WASHINGTON — The stunning overthrow of Syrian President Bashar Assad by Islamist rebels half a century after his family took power raises an old question when it comes to regime change in the Middle East: Will the new governing forces behave any better than those that have been deposed?
“The Assad regime has fallen,” President Biden declared Sunday from the White House. “It’s a moment of historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria.”
“It’s also a moment of risk and uncertainty, as we all turn to the question of what comes next,” Biden said.
In a matter of weeks, the rebels achieved what the United Nations, the U.S. and other Western powers long tried but failed to do. The Russian government announced late Sunday local time that Assad and his family had arrived in Moscow and were being given asylum, Russian state news agencies reported.
Decades of brutal rule by Assad has left Syria fragmented ethnically, religiously and politically. The victorious insurgency is also divided. The leading group, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, known as HTS, traces its roots to the terror organizations Islamic State and Al Qaeda but claims to have reformed.
Long concerned about HTS taking power, Washington continues to designate it a terrorist group, which will complicate any dealings with it.
The rebel victory also scrambles regional relations. It deals a major setback to Assad’s allies Iran and Russia while boosting Turkey, which backed the HTS and will probably be Washington’s main conduit to Syria’s new leaders.
The U.S. backed a different rebel group, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, a Kurdish militia that helped defeat Islamic State but that Turkey considers a terrorist group.
Clashes between the SDF and Turkish-backed factions were already being reported on Sunday.
Israel, meanwhile, is glad to see the departures of an Iran-backed Assad but not exactly thrilled at having Islamist leaders next door. The country was already bolstering a buffer zone along the border between the Israel-controlled Golan Heights and Syria and joined in the bombing of a small number of sites inside Syria.
By any measure, the immediate future of Syria will be an unstable and potentially violent melange of competing groups, intense jockeying for power and settling of scores. Among worst-case scenarios are a deepening civil war or the conversion of the once-wealthy and now devastated country into a haven for militants such as the Islamic State.
After 24 hours monitoring what the White House called the “extraordinary” developments in Syria, Biden convened his National Security Council Sunday for updates and planning before speaking to the American public.
“We will remain vigilant,” Biden said, pledging to keep militants at bay and “do whatever we can to support” the Syrian people “to help restore Syria after more than a decade of war and a generation of brutality from the Assad family.”
By contrast, Donald Trump, who becomes president in about six weeks, said on his social media platform that the U.S. should “stay out of it.” “This is not our fight,” he said.
Similarly, as president in 2019, he declared that “someone else should fight” in Syria and in a much-criticized move ordered the withdrawal of most U.S. troops posted there, clearing the way for Turkey to move in and attack the United States’ Kurdish allies.
Several hundred U.S. troops remain in Syria, officially to counter any resurgence by Islamic State.
There are other looming issues, however, that might demand a U.S. role, officials said.
Syria will need huge amounts of humanitarian aid, especially if some of the millions of citizens who fled as refugees during the last decade of war begin to return to the ruins of their former homes.
Also, critically, U.S. officials expressed concern about Assad’s large stockpiles of armament, including missiles and chemical weapons, that could end up in the hands of the rebels. Assad notoriously used chemical weapons on his own people to put down rebellion and dissent.
Trump’s pick for director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, voiced support for Assad after a 2017 visit to Syria. She said she doubted U.S. intelligence reports that he had used chemical weapons inside his country.
For many ordinary Syrians, however, the principal concern is how minorities will be treated. Some, like the Alawite Shiite Muslim faction to which Assad’s family belonged, as well as some Kurds and Christians, are seen as having colluded with the regime. Most of the rebels are Sunni Muslims.
The first government to congratulate the opposition victory in Syria was Afghanistan’s radically conservative and repressive Islamic Taliban.
Ahmed Sharaa, the bearded commander of HTS, has sought to portray the group as a reformed and more moderate faction than its past associations suggest. He has preached tolerance and pluralism, although his rule over Syria’s Idlib province where HTS has held sway only displayed the most minimal version of such policies. Christians, for example, have been allowed to attend church.
“These sects have co-existed in the region for hundreds of years,” he told CNN in an interview last week as the rebels were advancing toward Damascus. “No one has the right to erase another group.”
He promised a “transition to a state of governance and institutions” and even suggested HTS could disband having achieved its military victory.
That would be a very unusual transition in the Middle East, where players who gain power tend to hold on to it.
The Assad regime began in 1970 with Bashar’s father Hafez. With an insidious intelligence service, routine imprisonment and torture of dissidents and iron-fist control of media and public speech, the Assads maintained a ferocious and violent control of the Syrian population.
The Arab Spring protests of 2011 led to a brutal crackdown and eventually a civil war that killed an estimated 500,000 people.
Assad remained in power with military help from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed political and military faction based in Lebanon. Over the last year or so, those three allies all lost their ability to defend him.
Russia is overextended in its nearly three years of war in Ukraine. Iran has been battered by Israel from outside and dissent and economic turmoil on the inside. And Hezbollah has been vastly weakened by Israeli assassinations and bombardments.
It is expected that Syria’s new leaders will close the Russian air base and port on the Mediterranean coast. Iran has lost a large portion if not all of its land and air routes to Lebanon and Hezbollah, its proxy there.
In his speech Sunday, Biden claimed some credit for the recent turn of events in Syria, as uncertain as its future may be.
“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions, diplomacy and targeted military force when necessary,” he said.