Al-Sharaa's assessment of the first year of the Syrian Revolution at the Doha Forum

DOHA

A full year has passed since the bloody and oppressive Assad regime in Syria was overthrown by a revolution in the true sense. The road to the Revolution, which lasted 14 years and from which hope had been largely abandoned toward the end, was opened and completed in 11 days. Although there are those who say "the 11-day Revolution" and search behind it for other weaknesses, what they overlook is that the revolution is an uninterrupted process of 14 years plus 11 days. Ahmed al-Sharaa and his team, who brought the revolution to completion, had been doing what amounted to an apprenticeship in state governance in Idlib for several years, and, since in the first stages they were in conflict with one another, they were finding ways to eliminate the severe discord that had exhausted hopes in the revolutionaries.

The strong dialogue that formed toward the end between HTS and the other groups, the merging of forces, and the experience gained in focusing on the legitimate goal became a factor that made it very easy to finish the revolution as it had begun, within 11 days.

At this time last year, in Doha, regarded as one of the most important global platforms for discussing the fundamental problems facing the international community, the agenda suddenly turned into an environment in which what was happening in Syria was being watched and assessed live. All pre-determined agendas suddenly fell to secondary status, and the developments in Syria that shocked everyone became the main agenda. Frankly, there was no data that would allow definite predictions about what else would happen, but the last day of the Forum was also the day Damascus fell.

Ahmed al-Sharaa's participation in the next Forum, that is, the one held last weekend, timed to coincide exactly with the first anniversary of the revolution, constituted a meaningful gesture for the Forum. He was definitely the most popular and most sought-after guest in Doha. When CNN's Christiane Amanpour, moderating, announced his name, everyone stood up to see him; since he entered not from the expected place but through the door the audience uses to enter the hall, it took him a while to reach the stage. After he sat down with his usual modest and dignified movements, calm and unostentatious, his first words in the dialogue that began were on the simultaneity of the Forum and the Revolution last year. On this occasion we had the chance to hear from its leader an accounting of one year of the will displayed toward changing the fate of a bloody and despotic regime that lasted 60 years in Syria, but in fact a fate that had begun more than a hundred years ago.

IN RESPONSE TO THE QUESTION, "AFTER A YEAR, ARE THE SYRIAN PEOPLE AFRAID OF THEMSELVES, ARE THEY ANXIOUS?" he put forth a very clear and plain datum: previously every movement inside Syria caused hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes, their places, their homeland. Now think: in a year an armed revolution was carried out, but the coming revolution was such a long-awaited step by the people that not a single Syrian citizen had to leave their home. On the contrary, nearly a million people have already returned to their homes, from many countries, Türkiye above all.

In the part completing Amanpour's question there was the question of how far Sharaa, who until a year earlier was considered a terrorist, might have moved away from that position now. With his usual composure, without raising his voice at all, Sharaa stated in the clearest way that the accusation of terrorism is made today, by every criterion, by the very forces that spread terror. If the most objective definition of terror is the massacre of civilians, no one calls terrorists those who today have savagely massacred 60 (70) thousand civilians in Gaza, but they call others terrorists. Likewise, in Syria, more than a million people lost their lives in 14 years, and even Assad, who massacred them, civilians, women and children alike, made 250 thousand of them disappear in detention and displaced 15 million of his people, was not called a terrorist by anyone until his last day. As he said, "But I waged an honorable struggle, I fought on many fronts for more than 20 years and harmed no civilian; I even endangered myself and those with me so that civilians would not be harmed," his words were frequently interrupted by applause in the hall.

One of the questions Amanpour directed at Sharaa was in fact a classic one smelling somewhat of Orientalism and somewhat touching on Sharaa's Islamism. She asked whether there would be the interventions or restrictions "feared" from Islamists regarding women's rights and freedoms. In the calmest tone possible, Sharaa again referred to the 5-year experience of governance in Idlib. This is important because that was precisely the place where he was coded by the international order as an Islamist terrorist. After explaining that two-thirds of the 26 thousand students of the university they established there are women, that they now work both in the state and in the private sector, and that this will not change, he concluded his words on this subject with a joke that made everyone laugh: "You need not fear for women in Syria. We are really worried about the Syrian man."

Israel's unprecedented aggression toward Syria since the day of the revolution is well known. On paper Assad was Israel's greatest enemy in the name of the "Axis of Resistance," but for some reason he was only very rarely subjected to Israeli aggression. Despite this, many know-it-alls do not refrain from displaying creative conspiracy theories attributing the Syrian Revolution to an Israeli-US plan. Yet Assad was a trustworthy custodian for Israel. In his time Syrian territory was in reliable hands, and the massacres and Sednaya atrocities committed here only gave Israel satisfaction. The case was no different from what it itself did to Gaza and Palestine, neither in nature nor in mission. The Syrian people's coming to head the state led Israel to change all its threat perceptions.

In response to a question on this, Sharaa said that Syria is moving in the right direction and has become a model of stability from a region that exports crisis; he accused Israel of exporting crisis. After noting that Israel had carried out a thousand air strikes on Syria last year and violated the border 400 times, he emphasized that they themselves respect the 1974 Agreement.

Meanwhile, to the 23rd Session of the Doha Forum, held for two days at the Doha Sheraton under the slogan "Establishing Justice: From Words to Concrete Reality," Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan also took part this year, both as a panelist in the opening panel moderated by Christiane Amanpour and later with a speech in which he answered questions alone. In his speech, which drew intense interest, he answered questions about Türkiye's mediating role in Gaza, Syria and Ukraine.

In another hall, in a session on the Economy, Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek was also giving a talk on the Turkish economy.

More than 6000 participants and 471 speakers from 160 countries attended the Forum. In addition to assessments and solutions regarding the world's crisis and conflict zones, critical issues such as food security, energy, climate change, artificial intelligence and child deaths, and women's rights are addressed.

The Doha Forum is regarded as one of the most important global platforms for discussing the fundamental problems facing the international community. Qatar, which has become a distinctive brand in areas such as developing and sustaining, with Al Jazeera, the most open and advanced media sector of the Islamic world, hosting the World Cup, and many research centers and museums, also contributes to world politics and agenda in its own distinctive way with this forum that it has organized without interruption for 23 years.