The end was “as stunning as it was swift”, said Rania Abouzeid in The New Yorker. Less than a fortnight after launching a lightning strike from its stronghold in northern Syria, the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) this week succeeded in ending the 24-year rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
The regime had pledged to defend the capital, Damascus, with a “ring of steel”; but in the event, the rebels’ rapid southward advance met little resistance. Regime soldiers abandoned their posts, leaving uniforms and equipment strewn in the street, as Assad and his family fled the country.
Why didn’t the regime put up more of a fight?
The brutality of Assad’s regime masked its extraordinary weakness, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Assad would have lost power a decade ago, in the wake of the Arab Spring, had Iran and Russia not come to his aid with ground forces and air power. He should have used the breathing space provided by their rescue to try to bolster his legitimacy and extend his power base beyond the Alawite minority, the branch of Shia Islam to which he and most of his cronies belong. Instead, he carried on just as before, leaving Syria’s Sunni majority to “seethe in discontent”, counting on his allies to bail him out again if necessary. But with Russia tied up in Ukraine, and Iran reeling from Israel’s assault on its proxies, nobody was willing to fight for him this time.
Assad invited his own downfall, agreed Benjamin Byman in Foreign Policy. He was so paranoid about falling victim to a coup, that he deliberately fostered disunity and inefficiency in his armed forces, leaving them a hollowed-out rabble made up largely of unwilling conscripts.
What has happened in Syria since Assad’s fall?
Assad’s departure prompted jubilant scenes in cities across Syria. People tore down posters and statues of the Assads, who first came to power in 1970, and stormed their palaces, filming their collections of luxury cars and emerging with their family albums, furniture and other trophies. Many members of Syria’s large diaspora, meanwhile, started making plans to return home.
Amid the euphoria, there was also desperation as people headed to prisons, thrown open by rebels, in a frantic search for missing loved ones, said Sam Joiner in the FT. Videos shared across social media showed gaunt and bewildered prisoners, including toddlers, stumbling out of dark cells into the light. Some of the released men were apparently unaware that Bashar’s father, former dictator Hafez al-Assad, had died – an event that took place 24 years ago.
The scenes at Sednaya Prison, a large facility outside Damascus known locally as “the human slaughterhouse”, were particularly grim, said David Patrikarakos in the Daily Mail. Rebels discovered an iron press allegedly used to crush and execute prisoners. Officials resorted to putting out appeals on social media for people to provide the codes to electronic doors leading to underground cells, where detainees could be seen on CCTV monitors.
Where is Assad now?
By dawn on Sunday, Assad, his British wife, Asma, and other members of their family had all fled to Moscow. Assad will have plenty of time to ruminate on his errors in his new home, said Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Times. He’s no stranger to the city: his family is said to have a huge property portfolio there, including at least 18 flats in the City of Capitals skyscraper complex; and his oldest son, Hafez, has just graduated from Moscow State University in mathematics.
But while he and Asma may feel at home browsing the city’s “gilded shopping malls”, they “face the prospect of a withering life of obscurity – semiguests, semi-prisoners”. As Assad is only 59, there’s a decent chance that he could yet be handed over to an international court following a change of regime in Russia, said Marcel Dirsus in The New Statesman. Whatever happens, he’ll “never truly be safe again”, given how many people wish him ill.
What will happen in Syria now?
As for the devastated country Assad left behind, its future is now up in the air, said Daniel Byman in The New York Times. Having watched similar scenes of jubilation in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, and in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, one can’t help but worry that “Syrians’ sense of deep relief today could be followed by a new set of horrors tomorrow”.
There’s much to worry about in Syria, agreed The Times. Although HTS claims to have evolved from its jihadist roots and become more inclusive, it remains to be seen how genuine this is. And beyond HTS and other Islamist fighters, there are many other factions jostling for control in Syria, including a coalition of Kurdish groups in the northeast, Druze factions in the southwest and Syrian opposition forces in the southeast. It’s all too likely that Syria will now descend into inter-factional fighting, said Colonel Richard Kemp in The Sun. That would be disastrous for the country and risk propelling millions more refugees into Europe.
What’s the best case scenario?
“Black pessimism is rarely unfounded when considering events in the Middle East,” said Patrick Bishop in the Daily Mail. And it will certainly be hard for Syria to move on from half-a-century of dictatorship. There are, though, some reasons for hope. Before the past decade of bloody civil war, Syrians of different faiths had a “long, if intermittent”, history of “harmonious co-existence”. Syrians have had enough of war and are desperate to forge a new future, said Kim Ghattas in the FT. It was striking that the fall of Assad was celebrated even in regime strongholds such as Latakia.
The citizens of many other countries in the region are also keen to move on from war and embrace economic development, said Arash Azizi in The Atlantic. “Nobody expects a flourishing liberal democracy to suddenly emerge from the ashes of the Syrian civil war”, but if Syrians can put their differences aside, “they can begin to build an effective polity” that would advance their country’s interests and potentially benefit the whole Middle East.
It’s certainly too early now to succumb to defeatist gloom over the nation’s prospects, said Gideon Rachman in the FT. For all the understandable anxieties about the future of Syria, there’s no denying that “the fall of a brutal regime that is aligned to other brutal regimes is a good thing”.