Qunfuz

Qantara has published an article of mine in not one but three languages. The German version is here. The Arabic version is here. And the English version is here on the Qantara site, and reprinted below.

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When Syria’s Assad regime collapsed in December 2024, it was replaced at first by a wave of euphoria. The final rebel offensive had taken a mere 11 days to reach Damascus from Idlib. Assad’s army made no last stand in the capital, as many had feared it would, but simply dissolved. The final battles involved no sectarian massacres and almost no civilian casualties. The tyranny that had ruled by terror for over half a century ended with a whimper rather than a bang.  

Syrians couldn’t believe their luck. After decades in which public gatherings had been banned, men and women, the secular and the religious, rushed to the streets to celebrate. The triumphant gunfire and ululations of the first days soon mellowed into bouts of communal dancing and flag-waving in city squares. The revolutionary song “Raise your head up high / You’re a free Syrian” was amplified everywhere. 

Numerous smaller celebrations lit up the country’s destroyed cities and villages as displaced people returned home and were finally reunified with their relatives. More than 3 million Syrians, including both refugees and the internally displaced, have returned to their areas of origin. And the wild enthusiasm unleashed by the liberation has persisted. Even a year later, I saw people arriving in Damascus airport dressed in the revolutionary flag. 

In reality, liberation took a lot longer than 11 days. It followed almost 14 years of revolution and war during which the regime was slowly hollowed out and the country splintered into militia fiefdoms. Over half the population was driven from their homes. Many Syrians had to resort to sub-national identities – sectarian, regional or ethnic – for solidarity and protection. The civic and democratic revolution that produced hundreds of self-governing local councils was largely drowned in violence, crushed by local warlords and foreign states. 

So, though the regime collapsed, it isn’t quite correct to say that the revolution won. What happened is that the strongest rebel militia—Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with Ahmad al-Sharaa as leader—assumed power when Assad fled. Many of the original civil revolutionaries were disturbed by this. My colleague Amer Matar, director of the documentation project the Prisons Museum and the person who gave me the title for my book on the new Syria, put it bluntly: “Ten years ago [al-Sharaa’s] group was cutting off the heads of revolutionaries. How can we trust these people? There is blood between us.” 

It was certainly problematic that an authoritarian Islamist militia had achieved power in multicultural Syria, but it could have been so much worse. HTS had been moderated by the exigencies of power while it ruled the Idlib pocket. It had moved away from Salafi-Jihadism towards the traditional Sunni mainstream. It allowed civil society to participate in service provision and learned to tolerate a certain level of dissent. This wasn’t an ISIS takeover, as some propagandists claimed, but the arrival in government of a militia that had fought ISIS and al-Qaeda and had already cooperated with powers like Turkey and the United States. 

Most Syrians support their new government and praise its undoubted achievements. Without the discipline and military prowess of HTS, the liberation would not have happened. Since then, the HTS-led government has brought the formerly SDF-ruled northeast back under central control, securing the survival of the Syrian state. Its deft diplomacy has reconnected a long-isolated Syria to the world and helped lift US and EU sanctions. The economic improvements—like all-day electricity in some regions—are obvious, even if the economy is still in crisis. 

Yet the government is “revolutionary” only in the narrow sense that it follows the collapse of the old order. Rather than establishing a transitional council representing the various currents of Syrian politics—leftist, liberal and nationalist as well as Islamist—it has kept real power within its own circle. It did organise a brief “National Dialogue”, but one that was neither truly national nor a real dialogue.  

So far, there has been too much rule by presidential decree. One hopes this is temporary, given the necessity of rebuilding homes and returning and registering refugees before meaningful national elections can be held, but there are concerns about the slow pace of political reform. No law on political parties has been legislated, for instance, so Syrians still don’t have the opportunity to organise politically on a national level.