During the early hours of 8 December 2024, Syrian rebel forces entered the capital city of Damascus, ending the 24-year reign of Bashar al-Assad, president of the failed state officially known as the Syrian Arab Republic. Various media reports indicated that Assad, abandoned by Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia, and shunned by Türkiye, had flown out of Damascus to an “undisclosed destination.” Meanwhile, Syrian Prime Minister Mohammed Ghazi al-Jalali called for the peaceful handover of power to a transitional government.
The 54-year -old Assad dynastic regime dates back to a bloodless takeover of power in November 1970 by Air Force General Hafez al-Assad, minister of defence. Hafez had secured his ministerial position following an earlier coup in February 1966, engineered by the Neo-Ba’ath, a leftist offshoot of the pan-Arab, secular, and socialist Ba’ath party. He officially became president in March 1971. Hafez al-Assad’s membership of the Alawi minority, a heterodox and syncretic Shia sect, would inevitably pose problems in a country with a Sunni majority and would foster a concentration of power among the Alawites, particularly in the armed forces and security apparatus.
Bashar al-Assad’s succession to the presidency was unintended. In 1994, his elder brother, heir-apparent Bassel al-Assad, was killed in a car accident. Thereupon, Bashar cut short his training at the Western Eye Hospital in London and returned home with his British-born Sunni Muslim investment banker wife, Asma al-Akhras. Preparation for his future role included training at the military academy in Homs and mentoring in politics by his father. Hafez al-Assad died on 10 June 2000, and Bashar automatically succeeded to the presidency unopposed, being re-elected to a second term in 2007, once again without challenge. Bashar made a promising start as a seemingly reform-minded president, but his economic policies, the fall-out from the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Syrian involvement in neighbouring Lebanon changed opinions. Syria was soon considered a state sponsor of terrorism by the Western powers, and placed under US economic sanctions by the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act of 2003.
Bashar al-Assad faced the first real challenge to his authority during the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, which broke out in the southern city of Deraa in March that year. The demonstrators initially sought reform rather than regime change, but brutal repression of ensuing protests focused their minds. Civilian dissidents and army defectors formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in July 2011, while its civilian counterpart, the Syrian National Council (SNC), was simultaneously established in Istanbul. The SNC was recognised as “the legitimate representative of the Syrian people” by the US, Türkiye, and the Gulf Cooperation Council. In little over a year, the SNC joined the larger National Coalition for Syrian and Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (SOC), formed in Qatar in November 2012, which came to be recognised as the sole “legitimate representative” of the Syrian people by over 130 countries. The FSA itself was superseded by a succession of military organisations. Shunned by much of the outside world, Bashar adopted an increasingly authoritarian stance to contain internal dissent. His reign was characterised by human rights abuses and even the misuse of chemical weapons, while Syria fragmented into several spheres of influence.
Abu Mohammad al-Joulani (nom de guerre of Ahmed Hussein al-Shar’a), leader of the victorious rebel coalition-the Military Operations Command-was sent by the Islamist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi to Syria in August 2011. Joulani, born in Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents, had spent five years in an American-run prison at Camp Bucca in Iraq after his arrest in Mosul in 2005 for his membership of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Back in Syria, he formed an al-Qaeda affiliate in January 2012 under the name of Jabhat al-Nusra (Al-Nusra Front). Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) was formed in 2016 by the merger of Jabhat Fatah al-Shaam (a renamed Jabhat al-Nusra) and other like-minded groups. At the same time Joulani broke with his erstwhile mentor, al-Baghdadi, who had declared a “caliphate” in June 2014, and took a more moderate and accommodating stance. HTS developed over time into a disciplined and well-equipped military outfit, forming a de facto government in northwest Syria, which took in the city of Idlib.
HTS, which is proscribed as a terrorist organisation by the UN Security Council, US, UK, EU, and Türkiye, formed a coalition with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), a collection of Turkish-backed militias, and other anti-government forces prior to toppling Bashar al-Assad. The rebels launched their lightning offensive on 27 November 2024 and quickly took control of Aleppo, the second-largest city in the country. By 5 December, the city of Hama, 90 miles to the south, had fallen, followed by Homs on 6 December and Deraa, the birthplace of the 2011 uprising, on 7 December. The rebel capture of Homs isolated Damascus from Assad’s Alawite power base in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus and also from the Russian naval base in the port of Tartus, which provides Russia access to the Mediterranean. Before long, Damascus was within striking range of the rebels, only to fall without any significant resistance, to a fulsome welcome by the majority of the city’s residents.
The victorious rebel coalition is a somewhat fragile collection of anti-Assad forces that were not natural allies, including Islamists and secular elements. It does not include the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a grouping of US-backed militias that was originally formed in 2015 to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and exerts de facto control of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), also known as Rojava. Around nine hundred American soldiers remain in north-eastern Syria as of now, operating from four bases in support of the SDF.
Today, Syria is in a sorry state. A contracting economy, high inflation, shortages of essential commodities, widespread poverty, rampant corruption, political repression, and tight control of the media have affected a majority of Syrians and discouraged free expression of the people’s will. Much of Syria’s rich cultural heritage, including its six UNESCO World Heritage Sites, has been destroyed. Since 2011, 14 million Syrians have left their homes, 7.2 million of whom are internally displaced within their country, creating the largest refugee crisis in the world. Syria has been carved up into smaller self-governing regions during an ongoing civil war, creating a raging cauldron within which numerous militias compete to assert their influence, on occasion supported by foreign fighters. The departing Assad regime’s authority was mostly limited to southwest Syria, including Damascus, and the Mediterranean coastal region to the northwest. Bashar al-Assad may have gone, the power vacuum that has been left behind does not bode well for Syrian nation-building in the short term and an eventual return to democratic rule.
Ashis Banerjee
PS: Bashar al-Assad and his family have been granted asylum in Russia for “humanitarian” reasons. Mohammed al-Bashir, prime minister of the Syrian Salvation Government, based in Idlib province, has taken over as interim prime minister of Syria, until 1 March 2025 in the first instance.