The Collusion of Two Fundamentalisms

“1-Syria's new government has told business leaders 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, declared Bassel Hamwi, head of the Damascus Chambers of Commerce

2- Bassel Hamwi was just ‘elected’ to this position in November 2024 few weeks before the fall of the Assad’s dynasty . He is also the chairman of the Federation of Syrian Chambers of Commerce. Remnants of the old regime still in top positions…

3- HTS has no alternative to the neoliberal economic system, most probably with business networks gathering new and former business personalities, also to be connected to the new ruling leaders similar to forms of crony capitalism we had in the past in Syria

4- This neoliberal system accompanied with authoritarianism will lead to continued socioeconomic inequalities and impoverishment, which were one of the main causes at the roots of the initial uprising. HTS is a threat to the future of Syria in all its policies.”

—via Joseph Dahr, 11 December 2024

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Syrians face an uncertain future

Syrians within Syria and in the diaspora are wary of HTS. Syrian activists have long described Nusra and other Islamist groups as a second pole in the counterrevolution, after the Assad regime. Syrian activists for years have lifted the stories of Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, Samira Khalil and Nazem Hammadi — four democratic activists who opposed the Assad regime as well as the Islamist groups, and were kidnapped and disappeared at the end of 2013, most likely by another, similar Islamist militia.

But Syrians have also resisted Nusra, and are likely to continue to resist HTS as well. In 2016, residents of Ma’arat al-Nu’man, a city in rural Idlib between Aleppo and Hama controlled at the time by Nusra, protested every day for over six months against Nusra and its allied Islamist groups and their reactionary crimes. After four months, the popular protest campaign in Ma’arat al-Nu’man won the release of protestors who had been arrested by Nusra.

As HTS captured the country from Assad, Syrian activists within the country and abroad voiced that they will not allow the group to oppress them as the Assad regime did for decades, restating their commitment to the 2011 revolution and the continuance of that struggle.

“We cannot have a new kind of dictator replace another,” Banah Ghadbian, a Syrian activist and professor based in the U.S., told Truthout. “Syrians have been working toward this moment for so long, we will not allow it to be coopted. We won’t let them take our revolutionary spirit away.” Ghadbian continued:

“We must hold the regime accountable for its crimes, and let the civil society organizations on the ground guide the democratic transition, rather than glorify the rebel forces who do not answer to anyone but themselves. Echoing the early slogans of the revolution, ‘We want to build a Syria for all Syrians,’ which means building a thriving democratic civil society for all minorities and ethno religious groups.”