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Syria Is Rotting, and Patching It Up Is Hastening Its Death
Without sugarcoating it: Syria is rotting and moving toward fragmentation, despite American, Turkish, and Saudi attempts to patch things up. The disease is old; it began when the Baathists and the Assads seized the state. The national revolution was supposed to save it, but it ended in a disastrous regime that blends takfiri Salafism with the remnants of Arab nationalist Baathism, making the disease even more deadly.
Today, Syria is shuttled between treatment rooms in Ankara and the White House, then taken to the United Nations stage to make it look as though the country is recovering. But regional and international powers are not treating the disease. They are legitimizing it and placing centralized power in its hands, enabling it to control the state and society—and hastening the country’s decay and collapse.
Decentralized federalism is not a plan to partition Syria; it is the last arrangement capable of preventing its disintegration. It would curb the spread of the disease and prevent an ideological regime from swallowing the entire country. By contrast, insisting on a centralized, religious, takfiri Salafi system will drive Syria itself toward fragmentation and death as a homeland and a state.
Replacing a centralized, racist Baathist regime with a centralized, takfiri religious regime is not a cure; it worsens the disease and accelerates its spread. When a state dies from within, no one needs to divide it: it breaks apart on its own, and little may remain of Syria beyond the name of a homeland that once existed in history. The danger regional powers recognize is that the contagion of this collapse will not stop at Syria’s borders, but will spread throughout the region.
**Dr. Mahmoud Abbas**
