Syrians see a future without Russia, but Moscow still hopes to stay

For years Russia and Syria were key partners – Moscow gained access to air and sea bases in the Mediterranean while Damascus received military aid to fight rebel forces.

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

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

The city was once a prosperous place in the region known as the “bread basket” of Damascus. And Ahmed Taha was once a civilian, working as a merchant, when he took up arms against the Assad regime after the protests were violently suppressed in 2011.

Entire residential districts of Douma are now in ruins after the heaviest fighting in Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war.

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

The operation in Syria showed the ambition of Russian President Vladimir Putin to be taken more seriously, after international condemnation of his annexation of Crimea.

He said Moscow had tested 320 different weapons in Syria.

It also obtained 49-year leases for 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 springboard for Russian operations in Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso.

Despite the support of Russia and Iran, Assad was unable to prevent the fall of his regime. But Moscow offered shelter to him and his family.

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

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

The Kremlin has always denied this, saying it was only targeting 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, in an attack on densely populated East Aleppo, Syrian and Russian forces carried out relentless airstrikes, “claiming hundreds of lives and reducing hospitals, schools and markets to rubble,” according to a UN report.

In Aleppo, Douma and elsewhere, regime forces besieged rebel-held areas, cutting off supplies of food and medicine, and bombarded armed opposition groups until they surrendered.

Russia also negotiated ceasefires and agreements to surrender 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 exit from the city after a five-year siege by the Syrian army.

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

“Despite Russia, despite the regime and all those who supported it,” says Taha.

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

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

Leaders of the Christian communities in Syria that Russia has vowed to protect also say they have had little support from Moscow.

In Bab Touma, the old Christian quarter of Damascus, the Patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church says: “We had no experience of Russia or the outside world protecting us.”

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

Other Syrian Christians were less diplomatic.

“When they first came, they said, ‘We’ve come to help you,'” says a man named Assad. “But instead of helping us, they destroyed Syria even more.”

Sharaa, currently the de facto leader of Syria, said a The BBC was to conduct the interview last month he does not rule out giving the Russians the opportunity to stay, and he has described the relations between the two countries as “strategic”.

Moscow seized on his words, with Foreign Minister Lavrov admitting that Russia “had a lot in common with our Syrian friends.”

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

Rebuilding the Syrian army will require a completely new start or dependence on Russian supplies, which would mean at least some relationship between the two countries, says Turki al-Hassan, a defense analyst and retired Syrian army general.

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

“Since its inception, the Syrian army has been equipped with weapons from the Eastern Bloc.”

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

Many of them supported Syria’s wars with Israel, which had largely determined the nation’s foreign policy since independence from France in 1946.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, more than half of that amount remained unpaid, but in 2005, President Putin canceled 73% of the debt.

For now, Russian officials have taken a friendly but cautious stance toward the interim authorities that ousted Russia’s longtime ally.

Vassily Nebenziak, the UN envoy in Moscow, said the latest events marked a new phase in the history of what he called “the brothers of the Syrian people”. He said Russia will provide humanitarian aid and reconstruction assistance to Syrian refugees to return home.