The shakeup may be a sign that he has lost confidence in several key governors or that he recognizes a series of security incidents requires a change.
By SETH J. FRANTZMANSyrian President Bashar al-Assad addresses the government committee that oversees measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Damascus, Syria in this handout released by SANA on May 4, 2020(photo credit: SANA/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)
Syrian President Bashar Assad replaced three governors in southern Syria over the weekend, jettisoning a long-time henchman in Dara’a and moving the governor of Quneitra from the Golan border to the Druze area of Suwayda.The shakeup may be a sign that he has lost confidence in several key governors or that he recognizes a series of security incidents requires a change.Assad’s forces retook Quneitra and Dara’a provinces in the summer of 2018. With Russian military police helping to smooth the way, he signed some reconciliation deals that saw some rebel groups remain as enforcers for the regime temporarily.This ad-hoc arrangement was put in place to avoid more bloodshed and it appeared to work for a time. However, many Syrian refugees in Jordan did not return, and in the last months there have been an increase in security incidents.The Syrian rebels in the area were more moderate than other places, but there were also ISIS elements. In Suwayda in July 2018, ISIS kidnapped Druze women in its typical genocidal targeting of minorities. The women were freed in November.The former governor of Suwayda, Amer Ibrahim Al-Ashi, had worked with the UN and Russians during his tenure. Now he is being replaced by Humam Sadeq al-Debiyat, who was governor of Quneitra since February 2018.He thus presided over the complex period after Assad’s forces returned to the ceasefire lines with Israel. He has seen some Hezbollah activity in his area and the frictions after Hezbollah tried to use drones against Israel last August.Now he will be running an area that borders on the Syrian desert where US forces continue to run a base at Tanf near the Jordanian border.Debiyat was born in Hama in 1962 according to one report. He has a BA from Aleppo University and then worked at a power station. After work for the electric authority he got involved in city council affairs in Hama before 2017. How that qualified him to run Quneitra or Suwayda is unclear.More sensitive is Dara’a province. Here, the well-known governor Mohamed Khaled Al-Hanous, who ran the area since 2011, will be replaced. He was brought in during the April 2011 protests and was a former lieutenant general. Marwan Ibrahim Sharbak will now run Dara’a, where there have been many recent incidents of killings of regime members.
The man being sent to run Quneitra, a sensitive job, is Mohammed Tarek Ziad Kreshati. He was apparently the Damascus tourism director prior to this and a tourism official in Damascus countryside before that.He may have been on a local provincial council, according to a list obtained from Syrian media. An article notes that in 2018 he conducted at least 2,401 oversight tours of restaurants and tourism facilities in Damascus. In 2019 he only did 2,240 inspections.Sending a tourism expert and former electric facility manager to run key areas in the south may be to shake things up or bring in regime loyalists or because the regime thinks it needs technocrats to repair infrastructure down south. Either way, none of these key men seem to have a heavy security background.
