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

For years, Russia and Syria were key partners, with Moscow gaining access to Mediterranean air and naval bases while Damascus received military support for its fight against rebel forces.

Now, with 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 unspeakable,” said Ahmed Taha, a rebel commander in Douma, six miles northeast of the capital, Damascus.

The city was once a prosperous place in a region known as the “breadbasket” of Damascus. And Ahmed Taha was once a civilian working as a trader when he took up arms against the Assad regime after the brutal crackdown on protests in 2011.

Whole residential neighborhoods in Douma now lie in ruins after some of the fiercest 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 Sergei Lavrov later said that at the time of the intervention, Damascus was only weeks away from being captured by the rebels.

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

Moscow claims 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 Force 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 could not prevent the collapse of his regime. But Moscow offered asylum to him and his family.

Many Syrian civilians and rebel fighters now see Russia as complicit with the Assad regime, which helped destroy their homeland.

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

The Kremlin has always denied this, saying it only targets jihadist groups such as IS or al-Qaeda.

But the UN and rights groups have accused the regime and Russia of committing war crimes.

In 2016, during an assault on densely populated eastern Aleppo, Syrian and Russian forces launched relentless airstrikes “taking 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 food and medicine supplies, and continued to bombard them until armed opposition groups surrendered.

Russia has also negotiated ceasefires and surrender agreements in rebel-held towns 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 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.

“We came home in spite of Russia, in spite of the regime and everyone who supported it,” says Taha.

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

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

Even the leaders of the Christian communities in Syria, which Russia has promised to protect, say they have had little help from Moscow.

In Bab Touma, the ancient Christian quarter of Damascus, the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church says: “We didn’t have the experience of Russia or anyone else from the outside world protecting us.”

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

Other Syrian Christians were less diplomatic.

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding the Syrian army would require either a complete fresh start or continued dependence on Russian supplies, which would mean at least some kind of relationship between the two countries, said Turki al-Hassan, a defense analyst and retired Syrian army general.

Syria’s military cooperation with Moscow predates the Assad regime, Hassan says. Virtually all the equipment at his disposal was made by the Soviet Union or Russia, he explains.

“Since its inception, the Syrian army has been armed with weapons from the Eastern bloc.

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

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

More than half of that amount remained unpaid when the Soviet Union collapsed, but in 2005 President Putin wrote off 73% of the debt.

So far, Russian officials have taken a conciliatory but cautious approach to the interim rulers who ousted Russia’s longtime ally.

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