Hope returns to Syria

The fall of the Assad regime, thirteen years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, is among the most extraordinary events in Middle Eastern history.

The 2011 Syrian revolution was the most far-reaching of all the Arab revolts, penetrating deep into every crevice of society. Driven by poverty, economic crisis and hatred of a brutal authoritarian regime, millions took to the streets demanding an end to the regime.

But President Bashar al-Assad’s vicious strategy to maintain his rule—slaughtering half a million people, flattening cities, imprisoning and torturing tens of thousands, forcing millions into exile—came to embody the smashing of all the dreams of democracy and freedom that animated the Arab revolution in its first months.

The Syrian struggle for freedom was assaulted from every conceivable angle. Peaceful protesters were mowed down in the streets without mercy, forcing the resistance to take up arms and transforming the mass movement into a civil war. When it looked like the rebel forces might finally overcome the regime, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah intervened to choke the life out of free Syrian cities.

The US initially mouthed support for the revolution. But Washington was never interested in a genuinely democratic Syria, which it accurately judged not to be in its foreign policy interests. The US refused to provide the weaponry the rebels were pleading for, which would have allowed them to defeat the regime. It also blocked other states from providing those weapons. This betrayal didn’t save the Syrian revolution from being slandered by many so-called anti-imperialists on the Western left, who shamefully dismissed Syrian aspirations for freedom from dictatorship as little more than a CIA/Mossad plot.

Years of devastating civil war, foreign intervention and monumental death and displacement destroyed almost all of the revolution’s civic institutions and fed the rise of groups whose aims greatly diverged from the spirit that drove revolutionaries in 2011.

Yet, despite everything, and seemingly against all hope, Assad is suddenly gone. In less than two weeks, a rebel offensive that began in the northern city of Aleppo transformed into an extraordinary nationwide uprising that routed the regime. As rebel forces swept south, taking first Hama and then Homs, it became clear that the regime would get little support from its foreign backers. Rebel factions across the country joined the offensive.

Instead of the much-feared influx of Iranian-backed militias from Iraq to defend the regime, regime fighters fled to Iraq or ditched their military uniforms and left their tanks and weapons lying in the streets.

The great lie—that the Assad regime had the support of large numbers of Syrians—disintegrated as quickly as the regime itself. Without Russia and Iran slaughtering people on its behalf, the regime couldn’t last two weeks. As Assad fled the country, his forces melted away. Even the coastal Alawite areas fell with barely a fight.

The coalition of fighters behind this extraordinary chain of events was led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—an Islamist group originating in Jabhat al-Nusra, which was affiliated with al-Qaeda. However, the group that became HTS broke from al-Qaeda and then re-formed under its current name in 2017. For many years, and especially in the course of this uprising, it has emphasised tolerance of other religious groups and minorities and has disavowed the most reactionary elements that characterised al-Nusra and ISIS.

HTS has for years controlled Idlib in the north-west. During that time, it repressed protests, but nothing remotely on the scale of what either the Assad regime or ISIS have been guilty of. It is far too early to know its role in the coming months. But whatever the sincerity of HTS’s shift to a more inclusive, all-Syrian stance, that stance played a vital and probably decisive role in uniting the country behind the rebel offensive. Unity across religious lines was a crucial part of the initial success of the 2011 revolution and will remain so for its prospects.

However, with Assad gone, Syria’s free and democratic future hinges on a revival of the extraordinary revolutionary energy that first emerged in 2011. The real hope is that the mass of Syrian people can seize this opportunity to build a society of genuine justice and equality that so many gave their lives for.

The scenes emerging from Syria since the fall of the regime are extraordinary: thousands celebrating on the streets, chanting the slogans of unity and freedom that had been buried under years of counter-revolution.

All ethnic and religious minorities have been involved. Christians in Aleppo chanted, “Syrians united, we are one people!” and decorated their areas of the city with Christmas trees. Alawites in the port city of Tartous, traditionally an important base for Assad, tore down regime statues to wild cheering. In Iraqi Kurdistan, people filled the streets carrying the flag of the Syrian revolution and chanting, “One, one, the Syrian people are one!”

Multi-coloured Druze flags filled the streets alongside the green and black flag of the revolution. Palestinians in Raml refugee camp in Latakia held a nighttime demonstration, lit up with lanterns, protesting against Assad right before he fell.

Across the country, statues of Bashar and his father, Hafez al-Assad, came crashing down. In one case, a gold one was used as a sled. People mocked Bashar by ostentatiously walking along the red carpet in his Damascus palace and filming themselves saying banned words. It was a nationwide carnival of celebration.

An extraordinary reversal of the mass displacement of the last thirteen years has also begun. Thousands are returning to cities they were forced from in the war. From Lebanon and Türkiye, enormous convoys of former refugees are streaming back into the country.

Nothing has captured the momentous but also heartbreaking nature of this moment more than the liberation of the prisons. As each city fell to the rebellion, the doors of the regime’s vile and vast jails were broken open. “Hellholes” does not adequately convey their nature. Every Syrian knew the reality of these places. They were no secret—the whole point of them was to instil terror in anyone who thought of resisting the regime. But to see the videos of people emerging from them—people who had endured years of torture, physically and mentally broken; to see toddlers, whose mothers had been raped in prison and who had lived their whole lives in these pits—is devastating beyond words.

The joy of seeing these prisons empty must be accompanied by rage that they were allowed to endure for so long. There are those in the Palestine solidarity movement who laud Iran or Russia—because they purportedly fight against tyranny—and who defended the regime as a heroic part of the “axis of resistance” right until it fell.

But Assad did nothing for the Palestinians except massacre them and lock them up. Among the thousands released from the notorious Sednaya Prison were 67 members of the Al-Qassam Brigades and 630 other Palestinians, according to reports. Bashar al-Assad, like his father, never fought Israel, either to defend the Palestinians or to take back occupied Syrian land.

Even if Assad had supported the Palestinians, it wouldn’t have justified his regime or made the revolution illegitimate. You can’t tolerate one genocide to oppose another.

And while there was support for Assad among some activists in the West, Palestinians themselves sympathised with the uprising from the start. And why wouldn’t they? Who knows better than the Palestinians the meaning of genocide, dispossession and exile? And how could anyone watch the beautiful scenes of Syrian refugees returning to their country and not dream of the day the Palestinians will end their long exile?

In any case, whatever short-term geopolitical benefit Israel might now gain (which is not at all clear), the past year has demonstrated, yet again, that there is no hope for a free Palestine in a Middle East ruled by dictators. The hope that dictators in Tehran and Moscow, any more than those in Cairo or Amman, would liberate Palestine was a fantasy. The only hope for Palestinian liberation is an Arab world with the Arab people themselves in charge.

Overnight, Syria has gone from being the most despotic state in the Middle East to the freest. This is not to say that the country’s problems will be resolved simply. There are enormous issues to be worked through and obstacles to be overcome. After a long dictatorship and civil war, the country is deeply scarred and controlled by militias, many of which have fought each other in recent years. The Israelis have already invaded from the west, the Americans have troops in the south-east, Turkish-backed forces are fighting the Kurds in the north, and ISIS still holds territory in the centre of the country. The struggle ahead will be long and difficult, with no guarantee of success.

Nevertheless, the precondition for achieving any of the goals of the Syrian revolution was the overthrow of the Assad regime. This is now done; he is gone. The future can start to be written.

Jasmine Duff contributed to this article.