The Fall of Assad’s Syria

For fifty-four years, generations of Syrians lived and died in a country that was colloquially known as Assad’s Syria. It was a place where children were taught that the walls had ears and that a misplaced word could lead to being disappeared. The regime had multiple branches of secret police, collectively called the Mukhabarat, which helped underpin its one-party, one-family, one-man rule. President Bashar al-Assad, and his late father and predecessor, Hafez, were omnipresent forces, glaring down from the many billboards, posters, and statues that were felled this week with all the exuberance, rage, and grief of the long-oppressed.

The end of Assad’s Syria was as stunning as it was swift. It took eleven days for some of Assad’s armed opponents to bring down the regime. The fall of the capital, Damascus, on Sunday morning marked the climax of an almost fourteen-year campaign that began in March, 2src11, when peaceful protests morphed into a messy war that pitted myriad armed rebel groups (and others, including foreign jihadi fighters) against the Syrian military and each other. Since about 2src18, the conflict had been largely stalemated, and Syria has been a unified state in name only. Its northwestern province of Idlib was controlled by the Sunni Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (H.T.S.), a coalition led by the group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of Al Qaeda. Its oil-rich northeast was dominated first by ISIS and then by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which are supported by the U.S. The northwest, around the town of Azaz, was home to the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. Jordanian-influenced rebel groups held sway in pockets of the south. The rest was what remained of Assad’s Syria.

This year, on November 27th, the same day that a ceasefire took hold between Israel and Hezbollah, in neighboring Lebanon, H.T.S. and its allies abruptly pushed south from their stronghold in Idlib. Cities fell rapidly, one after another, with little resistance from the forces of a crumbling state that had been hollowed out by years of U.S.-imposed sanctions, endemic regime corruption, and Israeli air strikes on military infrastructure.

By Sunday morning, Assad had fled on a private plane shortly before Damascus International Airport closed down. It was a remarkable abdication of power from the head of state, who just weeks earlier had attended a meeting of the Arab League in Saudi Arabia, where he had been welcomed back into the fold following years of bitter estrangement. Assad did not address the nation or issue a statement regarding his departure. His Prime Minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, extended his hand to the opposition. He said, in a short, prerecorded message, that he remained in Damascus and was ready to facilitate an orderly transition to whatever comes next. He called on citizens to protect public property, adding that he would be at work in his office the following morning. “We believe in a Syria for all Syrians,” he said. “This country deserves to be a normal state, with good relations with its neighbors.” (Earlier this week, as the opposition gained momentum, some of Syria’s neighbors—Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq—closed their borders with the country.)

The peaceful handover of power in Damascus was marked by scenes of jubilation, of people cheering and tearing down posters of the Assads, and by scenes of fear: of tearful citizens hurrying through a deserted airport; of soldiers abandoning their posts, leaving military fatigues, equipment, and even tanks strewn in the streets. In the end, Assad’s exhausted army of conscripts wasn’t prepared to continue to fight and die for a dictatorship. A friend who lives in Damascus told me that he was hearing rampant gunfire—he wasn’t sure if it was all celebratory or not—and the sounds of explosions. Social media was flooded with videos of people emerging dazed and dishevelled from Assad’s state prisons, in many ways the most potent symbol of his rule, which had been flung open by opposition forces. In one clip, said to be from Sednaya, a facility near Damascus that was particularly notorious for executions and torture, a man dressed in plain clothes and carrying a Kalashnikov unbolted the door of a cell full of women. Another man, off camera, said, “Get out, get out! Don’t be afraid!” A woman asked who the men were. “Revolutionaries,” one of them responded. “Syria is ours.” Some of the women shrieked. “Why are you afraid?” a man told one. “Bashar al-Assad has fallen! He’s gone! He’s left Syria! . . . The brother of a whore has gone!”

The offensive came at a time when Assad’s key backers were tied down or weakened by other conflicts: the Russians in Ukraine, and Iran and Hezbollah with Israel. The push was spearheaded by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the founder and leader of Jabhat al-Nusra, which he rebranded as part of H.T.S. a few years ago, claiming to disavow ties to Al Qaeda and casting himself as a fatigues-clad statesman. Other groups, most notably the Syrian National Army, were also involved in the blitz, as were foreign fighters from factions including the Turkistan Islamic Party, which has long been present in rebel-held territories. On Syria’s exceedingly complicated battlefield, H.T.S. and its earlier Al Qaeda incarnation opposed both Assad and various rebel groups, defeating many during years of intra-opposition infighting. If anything, H.T.S. and its hard-line conservatism represented a counter-revolution that was rejected by the more secular, pro-democratic opposition. They weren’t so much “the rebels” but rather the factions that defeated the rebels.

Since late November, Julani has issued statements aimed at reassuring Syria’s many religious minorities, including the Alawites, of which the Assads are members, that his group has embraced pluralism and religious tolerance. (The overtures have been made to Christians, and others, too.) The coming hours, days, and weeks will be a test of those stated intentions. Julani has said that he’s a changed man, but at least one of his fellow-fighters, a man I’ve known for years who held leadership positions in Jabhat al-Nusra, told me that the changes were cosmetic.

Before dawn on Sunday, I reached a former emir of Jabhat al-Nusra, who knows Julani well, by phone. He told me, “The man hasn’t changed at all, but there’s a difference between being in battle, at war, killing, and running a country.” Julani had seen the sectarian bloodlust of other Salafi-jihadi groups—before coming to Syria, in 2src11, to form Jabhat al-Nusra, he was a member of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State of Iraq—and he’d noted those mistakes. Julani, the former emir went on, “now considers himself a statesman.” He remains, however, a U.S.-designated terrorist with a ten-million-dollar bounty on his head, which will surely complicate any state-building plans.

The challenges facing a new Syria are many, not least the anti-Assad opposition’s history of bloody infighting. But the former emir was hopeful. He anticipated that Julani would dissolve H.T.S. and incorporate it and other factions into a new defense ministry. “He can’t punish every Syrian,” he said. “Julani has subdued the northern factions, which won’t dare to take him on, especially now that he has about forty thousand fighters.” He went on, “The fear, to be honest, is from the southern factions, one of which is supported under the table by the Israelis. But it has about two thousand or two thousand five hundred fighters. There is no local military power to stand or compete with Julani.” If he fails, the alternative scenario is Libya, a state torn apart by rival armed militias.