Syrians eye future without Russia, but Moscow still hopes to stay

For years Russia and Syria were key partners – Moscow gained access to Mediterranean air and sea bases while Damascus received military support for its fight against rebel forces.

Now, after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, many Syrians want to see Russian forces leave but their interim government says it is open to further cooperation.

“Russia’s crimes here were indescribable,” says Ahmed Taha, a rebel commander in Douma, six miles north-east of the capital Damascus.

The city was once a prosperous place in a region known as the “bread basket” of Damascus. And Ahmed Taha was once a civilian, working as a tradesman when he took up arms against the Assad regime following the brutal suppression of protests in 2011.

Entire residential districts in Douma now lie in ruins after some of the fiercest fighting in Syria’s almost 14-year civil war.

Moscow entered this conflict in 2015 to support the regime when it was losing ground. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov later claimed that, at the time of the intervention, Damascus was just weeks away from being overrun by rebels.

The Syrian operation showed the ambition of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to be taken more seriously after the widespread international condemnation of his annexation of Crimea.

Moscow claimed to have tested 320 different weapons in Syria.

It also secured 49-year leases on two military bases on the Mediterranean coast – the Tartus naval base and the Hmeimim air base. This allowed the Kremlin to rapidly expand its influence in Africa, serving as a spring board for Russian operations in Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Burkina Faso.

Despite the support of Russia and Iran, Assad could not prevent his regime from collapsing. But Moscow offered refuge to him and his family.

Now, many Syrian civilians and rebel fighters see Russia as an accomplice of the Assad regime that helped destroy their homeland.

“The Russians came to this country and helped the tyrants, oppressors, and invaders,” says Abu Hisham, as he celebrated the fall of the regime in Damascus.

The Kremlin has always denied that, saying it only targeted jihadist groups like IS or al-Qaeda.

But the United Nations and human rights groups accused the regime and Russia of committing war crimes.

In 2016, during an assault on densely populated Eastern Aleppo, Syrian and Russian forces conducted relentless air strikes, “claiming hundreds of lives and reducing hospitals, schools and markets to rubble,” according to a UN report.

In Aleppo, Douma and elsewhere, the regime forces besieged rebel-held areas, cutting off food and medicine supplies, and proceeded to bomb them until armed opposition groups surrendered.

Russia also negotiated ceasefires and deals for the surrender of rebel-held towns and cities, such as Douma in 2018.

Ahmed Taha was among the rebels there who agreed to surrender in exchange for safe passage out of the city following a five-year siege by the Syrian army.

He returned to Douma in December as a part of the rebel offensive led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its leader Ahmed al-Sharaa.

“We are back home in spite of Russia, in spite of the regime and all those who supported it,” says Taha.

He has no doubt the Russians should leave: “For us, Russia is an enemy.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by many people we speak to.

Even leaders of Syria’s Christian communities, who Russia vowed to protect, say they had little help from Moscow.

In Bab Touma, the ancient Christian quarter of Damascus, the Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church says: “We did not have the experience of Russia or anybody else from the outside world protecting us.”

“The Russians were here for their own benefits and goals,” Ignatius Aphrem II tells the BBC.

Other Syrian Christians were less diplomatic.

“When they came in the beginning, they said: ‘We came here to help you,'” says a man called Assad. “But instead of helping us, they destroyed Syria even more.”

Sharaa, now Syria’s de facto leader, said in a BBC interview last month that he would not rule out allowing the Russians to stay, and he described relations between the two countries as “strategic”.

Moscow seized on his words, with foreign minister Lavrov agreeing Russia “had much in common with our Syrian friends”.

But untangling the ties in a post-Assad future may not be easy.

Rebuilding Syria’s military will require either a completely new start or a continued reliance on Russian supplies, which would mean at least some kind of relationship between the two countries, says Turki al-Hassan, a defence analyst and retired Syrian army general.

Syria’s military cooperation with Moscow predates the Assad regime, Hassan says. Virtually all the equipment it has was produced by the Soviet Union or Russia, he explains.

“From its inception, the Syrian army has been armed with Eastern Bloc weapons.”

Between 1956 and 1991 Syria received some 5,000 tanks, 1,200 fighter aircraft, 70 ships and many other systems and weapons from Moscow worth over $26bn (£21bn), according to Russian estimates.

A lot of this was in support of Syria’s wars with Israel, which has largely defined the nation’s foreign policy since it gained independence from France in 1946.

More than half of that sum was left unpaid when the Soviet Union collapsed but in 2005 president Putin wrote off 73% of the debt.

For now, Russian officials have taken a conciliatory but cautious approach towards the interim rulers who toppled Russia’s long-standing ally.

Vassily Nebenzia, Moscow’s UN envoy, said recent events had marked a new phase in the history of what he called “brotherly Syrian people”. He said Russia would provide both humanitarian aid and support for reconstruction to allow Syrian refugees to return home.