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SYRIA AFTER ASSAD  
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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
April 21, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ Hope has been restored for many Syrians. But vigilance will be
needed to ensure that democratic institutions emerge and withstand
autocratic impulses. _

Dancing and singing to forget the pain of Syria's conflict, UK
Department for International Development (CC BY 2.0)

 

In 2015, a decade before the Assad family’s fifty-three-year rule
over Syria ended, the Obama administration was spooked by the advances
of a rebel alliance from Idlib, which seemed poised to topple the
government in Damascus. The administration reviled Bashar al-Assad’s
regime, but since the rise of ISIS in 2014, it had treated Syria as a
front in the War on Terror, and it was loath to see Damascus fall to
Islamists, some with links to Al Qaeda. When Russia intervened in
September 2015 to shore up Assad, the White House was privately
relieved. Then Secretary of State John Kerry spent the waning days of
the Obama administration negotiating a counter-terror alliance with
Russia. Not long after, Russia’s savage methods in Syria triggered
the world’s largest mass exodus in half a century.

The West has viewed Syria through the lenses of terror and migration
ever since. Syrians suffered at home, with their survival subordinated
to security concerns, and in exile, with their presence seen as a
burden to be offloaded. In 2020, when the Syrian regime, supported by
Iranian-funded sectarian militias and the Russian air force, initiated
a major military operation to seize Idlib, triggering the largest
displacement of the war, the European Union rushed €700 million to
Greece to erect a wall. In the end, Turkish military intervention
halted the rampage, but Turkey also went no further than securing its
interests, confining itself to northwest Syria, which served as a
security buffer and a refugee sanctuary.

While Western leaders focused on terrorism, defined narrowly as
political violence perpetrated by nonstate actors, they ignored the
more consequential effects of state terror. In Syria, 90 percent of
civilian deaths during the war came at the hands of the regime and its
allies. State violence was also the main reason Syrians were fleeing
the country. But even as the backlash against refugees caused a surge
in authoritarian populism in much of the West, most Syrians never left
Syria—and of those who did, the majority were dispersed in Turkey,
Lebanon, and Jordan.

Ceding control of Syria to Assad had brought considerable misery to
Syrians. Hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced. And
the impunity enjoyed by Vladimir Putin in Syria encouraged him to
invade Ukraine. Western governments’ decision to subordinate
humanitarian concerns to the imperatives of “stability” ended up
roiling much of the Northern Hemisphere.

When rebels finally captured Damascus on December 8, 2024, they did so
with considerably less bloodshed than the “shock and awe” approach
the United States had used in 2003 to capture Baghdad. Nor did their
victory have the scorched earth quality of the U.S. campaign against
ISIS, which left Mosul and Raqqa in ruins. For an army made up of
disparate factions, including hardline Islamists, the rebel coalition
conducted itself with surprising restraint. Unlike the United States
in Iraq, Syrian leadership issued a general amnesty to former regime
soldiers and employees, and, until pro-Assad insurgents launched an
uprising in March, there had been few revenge killings.

Syria faces immense challenges, both internal and external. It is
recovering from the consequences of a prolonged and savage war. But
for the first time since the start of the 2011 revolution, in spite of
all the heartbreak, it has recovered a resource without which these
challenges could become insurmountable: hope.

The ill-fated Syrian revolution seemed to be at its nadir in February
2023, when an earthquake flattened much of northwest Syria. Cries for
help from under the rubble in rebel-held territories had subsided with
no relief arriving, while states like the UAE and Egypt used the
disaster as an excuse to rush aid to Damascus and reinstate Syria into
the Arab League, from which it had been expelled twelve years earlier.
As Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon created new waves of refugees,
Italy led similar efforts in the EU to normalize relations with Assad,
supported by a coalition including Austria, Hungary, Czechia,
Slovakia, Slovenia, Greece, Croatia, and Cyprus. They hoped it would
hasten the return of refugees to Syria. Denmark had already started
revoking Syrians’ asylum status. Meanwhile, Russia was helping Assad
reconcile with Turkey, whose population had grown increasingly hostile
to its over 3 million Syrian residents. Hope was receding.

But even as Syria disappeared from international headlines, something
was stirring in Idlib, a governate in northwest Syria. Ahmed
al-Sharaa, then going by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani,
used Machiavellian ingenuity to unite rebel groups and consolidate
control over the territory. He founded Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)
as a coalition to liberate Syria and created a “salvation
government” in Idlib to provide security and social services. When
this Syrianization policy put him at odds with Al Qaeda, whose goals
are transnational, he suppressed the terrorist group. He was equally
ruthless in eliminating rivals within his own coalition.

HTS’s superior organizational skills allowed it to outsmart rivals
and bring a degree of order and economic development to a battered and
isolated province. But the benefits were not evenly distributed: HTS
supporters reaped most of the rewards, and order was imposed
autocratically. An August 2024 report by the UN Commission of Inquiry
presented a damning picture of HTS rule. The government was accused of
suppressing dissent through arbitrary arrests, torture, and at least
four executions. In February 2024, these practices provoked protests
that by September had spread across Idlib. Al-Sharaa responded by
acknowledging the excesses and promising accountability and reform.

Unlike the Syrian National Army, a Turkish proxy, HTS retained its
independence and was kept at arm’s length by Ankara. As the wars in
Ukraine, Gaza, and Lebanon intensified, HTS was building its offensive
capacity with locally produced drones and munitions. Assad, meanwhile,
felt secure enough in his position to spurn the Biden administration,
even as his allies Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah got embroiled in other
wars. But as Israel’s posture toward Iran grew increasingly
aggressive, Assad hedged by distancing himself from his former ally
and yielding to overtures from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Israel was
able to bomb Iranian forces in Syria with impunity, and the regime
denied Hezbollah the use of its territory as a new front against
Israel.

When the HTS-led forces initiated their march toward Aleppo on
November 27, no one, not even HTS, predicted that victory would be so
swift. In 2016 the regime had captured the city after four years of
brutal war and siege; it now fell in three days. By December 5, rebels
took Hama, a city best known for the 1982 massacre in which the regime
suppressed a rebellion by killing as many as 40,000 people. On
December 7, Homs, a city decimated by the government during the war,
was also seized. Damascus was captured the following day, and regime
strongholds Tartus and Latakia fell next without a shot fired.

When the offensive began, the Russian air force launched desultory
strikes, mainly targeting civilians. But Russian air power in Syria
was significantly diminished due to heavy losses of combat aircraft in
Ukraine. Iran had invested at least $30 billion in shoring up Assad,
but in its confrontation with Israel it too had exhausted itself.
Assad’s new allies in the Gulf had alleviated some of the pain of
international sanctions, but he had done little to rebuild his
dilapidated army. With rebels on the march, and without the Russian
air force or the Iranian whip, the regime’s conscript army melted
away, and Iran withdrew its remaining troops.

Hezbollah, the only other force that could have saved Assad, had also
degraded itself in Syria by compromising its operational security. The
notoriously secretive organization had to work with Russian and
Iranian forces, whose ranks are infiltrated by informants for foreign
intelligence agencies. This gave Israel the opportunity to surveil and
destroy Hezbollah’s entire top echelon. The organization announced
its intention to send reinforcements, but the regime collapsed before
they had time to mobilize.

The protracted battle for Damascus that everyone feared never
materialized. In the end, Assad’s selfishness may have saved the
capital city from a ruinous last stand: he fled, blindsiding his own
supporters. The paranoid autocrat had kept his planned flight secret
even from his own brother. His allies were soon stampeding through the
nearest exits.

Having ably exploited regional upheaval, the one-time jihadi and
former Abu Ghraib detainee Ahmed al-Sharaa is now in charge of a major
Arab state. But Syria is a diverse country, with large Kurdish,
Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Ismaili minorities, and none of them
want Islamist rule. Al-Sharaa has tried to allay their fears in his
public pronouncements. In addition to updating his wardrobe to present
himself as a modern leader, he has replaced an earlier all-male
caretaker government with one that includes an Alawite, a Druze, a
Kurd, and a Christian woman. Earlier infractions against minorities,
such as the burning of a Christmas tree by foreign fighters, were
swiftly redressed. Men were also deployed to guard Shia shrines, and
the government disrupted an ISIS plan to target Sayyidah Zaynab, a
shrine whose protection Iran had used as a pretext for its
intervention in Syria.

Syria’s new rulers seem conscious that their authority will be as
brittle as Assad’s if they try to govern without the good will of
the public. People who weren’t cowed by Assad’s ruthless violence
and his vast torture and detention apparatus are unlikely to submit to
new authoritarian rule.

Official pronouncements already acknowledge this power dynamic. When
al-Sharaa first addressed the country as Syria’s caretaker
president, he directed his message to “the displaced and refugees,
to the wounded and injured, to the families of the martyrs and the
missing, to the revolutionary activists who have dedicated their lives
to the struggle for a free Syria,” assuring them that he spoke
“not as a ruler, but as a servant of our wounded homeland.” This
was a transitional phase, he said, and Syria’s unity and renaissance
would require “the real participation of all Syrian men and women,
at home and abroad, to build their future in freedom and dignity,
without exclusion or marginalization.” After God, he credited
Syria’s liberation to “every person who struggled at home and
abroad, every person who sacrificed his soul and blood, his home and
money, his security and safety.” He also aligned himself with the
symbols and avatars of Syria’s popular revolution:

This victory was launched from the throats of the demonstrators and
the chants of the protesters in the squares and fields. It was
launched from the fingers of Hamza al-Khatib [a thirteen-year-old who
was arrested at a protest in 2011 and was returned to his family a
month later tortured and mutilated to death] and the chants of the
demonstrations, and the groans of the detainees and tortured in the
basements of Tadmur, Sednaya, and the Palestine Branch. It continued
with the sacrifices of the revolutionaries who liberated the land of
Syria, despite years of suffering from missiles, barrels, and chemical
weapons. They did not bend or break.

Al-Sharaa has since made several overtures to minorities, especially
to Christians and the Druze, facilitated by Syria’s Ismaili
minority. But minorities expect more than mere protection; they also
expect representation and a stake in Syria’s future. The Druze in
southern Syria, who had been confronting Assad’s regime for a year,
welcomed its fall and have expressed their eagerness to serve in the
new national army, but they also expect public services and proper
representation. Israel has tried to entice them with promises of aid
and protection, but without much success. Early in March, Israel
threatened to use a minor incident in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana
as a pretext for invading Syria—to protect the Druze. But the Druze
spurned these inducements and worked with government forces to
stabilize the situation.

The fraught relationship between anti-Assad factions and the
Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces is also finally on the mend. In a
historic move, the SDF agreed in March to dissolve all its military
and civilian institutions and integrate them into the central Syrian
state. The interim government has affirmed Kurds as an integral part
of the Syrian nation and promised full citizenship rights. But the SDF
is not comfortable with the Syrian National Army being part of the new
configuration, pointing not only to their lack of discipline but the
fact that they have served as mercenaries for Turkey, often deployed
against Kurds.

These fears and misgivings were magnified by a recent catastrophe. On
March 6, pro-Assad insurgents, including members of the regime’s
notorious Fourth Division, launched a coordinated attack on government
forces and civilian infrastructure across the Latakia, Tartus, and
Hama regions. Lacking sufficient manpower, the government announced a
general mobilization, and its official forces were soon reinforced by
local militias, foreign Islamists, and armed civilians. Many of them
were ambushed and some executed by pro-Assad insurgents. The violence
spiraled into sectarian killings, with pro-government forces and
affiliated militias massacring hundreds of Alawite civilians and up to
seven Christians.

The coastal city of Banias, where in May 2013 the regime massacred
civilians opposed to Assad, now saw anti-Assad forces massacring
Alawite civilians. According to Amnesty International, “government
affiliated militias deliberately targeted civilians from the Alawite
minority in gruesome reprisal attacks—shooting individuals at close
range in cold blood. For two days, authorities failed to intervene to
stop the killings.” Most of the executions were carried out by two
militias, both formerly affiliated with the Syrian National Army, but
HTS and foreign fighters were also implicated.  The Syrian Network
for Human Rights verified a total of 803 dead, including thirty-nine
children and forty-nine women. The pro-Assad insurgents had killed 172
security personnel and 211 civilians, and in turn the pro-government
forces had killed 420 civilians and disarmed fighters.

Real videos of the atrocities were soon supplemented over social media
by a deluge of fake ones and various false claims, attempting to turn
minorities’ legitimate fears into existential paranoia. The
disinformation campaign was led by an improbable alliance of Russian,
Iranian, Israeli, and global far-right media, which circulated
inflated numbers, videos of past atrocities, and images of alleged
victims, many of whom had to take to social media to deny reports of
their own death. A Deutsche Welle investigation revealed that members
of an Iraqi sectarian militia were receiving $20 to $30 to post such
stories on social media, with other influencers being paid $100 per
post. This was an intensification of the disinformation campaign that
had started immediately after Assad’s fall, with tropes ranging from
the absurd (Ahmed “Jewlani” al-Sharra was part of a Zionist plot
to subvert the Axis of Resistance) to the pernicious (a profusion of
atrocity stories, most of which the fact-checking collective Verify-Sy
has investigated and debunked).

Despite the disinformation, the real atrocities have sullied the new
government’s record and will remain indelible unless justice is
served. Al-Sharaa condemned the killing of civilians and promised to
bring the perpetrators to justice. Some have been arrested, but many
more remain at large. Al-Sharaa has also announced an independent
commission to investigate the crimes, but it would have been better to
refer the crime to UN investigators, which would have also made it
easier for the government to avoid the thorny task of balancing
accountability with preserving the loyalty of its more fractious
allies. There is understandable skepticism about the government’s
inclusive messaging when one spark can lead to such a conflagration.
Before the month was over, on the day of Eid, two men from a
government-affiliated militia carried out another massacre of Alawite
civilians in Haref Nemra, a village in the Banias countryside. Among
the six killed were a child, an elder, and the local mayor. Government
forces cordoned off the village and arrested the perpetrators and
officials promised accountability, but this did nothing to allay the
fears of the Alawites from Haref Nemra and surrounding villages who
have fled their homes. Until perpetrators of such crimes face
justice—and justice is _seen_ to have been delivered—Syria will
struggle under the weight of its past.

Syria’s fragile economy makes its security provisional, with the
state relying on the support of disparate militias with disparate
agendas, over which the state has limited leverage. Wounded by war,
and saddled by sanctions, Syria’s struggling economy leaves the
country vulnerable to perennial insecurity, internal fragmentation,
and external interference. Despite all the challenges, a rare poll
conducted by the _Economist_ in March revealed that 70 percent of
Syrians are optimistic about their future, and 81 percent approve of
al-Sharaa’s leadership, with the majority seeing the country as
“safer, freer and less sectarian” than under Assad. But over half
of the respondents also feel that “economic conditions have either
stagnated or worsened” since Assad’s fall, with the government
lacking the funds to pay public servants’ salaries.

Syria has been under U.S. sanctions since 1979, with tighter sanctions
imposed after 2011. The sanctions succeeded in impoverishing ordinary
Syrians without impeding the regime; with the regime gone, they only
contribute to Syria’s immiseration. Today 90 percent of Syrians live
below the poverty line, a quarter are unemployed. Three-quarters of
the population survives off humanitarian assistance, and a third lives
in makeshift shelters.

Israel, Iran, Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, and regime remnants have
all tried to exploit this situation, and the new government is
stretched thin. Syria’s allies like Qatar are eager to help, but
they too fear falling foul of U.S. sanctions. Europe, by contrast, is
finally acknowledging what’s at stake in Syria and has recently
moved toward providing economic relief. But until the sanctions are
lifted, Syria’s future remains in jeopardy.

Except for the early days of the War on Terror, when Damascus became a
preferred destination for the CIA’s outsourced torture program and
Tony Blair considered knighting Assad, Western governments treated
Assad with disdain. But they tolerated him as a necessary xxxxxx
against Islamists and instability. Now that the regime has fallen, the
threat to Syria’s stability is coming mainly from Iran and its
proxies and Israel. While there have been many condemnations of the
former, Western leaders have carefully avoided criticizing the latter.

On the day Assad’s rule ended, Israel launched air strikes across
Syria to destroy its combat aircraft, naval vessels, and weapons
caches. (Over the fourteen years that Assad’s forces were
perpetrating a genocide, Israel had left Assad’s military capacity
untouched.) Israel also expanded its occupation of Syrian territory
beyond the Golan Heights, into the Quneitra province, depopulating
many villages. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense
Minister Israel Katz appeared for photo-ops on Syrian territory, with
the latter promising an indefinite occupation, it drew condemnation
from around the world. But among Western states, France alone
protested Israeli airstrikes. Israel has since launched more attacks
on Damascus, and on the fourteenth anniversary of the beginning of the
Syrian revolution, it launched thirty airstrikes on Daraa, the cradle
of the revolution. It has since intensified its attacks on the south,
killing seven in Daraa on March 25 and, in a combined land and aerial
assault, nine more on April 3.

Many Syrians have seen their own experience under Assad reflected in
what Israel is doing in Gaza, so they were unlikely to warm to the
country, even if according to the _Economist_ poll only 10 percent
support armed resistance. But Israel’s current aggression ensures
that its territorial gains will come at the price of a democratic
Syria’s abiding hostility. Syria has no capacity to confront Israel
at this moment, but it can’t afford to be at the mercy of an
intransigent neighbor either. It has no choice but to rearm, and
Turkey will likely help it develop deterrence by building its
anti-aircraft capacity. (In March, as talks were underway for Turkey
to establish an airbase in Syria, Israel preempted it with airstrikes
on all the proposed locations.)

It is doubtful that Iran will be welcomed in Damascus any time soon.
Russia has taken a more pragmatic approach, making diplomatic
overtures to protect its interests. The states that had championed
Assad’s return to the Arab League are also reconciling themselves to
Syria’s new realities. Saudi Arabia and the UAE played a critical
part in rolling back the Arab Spring revolutions, but Saudi Arabia
offered itself as the destination for al-Sharaa’s first official
visit abroad, and in April Mohamed bin Zayed of the UAE received
al-Sharaa in his official capacity as Syria’s head of state.

For the most part, the world has responded positively to the changes
in Damascus, with French President Emmanuel Macron becoming the first
Western leader to directly call al-Sharaa. This followed visits by the
French and German foreign ministers. But where Qatar, Turkey, and the
Saudis are offering tangible support, the Western response until
recently was once again focused on terrorism and migration. Indeed,
the first response to Assad’s fall in some EU states was to halt the
asylum process for Syrians.

Given a choice, few Syrians would have chosen exile. At the peak of
Europe’s so-called refugee crisis, a Berlin Social Science Center
survey revealed that all but 8 percent of Syrian refugees in Germany
wanted to return home if they could. Since the fall of the regime,
many people have returned—some from exile, some from the regime’s
dungeons. With sanctions relief and economic support, this number will
certainly increase.

One irony of the mass displacement of Syrians was that it was easier
for its people to form associations and develop civil society
institutions in the more permissible conditions of exile. These
associations will be crucial as a new Syrian state takes shape. Few at
the start of Syria’s revolution would have believed that their
eventual triumph would be catalyzed by a man who was once an Al Qaeda
fighter. Al-Sharaa’s evolution is itself testimony to the strength
of Syria’s new society, which is setting the parameters for what is
acceptable in a leader. If his transformation is mere theater, then it
only suggests that he has an acute sense of his new audience. But the
changes are not intangible. Journalists can now visit and speak to
people without the intimidating presence of minders. Kurds, meanwhile,
were able to openly celebrate Nowruz—the Kurdish new year—in
Damascus.

For now, hope has been restored. And this is critical, because only
vigilance combined with hope can protect liberty. In both Egypt and
Tunisia, successful revolutions devolved into tyrannies far worse than
the ones they had replaced. In both countries, public impatience was
exploited by ruthless figures to destroy democratic institutions
before they had a chance to take root. In Syria, vigilance will be
needed to prevent the emergence of new tyranny, and effective
organizing will be needed to ensure that democratic institutions
emerge and have the resilience to withstand autocratic impulses.
Revolutions are fueled by dreams, but democracy requires patience and
responsibility.

The day before Assad fell, I met with two of Syria’s most tireless
human rights activists at the Doha Forum. Both young women are modern
in their own ways—one a Western-attired Circassian graduate student,
the other a hijabi communications specialist. We discussed Syria’s
future, and for once it was a conversation free of despair and
heartbreak. Just eight weeks later, I was pleasantly surprised to see
one of them included in al-Sharaa’s delegation for his first state
visit abroad. She had no previous connections to Syria’s new rulers.
If Syria’s caretaker government is turning to people like her, who
have been part of local initiatives to promote democracy and human
rights in the Arab world, it’s a hopeful sign that it is seeking
sure hands to navigate Syria out of a sea of troubles.

_MUHAMMAD IDREES AHMAD is the director of journalism at the
University of Essex and a contributing editor at New Lines Magazine._

_Dissent is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
times a year. Founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954, it
quickly established itself as one of America’s leading intellectual
journals and a mainstay of the democratic left. Dissent has published
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Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin, Czesław
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* Syrian Civil War
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* Bashar al-Assad
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