Today the world woke up to a Syria without Bashar al-Assad, a reality that many felt unimaginable even just weeks ago. But in the early hours of the morning on 8th December, the regime fell. Having made lightning advances from south-west and north-west Syria in the past week, armed opposition groups then secured complete control of Damascus for the first time in the nation’s 13-year-old conflict.
Over the past 10 days, Operation Deterring Aggression, spearheaded by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in the north-west, made rapid advances from Idlib, taking Aleppo city before quickly moving on to Hama and Homs (which fell on 7th December). The operation’s initial successes sparked hopeful anti-Assad demonstrations in the south, and saw the mobilization of large numbers of young men in the north-west to join the fight against the regime. Following these successes, factions operating under the southern opposition’s Military Operations Command launched a second front, advancing quickly towards Damascus from the south. Regime frontlines quickly collapsed, with army, militia and shabeeha units fleeing desperately towards the capital. As the opposition advanced, residents in former centrifuges of the 2011 uprising around the capital—such as Darayya, Moadamiyet al-Sham and Eastern Ghouta—took to the streets, pulling down statues of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad and chanting for the downfall of the regime.
The images coming out of Syria are jubilant, hopeful and heart-breaking. But if nothing else, they demonstrate Syrians taking up an agency that has been so long denied to them, whether during the 2011 uprising and armed rebellion or the repression, corruption and tyranny that defined Syria’s decades under the Assad family.
Five decades of Assad rule turned Syria into a surveillance state defined by arbitrary detentions, imprisonment and torture. This only worsened after the 2011 uprising: borrowing from his father’s playbook, Bashar al-Assad deployed brutal tactics to suppress the peaceful protests against his rule. Many of the cities liberated in the past ten days—among them, Aleppo, Hama and Darayya—are synonymous with the horrors perpetrated by the regime: siege and bombardment, starvation to submission, chemical weapons attacks and large-scale massacres against civilians.
With each advance came the liberation of the regime’s notorious prison system, including perhaps most miraculously, from Sednaya—the horrific black-site once described as a “human slaughterhouse” where tens of thousands have been executed in recent years. Some of those being freed today have been in Assad’s prison system for decades, and videos from the ground depict men, women and even young children walking free from prisons.
For years, Syrians have talked about what “the day after” Assad might look like. Now that Assad is gone, that day after is finally here. And understandably, there will be many questions about what comes next. Of course, the coming period will be full of challenges—will there be a transitional government? Will there be elections? And can Syria’s armed opposition take steps towards overseeing a genuine democratic transition that represents all Syrians?
For now, Syrians will celebrate. The events of the past 10 days have demonstrated the resilience and will of the Syrian people to finally achieve freedom, something that until very recently many believed impossible.
