The end of Bashar al-Assad

The bloodthirsty dictatorship of the Assad family in Syria ended on Sunday after more than half a century and two generations in power. The lightning offensive by an amalgam of rebel groups entered the capital, Damascus, in the early hours of Sunday, just 11 days after having conquered Aleppo and after crossing the country from north to south with little apparent resistance in their path. Bashar al-Assad, in power since 2000 after inheriting the dictatorship from his father, fled the capital and went into exile in Moscow with his family. Since then, scenes of joy within the country and among the Syrian diaspora have been unfolding to celebrate the end of the horror.

The brutal civil war that began with the Arab uprisings and which has torn the country apart for 13 years thus ended overnight, at its lowest point of intensity, with different protagonists from when it began, and in a radically different geopolitical context. The toll is catastrophic: more than 300,000 dead, five million people expelled from their country (of which one million are living in the European Union and three million in Turkey), almost seven million internally displaced people, and episodes that have become part of the history of human horror, such as the use of chemical weapons against the civilian population by Assad or the beheadings carried out by Islamist rebel groups.

None of this has been seen in recent days. The war was apparently at a standstill when the offensive began on Aleppo in the north, led by a fundamentalist militia called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which encompasses a dozen rebel groups and has the sympathy, if not the direct support, of Turkey. Its leader is Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a son of Syrians raised in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and trained in jihadism. Al-Julani has apparently stripped the militia of the terrorist fanaticism of ISIS and Al Qaeda, which remain active on their own, although it is essentially an Islamist group.

The sudden collapse of the regime is largely explained by the withdrawal of support from Russia and Iran, its main backers. The former, because the war in Ukraine does not allow it to maintain any more open fronts. It was the Russian air force that saved Assad in 2015. The other great ally, Iran, is in international retreat in the face of Israel’s advance. The regional consequences are unpredictable at this point. Syria, whether at war or not, was a buffer state in the Middle East penetrated by Turkey and Iran, with conflicting interests, and with the military presence of Russia, the United States and Israel in different corners of its territory. This Monday, Syria is an indefinite stain on the map.

Talking about the end of an era is perhaps an understatement when it comes to defining the end of the Assad family dictatorship, the consequences of which are still too risky to even guess at. Western foreign ministries were quick to celebrate the fall of the dictator, but the reality is that no one is sure that what comes next will be an orderly, or even peaceful, process. In the coming days we will see the impact, if any, of the Syrian prime minister’s gesture reaching out to the rebels to form a new government.

It would not be the first time that the world celebrates the fall of an Arab dictator without any plan to guarantee peace and give a true voice to the people. The lack of definition that plunged Libya or Iraq into chaos cannot be repeated. If there are leaders among the rebels willing to engage in constructive dialogue to avoid a power vacuum, they must be identified promptly, and those who have the capacity to engage in dialogue, mainly Turkey and Qatar, must exercise it quickly in that direction, so that the end of the Assad dictatorship is truly the beginning of the reconstruction of Syria.

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