Syrian President Assad toppled after lightning rebel advance

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government has fallen after a stunning territorial advance by opposition groups over the past few days.

On Sunday morning, state television announced the “triumph of the great Syrian revolution and the fall of the criminal Assad regime.” Assad decided to step down and left the country, Russia’s foreign ministry later said in a statement.

The toppling of the longtime ruler is sending shock waves through the Middle East and will be a major blow to Russia and Iran, his main foreign backers.

Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, which has led the push to oust Assad and his government, entered Damascus on Saturday evening and captured the key city of Homs — about 100 miles (160 kilometers) north of the capital — around the same time. Other areas of the country, including in the north near the Turkish border and in the south, have been captured by different groups.

Videos and broadcast footage showed Syrians in Damascus and elsewhere celebrating the downfall of the widely despised regime. There were also signs of jubilation in Turkey, which hosts millions of Syrian refugees.

HTS’s leader, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, called on all of the Syrian government’s forces in the capital to stand down. Al-Sharaa, also known as Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani, said Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali will remain in his role until there’s an official handover.

Al-Jalali, speaking to Al Arabiya television, said he didn’t know where Assad was. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict, said he took a flight from Damascus and left the country. U.S. officials currently believe Assad is in Moscow, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The 59-year-old, who took over from his father Hafez in 2000, made a last-ditch attempt to remain in power, including indirect diplomatic overtures to the U.S. and President-elect Donald Trump, Bloomberg reported on Saturday. In a sign of how weak his military position was, he ordered his army to fall back on Damascus, essentially ceding much of the country, including Homs, to the insurgents.

Syria was reclassified as a low-income country by the World Bank in 2018, with its gross domestic product collapsing by more than half between 2010 and 2020. Its exports chiefly comprise products such as olive oil, nuts and phosphates, according to the CIA World Factbook. It also produces and traffics narcotics, the U.S. State Department says.

Trump took to social media to say that the U.S. should “have nothing to do with” the developments in Syria. “This is not our fight,” he said. “Let it play out. Do not get involved!”

President Joe Biden’s administration, in power until next month, showed little inclination to intervene and has said the U.S. has nothing to do with HTS’s rebellion.

The U.S. and Israel, which borders Syria, are watching warily. Assad was no ally of theirs, and Washington has severely sanctioned the Syrian government. But HTS is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and other Western countries.

On Sunday morning, Israel said it had deployed forces in a buffer zone near Syria to protect communities in the Golan Heights. The Israeli military added it’s not involved with what’s happening in Syria.

“It should be remembered that these rebels aren’t lovers of Zion,” Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told Israel’s Channel 14. “It’s true that everyone is today welcoming the weakening of Iran — something that is certainly very significant from a regional perspective. But there is also concern that parties aligned with terrorist organizations” will use Assad’s weapons against Israel.

HTS, a Sunni group, broke away from al-Qaeda in 2016 and has tried to portray itself since then as more moderate. Al-Sharaa, in an interview with CNN on Dec. 5, said non-Muslims and other minorities would be safe in Syrian areas overseen by HTS. The leader, in his early 40s, attributed the success of opposition forces to greater discipline and unity.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in a statement warned “the country must not now fall into the hands of other radicals — whatever guise.” France called on its partners “to do their utmost to help the Syrians find the path to reconciliation and reconstruction through an inclusive political solution.”

Syria’s political situation is likely to remain fluid as various groups try to bolster their positions, according to risk consulting firm RANE.

“The collapse will likely trigger a contested political process among competing rebel factions to create a provisional government,” said Freddy Khoueiry, RANE’s global security analyst. “This will likely be a slow process prone to violence as foreign actors try to shape the postwar balance of power, making an unstable and fragmented Syria the most likely outcome in the near term.”

Assad lost large swaths of the northwest of the country in late November as opposition fighters made a sudden advance out of Idlib province. They first captured Aleppo, one of the biggest cities in Syria, and then advanced on Hama.

The rapid collapse of Syria’s government has taken Russia, Iran and the U.S. by surprise. In 2015, Russia and Iran came to Assad’s aid and helped turn the tide in Syria’s war — which began four years earlier — in his favor.

This time both Tehran and Moscow, which has a naval base at the Syrian port of Tartus, have been stretched by conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine. Iran tried to drum up support for Assad among Arab states. It also said it would send Iranian troops to Syria if he requested it, but was ultimately unwilling or unable to.

Moreover, Tehran’s most powerful proxy militia group, Lebanon-based Hezbollah, has been hugely degraded since September by war with Israel. Its fighters were crucial to helping Assad stay in power from early in the civil war.

The Syrian conflict has left between 300,000 to 500,000 people dead and displaced more than 10 million, with many of them fleeing abroad, according to United Nations agencies and Syrian organizations.

_____

(With assistance from Peter Martin, Dan Williams and Selcan Hacaoglu.)

_____