The early days of the rebellion towards Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime — which got here to a surprising finish this weekend after 13 lengthy years of civil battle as insurgent forces entered the capital of Damascus and Assad fled into exile — had been outlined by two well-known items of graffiti.
The primary was written by a bunch of teenage boys on a faculty wall in early 2011 within the metropolis of Daraa. Impressed by the Arab Spring protests then seemingly sweeping away the previous order in longtime dictatorships like Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, they wrote, “You’re subsequent, physician,” referring to Assad, who had skilled and labored as an ophthalmologist in London in his early years earlier than returning to take over the household enterprise of ruling Syria with an iron fist. The boys had been then arrested and tortured by the regime’s safety forces, an occasion credited by many with sparking the mass protest motion towards Assad.
The message proved to be overly optimistic: Assad didn’t flee and he didn’t compromise, as a substitute opting to crush the rebellion by power, resulting in a civil battle that will kill as many as half 1,000,000 individuals and displace hundreds of thousands extra.
The second graffiti message was a slogan scrawled by pro-regime militias all through the nation within the early days of the rebellion: “Assad or we burn the nation.” The phrase signaled the regime’s full unwillingness to compromise with its enemies and the lengths it could go to remain in energy.
Over the previous week, even because the rebels took the traditional metropolis of Aleppo on November 30 and started streaming down the freeway south towards Damascus, it nonetheless appeared far-fetched that the Syrian regime would fall — {that a} household that had been in energy since Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad carried out a coup 54 years in the past and was keen to go as far as to use chemical weapons by itself individuals and scale back its personal cities to rubble to protect that energy would merely crumble in a matter of days.
However that’s precisely what occurred: Because the rebels superior, there have been quite a few experiences of presidency forces merely abandoning their positions and discarding their uniforms. The Russian authorities says it has supplied Assad and his household asylum. US officers say they haven’t confirmed that Assad is in Russia, however don’t have any cause to doubt it.
Right this moment, footage from Damascus is displaying the sort of celebrations not seen for the reason that heady early days of the Arab Spring. Movies on social media present individuals who had been imprisoned, together with young children and other people who’ve been incarcerated for many years, being launched from the regime’s infamous prisons. The occasions of the previous week have raised hopes amongst at the very least some of the greater than 6 million Syrians who’ve fled the nation — forming the world’s largest refugee inhabitants — that they can return dwelling.
The White Home initially distanced itself from the occasions in Syria, after the autumn of Aleppo. However on Sunday, President Joe Biden spoke from the White Home calling Assad’s fall a “basic act of justice” and a “second of historic alternative.” His assertion additionally linked the occasion to the US help for Ukraine and Israel of their struggle towards Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran, all key backers of the Assad regime.
The preliminary warning to embrace the offensive wholeheartedly was due in no small half to the truth that the principle group main the opposition, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is a former affiliate of al-Qaeda that’s nonetheless designated as a terrorist group by the US. On a background name on Sunday, a senior US administration official stated that the US “intends to interact with [HTS] appropriately and with US pursuits in thoughts,” however wouldn’t touch upon whether or not it could rethink the group’s terrorist designation.
There are looming questions over points together with the destiny of Assad’s chemical weapons and the destiny of Syria’s non secular minorities, together with the Kurdish forces which have allied with the American navy to struggle ISIS. Seemingly driving this level dwelling, the US carried out dozens of airstrikes concentrating on ISIS in Syria on Sunday as a part of what US Central Command referred to as an effort to “make sure that ISIS doesn’t search to make the most of the present scenario to reconstitute in central Syria.” For American policymakers, the scenes in Damascus might reawaken recollections of Iraq and Libya — nations the place longtime dictators had been toppled, solely to see their nations consumed by sectarian violence and terrorism.
One key distinction this time round is that Assad was toppled by a principally homegrown rebellion, moderately than a US-led navy intervention. Not that the US has been completely absent from the scene. American navy forces carried out a strike on Iranian militia targets in Syria on December 3, although the Pentagon was fast to emphasize that this was in response to a risk to American forces, not in help of the rebels.
The insurgent forces additionally embrace the controversial Turkish proxy group referred to as the Syrian Nationwide Military (SNA) , and it seems doubtless Ukraine’s intelligence providers might have performed some function in helping the offensive by fellow opponents of the Russian navy. It’s value noting that the fighters getting into Damascus additionally included a brand new insurgent group from southern Syria dominated by veterans of the Free Syrian Military, which for years was backed by the US and different western powers.
However as of now, as Biden instructed, it seems to be as if the largest function worldwide actors performed in helping the rebels was oblique and occurred outdoors of Syria itself: After 14 months of battle with Israel, Assad’s ally Hezbollah was not able to intervene on Assad’s behalf, because it has previously; with its principal navy belongings tied up in Ukraine, neither was Russia.
Consideration will now flip to Syria’s new rulers and the way they are going to govern. Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the HTS chief, has stated all the appropriate issues, calling on its supporters to keep away from vengeance towards regime supporters. For now, he’s leaving Assad-appointed Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali in place till a transitional authorities is shaped.
On Saturday, a couple of hours earlier than Assad’s overthrow, Vox requested Mouaz Moustafa, govt director of the US-based Syrian Emergency Activity Pressure, what a transitional authorities might appear to be. He instructed that UN Decision 2254, adopted again in 2015 however by no means applied, might present a highway map: It requires a Syrian-led political course of facilitated by the United Nations resulting in new elections inside 18 months.
Within the coming months, we’ll see whether or not Jolani, the previous al-Qaeda fighter with a $10 million worth on his head from the US authorities, is absolutely the pragmatic pluralist he now says he’s, and assuming he’s, whether or not he’s able to protecting collectively an ethnically and religiously various nation, one awash with weapons, varied armed teams, and traumatized by many years of dictatorship and battle.
An enormous query mark is how Damascus’s new rulers will cope with the Kurdish-ruled northeast nook of the nation, significantly if the incoming Trump administration follows by way of on plans from his final time period to take away US troops from the area. There have already been regarding experiences in current days of clashes between Kurdish forces and the Turkish-backed SNA. On Saturday, Trump posted on Reality Social that the offensive in Syria was “NOT OUR FIGHT” and that America “SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.”
Past these questions, Assad’s fall must be a reminder of some vital details. One, governments and analysts proceed to be extraordinarily unhealthy at assessing the energy of non-state militant teams like HTS, their means to launch main offensives, and the flexibility of governments to withstand them.
Two, authoritarian regimes are sometimes a lot weaker than they seem. Because the just-freed Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza just lately advised Vox, referring to his personal nation, “In these repressive, tyrannical regimes, you don’t know what’s taking place beneath the floor … there could also be issues creating for the regime, however no one’s conscious of them till they arrive out of the open and abruptly every thing collapses.”
Over the previous few years, the world had all however determined that Assad had gained the civil battle. Regional governments that had spent years attempting to topple him had been welcoming him again into the fold, whereas the US was transferring on to different priorities. If the previous few days educate us something, it’s that governments like Assad’s can typically be extra brittle than they seem from the surface, and it simply takes a powerful push to knock them over.
For all of the very justified concern and warning about what lies forward for Syria, that must be some trigger for optimism.
