Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled the country early Sunday local time as a lightning advance by a coalition of rebel groups brought an abrupt end to 50 years of brutal rule by the Assad family. The news sparked jubilation on the streets of Damascus but also immense uncertainty about the future of the deeply troubled country.
The stunning offensive, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), saw the armed rebels seize control of the major cities of Aleppo, Hama, and Homs in less than two weeks as Syrian government forces—demoralized and in disarray after years of fighting—made a rapid retreat. Meanwhile, Assad’s most powerful allies also appear to have been caught off guard by the swift advance, with Russia bogged down in Ukraine and Iran’s proxies badly weakened in clashes with Israel.
The unexpected collapse of the Assad government has sent diplomats scrambling to both keep pace with events and fathom the potential ramifications of the sudden power vacuum in a country where armed groups, Islamist extremists, and foreign powers have long jockeyed for influence.
Geir Pedersen, the United Nations special envoy for Syria, said on Sunday that there were “contradictory messages” coming out of Damascus, but he underscored the need to “avoid bloodshed” and called for dialogue and preparations for a transitional governing structure.
An immediate priority for the international community will be to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria to prevent them from falling into the hands of armed groups.
“Any possible chemical weapons inventory or related materials must be secured,” Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said at a press conference on Sunday.
The Israeli Air Force has struck a Syrian chemical weapons factory to prevent it from falling into rebel hands, the Jerusalem Post reported on Sunday.
Turkey is widely believed to have greenlit the HTS-led offensive—though it officially denies involvement—having become frustrated with Assad’s refusal to engage with Ankara. The Turkish government’s main proxy among the victorious opposition forces is the Syrian National Army, a coalition of militias that has a complicated relationship with HTS, and Ankara is poised to wield significant influence in Syria moving forward.
“The new [Syrian] administration must be established in an orderly manner. The principle of inclusiveness must never be compromised. There must never be a desire for revenge,” said Fidan, who added that the Turkish government had no contact with Assad.
In a foreshadowing of one of the many complex dynamics that are likely to play out in the coming weeks and months, Fidan said he saw no room for the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the country’s future. Turkey considers the group, which is backed by the United States and controls roughly one-third of the country’s territory in northeastern Syria, to be an extension of its arch-nemesis, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Kurds in Syria, like the country more generally, face an unpredictable road ahead.
Speaking at the Doha Forum in Qatar on Saturday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was doing everything to ensure that “terrorists” would not be able to prevail in Syria, referring to HTS, which is designated as a terrorist group by the United Nations as well as the United States but whose leaders have sought to present a more moderate stance in recent years.
Lavrov met with his Iranian and Turkish counterparts on the sidelines of the summit on Saturday to discuss the situation in Syria. The officials from the three countries, all of which have sought to shape events in Syria in recent years, met again in the evening with the foreign ministers of five Arab states, where they huddled late into the night in a meeting room at the Sheraton Hotel.
In a joint statement issued after the meeting, the ministers called for an end to military operations and for a political solution to the crisis under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, adopted in 2015 and which called for a cease-fire and political settlement.
By Sunday morning, Assad was gone, his departure from the country later confirmed in a statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry. His whereabouts remain unknown.
“On the one hand, it’s amazing, remarkable that one of the worst war criminals in a very long time is out of the way,” said Charles Lister, the director of the Syria program at the Washington-based Middle East Institute. “But also it’s opened up a can of worms that frankly nobody has a vision for at the moment.” Assad has not been convicted of war crimes, but extensive evidence collected by human rights organizations and numerous foreign governments has documented his regime’s widespread abuses.
Another area of immediate concern is the likelihood that the Islamic State, which once exerted its bloody rule over swaths of Syria and Iraq, will try to take advantage of the situation, Lister said. There is also the question of whether to include HTS in future negotiations.
On Saturday, Pedersen, the U.N. envoy, called for urgent talks in Geneva to discuss the situation, but it remains unclear who will represent the country and the different factions within the talks.
“The fact that HTS is a listed group creates challenges,” Pedersen said on Sunday, noting that the processes within the U.N. to remove the group’s terrorist designation were beyond his control.
“We will continue to work to try, as I said, to make sure that we have as inclusive a process as possible,” he said. “But let me be honest, this is work in progress,” he added, saying that the realities on the ground were “changing all the time.”
The Syrian civil war has been marked by the involvement of a host of other countries backing different factions in the conflict as they sought to compete for influence and advance their interests.
“We’re also at the phase where a lot of external actors will be rechoosing their favored parties and proxies within the Syrian communities, and that’s a dangerous point, too,” Lister said.
Russia’s intervention in the conflict in 2015 in the form of punishing airstrikes on rebel-held areas proved pivotal to bolstering Assad’s grip on power, while Iran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, fought alongside Syrian government forces.
Seeing the writing on the wall, Iran began withdrawing its military commanders and personnel from Syria on Friday, leaving its longtime ally, Assad, to his fate.
“Iran made a choice to cut its losses,” said Sanam Vakil, the director of the Middle East and North Africa program at Chatham House. “It read the room. It recognized that there was a huge amount of momentum and that the army wasn’t prepared to fight.”
The United States intervened in the conflict in 2014 with airstrikes against the Islamic State and retained a small contingent of some 900 troops in the country’s northeast to support the SDF.
The collapse of the Assad regime also comes as Donald Trump is set to return to the White House in January. During his first term, Trump sought to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria but was persuaded against the move by advisors who warned that Iran and Russia would seek to fill the void. Trump also ordered strikes against Assad more than once.
On Saturday, Trump described Syria as a “mess” but not a “friend” of the United States. “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,” he wrote in a post on X.
The fall of the Syrian government came almost 14 months to the day since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, set off a chain of events that have upended the Middle East. Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance has been badly damaged in Israeli campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon, while Israel’s direct strikes on Iran have reportedly thrown a wrench in its missile production and taken out a number of its air defense systems. Tehran now finds itself at a moment of “profound weakness,” said Vakil, as Trump takes office again and his allies are promising a return of his maximum pressure campaign on the country.
While Syria’s future remains deeply uncertain, the situation also has “massive implications” for neighboring Lebanon, Amos Hochstein, the Biden administration’s point person for peace talks between Israel and Hezbollah, said at an event at the Doha Forum on Saturday.
Syria is the main land route for Iranian weapons deliveries to Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon.
“I think what’s happened in Syria, which of course happened the day after the cease-fire started, is now creating a new weakness for Hezbollah,” Hochstein said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday celebrated and claimed credit for Assad’s stunning political demise, contending it was a “direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, the main supporters of the Assad regime.” Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah has left the Tehran-backed militant group greatly diminished. The fighting resulted in the death of Hezbollah’s longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah, while dealing major setbacks to the group’s military capabilities. Israel and Hezbollah continue to trade fire despite a recent cease-fire agreement.
Shalom Lipner, a former advisor to a number of Israeli prime ministers, said Israel was likely cautiously optimistic about Assad’s collapse but would be closely monitoring the race to fill the power vacuum left in his wake. “Obviously, there are all kinds of concerns about who could take over once this thing shakes out,” Lipner said. “I think that it’s not just an Israeli concern—it’s an international concern.”
Amy Mackinnon reported from Doha, Qatar. John Haltiwanger reported from Washington.
The post Assad Has Fallen. What’s Next for Syria and the Middle East? appeared first on Foreign Policy.
