Hope and Fear in Syria

The brutal regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad fell in a week. Syrians have been preparing for this moment for years.

By Elizabeth Parker-Magyar

December 2024

A decade ago, weeks after the Assad regime’s chemical-weapons attacks in Ghouta, I began work as a journalist and translator at a small newsroom in Amman. At the time, it was characteristic of the initiatives popping up among Syrians in exile. The website was staffed by a tiny team: a few Europeans and Americans working alongside a handful of Syrians who were among the hundreds of thousands arriving in Jordan that year.

One of my coworkers had smuggled himself out of the siege of Homs through the sewer network. He had made it through the desert and to Jordan mostly on foot, skinny and bitingly sarcastic about the ordeal. At that time, the violence of the war made stories like his seem almost quotidian — nearly every Syrian I met had experienced deep trauma. But for those I translated for, the trauma they had experienced was narrated closely alongside the belief that their sacrifice came on behalf of a new Syria, free of Bashar al-Assad’s rule — and just around the corner.

As will forever be relitigated, that is not what happened. President Barack Obama’s hopes for a deal with Iran and fears of the “Libya scenario” led him to opt against U.S. intervention, while Hezbollah, Russia, and Iran redoubled their support for Assad. The war settled into a grinding, never-ending brutality. After Assad’s regime regained control of Aleppo in 2016, it seemed that the Assad regime would indeed rule Syria “forever, forever,” as schoolyard chants in the era of his father, Hafez al-Assad (1970–2000), always insisted it would.

Borders hardened as anti-Syrian sentiment rose and foreign-aid funding declined in places like Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. Many of the anti-Assad Syrians I interviewed in the suburbs of Damascus and Homs and the city of Aleppo were gradually forcibly displaced — literally starved out — to the northwest. Those remaining in government-held areas sought to shield their sons from conscription and confronted a collapsing and increasingly rapacious state. Amid hyperinflation, civil servants’ monthly salaries could purchase little beyond transportation to work.

Outside Syria, too few of the Syrians I knew were able to find legal pathways to migrate. Dozens of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances instead risked their lives to get to Europe via winding pathways through Libyan prisons or Belarussian forests or small dinghies bobbing in the waves off of Greece. Some disappeared en route. The ones who made it have reestablished themselves elsewhere, raising their children in hard-earned safety and security.

After fourteen years and incredible destruction, Bashar al-Assad’s fall came more quickly than anyone could have anticipated. Without the support of his foreign backers, it took eight days for rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), translated as the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, to advance from Aleppo to Damascus.

“After all of these years and all of this blood, no Syrian even in his own army wants to die for Bashar al-Assad,” a Syrian friend told me three days before the regime’s collapse. In the hours since his fall, many Syrians online have shared the phrase “Nothing is forever,” reframing the chants they had been forced to repeat in their youth.

If the Assads are not forever, it is far too soon to know what comes next.

The Dangers That Remain

Assad’s fall is unlikely to end Syria’s violence. As scholars often note, the most likely outcome of any civil war is another civil war. But while many are quick to draw parallels with grim outcomes in settings like Iran or Afghanistan, these can only travel so far.

While Assad’s exit did not come through the staged negotiations long hoped for, Assad’s arrival in Moscow and HTS’s communication with his prime minister has spared Syria grisly scenes like those of Muammar al-Qadhafi’s death in 2011, which helped to first set Libya on its path to violence.

While some rightfully fear that HTS will impose the same autocratic control that it has in Idlib across the rest of Syria, it is not clear the group has the capacity to do so. The first opposition groups to enter Damascus came from the south, where rebels had earlier “reconciled” with Assad, have fewer ties to HTS, and stronger links to Jordan. As Assad’s regime fell, Turkish-backed militias seized territory from U.S.-backed Kurdish groups, who in turn advanced on positions long held by Assad and Iran near Deir al-Zour, while Israel immediately seized more land in the Golan Heights and launched hundreds of airstrikes across Syria. None of these actors will be quick to disarm, nor will militias empowered by Assad, Iran, or Russia. Syria could remain fragmented. Any bloc that does emerge will be far weaker than the prewar Assad regime, which sustained itself not only through military supremacy but also via entrenched intelligence services that, over several generations of wanton violence, torture, and mass imprisonment, enforced dystopian levels of self-censorship and fear.

More unpredictable is the threat of continued intercommunal violence. HTS is eager to shed its label as a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, which would allow any government HTS is part of to access the funds Syria desperately needs to rebuild. The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has taken pains to assuage Syria’s minorities, made a show of communicating with Assad’s prime minister over the peaceful transfer of state institutions, and issued a general amnesty for conscripts. As analysts like Dareen Khalifa write, these announcements follow closely from the group’s long-evolving “strategic pragmatism” in Idlib. As evidenced by the jubilant and fearful Syrians crossing paths at the Lebanese border, preventing sectarian violence will prove to be a far more difficult and long-term task. Even as HTS emphasizes the culpability of “the Assad family,” any central power that emerges in Syria will grapple with the urgent need for transitional justice alongside a desire and impulse to bury a bloody past.

Syrians also rightfully fear their country will continue to be a battlefield for foreign powers, reminded of the interventions that have derailed transitions in Sudan, Libya, and Yemen. Assad’s fall is intimately linked to Israel’s body blows to Hezbollah and Iran — the aftershocks of which will continue to reverberate in the region. It is not just Israel and Turkey that may try to exert influence. The United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, as well as neighbors in Jordan and Iraq, will in some form all be tempted to maintain or deepen whatever influence they have established in Syria.

Articulating these realities does not detract from how meaningful Assad’s fall is for Syria’s future. They should, however, temper the cynical instincts of governments in Europe, North America, and Syria’s neighbors to pressure Syrian refugees to return or to halt their claims for asylum, as some governments across Europe already have. For so many reasons, Syria remains far too dangerous for too many.

A Source of Optimism

Despite these fears, the proliferation and evolution of Syrian-run humanitarian initiatives, media outlets, and nonviolent organizations underscore the possibilities for a more pluralistic and accountable path forward. Drawing on testimonies from Syrian participants in the 2011 revolution, Wendy Pearlman has written that the Syrians who took to the streets then were “mobilizing from scratch.” As she detailed, the total absence of associational or political life under Assad meant these communities had none of the networks and organizations that normally facilitate mass protest, and that often form the foundation of what comes next. That phrase resonated with the experiences of my colleagues in our tiny newsroom, many of whom were teenagers when they had decided to film the protests emerging from their high school classrooms — and who now found themselves pursuing careers as journalists in exile.

Fourteen years later, Syrians are not mobilizing from scratch. Indeed, perhaps the greatest source of hope comes in the lessons they have learned throughout the long war, the organizations they have built during it, and the autonomous networks they have relied upon as Syria’s centralized authority slowly withered from within.

From smaller media, humanitarian, and educational organizations in exile, to governance initiatives in areas of Syria outside of Assad’s control, to the neighborhood-level groupings in government-held areas, Syrians have developed a wealth of local organizations that will be eager to contribute to a nonviolent future. As scholar Rana Khoury writes and activists such as Marcelle Shehwaro narrate, these organizations retained their agency and voice while navigating continuous violence, tensions between those in Syria and in its diaspora, and the distortions wrought by foreign aid.

HTS’s bureaucracy may be dominating attention, but each armed opponent of Assad’s regime self-consciously developed local institutions to provide services such as education, healthcare, and civil records — informing the perspective of thousands of Syrians. Even as too little foreign aid has reached initiatives led by Syrians themselves, Syrian-run organizations such as the Molham Team played critical roles in the 2023 earthquake response in northwest Syria and groups like Jusoor have long provided Syrians important access to education in neighboring Lebanon and Jordan.

Though many of the initial, ardently revolutionary organizations have been shuttered, silenced, or changed form, the evident popularity of the narratives they espoused points to the capacity for more sustained influence from the organizations that have survived. In the days since the fall of Assad, writer Yassin Al Haj Saleh — whose wife, Samira Khalil, was among the prominent activists whom Islamist rebels kidnapped in the Damascus suburbs in 2013 — has called for redoubled caution and continued mobilization. The newspaper Saleh edits, Al Joumhouria, remains widely read. Many of the Syrian journalists and analysts I first met a decade ago have grown into reporters well-sourced to make sense of even the bewildering news of the past few days. In the days and weeks to come, some of them could experience the thrill of reuniting with their families. Others will revel in the renewed freedom of dropping the pseudonyms they have long used to protect themselves.

As events shift hourly, some of the earliest news highlights domestic voices and organizations’ capacity for influence. As the strength of the Syrian state gradually receded in recent years, neighborhood-level committees, drawing on their own deeply localized sources of authority, developed the authority to negotiate many of the conflict’s truces, and in recent years have voiced demands for basic services.

When Syria’s rebels advanced toward Damascus last week, those same local committees reportedly helped to negotiate the surrender and withdrawal of government forces from their communities — helping to explain the relatively limited civilian-casualty total thus far. On Monday, as harrowing scenes unfolded at the notorious Sednaya Prison outside Damascus in the 24 hours after Assad’s fall, a small organization with roots in Syria’s revolution, the Association of Detainees and the Missing in Sednaya Prison, drew on its expertise to temper fast-circulating rumors that tens of thousands were still underground.

The logic of violence among actors unlikely to disarm will play a guiding role in Syria’s future. But the nonviolent institutions and organizations that Syrians have set up to govern themselves and to survive the past fourteen years will also be critical in what comes next. While fear of the future remains, we should listen to and find cautious optimism in their networks and voices.

Elizabeth Parker-Magyar is the Moulay Hicham Alaoui Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She will join Yale University’s Department of Political Science as an Assistant Professor in July 2025.

Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy

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