For much of its 13 years, the horrors of Syria’s grinding civil war felt unending. Now, after just 11 days, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad is gone, the dictator fleeing his country in the face of a sensational advance by rebel forces.
Many Syrians are jubilant.
Assad clung to power through domestic oppression, torture and murder, eventually suppressing a 2011 uprising with a mix of chemical weapons and deadly backing from Russia and Iran. That seems to be over, bringing to an end his family’s iron-fist dynasty that began in 1971.
However, this is far from a quick, simple fix. The rebels who toppled Assad are led by a group that the United States and others regard as a terrorist organization. And they reclaim a Syria deeply scarred by more than a decade of war — with no clear path to what happens next or how it might be governed.
“There is undoubtedly justified optimism in Syria today after the overthrow of the brutalizing dictatorship of Assad,” said Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. “What is simultaneously true is that Syria remains fragile and faces an uncertain future.”
Here’s what to know.
Assad is gone
The sensational news that spread across Syria and social media was eventually confirmed in an announcement Sunday from Russian state media: This once feared strongman had fled the country his family had ruled for more than 50 years.
He did so as the rebels entered and seized Damascus, seemingly with little fightback from Assad’s government forces. Their lightning advance only began Nov. 27, quickly overrunning the cities of Aleppo, Hama and then the capital itself.
The rebels appear to have capitalized on Syria’s backers being distracted elsewhere: Russia in Ukraine, and Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah fighting Israel. Nevertheless, many experts did not see this coming. And Moscow was no different.
“What happened surprised the whole world, and we are no exception here,” Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov said Monday.
Syria dominated international consciousness for almost a decade, its civil war erupting after Assad crushed peaceful protests during the region-wide 2011 Arab Spring.
It soon became a head-spinning, complex conflict, with Iran, Russia and Hezbollah lining up behind Assad and the U.S., Turkey and others supporting different rebel groups, which in turn fought not just each other but also the Islamic State terror group as it captured and then surrendered large swaths of Syria and Iraq.
But until last month the conflict had been largely at a stalemate, after Assad’s forces regained control of much of the country.
Syrians are celebrating — and searching
As the rebels swept through Damascus, celebratory gunfire reverberated around the streets as people swaddled themselves in the flag of the Syrian opposition and toppled statues of the former ruler.
More than 13 million people fled their homes in the war, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR. Some 7 million of them were displaced within the country and 6 million abroad — scattered throughout Turkey, other parts of the Middle East and beyond. The conflict in Syria partly contributed to a wave of mass migration into Europe, met by a right-wing backlash across the continent that is still reverberating today.
Much of this diaspora has also responded to Assad’s downfall with astonished glee, some rushing to return home.
Thousands of people rallied across European cities such as London and Berlin, capital of the continent’s largest Syrian population, Germany, where more than 1 million of them live. It wasn’t just the fighting they were escaping.
The brutality of the Assad regime was illustrated in stark detail Sunday as Syrians began freeing people from the regime’s network of political prisons — essentially dungeons — where rights groups say it disappeared, tortured and executed its own people.
One of these liberated gulags was Saydnaya military prison outside Damascus — known as the “human slaughterhouse” — where Amnesty International says people were executed every week, an estimated 13,000 in total. On Monday it was being searched after survivors reported the possible presence of secret underground jail cells, with families across the country looking for loved ones long held as political prisoners.
What next for the rebels?
That brutality has been replaced with uncertainty.
The rebels are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group that grew from an Al Qaeda affiliate. Its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, was involved with militants battling American forces in Iraq following their 2003 invasion. And the State Department has a $10 million bounty for information about him.
In recent years he has sought to project a more moderate image, however, cutting ties with al-Qaeda, renouncing international extremism and instead focusing on creating an Islamic republic in Syria. He says he supports religious tolerance and internal debate.
This was echoed in its order via Syria’s state newspaper Monday that there should be no controls on women’s clothing.
Even so, myriad complexities and problems remain.
First, the rebel coalition led by HTS appears to be fragile. Turkish-backed rebels have in recent days launched attacks on Kurdish forces in the northern town of Manbij, local officials said.
Meanwhile, HTS has started outlining the basics of a nascent state — publishing prison sentencing guidelines for theft and criminal damage, as well as a plea “not to settle scores or seek revenge.”
However, it remains unclear what HTS has in mind for Syria’s future, and stories of war-torn states rising from iron-fist dictatorship to flourish into democracies are rare. Syria’s will be as challenging as any.
Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in Washington, called it a “now out of never” moment reminiscent of Eastern Europeans throwing off Soviet rule in 1989.
“The country is not fated to a violent future, but it would be remiss not to consider the possibility and plausibility of an insurgency against the new order,” he wrote in a briefing.
How does the U.S. fit into all of this?
President Joe Biden and his officials have welcomed Assad’s fall while voicing caution at the potential for further violence and oppression as Syria enters a new era.
“It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future for their proud country,” he said Sunday. “It’s also a moment of risk and uncertainty as we all turn to the question of what comes next.”
The U.S. has around 900 troops supporting Kurdish forces in northeast Syria, part of an 80-country coalition to keep ISIS at bay.
President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to withdraw these forces, reiterating on his website Truth Social that the U.S. should “have nothing to do with” the situation in Syria. “This is not our fight. Let it play out,” he wrote.
Washington is “stuck between a rock and a hard place,” according to Ozcelik at RUSI.
“Two questions will be key to his decision,” Ozcelik added. Are the Kurds “the most effective or only option in the new post-Assad Syria to facilitate American interests”? And “How much of a clear and present danger do remaining Islamic State cells pose to stability in Syria and neighboring Iraq?”
A loss for Russia and Iran
Russia has been dealt a huge blow, the regime it so vehemently backed in 2015 being wiped out in the blink of an eye.
With it is likely much of Moscow’s influence in this part of the world, not to mention its strategic warm water Mediterranean port of Tartus.
Iran and Hezbollah have also been chastened, after a year in which Israel has dealt both significant blows in the conflict farther south. In Assad, Iran has lost a key pillar of its vaunted “Axis of Resistance,” after backing Syria with funds and armed forces.
The presence of Moscow and Tehran in Syria has therefore been severely diminished. The question is what steps into that void.
