How Bashar al-Assad’s Regime Crumbled

Over the weekend, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia as opposition forces took over the capital of Damascus, ending an uprising that had begun in 2src11 and killed hundreds of thousands of people, and displaced millions. Assad’s regime had appeared to have gained the upper hand after receiving significant military support from Iran and Russia. But with his allies tied down with conflicts against Israel and Ukraine, respectively, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (H.T.S.), a rebel group once affiliated with Al Qaeda under its former name, Al Nusra Front, marched with stunning speed across Syria’s major cities.

To understand what this turn of events means for Syria’s neighbors and how the country might achieve a semblance of normalcy, I recently spoke by phone with Emile Hokayem, the director of regional security and a senior fellow for Middle East security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, who has written extensively on Syria for almost two decades. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the internal dynamics that led the Assad regime to decline, why Assad’s onetime regional enemies remain concerned, and what the rebels who overthrew the government really want.

Over the past forty-eight hours, we’ve seen people celebrating Assad’s fall, but what are you most concerned about right now and why?

I think everyone’s concern has to do with the factionalism that has pervaded not just the opposition, but Syria. The regime itself was as fractured as the opposition has been in the past. Syria has a Kurdish population, and ISIS is still rearing its ugly head in the eastern desert. So some part of the country was unified for a long time around Assad because he seemed like the lowest common denominator. But that became part of the reason he fell. The opposition became relatively more united because it had one enemy to rally against. Now we are essentially going back to a competition for power, for territory, for legitimacy. And that is going to be the difficult task here—to rise above that.

But I don’t think we should be cynical. Just because it was hard in the past and that it didn’t succeed elsewhere doesn’t mean that the Syrians will fail. There is a strong argument for optimism here based on the fact that this was in a way a purely Syrian victory, or a Syrian solution to a Syrian problem. This was not an international or a regionally backed effort that led to the demise of Assad. That it was a bottom-up process may actually serve to reduce some of these divisions.

Specifically, the fact that we have avoided the so-called Qaddafi moment—that essentially Bashar al-Assad was not captured and killed, which happened with Qaddafi in a pretty gruesome way—could serve to diffuse tensions. Had we had a Qaddafi moment, I think the way it would’ve played into the Syrian confessional universe would have been worrisome, and that would’ve been the overwhelming image.

Because it would have been the majority religious group, Sunnis, murdering someone—even if he might deserve it—someone from a minority sect, in this case the Alawites?

Exactly. In a way, yes, it’s sad that he escaped, and there’s certainly going to be very, very legitimate calls for justice. But avoiding this violent culmination of that process—although there is still violence and I’m not whitewashing what’s happening—and not having that one moment, the one picture that crystallizes all the fears, does help.

You said that this was a Syrian solution to a Syrian problem. Does that imply that you think the role of Turkey in supporting this group, H.T.S., is overstated?

Certainly. Turkey is the big geopolitical winner, but I think we need to provide some context there. First, Turkey is not a direct sponsor of H.T.S. It is actually the sponsor to another coalition called the Syrian National Army, which brought remnants of other groups together. And if anything, H.T.S., although it comes from a radical jihadist past, has actually been quite disciplined in this space and in recent years has avoided some of the extreme behavior that Turkish-supported groups like the S.N.A. have not. I would argue the S.N.A. is a more problematic force in this regard.

I don’t believe, and a number of other analysts don’t believe, that Turkey masterminded the march to Damascus from Day One. I think the Turks had in mind limited achievements in and around Aleppo. The rebels wanted to push further, but the Turks were on board for a limited operation. It’s just that the speed at which things happened, the momentum that the rebels gathered, essentially overtook initial calculations. I think that this march and this frenetic advance is largely due to momentum that the rebels themselves were a bit surprised about.

But more fundamentally, and I think this is the key factor, it exposed the hollowness and the rot of the Assad regime. The loyalist constituencies of Assad decided that it wasn’t worth fighting. Why? Because Assad defeated his enemies, and they stopped posing an existential threat to him. But there were no victory dividends the day after, and that really hurt his constituency. He won, but there were no positive returns economically.

Who was his constituency?

It was a very diverse one that included Alawite individuals and clans that have benefitted from the regime and served in key security functions. But it extended to a senior Sunni officer corps, and to a large section of the Sunni urban, élite middle class, upper class. It included members of minorities: Armenians, Christians, others. It was a disparate coalition that supported him first and foremost because he was the rampart against Islamists, broadly defined. And they shed a lot of blood for him. They suffered profoundly, and they justified Assad’s murderous campaign in the previous decades.

But these constituencies, and their economic and social fortunes, declined since victory was achieved. Assad did not have the mind-set, did not have the plan, did not have the resources to make things better, including for his constituency. If anything, his regime grew more predatory, more rapacious, more violent in the past few years. It never regained cohesion. It never regained a sense of purpose.

There’s an argument being made that the most important foreign backers of Assad, such as Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia, withdrew their support or weren’t able to provide the same levels of support, and that caused the regime to collapse. I assume you think that’s part of the reason, but it also seems like you’re saying something distinct.

Look, I don’t deny the significant contribution that the weakening of Iran and the overstretch of Russia had in all this. But the speed at which the regime forces collapsed and the total absence of those popular militias which had rallied in the past and the fact that Assad did not have a narrative mattered. He did not appear once on television in the past ten days. All this points to the utter hollowness of his regime and the fact that it had essentially lost the support of all these constituencies that were key to survival during the prior iteration of that war, between 2src11 and 2src17. I don’t think one can understand what happened if one ignores that significant dynamic. So yes, there’s certainly a geopolitical context for all this, but there is Syrian agency. There are local conditions that have allowed this to happen the way it did happen. And keep in mind the economic collapse, and the fact that they lost access to the Lebanese economy.