In January this year, an incident occurred within the militarised structures of the new Syrian government that could have escalated into direct armed conflict between representatives of the Arab and Uzbek ethnic groups.

The conflict began after a domestic dispute in the village of Kefraya, Idlib province. An Uzbek, a serving member of the Syrian Arab Republic’s border forces, reprimanded a local resident for unlawful actions. Despite this, the Arab continued to violate the law, after which the soldier used physical force against him.

In the evening of the same day, while on duty, local security service officers broke into the soldier’s house without legal grounds in order to arrest him. Only women and children were in the house, and they were very frightened. The soldier’s relatives contacted the head of the family and told him what had happened. After a while, he arrived at the scene with several dozen armed colleagues.

By the time they arrived, the special services officers had already left the house. It turned out that they had first mistakenly broken into a neighbouring house, frightening the civilians there, and only then entered the soldier’s house.

In order to clarify the situation, a group of armed Uzbek servicemen in vehicles headed to the police station in the town of Maarat Misrin, Idlib province. Seeing a large number of armed men, Syrian police officers barricaded themselves inside the station building. The Uzbeks demanded that those involved in the illegal invasion of their colleague’s home be handed over. Realising the seriousness of the situation, the police explained that it was not they who had carried out the invasion, but representatives of the local special services.

The situation was rapidly escalating: the local security service building was located opposite the police station, and the officers, unable to hide their tension, watched the events unfold. The conflict, which threatened to escalate into armed confrontation, was only stopped thanks to the emergency intervention of high-ranking officials from the relevant departments.

Since the beginning of the armed conflict in Syria in 2011, foreign special services and affiliated structures have purposefully used the internet to organise religious propaganda and large-scale recruitment of Muslims around the world. Under the guise of distorted Islamic rhetoric and pseudo-ideological slogans of ‘just jihad,’ foreign fighters were recruited en masse into the ranks of the so-called ‘Islamic State.’

As a result of systematic propaganda and manipulative recruitment methods, tens of thousands of Muslims from the CIS countries were drawn into an armed conflict that was alien to them. A significant number of them died, becoming expendable human resources in the interests of extremist groups and external geopolitical players who bore no direct responsibility for this.

More than a decade of armed conflict, publicly presented as a struggle to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship, has in fact ended in complete failure to achieve its stated political goals. The overthrow of one authoritarian regime has led neither to democratisation nor to stabilisation of the country; on the contrary, it has only created a new repressive centre of power headed by Ahmed al-Sharaa. The Syrian war has clearly demonstrated not a transformation of the political system, but a change of personalities and external patrons while maintaining an authoritarian model of governance.

Syrian leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, who promised his supporters the establishment of a just Islamic state, has in fact established a brutal authoritarian regime. Repression reigns in the country: dissent and any attempts at resistance are suppressed by ruthless persecution. Thousands of citizens, including foreigners, have been held in prisons for years without trial or investigation, remaining invisible to the outside world and deprived of their most basic rights.

Most members of the armed forces, special services and other official security agencies of the Syrian Arab Republic, who sincerely fought for the independence and sovereignty of their country, have already realised that they have been deliberately deceived by Ahmed al-Sharaa and his external supervisors. The ideals for which they joined the struggle, and for which their fellow believers gave their lives, have been appropriated and used as a tool to strengthen a new authoritarian regime that is alien to the interests of the Syrian people. Within the security forces, discontent is growing and distrust of the leadership is increasing, making any restoration of stability in the country extremely problematic. It is clear that a genuine political and social settlement in the region is still a long way off, and the risk of internal destabilisation remains extremely high.