Syria: The Raging “War of Position”

By Samir al-Taqi

On December 8, 2024, Damascus did not fall so that an alternative state might rise. It fell to expose, beneath it, the rot of decades—and four socio-political forces that remained, and still remain, locked in struggle within the ruins of power. Not in open battles settled by defeat or victory, but, as Gramsci described it, a “war of position” waged trench by trench, inside the institutions of society itself.

Four forces, none of which can prevail alone:

1.  A Salafi-jihadist current that wants to recast Syria as a Sunni Islamic sectarian state—and what it has generated on the opposing trench in the way of sectarian and ethnic reactionary forces, where all these forces converge in their projects against the inclusive national one.

2.  A nascent parasitic bourgeoisie that turns the war economy into a permanent privilege.

3.  A productive national bloc of small merchants, professionals, and the remnants of the bureaucratic administration—the group with the greatest stake in a state coming into being, and the weakest capacity to build it.

4.  A civil society of women and the young that has begun, warily, to breathe.

None of these wins alone. And that is precisely what leaves the outcome open to alliance: the forces of corruption on one side, the forces of construction on the other.

A state without a structure, an authority without institutions, a system run—without any point of reference—by three simultaneous monopolies.

The security monopoly: entrenched by the National Security Agency, so that security becomes a replica of the lame Idlib inheritance, imposed on twenty-three million people.

The financial-oligarchic monopoly: chambers of commerce distribute privileges within the circles of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, alongside a sovereign fund and a supreme council for economic development beyond any declared oversight—so that reconstruction contracts are parceled out in a living reenactment of Iraq’s catastrophic experience.

The third—the authoritarian monopoly—is hybrid and hidden: a quiet doctrinal shift from jihadist Salafism to a “Madkhali” Salafism taught in mosques, universities, and military colleges, its essence absolute obedience to the ruler and rejection of pluralism. It seeks to package the citizen into a policeman over his own mind, an unquestioning instrument of the ruler’s authority. Meanwhile a tangible mass of loyalists, “in their blindness,” denies the atrocities of the coast, Suwayda, and northeastern Syria, and denies a fact affirmed by international bodies such as Human Rights Watch: that the operation was centrally coordinated by the Ministry of Defense, not the chaos of unleashed militias.

After the massacres and battles on the coast, in Suwayda, and along the Euphrates, the researcher Rana Khalaf (Chatham House, Britain) describes these settlements as ones that “do not resolve the conflict, but defer it” inside institutions “built on quicksand.”

Indeed, it is a war of position everywhere—even within the Islamist camp itself: a mutiny of officers who refused to coordinate with Washington against ISIS, a fissure that runs through the entire security structure. Then the strenuous effort by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham to dissolve the Muslim Brotherhood, on the pretext that “the Islamist project has already been realized” through it, while the Brotherhood splinters into four factions, between withdrawal, compromise, and jihadist disintegration. This struggle will hardly be settled by decree—and the embers of the Brotherhood seep and simmer, for now.

On the other side of the war of position, a strong national alliance is forming to build the new Syria, in a war that spans society, the state, the economy, and the governing bureaucracy itself.

These forces are embodied in hundreds of thousands of patriotic Syrians working to reinforce everything constructive and sound, to make “life possible” for Syrians—against the twin projects of sectarian exclusion, bloody repression, and economic monopoly at once.

Beside them stands a large bloc of old and new bureaucratic forces that in no way want the past to return, yet reject a novel Islamist project—a “new Sunni nationalism” on the Turkish model. They work strenuously for a genuine, negotiated constitutional path, with binding constitutional guarantees, to build a true state of citizenship.

Within the economy, too, lies a raging battlefield: between corrupt monopolistic state capitalism and the productive national bourgeoisie. On the bank of the parasitic oligarchs, the names are known: merchants of the Assad era now sit side by side with bearded men from Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, from the financial oversight body to the border-crossings authority. No industry is protected, no agriculture supported—only tourism, real estate, and fast money, awaiting a share of the giant cake, where bad currency (cronyism and the quick deal) drives out the good (productive, long-term investment).

Against them, at every juncture of life and of the state, the productive national bloc wages its peaceful war against corruption and domination: the merchants of the cities, the professional class, and the workers who endured the harshest years of the war.

And on the most fragile margin stand civil society, women, and the young, waging together the battle against society being dragged backward—as the decorative inclusion of women becomes plain: “as if we were a painting hung on the wall.” The Baathist law has even been revived to require security approvals for the founding of associations; and even real-estate transactions have become tied to paid security clearances.

As Thomas Schelling put it: in the absence of a third party to guarantee and enforce the contract, no actor in this war of position holds any capacity to force a decision. It is a balance that Russian research centers describe as “a balance of gangs and clans,” not of state institutions. Meanwhile the International Crisis Group warns that “the number of Syrians who see Damascus as a threat rather than a protector will not stop growing” unless the rules of protection and accountability change radically.

Few are the historical examples in which contradictions like these were resolved peacefully. Indeed, in this chaotic melodrama, society and the forces of production brace for the jihadist-oligarchic alliance to storm the trenches of society, production, and rights. Three scenarios open up:

1.  Coerced cohesion. The circle of security and money tightens its grip, the side fires are extinguished by force, the embers buried under the ashes, and a surface stability persists to the beat of a muffled resentment: the Idlib security-economic model expands to every institution—the judiciary, the remaining chambers of commerce, the universities—so that the capacity of society and the economy to resist shrinks.

2.  Creeping fragmentation. Zones of ethnic and sectarian tension harden—a declared demand for autonomy and de facto parallel institutions, local taxes, a separate judiciary, direct security understandings with external parties without Damascus’s mediation—in “a policy of deferring the explosion” (Chatham House).

3.  Genuine negotiated pluralism. Imposed by the productive bloc, civil society, and the internal reform current together, its program gradual. This path alone can turn the muffled war into a state in the real sense of the word: a genuinely binding constitutional path—not a consultative one—in which the guarantees of society’s forces (the components, the secular forces, and women) are translated into real participation, not decorative.

A pressing question the outside world poses daily: are Syrians ready—or worthy—of waging a war of position in which their civic, embattled state triumphs over the forces of the jihadist oligarchs? If not, we await the coming, devastating round—one that threatens the entire national existence of Syria. Article link https://annah.ar/343220