Many Western leaders have expressed their relief at the collapse of the dictatorship of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Cities such as Homs and Damascus were taken by the coalition led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant) almost without combat. The reality is that the seemingly unshakeable fifty-four-year-old rule of the Assad dynasty had been rotting from within.
My personal interaction with Syria’s leadership from 1998 to 2002 led me to a simple observation: By its nature, this dictatorship was disconnected from the Syrian people, blind and deaf to their suffering, and even unable to perceive the discontent in its own forces and from its allies. So much so that this week, the regime’s only choice was to run away.
As expected, now is a time of relief and celebration in Damascus and elsewhere. Hopefully, the looting, violence, and executions will be rapidly brought under control. The gruesome fact is that gradually, more horrific evidence will emerge from morgues, burial sites, secret archives, and prisoners’ testimonies. More disappointment will surface when citizens do not find their missing relatives in the regime’s jails. In short, keeping revengeful impulses under control will be a challenge for the new leadership.
Politically, Syria’s new leaders will need to get organized in short order. It will not be enough for HTS military chief Abu Mohammad al-Julani to proclaim his tolerance for Syria’s ethnic and religious mosaic and assert himself as the natural leader of the Syrian people. One perfectly choreographed interview on CNN will not be enough.
Building an effective system of government is the new leadership’s obvious priority, as can be seen in the prompt appointment of Mohammad al-Bashir as head of the interim government until March 1, 2025. This priority inevitably entails working with antagonistic factions and remnants of the Assad administration, based on their allegiances to HTS. Syrian citizens expect that after nearly fourteen years of civil war, tolerance will become real and the security forces will operate under strict control. Another obvious expectation is the return of basic public services and a minimum of normalcy in the economy.
Beyond these first steps, another expectation is that justice will be served—a massive challenge given the flight of the entire political and security leadership. But at the very least, the new leaders will have to gather, protect, and make public the evidence of the Assad regime’s crimes. They will also have to document the unimaginable amount of wealth stolen and sent abroad. Even if the odds of implementing convictions and seeing funds returned to Syria are slim, the healing process would be helped by a genuine policy of honoring the suffering of the Syrian people. The strenuous efforts made in Western Europe since the end of World War II stand as a painful example. It would be natural, for example, for Syria’s notorious Sednaya Prison to be given the same status as, say, the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp memorial in today’s Poland.
The international repercussions of Syria’s regime change are no less momentous.
Türkiye is generally described as the prime beneficiary of Assad’s fall. This is probably true in the immediate future. However, it remains to be seen how the interim Syrian government led by Bashir—an Islamic figure from Idlib province, where Türkiye has a strong military and intelligence presence—will craft Syria’s foreign policy.
Assad had made the renewal of a dialogue with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan conditional on the full evacuation of Turkish forces from the four districts they control in northern Syria. This condition was never accepted, but in Ankara the absolute priority is to keep a 19-mile-wide buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border to prevent the Syrian Kurdish forces known as the People’s Defense Units (YPG) from joining with the Turkish Kurds, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). A discrepancy is already emerging between this imperative and Ankara’s December 10 statement on respect for Syria’s territorial integrity.
In addition, Turkish forces and their Syrian allies might be tempted to go after the YPG and push them far into Syria’s east, if not try to eliminate them. This would raise huge questions with the United States and European countries, since the YPG and their political wing, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), oversee camps that hold former terrorists of the so-called Islamic State and their families. In addition, Ankara will try to convince as many Syrian refugees as possible to return to their country and will eventually seek financial support from the EU for their departure and reinstallation.
Israel has long sought to degrade the land corridor between the two Damascus airports and Lebanon, through which weaponry and explosives where channeled from Iran to the Lebanese Hezbollah. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) also routinely carried out targeted eliminations of Hezbollah individuals and Iranian agents in the heart of Damascus. Since the fall of the Syrian capital, the IDF have conducted opportunistic strikes on arms depots, air defenses, naval assets, and other infrastructure of the Syrian Arab Army to preempt any future activities against Israeli territory. Vigilance against the assets of Syrian forces, the Iranian revolutionary guards, and Hezbollah fighters will remain Israel’s overwhelming priority.
Russia was probably not caught unprepared by the collapse of the Assad system. The Russians promptly evacuated assets and personnel from their Hmeimim air base and Tartus naval facility, but they will seek to maintain these assets through a new foreign base agreement. The naval base is essential to keep Russia’s Mediterranean fleet operational, not only because Türkiye has closed the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits to Russian vessels, but also because there are few alternatives to resupply this fleet, maintain its ships, and rotate its crews. The air base is crucial for Moscow in a different way: It is the indispensable stepping stone for Russia’s operations in Libya and farther afield in sub-Saharan Africa, which are all set up and resupplied by air cargo. In short, the loss of these strategic bases would be a significant political blow for Moscow over and above the loss of a client regime in Damascus.
Iran stands as another loser, on two counts, having lost its air-and-land bridge to Hezbollah and seen its ally, Assad, vanish into thin air. Iran has no obvious alternatives at this point and is facing Israel’s clear intention to maximize its advantage by cutting off residual Iranian influence in the Eastern Mediterranean.
The United States maintains a sizable contingent of 900 special forces on the eastern side of the Euphrates River in Syria and provides them with air cover and assistance from Iraq. The main goal of this force, which works together with the Syrian Democratic Forces in the autonomous Rojava region, is to keep in check the remnants of the Islamic State jihadists who maintain a presence on the western side of the river. Removing these U.S. troops in short order is probably not a promising military option.
Governments in Europe have long been absent from the political and security debate on Syria—and were often divided on the issue. The EU has provided humanitarian support to internally displaced people in Syria and to Syrian refugees outside the country. Syrians see Western Europe at best as an absent political actor and, in some cases, as having let oppressed Syrians down, for example when European leaders did not react to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. It is an understatement to say that citizens in post-Assad Syria have no great expectation of political support from Europe. Astonishingly, Europeans’ initial reactions have focused, at the behest of hard-right political parties, on the possibility of a new wave of Syrian refugees, whereas the intention of Syrian refugees already in the EU and Türkiye is to go back to their country as soon as it is safe and feasible.
An honorable position would be for the EU to acknowledge the suffering of Syrian citizens over the past fourteen years and offer support through specialized NGOs in documenting this tragedy and, possibly, setting up a healing process. On the security side, instead of overreacting to a potential surge in refugees or to Ankara’s possible demand to fund the return of refugees to Syria, it would be wise to set up a cooperation mechanism with the new Syrian authorities to oversee the movement of known terrorists, especially those with European citizenship. Wider, high-level cooperation with the new Syrian leadership might wait until its choices for the country’s governance, rule-of-law architecture, and foreign policy are known.
For Syrians, a long and difficult journey has just begun.
