The news has come that Manaf Tlass, an intimate Republican Guard friend of Bashir al-Assad, has defected to Turkey. As the press is saying, this is the most significant inner-circle defection since the beginning of the Syrian uprising. It could well be a sign that the inner circle is cracking in the belief that Assad cannot prevail. But it would be slightly premature to read too much into Tlass’s departure.
One reason for that is that Tlass is a Sunni, not an Alawi or a Druze or an Ismaili or a member of one of Syria’s several Christian minorities. Moreover, his father Mustafa, the former defense minister under Assad the father, left Syria some time ago, as did Manaf’s older brother Firas. (The father is said to be in France, the brother first in Egypt and now probably in Dubai, and no one doubts that the two of them, having parlayed their political positions into para-business activities of the very profitable sort, left the country with a great deal of money parked in various European and Caribbean banks.) The Syrian regime therefore might have seen this coming, assuming it had the luxury of time to think about such things in the midst of crisis. The point is that the defection Sunni ally of the regime, even a very prominent one, does not mean that the Alawi core is ready to shatter. Prominent Syrian Sunni families have regional options for retirement and recreation that powerful Syrian Alawis do not. The latter are far more likely to be blood-on-the-saddle bitter-enders.
As for the Tlass family, Syria, at any rate, is not a safe place these days for Sunni allies of the hatred Assad regime—and it would be hard to find more loyal and effective Sunni allies of the Assads than Mustafa Tlass and family. The elder Tlass was a key ally when Hafez al-Assad’s younger brother Rifaat tried to take power away from Hafez’s children following his 1983 heart attack. Mustafa also once bragged that he was the man who gave the order to attack U.S. and French troops bivouacked around Beirut in October 1983. And those who have been following Syrian affairs for some years will remember that not only was Mustafa Tlass an extremely useful Sunni front man for the regime, but that he was also its propagandist-in-chief. Tlass, fancying himself an intellectual, wrote articles and books that, for example, justified the blood libel against the Jews and propagated the myth that modern-day Jews don’t come from the Levant but are rather latter-day Khazar converts. The wilder and more anti-Semitic it was, the more Tlass believed it and proclaimed it.
This history will not endear the Tlass family to the majority Sunni community in Syria today, to put it mildly (although I suspect many of them could see it in their hearts to look past the anti-Semitic elements). He and his sons are sectarian traitors and are considered big-time thieves. As such, their lives are forfeit.
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You will not be surprised to learn that government intelligence experts, in the United States and elsewhere, are delving deep into the details of family and other related business circumstances concerning the Syrian elite in order to guess and hence be prepared for what that elite is likely to do in the coming weeks and months. At least that is what government intelligence experts should be doing about now. Supposing, just for a moment, that they really are doing what they should be doing, what does their thinking probably look like? And what are the policy implications thereof?
The first thing to understand is that the Alawi community in Syria, which composes somewhere between 10 and 12 percent of the country’s population, is not monolithic. There are four tribal confederations: the Kalbiyah, Khaiyatin, Haddadin, and Matawirah. Within each confederation are several clans. The Assad family comes from the Numaylatiyya clan of the Matawirah confederation. Endogamous marriage patterns have generally dictated that cousins from within clans, and certainly from within confederations, marry one another. As long as this was the case (and it has been the case for many centuries), some fairly serious tensions existed among the confederations, and even sometimes within confederations, depending on how people were planted in the land in Latakia province, the home of the Alawis from time immemorial. (Some anthropologists believe that the Alawis are the direct descendants of an ancient Canaanite tribe.) In a society based largely on sedentary agriculture, with animal husbandry mixed in, marriages very often had to do with building or consolidating or extending clan-based real estate empires, the inner core of power, wealth and, ultimately, the capacity for self-defense.
Since the Alawis have been in power, roughly since November 1970, there has been some diffusion of Alawi settlement outside of Latakia, notably in the Damascus area. What exactly has happened to traditional marriage clan patterns over the past forty years is fairly esoteric knowledge that only specialists in Syria can be expected to know. I don’t know, but my guess is that marriage patterns have broadened somewhat among the Alawis, especially including the Damascus-based families closest to the core of the regime. Intelligence analysis of the patterns of influence with the regime needs to know who has married whom in order to make sense of the influence networks within the elite. In the past, the CIA has been notably obtuse to such data: What we didn’t know and didn’t bother for a long time to find out about tribes in Iraq is a case in point. You will never find Jordanian intelligence making that mistake, and it’s probably not entirely a coincidence that the largest CIA analytical station in the region in located in Amman. Do I know for certain if U.S. intelligence personnel studying Syria are using this significant asset we have in our relations with Jordan? No. I just know that we should be.
It is also clear that a fairly huge amount of money has been siphoned away from the Syrian economy over the years to benefit Alawis both in their home province and elsewhere. That money has probably softened some or most of the old antagonisms among the confederations and the clans. But people have long memories in this part of the world, so it would probably be presumptuous to think that the calculations going on now among the Alawi no longer reflect traditional fault lines. Besides, it’s amazing what people can remember when times get really dicey.
Those calculations, at least in deepest privacy, have got to include plans to protect one’s closest kith and kin, should the regime begin to collapse. This is why specialists should certainly want to know how authority and power are linked among the confederations in the current Syrian regime. If they are not roughly symmetrical, then one might expect those farther from the center to be more willing to move against the Assads in a desperate attempt to save their own skin from the hordes of Sunnis and other Syrians who very probably want to harm them. It is very unlikely that any reconfiguration of Alawi power could prevail without the Assad clan, so that talk of a smooth transition to a new government, with many current non-Assad family individuals still in place, has always struck me as unrealistic. But looking at the matter from inside the broader Alawi community, the idea of an internal Alawi-led coup against the Assads, however risky, has got to look better than all the alternatives, should push turn into shove.
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From the very beginning of this mess in Syria, it has always been more likely that external pressure would generate an internal coup of some kind rather than that the revolution would succeed in storming the presidential palace. I still think that is the case. And that may explain at least some aspects of the otherwise strange and seemingly pusillanimous American policy, which has for months now been depending on Russian pressure to get rid of Assad and company.
There is no need to rehearse here all the reasons why the Kremlin has not been eager to get rid of a long-standing ally, and how it has managed in its public diplomatic stance to appear to be riding the same horse in two different directions. If there were ever an over-determined decision, this is it. But since the Obama Administration is determined, whether for good reasons or bad, to do nothing overtly kinetic in Syria, it makes a kind of sense to think that, if and when the Assad regime begins to crumble from within, Russian policy will quickly shift in order to prevent the United States from taking credit for Assad’s fall. The reasoning inside the Administration may be that, this being the case, a vocal Russian shift might stimulate a coup in Damascus faster than would otherwise be the case. We are also aware that the Russians have better contacts with, and better intelligence on, people deep inside the Syrian regime than we do. They may actually be able to turn or bribe some people that we do not have access to, if they decide the time is right to do that. So potential Kremlin influence in the endgame is not necessarily limited to Russian rhetorical panache.
It may further be argued (and here we get more to the strategic essence) that the possibility of a Sunni-led revolutionary government in Syria, which could lead willy-nilly either to an Islamist government, or to a new phase of civil war, or to both, is something that we and the Russians can agree to oppose and even prevent, insofar as that is possible. In other words, while U.S. and Russian interests do not now converge significantly over Syria, they might converge to at least some extent in the future.
I don’t go often out of my way to put the best face on Obama Administration foreign policy, because usually I don’t think it deserves it. But in this case, and at this time, it doesn’t hurt to think this through as objectively as possible. Syria has always been a very hard policy problem, much harder than Libya and very different from Egypt. Under such circumstances even a far-fetched idea can sound pretty good if there aren’t any less outlandish competitors in the mix. It is, after all, not unheard of for policymakers to say: “Well, we don’t have any attractive options right now, so we ought to set ourselves up to acquire one or two in the future.” Such forward-looking planning in American foreign policy is much less common than it ought to be, but it is not completely absent. I am in the mood to give the Administration the benefit of the doubt until I am persuaded otherwise—not that, as I have argued in the past, domestic political considerations are not critical in understanding the Administration’s overall posture with regard to Syria. In any event, time will tell—along with memoirs and leaked documents.
As for Manaf Tlass, he probably should be very careful deciding which eatery to visit in Turkey. In Turkey today there are undoubtedly lots of Syrian refugees, not to speak of members of the Free Syrian Army, who ardently hope he chokes to death on his next kebab.
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