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The rebels who ended the Assad family’s brutal rule in Syria began asserting control on Monday. They took up positions outside public buildings in Damascus and directed traffic in a show of their newly claimed authority.
Major questions remained unanswered, including who would lead the new government. Euphoria around the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad over the weekend mixed with uncertainty about the future of the country and the intentions of the rebels who now hold the capital, Damascus.
Here’s a guide to understanding how the rebels unseated Mr. al-Assad, and what may come next.
What is the situation on the ground?
In just over a week, Syrian rebel forces seized much of Syria’s northwest. First, the rebels captured Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, then Hama and Homs. On Sunday, they entered Syria’s capital, Damascus, taking the city without a fight as government forces fled.
Where is Bashar al-Assad?
Syria’s president fled to Russia, according to Russian state media outlets and two Iranian officials.
Moscow will not disclose Mr. al-Assad’s location in Russia, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Monday. He added that President Vladimir V. Putin had made the decision to offer exile to Mr. al-Assad and his family, but there were no immediate plans for the two men to meet.
Mr. al-Assad’s government kept rebel forces at bay for more than a decade with Iranian and Russian military support. But it collapsed with astonishing speed over the last week, culminating with rebels taking control of Damascus on Sunday morning.
Mr. al-Assad was central to the protracted and devastating civil war that began in 2011. His family — who are Alawites, a minority sect that is an offshoot of Shiite Islam — had run Syria since a 1970 coup. Mr. al-Assad initially portrayed himself as a modern reformist, but he responded to peaceful protests during the Arab Spring with brutal crackdowns, sparking a nationwide uprising.
His family’s dynasty bombed and detained thousands of opponents, building fearsome internal security agencies to quash unrest. As the rebels advanced this weekend, they took over many of the notorious prisons where the Assad regime had for decades imprisoned, tortured and executed political prisoners.
Who are the rebels?
The main rebel group behind Assad’s ouster is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose name means Organization for the Liberation of the Levant. It began to come together at the beginning of Syria’s civil war, when jihadists formed the Nusra Front to fight pro-Assad forces with hundreds of insurgent and suicide attacks.
The group had early links to the Islamic State, and then to Al Qaeda. But by mid-2016, the Nusra Front was trying to shed its extremist roots, banding together with several other factions to establish Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The United States and other Western countries still consider it a terrorist group.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, told The New York Times that his primary goal was to “liberate Syria from this oppressive regime.” He has tried to gain legitimacy by providing services to residents in his stronghold of Idlib. The rebels face the complex task of extending their control over a country with deep ethnic, sectarian and religious divisions. Their military leadership said in a statement on Telegram that rebel forces were “about to finish controlling the capital and preserving public property,” and that a new government would begin work “immediately” after being formed.
The statement did not name the leader of the transitional government, but local news reports said it would be Mohammed al-Bashir, who previously served as the head of a rebel-run administration in northwestern Syria.
The new de facto leaders of Syria appeared to be striving for security, stability and continuity. Though there were reports over the weekend of looting at the Central Bank and of people ransacking Mr. al-Assad’s personal residence and the embassy of Iran, his main backer, rebel fighters on Monday stood guard outside government institutions throughout the capital. The new authorities also circulated images on social media of security personnel patrolling the streets of Damascus.
Their goal appeared to be to avoid the kind of chaos that has gripped other Arab nations after rebellions overthrew longtime dictators. In Libya during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt and Iraq during the 2003 American invasion, for example, looting was widespread and order broke down, prompting armed groups to jockey for power and leading to years of dysfunction and violence.
Who is the rebel leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani?
Mr. al-Jolani, 42, was born Ahmed Hussein al-Shara in Saudi Arabia, the child of Syrian exiles, according to Arab media reports. In the late 1980s, his family moved back to Syria, and in 2003, he went to neighboring Iraq to join Al Qaeda and fight the U.S. occupation.
He spent several years in an American prison in Iraq, according to the Arab media reports and U.S. officials. He later emerged in Syria around the start of the civil war and formed the Nusra Front, which eventually evolved into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. At some point, he took on the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani.
Since breaking ties with Al Qaeda, Mr. al-Jolani and his group have tried to gain international legitimacy by eschewing global jihadist ambitions and focusing on organized governance in Syria.
Questions have emerged about what kind of government Mr. al-Jolani would support and whether Syrians would accept it. In Idlib, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has espoused a government guided by a conservative and at times hard-line Sunni Islamist ideology.
Since the rebel offensive began, Mr. al-Jolani has sought to reassure minority communities from other sects and religions. Some analysts say he now faces the test of his life: whether he can unite Syrians.
Speaking at the historical Umayyed Mosque in Damascus on Monday, he shed the nom de guerre he has used throughout the Syrian civil war and gave his real name, Ahmed al-Shara.
Who else is fighting in Syria?
Kurdish forces
Forces from Syria’s Kurdish ethnic minority became the United States’ main local partner in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria, under the banner of the Syrian Democratic Forces. After the extremist group was largely defeated, the Kurdish-led forces consolidated control over towns in the northeast, expanding an autonomous region they had built there. But Kurdish fighters still had to contend with their longtime enemy, Turkey, which regards them as linked to a Kurdish separatist insurgency.
Turkey
Since the beginning of the civil war, the Turkish military has launched several military interventions across the border into Syria, mostly against the Syrian Kurdish-led forces. Turkey now effectively controls a zone along Syria’s northern border.
Turkey also supports factions such as the Syrian National Army, a coalition of armed Syrian opposition groups. Analysts say it probably gave tacit approval to the offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey expressed support for the rebel advance as it rolled through Syria.
On Saturday, he said, according to Reuters: “There is now a new reality in Syria, politically and diplomatically. And Syria belongs to Syrians with all its ethnic, sectarian and religious elements. The people of Syria are the ones who will decide the future of their own country.”
Russia
Throughout Syria’s civil war, Russia was one of Mr. Assad’s most loyal foreign backers, sending troops to support his forces and jets to bomb his enemies. It maintained a strategic military presence in Syria with air and naval bases, which it uses to support military operations in the region.
Because of the war of attrition in Ukraine, analysts say, Russia was unable to support Syria’s government as forcefully as it had in the past, suffering one of its biggest geopolitical setbacks in the quarter-century rule of President Vladimir V. Putin.
The future of Russia’s military presence in Syria is now in doubt.
United States
The United States maintains a force of about 900 troops in Syria, centered in Kurdish-controlled oil drilling areas in the northeast and a garrison in the southeast.
The U.S. role in the Syrian civil war has shifted several times. The Obama administration initially supported opposition groups in their uprising against the government, providing weapons and training, with limited effect.
After the rise of the Islamic State in 2014, U.S. forces fought the terrorist group with airstrikes and assistance to Kurdish forces, and then stayed in northeastern Syria to prevent a resurgence. President Donald J. Trump withdrew many of those forces in 2019.
Israel
The Israeli military said on Sunday its troops had entered an internationally monitored buffer zone in the Golan Heights and ordered a curfew on Syrian villages there. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said Israel was deploying there temporarily for defensive purposes.
The Israeli Air Force over the weekend was also carried out airstrikes in Syria. The targets included small stockpiles of chemical weapons, primarily mustard gas and the nerve gas VX, which remained in Syrian possession despite prior agreements to disarm, according to Israeli officials. Israel also targeted radar-equipped batteries and vehicles of Russian-made air defense missiles, as well as stockpiles of Scud missiles.
What’s next for Syria?
There are many more questions than answers after the government’s rapid demise, starting with an uncertain future for the nation’s governance, security and economy.
Rebels will try to secure the capital and prevent a chaotic power vacuum. But it is unclear how far and how fast the coalition will extend its control over the whole country, and whether rebels can unite after ousting the Syrian leader.
In an interview last week, Mr. al-Jolani, the group’s leader, said that even before Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched its offensive, the group was thinking about its next steps. There are some hints of what’s to come in Aleppo, where the group won a pivotal victory just over a week ago.
Across Syria, the rebel group sought to reassure residents that it would safeguard public property and institutions. After taking much of Aleppo, its fighters moved on to the next front line, leaving the city to technocrats who came to preserve government institutions, Mr. al-Jolani said. His group said that public institutions would remain under the oversight of the country’s prime minister until there was a transition.
An enduring conflict
The Syrian war began in 2011 with a peaceful uprising against the government and spiraled into a complex conflict involving armed rebels, extremists and others.
The origins: The conflict started when Syrians rose up peacefully against Mr. al-Assad’s government. The protests were met with a violent crackdown, while communities took up arms to defend themselves. Civil war ensued.
Other groups became involved. Amid the chaos, Syria’s ethnic Kurdish minority took up arms and gradually took territory it saw as its own. The Islamic State seized parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and declared that territory its “caliphate,” further destabilizing the region.
Foreign interventions. Mr. al-Assad has received vital support from Iran and Russia, as well as the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The rebels were backed by the United States and oil-rich Arab states like Saudi Arabia. Turkey also intervened to stop the advance of Kurdish militias.
The toll. The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions. Forces loyal to Mr. al-Assad have committed by far the most atrocities. The regime has turned to chemical weapons, barrel bombs and starvation to force Syrians into submission.
The post The Fall of Assad in Syria: How It Happened and What Comes Next appeared first on New York Times.
