by Kit Klarenberg :

IN THE immediate wake of the Syrian government’s abrupt collapse, much remains uncertain about the country’s future — including whether it can survive as a unitary state or will splinter into smaller states as did Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, a move that ultimately led to a bloody NATO intervention. Moreover, who or what may take power in Damascus remains an open question. For the time being at least, members of ultra-extremist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) appear highly likely to take key positions in whatever administrative structure sprouts from Bashar Assad’s ouster after a decade-and-a-half of grinding Western-sponsored regime change efforts.

As Reuters reported on December 12, HTS is already ‘stamping its authority on Syria’s state with the same lightning speed that it seized the country, deploying police, installing an interim government and meeting foreign envoys.’ Meanwhile, its bureaucrats — ‘who until last week were running an Islamist administration in a remote corner of Syria’s northwest’ — have moved en masse ‘into government headquarters in Damascus.’ Mohammed Bashir, head of HTS’ ‘regional government’ in extremist-occupied Idlib, has been appointed the country’s ‘caretaker prime minister.’

However, despite the chaos and precariousness of post-Assad Syria, one thing seems assured — the country will be broken open to western economic exploitation, at long last.

Multiple reports show that HTS has informed local and international business leaders that when in office, it will ‘adopt a free-market model and integrate the country into the global economy, in a major shift from decades of corrupt state control.’

As Alexander McKay of the Marx Engels Lenin Institute tells MintPress News, state-controlled parts of Syria’s economy may have been under Assad, but corrupt it wasn’t. He believes a striking feature of the ongoing attacks on Syrian infrastructure from forces within and without the country is that economic and industrial sites are a recurrent target. Moreover, the would-be HTS-dominated government has done nothing to counter these broadsides when ‘securing key economic assets will be vital to societal reconstruction, and therefore a matter of priority’:

‘We can see clearly what kind of country these “moderate rebels” plan to build. Forces like HTS are allied with US imperialism, and their economic approach will reflect this. Prior to the proxy war, the government pursued an economic approach that mixed public ownership and market elements. State intervention enabled a degree of political independence [that] other nations in the region lack. Assad’s administration understood without an industrial base, being sovereign is impossible. The new ‘free market’ approach will see all of that utterly decimated.’

Reconstruction project

SYRIA’S economic independence and strength under Assad’s rule and the benefits reaped by average citizens, as a result, were never acknowledged in the mainstream before or during the decade-long proxy war. Yet, countless reports from major international institutions underline this reality – which has now been brutally vanquished, never to return. For example, an April 2015 World Health Organization document noted how Damascus ‘had one of the best-developed healthcare systems in the Arab world.’

Per a 2018 UN investigation, ‘universal, free healthcare’ was extended to all Syrian citizens, who ‘enjoyed some of the highest levels of care in the region.’ Education was likewise free, and before the conflict, ‘an estimated 97 per cent of primary school-aged Syrian children were attending class, and Syria’s literacy rates were thought to be at over 90 per cent for both men and women [emphasis added].’ By 2016, millions were out of school.

A UN Human Rights Council report two years later noted pre-war Syria ‘was the only country in the Middle East region to be self-sufficient in food production,’ its ‘thriving agricultural sector’ contributing ‘about 21 per cent’ to GDP 2006–2011. Civilians’ daily caloric intake ‘was on par with many western countries,’ with prices kept affordable via state subsidy. Meanwhile, the country’s economy was ‘one of the best performing in the region, with a growth rate averaging 4.6 per cent’ annually.

At the time that report was written, Damascus had been reduced to heavy reliance on imports by western sanctions in many sectors and, even then, was barely able to buy or sell much in the way of anything, as the measures amounted to an effective embargo. Simultaneously, the US military occupation of a resource-rich third of Syria cut off the government’s access to its own oil reserves and wheat. The situation would only worsen with the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act’s passing in June 2020.

Under its auspices, a vast volume of goods and services in every conceivable field were and today remain banned from being sold to or traded with any Syrian citizen or entity. The legislation’s terms explicitly state preventing attempts to rebuild Syria was its chief objective. One passage openly outlines ‘a strategy to deter foreign persons from entering into contracts related to reconstruction.’

Immediately after coming into effect, the Syrian pound’s value collapsed further, sending living costs skyrocketing. In a blink, almost the entire country’s population was left barely able to afford even the bare essentials. Even mainstream sources typically approving of belligerence towards Damascus cautioned of an inevitably impending humanitarian crisis. However, Washington was neither concerned nor deterred by such warnings. James Jeffrey, State Department chief of Syria policy, actively cheered these developments.

Simultaneously, as Jeffrey subsequently admitted to PBS, the US was engaged in frequent, secret communication with HTS and actively assisting the group — albeit ‘indirectly’ due to the faction’s designation as a terrorist entity by the State Department. This followed direct approaches to Washington by its leaders, including Abu Mohammed Jolani, former leader of Al Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra. ‘We want to be your friend. We’re not terrorists. We’re just fighting Assad,’ HTS reportedly said.

Given this contact, it may be no coincidence that in July 2022, Jolani issued a series of communications about HTS’ plans for future Syria, containing multiple passages in which finance and industry loomed large. Directly foreshadowing the group’s recent pledge to ‘adopt a free-market model,’ the extremist mass murderer discussed his desire to ‘open up local markets to the global economy.’ Many passages read as if they were authored by representatives of the International Monetary Fund.

Coincidentally, Syria, since 1984, has refused IMF loans, a key tool by which the US empire maintains the global capitalist system and dominates the Global South, ensuring ‘poor’ countries remain under its heel. The World Trade Organization, of which Damascus isn’t a member either, plays a similar role. Accession to both would go some way to cementing the ‘free-market model’ advocated by HTS. After over a decade of deliberate, systematic economic ruin, geopolitical risk analyst Firas Modad tells MintPress News:

‘They have no choice. They need Turkish and Qatari backing, so [they] will need to liberalise. They have no capital whatsoever. The country is in ruins and they desperately need investment. Plus, they hope liberalising may attract some Saudi, Emirati or Egyptian interest. It’s impossible for Syria to rebuild using its own resources. The civil war might resume. They are acting out of necessity.’

Shock therapy

IN SYRIA’S protracted political and economic dismantling, there are eerie echoes of the US empire’s destruction of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. During that decade, the multi-ethnic socialist federation’s breakup produced bitter wars of independence in Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia — encouraged, financed, armed and prolonged every step by western powers. Belgrade’s perceived centrality to these brutal conflicts and purported complicity in and sponsorship of horrendous war crimes led the UN Security Council to impose sanctions against what remained of the country in May 1992.

The measures were the harshest ever levied in UN history. At one point, producing inflation of 5.578 quintillion per cent, drug abuse, alcoholism, preventable deaths and suicides skyrocketed, while shortages of goods — including water — were perpetual. Yugoslavia’s once thriving independent industry was crippled, its ability to manufacture even everyday medicines virtually non-existent. By February 1993, the CIA assessed that the average citizen had ‘become accustomed to periodical shortages, long lines in stores, cold homes in the winter and restrictions on electricity.’

Surveying the wreckage years later, Foreign Affairs noted that sanctions against Yugoslavia demonstrated how ‘in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated,’ and such measures can serve as uniquely lethal ‘weapons of mass destruction’ against civilian populations of target countries. Yet, despite such desolation and misery, throughout this period, Belgrade remained resistant to privatisation and foreign ownership of its industry or to the pillaging of its vast resources. The overwhelming majority of Yugoslavia’s economy was state- or worker-owned.

Yugoslavia was not a member of the IMF, World Bank, or WTO, which went some way to insulate the country from economic predation. In 1998, though, authorities began waging a heavy-handed counterinsurgency against the Kosovo Liberation Army, a CIA and MI6-funded and armed al-Qaeda-linked extremist militia. This provided the US empire with a pretext to, at last, finish the job of neutralising what remained of the country’s socialist system. As a Clinton administration official later admitted:

‘It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and economic reform [in Eastern Europe] — not the plight of Kosovar Albanians — that best explains NATO’s war.’

From March-June 1999, the military alliance bombed Yugoslavia for 78 straight days. Yet, Belgrade’s army was barely in the firing line at any stage. In all, officially, just 14 Yugoslav tanks were destroyed by NATO, but 372 separate industrial facilities got smashed to smithereens, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Markedly, the alliance took guidance from US corporations on which sites to target, and not a single foreign- or privately-owned factory was hit.

NATO’s bombing laid the foundations for Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic’s removal via a CIA- and National Endowment for Democracy-sponsored colour revolution in October of the following year. In his place, a doggedly pro-western government advised by a collective of US-sponsored economists took power. Their explicit mission was to ‘make an economic environment favourable for private and other investments’ in Belgrade. Ravaging ‘shock therapy’ measures were deployed the moment they assumed office, to the further detriment of an already immiserated and impoverished population.

In the decades since successive western-backed governments across the former Yugoslavia have enforced an endless array of neoliberal ‘reforms’ to ensure an ‘investor-friendly’ environment locally for wealthy western oligarchs and corporations. In lockstep, low wages and a lack of employment opportunities stubbornly endure or worsen while living costs rise, producing mass depopulation, among other destructive effects. All along, US officials intimately implicated in the country’s breakup have brazenly sought to enrich themselves from the privatization of former state industries.

Internal repression

DOES such a fate await Damascus? For Pawel Wargan, founder of the Green New Deal for Europe, the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ He believes the country’s story is familiar ‘to those who study the mechanisms of imperialist expansion.’ Once its defences are fully neutralised, he foresees the country’s industries being ‘bought-up at bargain sale prices as part of market “reforms”, which transfer yet another chunk of humanity’s wealth to Western corporations’:

‘We’ve witnessed the well-rehearsed choreography of imperialist regime change: a ‘tyrant’ is overthrown; backers of national sovereignty are systematically and viciously repressed; with tremendous, but hidden, violence, the country’s assets are chopped and diced and sold to the lowest bidder; labour protections are discarded; human lives are cut short. The most predatory forms of capitalism take root in every crevice and pore that emerges in the collapse of the state. This is the agenda of structural adjustment policies enforced by the World Bank and IMF.’

Alexander McKay echoes Wargan’s analysis. Now ‘free’, Syria will be forcedly made ‘dependent upon imports from the west’ evermore. This not only fattens the US empire’s bottom line but ‘also severely restricts the freedom of any Syrian government to act with any degree of independence.’ He notes similar efforts have been undertaken throughout the post-1989 era of US unipolarity. It was well underway in Russia during the 1990s ‘until the slow turn around in policy started in the early 2000s under Putin’:

‘The aim is to reduce Syria to the same status as Lebanon, with an economy controlled by imperial forces, an army used primarily for internal repression, and an economy no longer able to produce anything but merely serve as a market for commodities produced elsewhere, and site of resource extraction. The US and its allies do not want independent development of any nation’s economy. We must hope the Syrian people can resist this latest act of neo-colonialism.’

ScheerPost.com, December 18. Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.