Over the weekend, Syrian opposition groups took over Damascus and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow, a sudden and embarrassing end to his family’s half-century dictatorship.
The 13-year old Syrian Civil War, which had ground to a stalemate in recent years, united the authoritarian governments of Iran and Russia in support of Assad, but also involved an intricate web of other players, including Kurds, Sunni Arab rebel groups, international jihadist movements, Turkey, and the United States.
To make sense of the abrupt end to this complex war and where Syria heads next, RDI spoke with Jennifer Cafarella, the director of strategic initiatives at the Institute for the Study of War, a noted expert on the conflict in Syria.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
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Christopher Schaefer (RDI): Syria is a small but diverse country. Could you give us an overview of the different ethnic and religious groups in Syria and their relation to the Assad regime?
Jennifer Cafarella (ISW): The regime of Bashar al-Assad was often described in Western press as a Shia Alawite minority regime with a power center that is concentrated primarily in the coastal heartland of Latakia and Tartus on the Mediterranean. There is truth to that categorization. However, the Assad regime only managed to secure control of the country and govern as a dictatorship for as long as it did by coercing other sects within Syria to align with the regime including minorities such as the Ismaili population and Syrian Christians.
The regime conscripted and forced into submission large elements of the majority Sunni Arab population. So, it is not as simple as saying the revolution was the Sunni Arabs against the Alawites. Some Syrian Christians, for example, also joined the opposition to Assad. It is more useful to understand Syria as divided along political lines rather than sectarian.
CS: Could you speak a little more about the repression and coercion that the Assad regime exercised over the Syrian people?
JC: To understand the regime that Hafez al-Assad created and bestowed upon his son Bashar, unfortunately you need to call to mind the horrors of Nazi Germany. It is difficult to fathom the scale of the killing—the torture, the executions, the imprisonment—that the Assad regime long conducted against its own people for simply daring to disagree with the regime.
The horrors of Sednaya Prison, which has always been the worst of the worst within Syria, are only starting to emerge. We’re going to learn a lot more in the coming days and weeks, but what we are already seeing is clear evidence of the atrocities that the Syrian opposition has long alleged was happening in regime dungeons.
The opposition that arose against Assad in 2011 was responding directly to this oppression. They called for dignity for the Syrian population, for the release of political prisoners and other very basic human rights. Assad viewed any proposal to grant such basic human rights to his population as an existential threat, and as we all know, responded with as much violence as he could muster against his population.
In my view, it is nothing short of a tragedy that the international community did not listen, did not provide greater assistance to the Syrians fighting for basic human dignity and human rights, and that we allowed Assad to continue to execute Syrians by tens of thousands in these prisons.
CS: The big question that everyone is asking is why the Syrian army collapsed right now. How did this happen so quickly?
JC: The rapid collapse of the Assad regime is a product of a perfect confluence of factors. Factor one is the inherent rot and fragility of the regime itself, which neither the Russians nor the Iranians solved after deploying to Syria last decade.
Russia and Iran kept Assad in power by overpowering the armed opposition to Assad and by defeating the will of many Syrian rebels to continue to fight—they did not fix the core failings of his regime. When Assad seized large swaths of terrain after 2015, including the fall of Aleppo in December 2016, he gained territory through negotiated surrenders of Syrian opposition groups, which Russia brokered. It now seems clear that the Russians vastly overestimated how enduring those reconciliation deals would be.
Factor two was the weakening of both Russia and Iran in other wars. Since late last year, Israel’s wars against Hamas in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon, combined with Israel’s targeted strikes against key elements of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, have severely weakened the critical land power that Iran provided to Assad. The Russians, who had provided the air power in Syria, similarly overextended in Ukraine after 2022, not anticipating the scale of the military investment that invasion would require. While the Russian footprint in Syria had always been relatively limited, Russia’s lack of reserves and ability to send additional assets into Syria is certainly a factor in the collapse of the Assad regime.
CS: What did Russia and Iran gain from their support of the Assad regime in Syria?
JC: Iran deployed in support of Assad in order to sustain its pipeline of military support to Lebanese Hezbollah and to pursue their own hegemonic vision for essentially an Iranian empire in the Middle East. Iran has long bragged about its victory in securing multiple Arab capitals in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, as well as Lebanon.
The Russians clearly saw Syria as a strategic opportunity to position themselves as a regional power broker in the Middle East and to gain a power projection platform into Africa, which the Russians pursued quite aggressively after establishing the air and naval base on the Syrian coast.
The resulting internationalization of the war protracted it and denied Syrians the opportunity to put enough pressure on Assad to force a transition. Only now do we see the Syrians seizing control once again of their own revolution.
CS: It wasn’t only the Russians and Iranians who were international players in Syria, though. Turkey played a role and so did jihadist groups, most notably ISIS. What happened to ISIS since they were last in the headlines?
JC: ISIS’s resurgence initially in the Middle East began after the US withdrew from Iraq in 2011. What formerly had been Al-Qaeda in Iraq resurged in the security vacuum that the United States left in part because of sectarian policies by the new Iraqi government. I start here because one of the commanders of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that played a key role in the developments that led to the creation of ISIS was a Syrian by the name of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. In 2011, he deployed to Syria along with a cell from Al-Qaeda in Iraq to take advantage of the growing chaos within Syria as the revolution turned into a civil war in order to create a Syrian wing of the organization.
What happened next was a power play within the Al-Qaeda in Iraq organization rooted in a disagreement over how to handle the Syrian revolution and key ideological divides. A schism resulted between Jolani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Iraqi wing that became the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. Baghdadi seized control of large portions of Eastern Syria, and Jolani formed a separate organization that he named Jabhat al-Nusra that deployed to Western Syria in order to prioritize fighting Assad.
ISIS implemented a very top down tyrannical form of Islamic law on the portions of Syria that it seized, which was essentially the flip side of the coin to Assad’s own tyranny. And in Western Syria, Jolani offered a model that was much more focused on fighting Assad first and building consensus within Syrian society for Jolani’s Islamist vision of a new Syrian state, which we are currently seeing Jolani pursue now that the Assad regime has fallen.
CS: How should we understand HTS? Where do they fit in the spectrum of Islamist political and military movements, moving from, say, Turkey’s democratically elected AKP party, all the way over to ISIS?
JC: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, is purposefully a difficult case. Jolani, who turned Jabhat al-Nusra into HTS, has proven himself to be a very shrewd political actor and a capable military leader. He announced a formal break from Al-Qaeda and declared that his organization would not pursue any transnational aims when he rebranded his movement Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Since then, Jolani has continued to put forward an increasingly moderate face in order to do two things. One, continue to try to build support within Syria for his rule, and two, to reduce his risks of continued terror designations, sanctions, potential targeting, and other isolation for his organization.
Jolani fought ISIS, but only because they declared him enemy number one in Syria. He has attacked and defeated some transnational and al-Qaeda affiliated groups that operated within Syria when they challenged his authority and his consolidation of control. But it remains an open question how far he will go to deny Syria as a safe haven for groups that he historically has been ideologically aligned with.
It is important to recognize, though, that Jolani’s bid for support within Syria has not been universally successful. What we don’t want to allow Jolani to do is what the Taliban has done in Afghanistan: present a more tolerable face to the international community to promise to uphold certain rights within Syrian society only to revoke those rights as soon as he has consolidated control and international attention has shifted elsewhere.
CS: What are you keeping your eyes on moving forward, whether in terms of international pressure on Jolani or how he engages with the other factions within the Syrian political system?
JC: Jolani and HTS have declared a transitional body and indicated that it will remain in control until March of next year. During that time, I suspect that Jolani will move very quickly and aggressively to build consensus within different elements of Syrian society for his vision, which again, he hasn’t actually achieved yet. In the meantime, there is a significant risk of reprisals against the Alawites, other loyalist communities, and regime officials who participated in the brutal treatment of Syrians over decades.
What should happen first, in my view, is that the international community establish a legitimate war crimes prosecution mechanism that is not controlled by Jolani and his organization, to ensure that justice is done in a way that affirms the original values and demands of the opposition that arose in 2011 rather than allow Syria to descend into a new spasm of extrajudicial violence. Second, the Syrian people need sanctions relief. The United States and other countries applied sanctions on Assad’s regime because he would have stolen reconstruction funds that were meant to enable Syrians to return to their homes. Now that Assad is gone, the Syrians need those reconstruction funds to rebuild their society and homes.
CS: To conclude, what lessons do you think we should draw from these events?
JC: Number one is that dictatorships that are adversaries of the United States are aligning in order to fracture international stability and international bodies that otherwise constrain their freedom of action. The Russia-Iran axis, which was forged in 2015, is now at war with Ukraine’s democracy. It is pulling in North Korea in support of its war against Ukraine’s democracy, and it has continued to seek further alignment with China, both before Assad’s fall inside of Syria and inside of Ukraine.
The United States must recognize that these regional conflicts will be used by these American adversaries in pursuit of their global ambitions, unless the United States can counter the alignment between these dictatorships and deny them opportunities to hijack local wars or to topple democratic governments in pursuit of their own imperial aims.
What the Russians, the Iranians, and other elements of this anti-American axis have created is a perception that democracies fail and a perception that these dictatorial regimes are so strong they cannot and should not be resisted. Syrians have proven that narrative to be false. Ukrainians are proving that narrative to be false at great cost. It is my very deep hope that the Ukrainians will eventually enjoy the same victory that Syrians are now enjoying.
Christopher Schaefer is communications manager at the Renew Democracy Initiative.
Jennifer Cafarella is the director of strategic initiatives at the Institute for the Study of War.
