What Are the Grandsons of Lawrence of Arabia Doing to the Syrian Body?

Samir Altaqi

It is often attributed to Churchill that he once said: “No one can govern Syria, nor can Syria govern itself.” Thus, before Sykes–Picot and after it, this mentality has continued to dominate approaches to Syria up to the present day.

According to many Western references, Orientalists and Western diplomats still read Syria as a space inhabited by people deemed unfit to build their own state—people who have not “civilized” themselves into a nation-state, but rather remain sects, tribes, and families loyal only to their narrow solidarities.

Accordingly, Syria must either be unified by an ideologically driven dictator, internationally mandated to discipline them through iron and fire, or else its territory must be divided among international hegemonic powers and regional states of influence, so that Syria may once again be treated as an object of conflict and as a “crisis-management file.”

Security realities help clarify this inclination. In December 2025, an attack targeted a joint U.S.–Syrian patrol near Palmyra. Official investigations and statements revealed that the perpetrator was a member of the personal security detail of the presidential palace. For Britain and the U.S. administration, the incident was not unexpected; rather, the writing had been on the wall. Jonathan Powell and Tom Barrack, among others, understood this perfectly well.

Hence came the “Paris moment,” which exposed this mood with striking clarity. Washington needed assistance from its regional proxies to discipline the Syrian space.

The Paris negotiations of January 5–6 were merely evidence of this reality. These talks were not a fleeting diplomatic stop, but rather a plan for dividing Syria and a protocol for dividing labor among the intervening states.

Officially, the Paris meeting aimed to resume security talks, reduce tensions with Israel, and revive old “disengagement” arrangements. Yet the names of the participants and the leaks from American and French diplomats revealed far more than the formal language suggested. The discussions were strategic—and far more consequential.

The Syrian side was represented by Foreign Minister Asaad al-Shaibani and Intelligence Chief Hussein al-Salama. The Israeli delegation, however, was a heavyweight one, including Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter; the prime minister’s military secretary, Roman Gofman; and the acting national security adviser, Gil Reich. The Americans were represented by equally influential figures, including Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, while Tom Barrack took charge of arranging the table and preparing the details. Most importantly, Hakan Fidan stood behind the scenes in Paris as the guardian of Turkish interests.

The Paris meeting was anything but ordinary. Yet it heralded neither peace nor even a final truce among the regional actors.

First, it called for the establishment of a U.S.-supervised “fusion cell” to exchange intelligence and link security with diplomacy.Second, and more importantly, it proposed a “demilitarized economic zone” opening pathways for “civilian” cooperation—in energy, agriculture, and health—serving as a guarantee for prolonged Israeli oversight of southern Syria extending as far as al-Tanf.Third, Israel did not concede a single millimeter of its security and sovereignty demands on Syrian territory: a security-sanitized south, under a mandate extending to the outskirts of Damascus, with no clarity regarding the fate of Mount Hermon and with the consolidation of what force imposed after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, when Israeli forces advanced into the buffer zone established by the 1974 agreement.

Afterward, al-Shaibani crowned the Syrian government’s position with a public statement setting the Golan aside without negotiation and without any compensation, while also stressing the necessity of Israel’s withdrawal to the pre–December 8, 2024 lines.

As usual—just as in the Versailles negotiations of 1918, when the Middle East was divided and the Sykes–Picot process was launched—the margins of the Paris talks proved more important than their substance.

As in Versailles, not everyone was seated at the table. In this case, Israel objected to Turkey’s presence following the Baku negotiations. The solution devised by Kushner and Witkoff to close the strategic circle was that Turkey would not sit at the trilateral table, but its shadow would loom from behind the scenes. Al-Shaibani met with Hakan Fidan, and both sides were keen to signal the role guaranteed to Ankara in this regional apportionment—namely, northwestern Syria.

After Bashar al-Assad opened Syria’s doors to all manner of supportive states against his own people—from North Korea to Russia, Iran, and the United States—observers of the Paris negotiations required little imagination to conclude that what is taking shape today is a new Syria: partitioned, a mosaic of the influence of intervening powers.

This may explain the acceleration of events in Aleppo, which appears as no more than a detail in this larger picture. Only days after the “southern understandings” in Paris, clashes erupted in northern Aleppo, ending with the evacuation of Kurdish fighters and civilians. This was not merely a local spasm of violence, but a message—one Turkey grasped within the context of the Paris accords.

Northwestern Syria is now fully subject to Turkish influence: postponed integration, contested control, and spheres of influence shaped by fire, drones, and international understandings. The northwest thus becomes an arena where Syrian sovereignty on the ground blends with effective Turkish tutelary sovereignty.

The south, in turn, is moving toward “special arrangements” under the umbrella of security understandings sponsored by Washington and framed by acute Israeli sensitivities. In eastern Euphrates, where the Autonomous Administration has taken root and Kurdish governance has consolidated, the United States and its network of international alliances remain the guarantors. The Syrian coast remains a deferred gray zone—unresolved but certainly not forgotten.

Amid all this, Kushner returns to his favorite question: what is the value of direct engagement, when regional proxies can be tasked with disciplining “this faltering land”?

Syrians possess neither ownership over their fate nor over their model of life and form of state. And after negotiating with outsiders has become a thousand times easier than negotiating with one’s own divided household, it no longer matters how much authority Damascus retains over Syrian territory in the end—what matters is that God’s rule be established on His land.

Thus was the partition of Gaza and the West Bank; thus the division of Sudan and South Sudan; then Yemen and South Yemen; then Libya east and west—and now, once again in Syria, the game of musical chairs is set in motion in a bloody conflict led by Syrians themselves.

The new grandsons of Lawrence—from Tom Barrack to Jonathan Powell—do not arrive this time with armies or banners. They arrive instead with a modest “fusion cell,” through which Americans and their Israeli and Turkish proxies, and perhaps the French and Russians, divide the spoils of the Paris understandings. Syria thus enters a new cycle of conflict and partition.

In the end, even the scenario outlined above does not appear final, as the cycle of international and regional conflict is still only at its beginning. https://annah.ar/269223