By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How to Hold Syria Together in the Wake of Assad’s Fall

Until Bashar al-Assad fled Syria, on December 8, few countries wanted the Syrian dictator’s government to fall. This was not because foreign governments liked Assad or approved of the brutal way in which he reigned over Syria. Rather, they were afraid of what might replace him: rule by extremist militants, sectarian bloodletting, and chaos that could engulf not just Syria but much of the Middle East.

That fearful vision was also the Assad government’s argument for itself, that its continued survival kept anarchy and carnage at bay—and many people, including foreign policymakers, were convinced of it. In 2015, when opposition militants came close to toppling Assad, U.S. officials regarded the possibility of outright rebel victory and regime collapse as tantamount to “catastrophic success.”

Now Assad is gone. Syrians are celebrating in the streets of Damascus, opposition groups are attempting to organize a political transition, and the world is about to find out what comes after the fall. Assad remained ruthless and cruel to the end, even as he presided over an increasingly impoverished and dysfunctional state. He leaves a shattered country in his wake, and any new government—never mind a coalition of fractious armed opposition groups—would struggle in these circumstances. But the poor record of Syrian rebel groups when they have ruled significant stretches of territory also makes it difficult to be optimistic.

Still, it is in everyone’s interest that Syria succeeds. Syrians do not want to endure further strife and devastation, and the international community cannot afford to see Syria fall apart. Interested countries now need to do everything they can, including encouraging a peaceful, inclusive transition and providing ample humanitarian and economic assistance, to ensure that the worst fears about post-Assad Syria do not come to pass.Formularbeginn

 

The Fall of Assad

In 2011, the Assad government attempted to crush a nationwide protest movement. Those protests became an armed rebellion, which Assad met with ferocious, escalating violence. At several points in the ensuing war, Assad’s government seemed in real danger of being overrun by opposition militants. Interventions by Syrian allies Iran and Russia, however, stabilized the government militarily and enabled it to regain ground. Between 2015 and 2020, Assad bombed opposition-controlled enclaves across Syria into submission and retook most of the country.

The war then entered an extended stalemate. Turkey secured several remaining opposition-held pockets in Syria’s north, while the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, controlled Syria’s east, including the country’s most valuable agricultural and petrocarbon resources. Thanks in part to new U.S. sanctions and neighboring Lebanon’s economic meltdown, the whole of Syria—but government-held territory most of all—was plunged into a deep economic crisis. Syria’s state institutions and military progressively weakened, and the government proved too resource-starved to stabilize and rebuild opposition-held areas it had recaptured.

But this year, with Iran and Russia entangled in other conflicts, what remained of Syria’s armed opposition seized the opportunity. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—the Syrian Liberation Group, or HTS—and other opposition factions had been organizing for years in a Turkish-protected bastion in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib. On November 27, these groups launched an offensive on the northern city of Aleppo. When they broke through the Syrian army’s defenses and seized the city, that set off the cascading failure and collapse of Syria’s military nationwide. HTS-led forces pushed south from Aleppo toward the capital, Damascus, as Syrians in the country’s center and south—including in formerly opposition-held areas—also rose up. On December 8, as opposition factions closed in on Damascus from both north and south, Assad fled to Russia. After more than 13 years of grinding civil war, the Assad government had crumbled in less than two weeks.

Now, in a post-Assad Damascus, HTS has taken the reins in attempting to manage an orderly political transition. HTS has installed the interim Syrian Salvation Government, which it created in Idlib, as a national transitional authority. It has also deployed its security forces in the capital, established checkpoints on key transport nodes across the country, and repeatedly warned triumphant opposition militants against abusing civilians and looting.

 

Rebels In Charge

Many in Western media and policy circles now evidently assume that HTS will govern Syria. Yet there are reasons to doubt that things will be that simple. Until a few weeks ago, HTS controlled two-thirds of a province on Syria’s rural periphery. Running all of Syria will present a different challenge.

HTS is the latest incarnation of the al-Nusra Front, originally the Syrian vanguard of the Islamic State in Iraq and then al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. The group publicly broke ties with al Qaeda and transnational jihadism in 2016, although it still includes some veteran militants and foreign fighters in its ranks. It has been designated a terrorist organization by the UN Security Council, the United States, and other national governments.

In recent years, HTS has worked persistently to rehabilitate its image and secure its removal from international terrorist lists. As opposition forces marched on Damascus, HTS and its leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, attempted to project an image of seriousness and moderation. HTS issued statements reassuring Syria’s diverse ethnic and sectarian constituencies and various international stakeholders, while Jolani gave interviews to Western media affirming Syria’s history of coexistence and committing to institutional governance.

As HTS swept to Damascus, its fighters appear to have remained relatively disciplined. Reports of summary executions and sectarian reprisals were limited, perhaps due, in part, to the way much of the Syrian army ceded territory without a fight. To be sure, some retributive violence has clearly taken place, and thousands of Syrians fearful of militant control have fled to Lebanon. But for the time being, the victorious opposition has not unleashed a vengeful campaign against its former foes or against communities widely associated with the old regime.

Unfortunately, HTS’s record at the local level does not augur well for the construction of a national government that accommodates Syria’s religious, ethnic, and political diversity. The group has not shown any real commitment to political pluralism in governing Idlib. HTS stage-managed some legitimating exercises to establish its Salvation Government in Idlib, including an ostensibly inclusive constitutional conference. Yet these were never open, participatory democratic processes. Jolani was always in control, even though he did not hold an official government portfolio; he was just understood to be the boss of Idlib. Just months ago, HTS’s security apparatus violently put down protests in Idlib demanding the release of detainees held by HTS and an end to Jolani’s rule.

HTS did manage to create order and relative stability in Idlib. Yet it seems unlikely that HTS will be able to reproduce its control over Idlib across the whole of Syria. The consolidation of HTS control in Idlib was a years-long, frequently violent process, in which HTS crushed rival opposition factions and eliminated its own dissidents and defectors. It seems plausible that HTS could have extended its administrative and security apparatus from Idlib to nearby Aleppo after it seized the city. Scaling that model to cover the whole of Syria, however, seems impossible. Syria is much larger geographically, has around ten times as many people as Idlib, is more diverse, and is now teeming with armed men outside HTS’s effective control. Although HTS may have fostered a strong culture of internal discipline, the group, by one recent count, commands only 30,000 men. That seems insufficient to govern Syria, or to control the many armed groups that may swim in HTS’s wake.

HTS is not the totality of Syria’s armed opposition. It was not even the whole of the armed opposition in Idlib, where HTS marshaled allied factions that functioned as its auxiliaries. HTS cannot control all the armed groups now active across the country. Certainly, the factions that remobilized in the country’s center and south over the past few weeks do not answer to Jolani.

When Syrian opposition groups previously captured other parts of the country—including in southern Syria, the countryside around Damascus, and in sections of northern Syria captured by Turkish-backed groups—the result was typically arbitrary militia rule and fratricidal infighting. Attempts to consolidate local factions and build unifying institutions repeatedly failed. HTS succeeded in Idlib only with a lot of time, persistence, and deadly coercion.

Many are now looking to Turkey to use its sway over HTS and other opposition groups to help steer Syria’s transition. But although Turkey has some influence over HTS, it does not seem to control the group, which, for example, previously rankled the Turkish government by seizing territory held by Turkish-backed groups in Aleppo. And among opposition factions in northern Syria that are more wholly Turkish-owned—on Turkey’s payroll, operating in Turkish-occupied areas that are administered by Turkish-linked institutions—Ankara has demonstrated no ability to impose discipline or curb abuses. Turkey has mainly just loosed these factions on the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, which Ankara considers an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a proscribed Kurdish militant group. Even after the fall of Assad, Turkish-backed factions have continued to attack the SDF in northern Syria.

There are reasons to doubt the sincerity of HTS’s moderate turn. But the more immediate danger to Syria is not Islamist extremism but the chaos that opposition victory might unleash. There is a real risk that the situation in post-Assad Syria will spin out of control and that the country will devolve into not only open conflict between armed groups but also myriad individual acts of revenge and bloody score-settling.

 

Set Up to Fail

Whatever dispensation replaces Assad, this new government will not face auspicious conditions for stability and recovery. Syria’s already crushing socioeconomic crisis seems likely to deepen further. According to the UN, 16.7 million Syrians needed humanitarian assistance in 2024, more than 70 percent of the country’s population and the highest figure since the start of Syria’s war. Some 12.9 million Syrians are believed to be food insecure. State services had already broken down before Assad’s toppling. In areas held by the Assad government, in particular, electricity shortages had disrupted daily life and the provision of public services such as education and running water.

HTS has limited resources of its own. The group was able to maintain social stability in Idlib thanks largely to internationally supported humanitarian assistance delivered via Turkey. It remains a designated terrorist organization—it may now assume power in an economically ruined Syria that was already extensively sanctioned. It is not clear how a Syrian state apparatus and economy subject to numerous overlapping sanctions regimes will work, or whether a necessary influx of donor support will materialize. Assad’s longtime allies cannot be expected to keep Syria afloat; already, Iran has apparently halted shipments of oil that were critical for power generation. Humanitarian agencies have reported shortages of essential goods and dramatic increases in food prices in major cities across the country.

Some observers have suggested that the fall of the Assad government could pave the way for the return of Syrian refugees. The result, however, may be the opposite: new flows of migration out of Syria. It was always an oversimplification to claim that refugees who left Syria after the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 were all fleeing the persecution of the Assad government; many were, but many others were trying to escape general insecurity and violence, Syrian military conscription, or socioeconomic collapse. For refugees to return in a meaningful, sustainable way, Syria needs to be a place where people can actually live—somewhere that is safe, with public services and reliable jobs. Even Syrian refugees overjoyed at the fall of Assad will be unable to return home if law and order breaks down or if they cannot find ways to support their families.

Economic privation could further encourage violent competition between Syrian armed groups over territory and revenues. After more than a decade of war, these groups have developed their own independent interests and needs. And the black markets of Syria’s war economy will not just go away now that Assad is gone. For example, Assad-linked actors—including groups that once opposed him—had been making hundreds of millions of dollars trafficking illicit amphetamines. Control of that trade now may stoke violence between competing factions.

New migration from Syria and the resumption of internal conflict will have destabilizing effects on Syria’s neighbors—even as those neighbors may themselves play a destabilizing role inside Syria. Turkey has kept up a hard rhetorical line on SDF “separatist terrorists” in Syria and has encouraged continued attacks by its local proxies on Kurdish-led forces. Israel has bombed and destroyed Syrian military facilities across the country and seized additional territory along the Golan Heights. Some countries in the region, including Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, are likely alarmed by the prospect of a militant Islamist group taking power in Damascus. There is a real risk now that regional countries could recruit local factions to secure their equities in Syria, potentially by seizing territorial buffers along Syria’s borders. All of these circumstances are unlikely to be conducive to a successful political transition.

 

Averting Disaster

Assad will not be missed. Under Assad and his father, Hafez, the Syrian government did heinous things to maintain power, brutalizing and immiserating Syria’s people. The relief of most Syrians at Assad’s departure is clear from the celebrations that have filled the streets of Damascus and other cities and from the outpouring of emotion at the opening of the government’s network of prisons and the liberation of its detainees.

Now all parties need to ensure that the darkest predictions about Assad’s fall do not come to pass and that what replaces Assad is not just chaos and violence. Syrians themselves will undoubtedly play the lead role in deciding the country’s future. Yet outside countries can also help by encouraging HTS and other Syrian groups to pursue a peaceful, maximally inclusive political transition. In parallel, donor countries should advance a large program of humanitarian and economic assistance for Syria, including aid for vulnerable Syrians and support for essential services nationwide. They should provide immediate relief from sanctions imposed on the previous Assad government, including waivers or licenses neutralizing sanctions on state institutions such as Syria’s central bank and on whole economic sectors. Outsiders should strongly discourage any new factional conflict and resist the temptation to advance their own interests by supporting one group over another.

Although some countries may have understandable reservations about HTS, they should still want Syria’s transition to succeed, and they absolutely should not interfere and make it fail. The disintegration of Syria will be worse, for Syrians and for the region. And if Syria sinks into chaos, it won’t just be a human disaster—it will mean that the case for the Assad dictatorship has been vindicated.

Celebrating the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Latakia, Syria, December 2024

 

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