After 13 years of war that began with street protests during the heady days of the Arab Spring and morphed into one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the Middle East’s recent history, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian strongman, collapsed in just over a week.
Sunni rebels – some of them former jihadists – who had broken out of the north-west province of Idlib swept into the capital Damascus after overrunning the major cities of Aleppo, Homs and Hama on their way south.
On the road into the city witnesses described seeing uniforms, military equipment and even tanks abandoned by the Syrian Army. On the country’s borders, queues began forming of displaced families desperate to return home after more than a decade as refugees.
In Damascus’s Umayyad Square, young men clambered onto tanks, shot in the air with automatic weapons, danced and took selfies. Many spoke of a moment of hope.
At Sednaya prison, one of the world’s most notorious penitentiaries where up to 30,000 inmates were reportedly tortured and killed, the cells were opened amid emotional scenes.
The unexpected fall of the Assad dynasty, which has ruled Syria since 1971, marks a seismic shift in the power politics of a region that is already aflame as well as a major setback for Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, Assad’s principal backers.
The rebel takeover of the country is also perhaps the most significant result so far of Israel’s taking a sledgehammer to the geopolitical architecture of the Middle East, in a bid to establish itself as the regional strongman.
Assad’s regime was on the brink of collapse in 2015 after opposition activists and rebel groups seized control of large swathes of the country. But it was saved by the intervention of Russian air power and Iran’s sending in thousands of fighters from Hezbollah, it’s proxy in Lebanon.
Now, however, Russia is stretched to breaking point on the plains of eastern Europe as President Vladimir Putin seeks to overwhelm Ukraine, and was unwilling to commit more resources to protecting Assad.
Hezbollah, meanwhile, has seen its fighting capacity gutted in its war with Israel which has killed much of its leadership. There were reports yesterday that several Hezbollah armoured vehicles had set off from Lebanon to bolster the Syrian regime only to be destroyed by Israeli air strikes.
Iran, the major Shia power in the region, is also on the back foot, with its economy teetering and its decades-long effort to build a regional axis of resistance to counter the power of Israel and Saudi Arabia in tatters.
With control of Syria now up for grabs, some analysts are comparing the significance of the fall of Damascus to the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah in Iran, brought the Mullahs to power and set the scene for half a century of bloody power struggle in the Middle East between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Syria now is at a crossroads. It could head down the path to turmoil and blood-letting as happened after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011.
But there is also hope that, having already endured such a brutal civil war, and with the old regime being swept from power with so little blood spilled, the various rebel factions will manage to unite to form a national unity government.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the leading rebel group, spent years burnishing its credentials as the government of Idlib, a north-western Syrian province that is home to 3 to 4 million Sunni Muslims, mostly refugees, who lived beyond the writ of Damascus.
There is fear that these Sunni militants – whose forebearers spawned a decade of violent international jihad and the horrors of al-Qa’eda and isis – will impose a hardline Islamist state that will persecute Shia, Christians and other religious minorities.
Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, however, the leader of HTS, has been at pains to stress that he intends to rule as a leader of all Syrians. When the rebels swept into Aleppo this past week he reassured residents that he would not be imposing Islamic strictures or banning worship by religious minorities.
In the capital Damascus yesterday HTS fighters and rebels from other groups were guarding government buildings, a far cry from the debacle that ensued after US soldiers reached Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Most Syrians, exhausted and demoralised after years of conflict, seemed at least ready to give HTS a chance.
Residents were out on the streets of several cities celebrating the demise of Assad. While some fighters shot in the air others joined arms and danced in the streets.
There was no early word yesterday of the fate of Bashar al-Assad although Moscow issued a statement saying he had left the country after negotiations with ‘other factions’. It said it did not know where he had gone.
Many of Assad’s close associates will probably have fled to a strip of land on the coast which is the heartland of the country’s Alawite community, from which Assad hailed.
It is also home to a major Russian air base in Latakia and Moscow’s only warm-water naval facility at Tartus from where it projects power into the Mediterranean and beyond.
Last week Moscow launched bombing raids against rebel targets, including against hospitals, in a response that did little to alter realities on the ground. But it has now indicated it is willing to negotiate with the leading rebel factions that are Syria’s new leaders.
Turkey will likely have an even big say in the future of Syria and could emerge as the major regional beneficiary of Assad’s fall. Of six million refugees forced out of Syria by the war, nearly four million currently live in Turkey.
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan pressured Assad for months to negotiate a power-sharing deal with the rebels that might have allowed many of the refugees to return from Turkey.
But Assad, a cruel and uncompromising despot even by the standards of his benighted region, had refused. Ankara finally seems to have run out of patience with Damascus and given the green light for the rebel advance.
As for Syria’s future much will now depend on the role of other powers in the region. Israel will be pleased to see such a staunch ally of Iran and Hezbollah fall, but wary of a resurgence of Sunni fundamentalism.
Turkey will be looking for a greater role in the north of the country where it is in a decades-old fight with Kurdish guerrillas, and the Gulf states, which had begun to rehabilitate Assad, will also be jockeying for position.
Yesterday the Syrian prime minister Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali, who is still nominally in control of the country, called for early elections. But others warned that after half a century of despotic rule and with 300,000 dead and half a million injured in the war, slowly rebuilding state institutions was more important than an early vote.
In the US meanwhile, the Biden administration said that it would not be intervening to support either side in the conflict.
Donald Trump, who will take the reins of power on 20 January, wrote on social media: ‘Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, and the United States should have nothing to do with it. This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved!’
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Julius Strauss writes a Substack Back to the Front on developments in Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East.
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