Portside

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 bulwark 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 articles by Hannah Arendt, Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, A. Philip Randolph, Michael Harrington, Dorothy Day, Bayard Rustin, Czesław Miłosz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Chinua Achebe, Ellen Willis, Octavio Paz, Martha Nussbaum, Roxane Gay, and many others. Sign up for the Dissent newsletter or subscribe.