A carnival of joy has erupted in Syria with the fall of the strongman Bashar al-Assad. Syrians have waited a long time and paid a heavy price for this jubilation. Thirteen years ago, the country’s revolution began with peaceful demonstrations; since then, by one estimate, more than 600,000 Syrians have lost their lives. The dictatorship’s list of crimes is much longer than that, encompassing peacetime abuses and stretching back 54 years, to when Assad’s father, Hafez, first assumed the throne. The Ba’ath Party, which once sought dominion over the entire Arab world, has now lost its final foothold.
The relief and joy over the fall of Assad are more than justified, but soon they will give way to the tough work of building a new order in a country battered by years of war and oppression. The success of this task will depend primarily on two factors: the ability of Assad’s many different opponents to work together, and the willingness of neighboring countries, chiefly Turkey, to accept the outcome.
Within a year of its inception in 2011, Syria’s revolution devolved into a civil war, and the country’s territory has since been divided among an assortment of armed groups. Even now, after the fall of Assad, several entities rule over different parts of the country. Damascus was liberated by three groups: the Islamist outfit Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS); the Southern Operations Room, formed only a few days ago as a coalition of local anti-regime militias in the south; and the United States–backed Syrian Free Army, a militia that has long controlled the area near the Syrian-Jordanian-Iraqi triple border. Farther from the capital, two more groups compete over the northern and eastern regions of the country: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by a left-wing Kurdish party with links to fellow Kurds in Turkey; and its mortal opponent, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA). Even as Syrians celebrated the fall of Damascus, the SDF and SNA were clashing over control of Manbij, the only major town the SDF held west of the Euphrates.
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