The end this morning of the Al Asad family, after more than half a century ruling Syria with an iron fistrepresents the elimination of an instrument of cohesion conceived as a result of atrocity against the Syrian people and the opening of a new era marked especially by the preceding civil war, as well as by the existence of numerous political and armed groups spread throughout the country, conditioned by many of them by foreign powers such as the United States, Russia or Turkey.
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has left power by force, unable to contain the unstoppable advance of a heterogeneous collective of opposition forces that include jihadists, Kurdish militias loaded with historical demands, armed rebel groups assisted by Türkiye and a conglomerate of local factions from the south of the country. His regime has fallen after an offensive by these opposition groups from several fronts, mainly from the northwest and south of the country, plus the additional push of Kurdish groups in the Syrian northeast.
The first hours of Syria without the Al-Assads have been marked by international calls to avoid the “balkanization” of a country where right now there coexists a Kurdish administration established in the northeast (Rojava), a jihadist bastion in the province of Idlib and a political vacuum in a capital that is becoming throughout the day the germ of an effort to begin a dialogue of transition, the outcome still uncertain, especially after 15 years of civil war that has cost more than 350,000 lives and a catastrophic humanitarian crisis, according to the UN.
The conflict is not over
The conflict is by no means over: Türkiye continues to undertake its military campaign against Kurdish groups along its border with northern Syria, the same ones that have received support from the United States to combat the traveling cells of the Islamic State jihadist organization that still roam the country, and have thousands of family members and children detained. in inhumane conditions in Kurdish prisons such as Al Hol. “The last thing we needed,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan acknowledged this weekend, “is for the Islamic State to explode again in this scenario.”
To all this we must add a regional scenario also marked by constant transformation through conflict, whether nearby or more distant.
Erosion caused by war in Ukraine led Russia to reduce essential support which he granted to Al-Asad to subdue the opposition groups. Israel, for its part, has declared broken the historic separation agreement with Syria and has entered the Golan demilitarized zone.
The United States, for its part, approaches this new era in the midst of the transition to the return of Donald Trump, who this past Saturday declared his intention to disassociate himself from this entire mattera wish that may not be fulfilled in a frayed country. Syria’s strongmen, waiting to see the behavior of the apparent leader of the offensive, the head of the Hayat Tahrir Al Sham jihadists, Abu Mohamed Al Golani, have disappeared.
The end of an era
What happened this morning represents the end of Bashar Hafez Al-Asad and his father’s legacyHafez, an air force officer who helped lead the socialist Baath Party’s takeover of the government in 1963 before assuming power himself in a bloodless military coup in 1970.
His son assumed power in 2000 with promises of a path of reforms.economic liberalization and a certain democratic openness that fell on deaf ears a year after taking office, when he began to stifle any threat of political opposition.
When opposition groups came together in 2005 to issue a statement demanding free parliamentary elections, Al-Assad responded by imprisoning his main signatoriessetting the pattern that would follow for the next five years until the outbreak of the Arab Spring in the country in 2011, the beginning of the Syrian civil war.
Two years later, the United States was already accusing Al-Assad of committing atrocities by declaring him responsible for a chemical attack with sarin gas that left 1,400 dead near Damascus. Al-Assad’s government blamed Islamic extremists for the attack, but ended up accepting a Russian-American plan for international observers to take control of Syria’s chemical weapons.
A turning point
In 2015, the war became a turning point with the definitive incorporation of Russia in a military campaign with technical support from Iran that managed to paralyze rebel and jihadist operations, confined until just twelve days ago to less than half of the country in the midst of relative calm.
Syria, however, was caught with a pinch of salt, as demonstrated by the dazzling offensive that put an end to a regime that had at that point been completely delegitimized by the United States and its allies, who refused to recognize the president as the winner of the last elections in Syria. 2021. Al-Asad was not free from the skepticism of Arab countries in recent years. that targeted Syria as a production center for drug trafficking — the amphetamine Captagon — to finance military operations against the opposition.
The president is now at an unknown location, far from a country that is now beginning an enormously difficult transition. The worst scenario that analysts contemplate is a “Libyan model”, characterized by the disappearance of an autocratic leader (Gaddafi, lynched to death in October 2011), fragmented between parallel authorities and an absence of the rule of law filled by armed groups. of all kinds, and where civilians would end up once again being the first victim of chaos in a country where, the UN recalls, more than 16.7 million people are in a situation of food emergency.
