The overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad and his regime is the greatest political earthquake to strike the Middle East since the fall of the Shah in the Iranian revolution in 1979.
Islamist rebels captured Damascus on Sunday after astonishingly feeble resistance from the Syrian armed forces since the opposition offensive began on 27 November. After 24 years in power, and though he commanded an army equipped with modern tanks and bomber aircraft, Assad found that nobody was prepared to fight for him. Abandoned by all, he flew out of the capital early on Sunday morning heading for an unknown destination. That evening, it was reported that he was in Moscow.
The sheer speed with which the regime unravelled has left both Syrians and the outside world in a state of shock, baffled about what might happen next. The leader of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Ahmed al-Sharaa (previously known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), whose 30,000 fighters spearheaded the offensive, is calling for a peaceful transition of power without a break-up of Syrian state institutions, as occurred in Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.
He wants a coalition government with full executive powers, but this might have little authority in a country as fragmented as Syria. After all, until recently its leading element, HTS, was a small if well-organised movement labelled by the West as “terrorist” in the opposition enclave of Idlib in northwest Syria.
Whatever the intentions of Syria’s new rulers, they will struggle to fill a giant power vacuum in a country divided by a savage 14-year-long civil war fought between hostile religious and ethnic communities.
The final disintegration of the regime came swiftly as soldiers and security men, understanding that the regime was finished, changed rapidly into civilian clothes, discarding their uniforms and weapons. Guns were left lying in the street to be picked up by boys who fired them into the air in celebration. As dawn broke over Damascus, many people went to pray in the city’s mosques, while others chanted “God is great” and shouted anti-Assad slogans.
Posters of Assad, previously omnipresent in government-held territory, were torn down while Assad family homes were ransacked along with the presidential palace where, until a few days ago, the Syrian leader received visiting foreign dignitaries.
For the tens of thousands of Syrians unexpectedly freed from prison – places of torture and death like Sednaya on the outskirts of Damascus – any qualms about the future stability of Syria will be irrelevant. It matters much, however, to the 5.5 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe, including some 900,000 in Germany. Suddenly free to return, they know that there may be little to return to, even supposing it is safe for them to do so. Syria is an economic wreck, broken and impoverished by war and US-led economic sanctions.
It was a strange civil war of sieges and blockades, mostly of rebel-held districts, which were bombarded, often for years on end.
Day and night in Damascus, I used to hear heavy artillery firing from the mountains into opposition enclaves until they looked like contemporary Gaza. Sometimes, the buildings were still standing but empty, ghost towns where doors and window frames had been stripped out by plunderers and what had once been ornamental trees had grown forest-high.
The dividing line between ruins and inhabited parts of Damascus, Homs and other cities usually ran precisely along communal frontiers. Districts where Alawites, Druze, Christians and others loyal to the government lived would be undamaged just next door to a Sunni Arab district reduced to a tangles of broken concrete floors and reinforcement bars, smashed by artillery and bombs dropped by helicopters.
Sharaa, a former al-Qaeda commander who cut ties with the group in 2016, says that today he embraces pluralism and religious tolerance, but Syrians will take a lot of convincing. Even supposing that he is sincere, can he deliver in a country where Islamic State still has its adherents? Is he simply trying to detoxify his image for international consumption? For many Syrians, these are life and death questions.
An additional problem is that there is more than one civil war going on in Syria. The biggest and best known has been between Assad and the mostly Sunni Arab opposition, but a second largely separate conflict is between Arabs and Kurds, fought out mainly along the Euphrates river and in the great plains of northeast Syria.
Here the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) backed by US airpower defeated the Islamic State. The US still has 900 troops there, but president-elect Donald Trump may want to withdraw them, a move that would expose the Syrian Kurds to Turkish-backed assault by Arab militias under the umbrella of the Syrian National Army. In the past few days this has been attacking eastwards, and is poised to capture the Kurdish-held but largely Arab city of Manbij, west of the Euphrates. The Kurdish minority in Aleppo is under threat. The Kurds, at least 10 per cent of Syria’s population, fear that Turkey, acting through Arab proxies, will be satisfied only by the destruction of their quasi-state and the mass expulsion of its inhabitants.
There are reasons for optimism as well as pessimism about Syria’s sectarian divide. The crumbling of Assad’s forces, at the core of which were the Alawites and other minorities, shows that they were no longer prepared to get killed trying to keep him in power. The trump card of the Assad family and the regime in the past was not that they were very popular, even among their supporters, but that they preferred them to Salafi jihadis, Sunni fundamentalists who saw them as heretics or unbelievers to be slaughtered at will.
Worn out by ceaseless warfare, economic sanctions and pervasive state corruption, the coalition that had long supported the Assad regime finally disintegrated. From the moment when HTS first attacked, the Syrian army and security services voted with their feet in Aleppo and later in Hama, Homs and finally Damascus.
The problem now in Syria is the same as that in Iraq in 2003 after the defeat of Saddam Hussein and his largely Sunni regime. Removing the old elite and purging the old Saddam appointees from the state apparatus may have been democratic in one sense, but it also meant replacing Sunni with Shia which provoked a sectarian bloodbath in Iraq that Syria will seek to avoid.
A further reason for guarded optimism is that the West and its regional allies have long been happy to allow Syria to be devastated by a forever war in which neither Assad nor his enemies triumphed. They wanted him weakened and isolated, but not replaced by not-so-former jihadis who might prove more dangerous to western interests than Assad.
This cynical strategy has now foundered. A former member of al-Qaeda will take power in Damascus – and nobody knows what will happen next.
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