As Assad Regime Falls, Syrians Celebrate — and Brace for an Uncertain Future

Less than two weeks after a surprise rebel offensive began to retake areas of Syria for the first time in nearly a decade, the Assad regime fell on December 8. Once seen as entrenched and immovable, the government’s collapse came 53 years since Assad family rule began in Syria and nearly 14 years after the start of an uprising that called for its overthrow.

The rebel takeover was rapid, and met with minimal resistance from the Syrian state or its allies. The rebels had begun their advance on November 25, crossing from the northwestern province of Idlib to take over Aleppo. A week later, they captured the city of Hama, south of Aleppo, and from there the offensive spread even more quickly. In the southern cities of Deraa, the birthplace of Syria’s 2011 revolution, and Suwayda, a majority Druze city that had seen recent regular protests against the regime, local militias joined with the rebels and declared themselves free from regime control. Rebels then captured the city of Homs, followed by the outskirts of Damascus, and then entered the capital, Damascus, itself. Bashar al-Assad fled by plane to Moscow, and by early morning of December 8, the rebels declared Syria liberated from the regime.

This sudden transformation on the ground in Syria marked a reversal of the defeat of rebel forces in 2016, when the Assad regime retook Aleppo in a brutal siege and bombardment campaign that marked a turning point in the Syrian civil war. Afterwards, the regime went on to besiege, bomb and force the evacuation of each remaining rebel-held enclave in the country, pushing the last remaining rebel groups — in addition to hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians — into the small province of Idlib. While at one point rebel groups controlled 80 percent of the country, after 2016 their gains were reversed, with the regime eventually retaking 70 percent of the country’s territory. Assad’s military relied heavily upon Russian airpower in its bombing campaigns, as well as Iranian militias and Hezbollah fighters.

But now, eight years later, with Russia bogged down in Ukraine, Hezbollah severely weakened in Lebanon, Iran preoccupied with Israel’s threats against it and its own domestic concerns, and Assad unpopular even in regime-held areas, the rebels’ offensives faced negligible resistance on the ground. On December 1, the Assad regime and Russia began bombing Aleppo and Idlib in retaliation for the rebels’ advance, but the bombing campaign did not thwart their offensives, either. Within days, Russia and Iran both abandoned their support for Assad, withdrawing their forces and leaving Assad to his collapse.

Rebel groups Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) led the offensives that began on November 25. Turkey, which had been in the process of normalizing relations with Assad, seems to have backed the offensive as a bargaining chip — its forces pulled back when they reached Aleppo, suggesting that recapturing entire cities was more than it expected to accomplish. The SNA’s decision to pull back enabled the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to take over some of the areas instead; the SDF has since gone on to capture Syria’s eastern city of Deir el-Zour. Since then, the Turkish-backed SNA has seized the city of Manbij from Kurdish groups, and the SNA and Kurdish SDF have clashed repeatedly, with the SNA reportedly committing abuses against Kurdish fighters and individuals. For its part, HTS went on to take control of Aleppo and the majority of the rest of the country, positioning itself as the liberator of Syria.

The significance of the overthrow of the Assad regime can hardly be overstated. As the rebels advanced, they released prisoners in one city after another, freeing thousands of detainees from regime prisons notorious for torture, death and disappearance. Each of the cities liberated from the regime hold significance to Syrians — Aleppo, due to the 2016 siege that marked the turning point in Assad’s retaking control of the country; Hama, due to a massacre by Hafez al-Assad in 1982 in which the former president killed 40,000 Syrians for rebelling against his rule; as well as cities like Deraa and Homs that played a particular role in the 2011 uprising.

The current moment is one of celebration and relief for most Syrians, who faced decades of oppression at the hands of the Assad regime, but also caution over what is to come, and what forces will take power in the coming period.

How Did We Get Here?

In 2011, as the Arab uprisings spread from Tunisia to Egypt, Syria, too, erupted in revolt. The protests initially called for reforms, but when met with severe and brutal violence at the hands of the regime, demonstrators called for the overthrow of Assad rule in its entirety. But what distinguished Syria from the rest of the region’s uprisings was the extent of the regime’s violence. Immediately, the Assad government responded to peaceful protests with sieges of entire towns, and the gunning down of protestors. Popular committees emerged on the side of the uprising, coordinating demonstrations and actions across the country, and centralizing slogans and principles for the uprising — which included nonviolence, opposition to sectarianism and to outside intervention. But the regime imprisoned and killed successive leaders of the popular movement. Members of the Syrian regime’s army defected and took up arms to defend their areas, eventually creating the heterogeneous Free Syrian Army (FSA), and then liberating entire cities and regions of the country from the regime. Popular, civilian councils emerged to manage the newly liberated cities, and to attempt to oversee the militias at a local level.

The militarization of the uprising was debated heavily within Syrian activist networks, but it was in large part seen as necessary to defend the population against the excessive violence of the regime. However, it also bifurcated the uprising between its progressive, nonviolent elements and increasingly more reactionary armed militias, over time sidelining the former. Meanwhile, the Free Syrian Army faced a lack of funding and lack of centralization.

The Assad regime responded to the liberation of cities with barrel bombing campaigns. It imprisoned progressive activists and released Islamists that it had in its prisons in an attempt to sectarianize the initially progressive uprising — several of whom became senior members of the Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda offshoot from which HTS later emerged. The government also allowed the Kurdish regions of the country to obtain a certain level of autonomy in a divide-and-conquer strategy. In both 2013 and 2015, the regime was close to falling to rebel forces, and Russia and Iran stepped in to save it; Russia aiding in bombing of rebel-held areas and Iran providing militias. As conditions on the ground became worse, and the violence of the regime continued unabated, the rebel forces also became more desperate and more reactionary. But the regime’s brutality cannot be overstated. In 2018, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that of the 500,000 killed since 2011 in Syria, 85 percent were killed by the regime.

On the other side, Turkey and the Gulf states stepped in, supposedly in defense of the opposition but acting in their own interests. The Gulf states, and individuals within them (primarily from Qatar), began to fund battalions, but demanded that they adhere to more Islamist ideologies in order to receive funds and munitions. Turkey intervened with the main priority of crushing the Kurdish movement.

Contrary to common misconceptions, the U.S. and Israel did not aspire to remove Assad after 2013. Both agreed that a weak Assad was desirable. The U.S. provided some aid to rebel forces, but refused to provide anti-aircraft weapons that would protect them from Assad’s barrel bombs. The U.S. sought to keep both the regime and the rebel forces weak, drawing out the militarized conflict. As scholar Ella Wind wrote in New Politics, the nonlethal weapons supplied by the U.S. “were enough to give the militarized opposition hope for larger infusions of resources later but fell far short of anything that could overthrow the regime. Essentially, the supplies maintained the momentum of the war, leaving each side to be just weak enough to neither win nor lose.”

The U.S. has restated throughout the rebel offensive that it “has nothing to do with this offensive” and has noted that HTS is on the State Department’s list of “foreign terror organizations.” Since the overthrow of Assad, Biden has expressed more willingness to work with transitional leadership — other states that have referred to the rebels as “terrorists” have also softened their rhetoric as a post-Assad government became inevitable.

Similarly, Israel has for years expressed its preference for the maintenance of the Assad regime, which has done little to oppose Israel’s expansionary tactics and violations. In 2018, Netanyahu said that “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights,” noting that his worry was with Iranian influence over Syria, not the Syrian regime itself. His comment also spoke to the fact that the Assad regime had done little to oppose Israel’s occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights, which began in 1967. Since the rebel takeover on Sunday, Israel has bombed Syrian regime weapons depots to prevent the rebels from taking them — showing the suspicion with which they view the rebels that they did not have for Assad — and invaded more areas of the Golan Heights for the first time since 1973. “We will not allow any hostile force to establish itself on our border,” Netanyahu declared, ordering the creation of a “buffer zone” between the Israeli occupation and the rebel forces.

Assad’s tightfisted control of the Syrian population has prevented solidarity with Palestinians, before and after October 7. For 48 years, until the start of the 2011 revolution, the Assad regime had state of emergency laws in place in the country, supposedly in case of war with Israel, but in fact used to arrest Syrians without charge, extend state powers throughout the country and crush dissent. After the outbreak of the 2011 revolution, protests and demonstrations, including solidarity with Palestine, were met with brutality, torture and disappearance. The Assad regime did nothing to demonstrate solidarity with Gaza since October 7, and its fear-based control of Syria meant that only the rebel-held Idlib province saw popular protests in solidarity with Palestine.

The SNA and HTS today

Over a decade after the start of the 2011 revolution, the forces of the Free Syrian Army have been largely transformed into a Turkish subsidiary under the banner of the SNA. The SNA was formed in Aleppo in 2017 and brought together former FSA factions, but under Turkish oversight, it has participated in Turkish military operations. Its priority is to crush the Kurdish groups and prevent the Kurdish population from retaining autonomy, rather than adhering to any of the initial ideals of the 2011 Syrian revolution. Turkey now hopes to have a prominent role in Syria’s future political trajectory — which, to be clear, will pose a threat to Syria’s autonomy, in addition to the fate of the Kurdish population.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, on the other hand, came out of the Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria. As the counterrevolution deepened and the violence expanded, Nusra began to dominate as it was better funded and equipped than other rebel groups. Unlike ISIS — which rose in Syria in 2013 until its defeat beginning in 2017 and was dominated by non-Syrian militants — Nusra was largely made up of Syrians.

In recent years, HTS’s leader Mohammad al-Julani — a nom de guerre for Ahmed al-Sharaa — has worked to sanitize the image of his group, distancing it from al-Qaeda and focusing on a national project. With rebel groups forcibly concentrated in the province of Idlib since 2016, Nusra joined with other factions, changed its name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and dropped some of its hardline elements. In the past two weeks, he has attempted to reassure Syrians that HTS wants a Syria for all religions, sects and ethnicities.

Nonetheless, Syrians within Syria and in the diaspora are wary of HTS. Syrian activists have long described Nusra and other Islamist groups as a second pole in the counterrevolution, after the Assad regime. Syrian activists for years have lifted the stories of Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, Samira Khalil and Nazem Hammadi — four democratic activists who opposed the Assad regime as well as the Islamist groups, and were kidnapped and disappeared at the end of 2013, most likely by another, similar Islamist militia.

But Syrians have also resisted Nusra, and are likely to continue to resist HTS as well. In 2016, residents of Ma’arat al-Nu’man, a city in rural Idlib between Aleppo and Hama controlled at the time by Nusra, protested every day for over six months against Nusra and its allied Islamist groups and their reactionary crimes. After four months, the popular protest campaign in Ma’arat al-Nu’man won the release of protestors who had been arrested by Nusra.

As HTS captured the country from Assad, Syrian activists within the country and abroad voiced that they will not allow the group to oppress them as the Assad regime did for decades, restating their commitment to the 2011 revolution and the continuance of that struggle.

“We cannot have a new kind of dictator replace another,” Banah Ghadbian, a Syrian activist and professor based in the U.S., told Truthout. “Syrians have been working toward this moment for so long, we will not allow it to be coopted. We won’t let them take our revolutionary spirit away.” Ghadbian continued:

“We must hold the regime accountable for its crimes, and let the civil society organizations on the ground guide the democratic transition, rather than glorify the rebel forces who do not answer to anyone but themselves. Echoing the early slogans of the revolution, ‘We want to build a Syria for all Syrians,’ which means building a thriving democratic civil society for all minorities and ethno religious groups.”

What Comes Next?

The release of thousands of prisoners from Assad regime prisons is just a first step in realizing Syrians’ demands for freedom and justice. The Syrian regime created a vast network of prisons, and an estimated 150,000 people were either detained or went missing since 2011. Over the past two weeks, among the thousands of freed prisoners have been activists from the 2011 revolution, as well as Syrian and Lebanese individuals who had been imprisoned for over 40 years. Thousands of families are attempting to locate loved ones, or at least to find out if they are still alive.

As Syrian activist, professor and writer Yasser Munif told Truthout, “One of the main pillars of Assad’s Syria was the prison system. The prison produced silence, violence, obedience, fear and death. An entire society was built around the carceral state. One of the main challenges for Syrians is to abolish that lethal institution for good.” That includes preventing HTS and other opposition groups from continuing the practice of unjust imprisonment. But it also means creating a freer, more just and equal society, and realizing other demands of the initial Syrian revolution, including economic justice, and an end to oppression and sectarian policies.

In the days since Bashar al-Assad fled and the remaining members of the regime handed state institutions over to the rebels, HTS along with political opposition leaders in exile have put together a plan for an 18-monthlong transitional government. Meanwhile, HTS has placed Mohammed al-Bashir, who headed the group’s governance in Idlib, as transitional prime minister. While these figures, both the Syrian opposition in exile and HTS, promise to advance the priorities of the Syrian people and retain a multiethnic Syria, their statements should be taken with skepticism, as their goals and ideologies do not reflect those of the popular uprising of 2011.

Another major challenge will be the continued interference of outside states. While Russia and Iran were intervening on behalf of the regime, now it is Turkey that seeks more influence in Syrian politics. Israel, which was comfortable with the Assad regime and its nonconfrontational relationship, will likely continue to bomb and encroach upon Syrian land. Finally, Turkey and numerous countries in Europe are attempting to capitalize on the fall of the regime to push Syrian refugees to return to Syria in the service of right-wing and xenophobic demands, even though the country might remain unstable for the foreseeable future.

But the overthrow of the Assad regime also means that hundreds of thousands of Syrians are likely to return to Syria from exile. For years, one of the regime’s main tactics had been mass arrests, and Syrians crossing back from Lebanon or elsewhere faced a high likelihood of arrest and imprisonment. If Syrians continue to be able to return home, however, they might have a chance of renewing the popular, progressive struggle from 2011 and building an alternative that represents society more than the current rebel and opposition forces.