A new political chapter has opened in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow, where he has been granted asylum. And the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani, the nom de guerre of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, has captured Damascus, barely ten days after launching its offensive on 27 November.
Brace for numerous theories about why Assad’s regime fell suddenly, with little more than a whimper, and even claims that its downfall was inevitable. In truth, no one predicted HTS’s lightning advance from its redoubts in the north-western province of Idlib, adjacent to Turkey – not Assad, not Iran and Russia, his principal patrons, perhaps not even Al-Jolani himself. The House of Assad was built in 1971 by Bashar’s iron-fisted father, Hafez, who ruled until 2000. Having brought it down, Al-Jolani has a country to run – most of it anyway.
HTS’s military success was breathtaking. From Idlib, the group moved southward, taking Aleppo, Hama and Homs, the capital cities of eponymous provinces, and entered Damascus’s outskirts by 7 December, sweeping a hapless Syrian army from its path. Elsewhere, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) attacked Kurdish positions in the north, and rebel militias overran Daraa in the south-west. And the US-supported, Kurd-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by Mazloum Abdi – who presides over the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), located across the north-east bank of the Euphrates river – chased Assad’s army from Deir ez-Zor province, which abuts Iraq and has been a conduit used by Iran and the Iraqi Shia’s militias backing Assad.
This is a remarkable development considering that in recent years, Assad’s political position seemed to have strengthened. The nationwide rebellion he sparked in 2011 following a bloody crackdown on protestors in Daraa during Syria’s version of the Arab Spring might have sealed his fate. But the Syrian army, supplemented by Russian airpower and fighters from Iran’s Quds Force and allied Shia fighters from Hezbollah and the Hashd al-Shaabi, a clutch of Iraqi militias, saved the day for the Assad regime. From 2016 onward, Assad consolidated his position. His fellow Arab leaders gradually welcomed back him to the fold – even those Gulf monarchies that had funded his Islamist opponents – and Syria rejoined the Arab League. Russia, Iran and Turkey, convenors of the multi-round Astana peace talks, initiated in 2017, couldn’t persuade him to reach a political settlement with the armed opposition. As Assad saw it, he controlled about 70 per cent of Syria and didn’t have to compromise; his enemies did.
The US, Europe and Israel, scarcely Assad’s fans, reconciled themselves to his survival. Some analysts even saw him as a bulwark against jihadist groups, including the Islamic State (IS). Israel disliked his alliance with Iran, but during the Israeli war in Gaza and the related military operations in the West Bank, Assad kept Syria’s southern border regions quiet and also did not aid Hamas, as Iran, Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis did.
Still, life after 2011 became even harder for the Syrians Assad ruled. Because of American sanctions and the continuing war, Syria’s per capita GDP plunged from $2,971 in 2011 to $421 by 2021. By 2022, the civil war was estimated to have killed almost 307,000 civilians, 7.2 million were internally displaced (more than in any ongoing civil war), and five million had become refugees: 3.6 million in Turkey alone. Assad’s regime is dominated by his Alawite community (though Alawites have also joined the opposition), which comprises 10-13 per cent of Syria’s population, and it relied on corruption and repression, including mass detentions, and torture, to ensure obedience. But the intermittent revolts in Daraa, especially in 2021, were proof of simmering resentment.
Assad’s fall leaves a vacuum. We cannot know who will fill it and with what consequences. Russia is out of the picture, at least for now. In 2015-16, Russian warplanes, plus ground forces from Iran and assorted Shia militias, prevented Assad’s defeat. But with Iran and Hezbollah weakened by their confrontation with Israel, and the Syrian army unravelling, Vladimir Putin knew that this time Russian airstrikes couldn’t turn the tide. In recent days, Putin ordered Russian personnel to exit Syria, along with the warships docked at the Russian naval base at Tartus and the planes parked at Khmeimim airbase. For Iran, Syria has been a conduit for supplying Hezbollah; Tehran will still have a stake in the country but no longer the sway it had under Assad. The erosion of Moscow’s and Tehran’s power in the region makes the vacuum left by Assad’s demise even bigger.
For now, after careful preparation, Al-Jolani has filled the void. He used the fragile ceasefire Turkey and Russian brokered in Idlib in March 2020 to better equip and train HTS forces and had already begun refashioning his own image by jettisoning a militant narrative in favour of one suffused with moderation. This was a stark metamorphosis. Al-Jolani had fought in Iraq following the 2003 American invasion and even spent five years in American prisons there. The State Department of the US government designated him a terrorist – it still does – and, in 2017, even offered a $10m bounty for information leading to his identification or location.
After the uprising against Assad began, Al-Jolani ran Jabhat al-Nusra, the IS’s Syrian branch. He then split with IS and aligned with Al-Qaeda, but soon cut ties with it as well. He created Jabhat al-Sham in 2016 and HTS, an ensemble of resistance groups, the following year. He now presents himself as an amalgam of Islamist and nationalist, disavows trans-national millenarian ambitions, and promises efficient governance and respect for Syria’s various minorities, among them Alawites, Druze, Kurds, Christians, Assyrians and Armenians. Some worry that this is an opportunistic makeover designed to gain power, not a genuine conversion. If so, Syria could be in for a new phase of violence.
Apart from the challenges of governing, Al-Jolani will face hard choices on the international front. Turkey’s influence in Syria has now increased, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will seek greater leeway to attack the Kurdish enclave in north and north-eastern Syria. He may succeed if Donald Trump, true to his words, withdraws the American troops based in Syria since 2014 – nominally as part of a multi-state coalition – to help Mazloum Abdi’s SDF fight IS. Trump already ordered US troops out of Northern Syria in 2019, and could now could cut a deal with Turkish president Erdoğan, who considers the SDF part of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), which has waged a secessionist war in Turkey’s south-east since 1984. Will Al-Jolani then allow Erdoğan have his way or decide to resist Turkish military incursions into the Kurdish-dominated AANES – which included the seizure of Afrin, Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn in 2019 – by backing Abdi? And if Al-Jolani lasts, will he stick with by his professed ideal of a decentralised Syria featuring local autonomy, or eventually seek to control the AANES?
And what of Al-Jolani and Israel? As a Sunni Islamist, Al-Jolani won’t align with Iran, Hezbollah or Hashd al-Shaabi, all backers of Assad. That will please Israel. But Al-Jolani’s family fled the Golan Heights after Israel captured it following the 1967 Six-Day War: his choice of nom de guerre (typically spelled Jolani) isn’t coincidental. Moreover, his political awakening occurred after the Second Intifada erupted in 2000. Will Al-Jolani focus on effective governance and political reconciliation within Syria and shelve his sympathy for the Palestinians’ resistance against Israel’s occupation? Or will he, in time, decide to support it, setting the stage for a confrontation with Israel? Yesterday (8 December), Israeli warplanes struck Daraa and Suwayda in southern Syria, while the Israel Defence Forces seized a buffer zone in the Golan Heights established in 1974 (Benjamin Netanyahu said the deal protecting it had “collapsed” following the rebel victory).
Post-Assad Syria raises many questions. Considering what has happened since 27 November, it is prudent to avoid predictions.
[See also: Jerusalem: city of blood and blame]
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