Three Ways to Understand Syria’s Future

This past weekend, Syrian rebels prompted the downfall of a more than 50-year fascist regime. Yesterday, rebels freed detained prisoners; people trampled on burning images of ousted President Bashar al-Assad; families strolled through a ransacked presidential palace, taking pictures. Assad and his family have fled to Moscow, where they have been granted asylum, according to Russian state media. Some Syrian refugees are waiting at border crossings to reenter the country they had fled during the Syrian civil war, which has been ongoing since 2011.

Until now, Syria had been part of “an informal network of autocracies,” my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote yesterday. The downfall of its leader represents the possibility of change, not just in Syria but in the other members of this network. Below are five questions, answered by Atlantic writers, about what comes next for Syria, its allies, and the United States.

Why did the Assad regime fall now, after 54 years?

The Syrian people’s loyalty to Assad eroded gradually, then all at once, Anne explains: Doubts grew after Assad’s Russian backers began to transfer troops and equipment from Syria to Ukraine in 2022, and “the more recent Israeli attack on Hezbollah’s leadership hampered Iran, Assad’s other ally, from helping him as well,” she writes.

Autocratic regimes use brutality to eliminate any hope their populace may have for a different future, Anne notes: “Our leader forever” was the slogan of the Assad dynasty. “But all such ‘eternal’ regimes have one fatal flaw,” she writes. “Soldiers and police officers are members of the public too. They have relatives who suffer, cousins and friends who experience political repression and the effects of economic collapse. They, too, have doubts, and they, too, can become insecure. In Syria, we have just seen the result.”

“The turning point was the surrender of Aleppo with almost no resistance,” Anne told me when we spoke on the phone today. “It was almost like the regime melted away as people saw that no one’s fighting for it, no one’s going to support it. Why should we fight for it?”

What comes next for the Syrian people?

The case for optimism exists, my colleague Graeme Wood noted today: “The recent behavior of the rebels who have just conquered Syria looks reassuringly civilized,” he acknowledges. “Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group most immediately responsible for Assad’s overthrow, has announced that victory is not a license to wreck the institutions of the state … If the rebels sustain this merciful beginning, and enshrine in law and practice tolerance and equal rights for women, Alawites, Christians, Kurds, Druze, and other groups, then they will deserve apologies from all who delayed their victory, including Western politicians.”

However, Graeme notes, “there are good reasons to doubt that the new Syria will resemble this gumdrops-and-ponies utopia.” Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s leader is Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who formerly led Jabhat al-Nusra—“the Syrian franchise of al-Qaeda that functioned as a slightly less-evil twin of ISIS,” as Graeme puts it. Still, Graeme acknowledges, the images of Syrian citizens on social media “show hope and solidarity. So far Syria has had 50 years of fascism and one day of its opposite. If it can string together more such days—perhaps a month, and dare one hope for even a year—the previous decade of resistance will have been worth it.”

In the coming days, observers may start to get a clearer picture of what Syria’s future looks like. What should we watch out for?

“Look at the peacefulness of cities,” Anne told me. “Will there be out-of-control panic, looting, and riots? Or will people be staying at home to watch what happens?” Observers should also “look at what the institutions and the government does,” she said. “There are a lot of people in Syria who make different pieces of the state function. It’s not a very effective or well-run state, but there’s an electricity system and traffic laws. There are people who are enforcing those things. Whether those people stay and continue to do their jobs in some kind of organized fashion will give you an indication of whether there will be a peaceful transition.”

The third thing to monitor, Anne told me, is how the various armed groups in Syria interact with one another. “Some of them have been using very open language, and trying to speak for the whole nation,” she noted. “They have different backgrounds and different origins. Some of them come from the Islamist world. Some of them come from the Syrian opposition. Some of them are Kurds. If they create some kind of council or transitional government, something that brings them all together, that’s a good sign. And if they don’t do that, it’s a bad sign.”

What does the fall of the Assad regime mean for Iran and Russia, two longtime backers of Syria?

Iran has lost another of its regional proxy forces, Eliot A. Cohen explains in a recent article: “Iran is a strong state, in the sense that its people are deeply rooted in a shared history and culture, but it has a relatively weak military. It has invested heavily in proxy warfare with notable success, including against the United States in Iraq. But with the defeats of Hamas and Hezbollah, and with the collapse of the Assad regime, Iran has suffered irrecoverable losses.” Russia also “has been humiliated by its client’s collapse,” Eliot writes, “and it, too, now faces an enduring hostility from a Syrian population that it helped suppress.”

What does the fall of the regime mean for the U.S.?

America has been thwarted once again in its desire to leave the Middle East, Eliot notes. And it faces an even more urgent problem: “If Iran does indeed choose to sprint for nuclear weapons, Trump’s White House will have to decide whether to call in the heavy bombers and forestall that move, which would trigger a landslide of nuclear proliferation well beyond the Persian Gulf,” he writes. “It might face that decision very early on.”

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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