damascus lifts the tip of the veil of the many, many beauties that Syria has. That’s right. You just wouldn’t know. Also in Aleppo, I spent a lot of time there, but it was only later on that I discovered a certain quarter, the mainly Christian quarter of al-Jdeida, where you have beautiful traditional houses and alleys. There is also the central citadel. Syria has a lot to offer, but it is not always visible to the outsider. This probably also has an effect in the political sphere. Sometimes if people like a country culturally, they are more inclined to be positive. I know Syria very well, but many people have preconceived ideas about it. Also, if you really want to know about Syria you have to spend time there. You can get to know a country through books, and that’s very important. But if you have the luxury or the possibility of combining that with a personal visit, that’s even better. In my opinion they are not going to help at all. What is usually missing in these cases is the dialogue. Because if you only impose sanctions, and you don’t talk or communicate with the Syrian government or the Syrian president, nothing positive will come out of it. I have seen it in many other cases – in Iraq, in Iran and other countries. The US also waited a long time to appoint an ambassador to Damascus, almost as if it were a privilege for the Syrians to have an American ambassador. As a result, he doesn’t have good access. If your government is talking only about sanctions, and telling the Syrians what to do, you’re not going to get very far. If you want to influence the president, you have to talk to him. If he only sees his foreign bank reserves have been frozen and that he cannot go to Marbella in Spain for a holiday, that’s not going to persuade him or his subordinates to act differently. You can impose sanctions, but if you don’t communicate at the same time you can be sure that you’re not going to contribute to a solution."

"In the period between 1976 and 1982, a military offshoot of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood started killing Alawis. Their aim was to topple the regime and polarize Syria on a sectarian basis. This culminated in the massacre of Hama in 1982, where about 30,000 people were killed. It was, perhaps, another example of Sunni Islamists imagining they could win because they are the majority of the population. But being in the majority doesn’t mean anything when the real instruments of power are in the hands of people from the Alawi minority. From then on a civil war, or at least a reckoning, seemed inevitable. Just as it may be inevitable that in the future—it’s impossible to say when, of course—there might be a new uprising. There are so many people who do not want to be reconciled; they want to settle accounts because so many people are dead. “If I were a Syrian, I would not dare to go back. You don’t have any guarantee that you will be treated reasonably.” I chose Fabrice Balanche’s book because he is very clear about sectarianism. Sectarianism is played down by many, not only academics but also many people from Syria. They say it doesn’t play a role, or that the other side is sectarian but we are not. Many Sunnis and opposition people say the sectarian factor is not important to them, as far as their own motivations are concerned. But the dynamics of the conflict mean that sectarianism is bound to be important, because the instruments of power and repression are mainly, if not all, in the hands of Alawis. The elite units of the Syrian Arab Army, including the Republican Guard and the Tiger Forces, the security services and the pro-regime armed militias that have been established, like the Shabbiha, are all recognizably Alawi-dominated. They are not only Alawi, but most of the key people are. Although Balanche clearly recognizes that there are all kinds of other factors that are important, he stresses that the sectarian issue cannot be ignored. It’s a real factor. He demonstrates that by using explanatory maps. He shows how the opposition areas were mainly Sunni, whereas the non-opposition areas were mainly inhabited by minorities. It doesn’t mean that all these people are motivated by sectarianism, but hardly any defectors from the army were Alawis or from other minorities. Balanche is showing all this on the basis of solid facts and statistics. People may argue that it is an oversimplification to say that it is ‘Sunnis against Alawis’. It is a simplification indeed, but when it comes down to it, one of the most important things is who has the power, and these are Alawis. (One should not say ‘the’ Alawis, because many Alawis oppose the regime). When Balanche started his in-depth research in Syria in 1990, he already noticed that the country’s sectarian divisions were glaringly evident. The Alawi community was the backbone of Hafiz al-Assad’s classic patronage system: in exchange for political support, they were given material benefits that only increased their sectarian loyalty. The regime knew very well how to agitate the Islamist threat in order to strengthen Alawi loyalty. Yet this privileged relationship increasingly frustrated portions of the majority Sunni population, especially those who suffered deteriorating living conditions. As a result, civil war—Balanche noted—seemed inevitable in the long term. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . From the beginning of the Syrian revolution, in 2011, Fabrice Balanche has been saying that the regime is very durable and could not be easily toppled. I was saying the same thing. This was at the stage of the conflict where the people predicting that Assad would have a long political life were accused of being pro-Assad—just because they said his chances of survival were high. Balanche was working at the time at the University of Lyon, but was reportedly disqualified for a senior job there just because his views on the possibilities for the survival of the Syrian regime— which turned out to be completely correct (!)—were disliked and rejected (based as this criticism was on wishful thinking). He is now working at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. This book is available electronically, but I have a print version. I prefer that in terms of seeing all the 70 coloured maps and so on. Yes. His book clearly demonstrates sectarianism in a way that has not been done by anyone else, certainly not with detailed maps, showing demographic developments, sectarian changes, tribal and ethnic groups, military developments, refugees, changing population compositions in different cities, quarters, regions and so on. By the way, Balanche uses a wide definition of sectarianism, denoting not only religious communities, but also ethnic and tribal groups. ‘Sect’, in this book, is described as any social group whose members share a common identity and are able to create a strong solidarity link. ‘Sectarianism’, in this sense, therefore also includes ethnic groups, like the Kurds and Turkmens."

"This book remains highly topical. When you read it—I just reread all the parts of it I had underlined (and there were many)—all of his analysis is very well argued and sophisticated. David Lesch told me that ‘ The Fall of the House of Assad ’ was the subtitle the publisher wanted, but if you read the preface you will see that he himself thought the Assad regime could very well survive the domestic uprising. David Lesch is, to my knowledge, the only foreign academic who has had extensive personal access to President Bashar al-Assad. He actually wrote an earlier book about the Bashar al-Assad regime, called The New Lion of Damascus . His second book is important for me, because he gives an insight into the mentality and inner workings of the regime. Lesch has noted, for instance, that the power accumulated over the years by the Syrian Mukhabarat (intelligence services) has led to systematic recklessness, which backfired against the regime. For instance, he writes about how he once came to Damascus to interview the president but was stopped and interrogated for three hours. And he said, ‘But I am going to see the president!’ This was an indication that in Syria the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, and that they did not seem to care. The intelligence services were acting on their own initiative, and this, according to Lesch, meant that there developed a disconnect that is both dangerous and an abdication of authority. It means the president does not always have full control over them. Another thing Lesch mentions is that the regime doesn’t like to be told what to do, and that it does not like to make concessions when under pressure. But what I pointed out in my book is that Bashar al-Assad does not like to give in when he is in a position of strength either. He’s very disappointed by Assad. He got to know Assad quite well and even tried to send him messages with policy suggestions at the beginning of the revolution. Later on, David Lesch accepted that in order to stay in power, Bashar al-Assad had to play according to the Syrian rules. He notes that the regime cannot reform, because then it would undermine itself. His knowledge and evaluation of the internal workings of the regime is a very important aspect of this book. Lesch is actually going to publish another book next year (2019), entitled Syria: A Modern History . I have read the manuscript. His forthcoming book is much more general, starting from early times, through Roman and Ottoman times up till now. It is an excellent and balanced analysis of Syrian contemporary history, enabling readers to access and understand the wide-ranging complexities of Syria today. People interested in the Syrian revolution can focus on the last part, where he sums up his analysis and conclusions of what has happened since the publication of his earlier work, and what he expects to happen with this revolution and Syria’s future prospects. In general people have tended to look at the Syrian revolution mainly from the perspective of the opposition and neglected the realities of the regime, except for its cruel dictatorial aspects. That is what is also missing in various books. They take the regime for granted. They don’t look at how the regime is, in fact, extremely strong because of sectarian, family and other loyalties. People would have done better to know more about the regime, because if you want to defeat your adversary, you must know it. That is what you will find in both the book by Lesch and the one by Fabrice Balanche. We are now talking about books published after 2011. Last time we spoke about books from a different era, about the hidden treasures of Damascus and a novel . But of the books which have been published after 2011, many side either with the opposition or with the regime. It is very important to look at books that do not side with either, but observe in a neutral manner. That is what Lesch’s book does."

"If you look at the Syrian war as a war by proxy, this is, I would say, the best book. It’s the first book to propose the thesis that much of this foreign interference has in fact prolonged the war instead of helping win or shorten it. In the book Phillips also gives a very good analysis of the Islamic State (IS). He notes that IS had ‘many parents’, and that if the Assad regime bore responsibility for it, so did his many international enemies, including Western countries, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others—who on earlier occasions supported trends which led to that movement. And IS would not have had a chance if the Iraqi regime of President Saddam Hussein had not been toppled during the US-British invasion in 2003. “None of the countries that have interfered in Syria have got anything positive out of it. They have only got something negative back” Phillips also discovered, through interviews, that at a certain moment President Obama wanted to declare that President Assad should step down. At that time, various people thought that Assad could fall any minute, so the American president felt he had to make a statement before that happened, just in order to be ‘on the right side of history’. This influenced all kinds of other politicians, because they simply echoed what Obama had said. But the US ambassador in Damascus at the time advised that you should only demand Assad step down if you could also impose it. This is another element in the war: politicians making demands they cannot implement. For instance, if they threaten military action and then don’t do it, it is better not to threaten it, because you lose all credibility. This book by Christopher Phillips I found to be one of the best books I have read on this period, particularly the international factor. It is very multifaceted. Certainly. Also, it means that for a solution you will need an agreement between the countries that have been involved in Syria. Some have got involved because of strategic interests. Some—like the Americans and the Israelis—want the Iranians out. The Turks don’t want any Kurdish element with power on their border. What Phillips writes—and myself also, by the way—is that their interference has put fuel on the fire. They intensified the fire of war through their actions and not even in a coordinated way! The opposition says, ‘If the Russians had not interfered we would have won the war against Assad long ago.’ But if the opposition had not been supported by billions of dollars of arm shipments from abroad then they wouldn’t have stood a chance. They would not have got anywhere near as far as they did. Many people or politicians talk about Russia or America or Turkey or Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Fewer people talk about the Syrians themselves. Whatever side you are on, the Syrian people have been the victim of all of this. But foreign observers often don’t involve them in these discussions. If this was just debates, it would be different. But 500,000 people are dead. There are so many victims, there is so much destruction. That’s why it’s better to admit that the war against the regime is being lost. But, as I said, even if Assad wins back Idlib, there will still be huge problems because America and various other countries will be looking out for their own perceived interests."

"He is probably right about that. He even predicts that they will play a role for decades to come. I do not agree with everything Lister says in his book, but this is, as far as I know, the most detailed study about the Islamist opposition groups. For that reason alone it is an important book. There are often discussions about who are the moderates and who are the radicals. Lister argues that in the past, there were still a lot of moderate people and groups, but that by now, behind the scenes, many of those moderate groups have begun to adopt many of the same political positions as their Syrian Islamist compatriots. The problem is that in a war that has lasted seven years and may last even longer, people cannot remain fully moderate. And, of course, moderation is a relative concept. You can have moderation in political thought, you can have moderation in the way you fight, and so on. It is not always really clear what ‘moderate’ means. In the West, in general, the Islamists are seen as radicals, which they are. But if you asked Robert Fisk about moderates and radicals he would completely disagree with Charles Lister on this point. Still, this book is a very good way of getting a better idea of how the Islamic State came up—first as Al Qaeda in Iraq, then as the Islamic State in Iraq and then as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and then the Islamic State without any additions. They now consider themselves a movement which has no geographic restrictions. Lister also deals with the issue that Western countries supported these so-called moderate groups. But in their battles against al-Assad and IS these moderates would sometimes have to work together with Islamists purely for opportunistic or strategic reasons. This happened, for instance, if there was an attack by the regime or IS on a certain area where both Islamist radical organizations and the generally more moderate Free Syrian Army happened to be located together. In such cases the moderates involved faced a military choice: either they could die while refusing to cooperate with the Islamic radical organizations, or they could survive, but would then be accused of collaborating with the extremists. So temporarily and purely for non-ideological reasons they worked together. “The problem is that in a war that has lasted seven years and may last even longer, people cannot remain fully moderate.” Western countries do not want to continue to support moderate groups if they work together with Islamist radical organizations, let alone the group that stands for Al Qaeda (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, previously called Jabhat al-Nusra). But if Western countries do not support these so-called moderates, the indirect consequence is that they will become weaker vis-à-vis the Islamist groups. So that is one of the issues Lister discusses. This book is also a historically important survey. I found it a very useful book when I was working on my most recent book. That is true of all these books I am recommending, they are the books I considered the most useful in getting a richer understanding of the situation in Syria, in addition to my own experiences with the country over many years, most recently as the Dutch Special Envoy for Syria. Yes, they are a very important component. They started to overshadow the other, more moderate groups, already early on, from the start of the Syrian revolution. The most powerful groups that remain are the more radical Islamist groups. So the strongest group is the one that now call themselves Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. Another strong Islamist movement is Ahrar al-Sham. And then there is Jaysh al-Islam, part of whose fighters were deported to Idlib Province after their defeat east of Damascus. Then there are many other smaller Islamist opposition groups. According to Lister, in 2015 at least 150,000 insurgents within as many as 1,500 operationally distinct armed groups were involved in differing levels of fighting across Syria. Some were within broader umbellas and fronts and others existed entirely independently. Interestingly, Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist movement, together with the Islamist Jaysh al-Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, all signed the Riyadh Declaration of December 2015. That declaration was an important and moderate compromise saying that Syria was to be a pluralist country where religious and ethnic groups would not be discriminated against and everyone would be equal. But the more radical Islamic groups do not really consider non-Sunni Muslims and Christians as equals. For political reasons, however, these opposition groups became salonfähig or acceptable for participation in the ‘Higher Negotiations Council’ because they signed that agreement. The leader of Jaysh al-Islam, Muhammad ‘Allush, was at the time even appointed as ‘principal negotiator’ of the opposition delegation for the negotiations with the regime in Geneva. But that doesn’t mean that if these radical groups had won the war they would have stuck to these agreements. That is a completely different thing. Charles Lister worked at the Brookings Institution in Qatar and was dealing with a lot of Track II meetings of the Syrian opposition, which ran in parallel with the intra-Syrian peace talks. In that context he met very many representatives of these military groups. I did as well, in my function as Special Envoy for Syria. I not only met people from these armed opposition groups, but I would also find out what they really thought. They may have signed the Riyadh Declaration but what they said in those Track II meetings gave a clearer picture of their real thinking. In Riyadh, the central identity and aim was to be Syrian. No other identity was to be more important than being Syrian. But then during the Track II meetings some people—from the Islamic current within the Free Syrian Army—said, ‘Yes, but we must also be very clear that Syria is part of the Arab nation and part of the Islamic world. The revolution cannot achieve its aim if the Islamic element is not there.’ Then the Kurdish representative would say, ‘Yes, but we already agreed on something else in Riyadh.’ Then another Kurdish representative would say, ‘Well. If you say you belong to the Arab nation, then I must say that we belong to the Kurdish nation of 50 plus million people.’ And so on. That is how some of these meetings went. Here some of them said rather different things than what their leaders had agreed upon in Riyadh and showed that, in practice, they would not fully subscribe to these principles. Because if ever the regime had been toppled it would have been toppled by the military and not by civilians. And the military are these people from Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam, the Free Syrian Army and others. They would have been the ones to decide what was going to happen and what wasn’t. So you have the world on paper and the world as it really is. Syria already had enormous economic problems, and the war has made things much worse. To survive, many had to join armed forces, and join the group that paid the most. For instance, I know of people from the Free Syrian Army who went to Al Qaeda or IS early on because they paid more. There is continuous movement. At a certain moment Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham were the strongest military opposition groups. The first wanted to incorporate the other. They refused. Then they started trying to get each other’s military over to their side. Many changed groups not for ideological reasons, but for practical reasons, to keep their families alive. Because after seven years of destruction and war, they hardly have anything to live on. This is a phenomenon that has continuously generated shifting alliances. Many of these alliances are what we call marriages of convenience. It is just for a certain strategic, pragmatic, temporary purpose. Look at the regime and the Kurds, the PYD in the north. Assad has provided them with arms, not because he likes them, but because he can use them against his other enemies. Assad has also been accused of cooperating with IS. If he did so, it was mainly as a kind of war economy, with limited means, to weaken as many of his opponents as possible. Then, when one group is eliminated, the other group which has helped him may be the next target. My guess is that if all the other groups are eliminated and the Kurdish PYD are still there, then Assad will not say, ‘Thank you for your cooperation against the others! You want autonomy, well you have earned it.’ Or perhaps Assad might temporarily give them some kind of autonomy if that were useful for him to use against Turkey. But these are alliances not of friendship but of perceived military necessity for that day or that period."