The fall of Syria’s dictator

SYRIANS HAVEHTSHTSHTSSDFSDFUAEUAEHTSHTSHTSSDFHTS seen these scenes before: their countrymen tearing down posters of Bashar al-Assad, overrunning his army bases, storming the jails where he keeps political prisoners. But that was ten years ago and more. They had not expected to see them again. And they certainly had not expected what came next: abandoned by his army and his foreign allies, Mr Assad has fled the country. The Syrian dictator’s brutal 24-year reign has come to a sudden end.His defeat took less than two weeks. On November 27th rebels launched an offensive in north-west Syria, ostensibly to retaliate for the shelling of rebel-held areas. As they pressed forward, the regime’s army melted away, so the rebels kept going. They took , Syria’s second city, on November 29th, and then Hama to the south on December 5th. Two days later they reached Homs, Syria’s third-largest city.The rebels are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (), a former al-Qaeda affiliate that broke with the jihadist group in 2017 and has for years governed a slice of north-west Syria. They met stiffer opposition around Homs than in Hama or Aleppo, but the city fell nonetheless. That allowed the rebels to sever the highway that links inland Damascus to the coast, the heartland of Mr Assad’s Alawite sect.But other insurgents beat to Damascus. Over the past few days the rebellion has spread to southern Syria. The fighting there does not involve ; instead it is led by local groups that have their own long-standing issues with the regime. They claimed control of the three governorates south of the capital, including Daraa, where the Syrian uprising began in 2011. Then they started driving north.By the evening of December 7th they had reached the southern suburbs of Damascus. There were poignant scenes in places like Daraya, a Damascus suburb where civilians were to survive a four-year regime siege that ended in 2016. In Jaramana, to the east of Damascus, residents pulled down a statue of Hafez al-Assad, the president’s father.Meanwhile, in the north-east, the Syrian Democratic Forces (), a mainly Kurdish militia, is on the march as well. It is pushing the regime out of Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in the east. The has also seized al-Bukamal, a border crossing that has been a vital conduit for smuggling weapons and drugs. The mayor of al-Qaim, a border town in Iraq, says thousands of Syrian troops have sought refuge there.The regime’s ever-shrinking rump state, consisting of Damascus and the coast, was almost totally encircled by the evening of December 7th. Nobody had seen Mr Assad in days. His office claimed that he was still in Damascus, working as usual, but there were no images to confirm it. Many Syrians thought he was long gone. His family was already thought to be in Russia and the United Arab Emirates ().In a video message hours later Muhammad al-Jalali, the Syrian prime minister, said the regime was prepared to hand control to a transitional government. The army chief told officers that Mr Assad’s reign had ended. There is still no official word on the president’s whereabouts.Syrians are in shock at the regime’s swift collapse—even though it had looked inevitable for days. Mr Assad’s foreign allies offered only token help. Russia carried out some scattered air strikes in northern Syria, while Iran said it would send missiles and drones. But Mr Assad would have needed much more than that to repel the rebel offensive. His allies voted with their feet. On December 6th the Russian embassy in Damascus told its citizens to leave Syria while they still could. Iran also reportedly evacuated some of its military personnel.A desperate Mr Assad then tried courting Arab states. Multiple sources say he made a personal appeal to Muhammad bin Zayed, the president of the , who has a well-known hatred of Islamist groups like . He has also begged for help from Egypt, Jordan and other countries. But nobody was willing to help a regime that seemed like a lost cause. “He’s telling everyone he wants to fight,” one well-connected Syrian said of Mr Assad before his fall. “The problem is that no one else wants to fight for him.”What happens next is impossible to predict. will want a big role in governing a post-Assad Syria. It already runs a reasonably competent government in Idlib, in north-western Syria, and it is trying to enforce discipline among its fighters. An edict on December 7th warned them not to loot government offices or private homes, and to avoid firing their guns in the air.But probably lacks the resources to govern a big, diverse country. The farther it gets from Idlib, the more it will need to work with others. Rebels in the south might want a degree of autonomy; so will the in the north-east. Though has tried to reassure Christians, Alawites and other minorities, it is likely that some of them will flee the country.As the rebels advanced on Damascus, officials from Iran, Russia and Turkey met on the sidelines of a conference in Qatar to discuss Syria’s future. They did not agree on much. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, called for dialogue between the regime and the opposition; events on the ground may swiftly make that moot. Whoever governs Syria next, Russia’s priority will be to keep its naval base at Tartus, its sole port on the Mediterranean.Turkey, which has backed the rebels in northern Syria, will have the most influence over how they act. Donald Trump, America’s president-elect, seems content to let others sort out the mess: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT,” he wrote on social media.For many Syrians, though, such questions can wait. There is great unease about the future—but greater relief that the end of the Assad regime, which brought so much death and destruction, has finally come.