SYRIAAfter Fall of Assad Dynasty, Syria’s Risky New Moment
The swift collapse of Syria’s regime brings a humiliating end to Russia’s and Iran’s sway and opens the door for greater Turkish influence. But the Islamist movement that seized power has yet to show its full intentions.
On January 21, 1994, Basil al-Assad was killed in what the Syrian government described as a car accident. According to official dispatches, he had been driving too fast on the way to the airport and lost control of his vehicle. It was both entirely believable and the kind of accident that did not happen to the sons of Middle Eastern dictators—especially those being groomed to take the reins of power.
Basil’s death required that the next oldest son of Hafez al-Assad take his brother’s place. That was Bashar, who had been living in London and training to be an ophthalmologist at the time of his brother’s death. Between 1994 and 2000, Hafez, who had come to power in 1971 and had brought a repressive and sterile order to Syria, put his unintended heir through a crash course in how to run Syria.
Now three decades after his rise to prominence and almost a quarter century of rule, Bashar is gone and so is the Assad dynasty. Almost incomprehensively swept away over a two-week period during which the Islamist rebel group Ha’yat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its partner, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), swept out of Idlib province to seize the country from Bashar who barely managed to put up a fight after his Russian and Iranian allies abandoned him. The flip side of this ignominious defeat for Moscow and Tehran is the liberation of Syrians who joined with HTS, in particular, to carry on the uprising they began in the spring of 2011.
In this “now out of never” moment that conjures memories of 1989 in Eastern Europe, people who had been cowed into submission by Assad’s indiscriminate use of force took up where they left off in 2011 and rose up to demand the end of the Assad dictatorship.
Of course, questions abound about what kind of successor regime will emerge in Damascus. Not only was Assad’s fall a blow to Moscow and Tehran, but also the major Arab states who look warily on both HTS and the demonstration of Syrian people power. The main rebel group is an offshoot of al-Qaeda and although its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, has made much of his break from jihadist extremism, it remains to be seen whether the liberation he engineered was for all Syrians as he has declared or a tactic to deflect criticism and opposition.
