Syria’s Bloody Dictator Has Fallen
In 2013, I met a 12-year-old Syrian girl who had been shot in the back by a government sniper near Aleppo. Her name was Maysaa, and she was paralyzed from the waist down.
“Am I a terrorist? Are all of the children they kill terrorists?” she asked, recuperating in an improvised medical facility on her way to a Turkish hospital.
Despite her pain, she was overcome with anger, and she cursed the man responsible. “Children are being torn to pieces. May God tear Bashar al-Assad and his children to pieces.”
Curses like Maysaa’s are seeds that took root in Syria’s blood-soaked soil and have stubbornly grown. Now, more than a decade later, they are bearing fruit.
The murderous tyrant who presided over the collapse of Syria, amid a brutal civil war, has finally fallen.
Assad’s regime, responsible for more than 617,000 deaths, has evaporated in the face of an onslaught that began with a ferocious offensive by rebels in the northwest, and which was soon joined by anti-government fighters from every corner of the country.
The end came quickly, in little more than 10 days. But the revolution in Syria against a regime that kidnapped, tortured, and murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens has been raging for nearly 14 years.
The paroxysms of pain caused by the war in Syria have wracked the globe. It became an epicenter of chaos that tore apart the Middle East and changed the face of Europe. Millions fled into exile, abandoning their homes in a quest for safety for themselves and their children. The conflict unleashed ghastly atrocities, from nerve-agent attacks carried out by Assad’s forces that killed hundreds; to the routine bombing of hospitals by Russian and Syrian aircraft; to the spread of the Islamic State, which exported its own brand of terror around the world.
Through it all, Bashar al-Assad ruled, stubbornly clinging to power through brute force no matter the cost to his people. He remains wanted for war crimes.
Assad was nearly toppled, until he was shored up by a foreign intervention in 2015 that came in the form of Russian bomber aircraft and Iranian mercenaries. Those who took up arms to defy him have carried on the struggle through long years of despair, dissension, and indifference.
When he became president in 2000, the son of Syrian despot Hafez al-Assad was praised as a potential reformer of the totalitarian state he inherited. His father had built a potent machine of oppression, using the Ba’ath Party — an anti-imperialist pan-Arab nationalist movement that seized power in 1963 — as a vehicle to ascend to power over the military and intelligence services, which he used to neutralize dissent and cement his rule.
When Hafez al-Assad died, Bashar became president. Hopes were high that change would come to Syria with a leader from a new generation. A brief period of liberalization, which came to be known as the Damascus Spring, encouraged many Syrians as some political prisoners were freed and a crackdown on government corruption began.
But any hope that Assad, who had trained as a medical doctor and had lived in London for years working as an ophthalmologist, would usher in a new Syria was swiftly dashed. The regime’s feared internal security and intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, reasserted the grip of the authoritarian inner circle, rounding up intellectuals and dissidents.
Damascus Spring turned into Syria’s winter, until 2011. Widespread civil unrest erupting across the region from a confluence of economic, ideological and social factors were soon dubbed the Arab Spring; Syria was not immune. A steady drumbeat of isolated protests became a movement in March, as Syrians took to the streets demanding democratic reform and the release of political prisoners. Mass protests and uprisings spread, starting a cycle of protest-and-crackdown that led to ever-increasing numbers of slain protesters.
Assad made no meaningful effort to address the widespread discontent that had started the uprising, choosing instead to blame “foreign powers” for fomenting unrest, and unleashing the security forces and military against his people. The country exploded into violence. By the summer, the protest movement had become an insurgency. Large numbers of soldiers were defecting and joining the protesters, and then organizing into armed militias. Protest became revolution, and descended into civil war.
Tens of thousands were killed in fighting and indiscriminate shelling, while efforts to round up dissidents and critics of the regime went into hyperdrive.
Hundreds of Syrians had long disappeared into the regime’s prisons, where they were raped, abused, tortured, and murdered. Now they did so in the thousands. The worst crimes and abuses committed by the regime have been documented in voluminous detail by human rights groups and international prosecutors. The broken bodies of the slain were thrown into mass graves, while many families were left without any clue as to the fate of their loved ones. Under Assad, people simply disappeared.
The fractious rebel alliance formed the Free Syrian Army in July 2011, but the reality was that most of the anti-regime units could do little more than conduct insurgency operations, or hold defensive positions. Many were katiba — an Arabic word approximating “battalion” — relatively small groups of defectors and amateur soldiers organized around charismatic leaders or local strongmen. Coordinating their activities was challenging.
Assad’s forces recognized no rules of war as they tried to crush the rebels, targeting noncombatants and even children with high explosives, sniper rifles, and machine guns.
In 2013, they started using chemical weapons. A government unit in Damascus fired artillery rockets containing the nerve agent sarin against a neighborhood in the hands of the rebels. Estimates of the number killed range from 500 to more than 1,700.
The scenes of men, women, and children choking to death — of entire families turned into piles of corpses as they huddled in the corners of basements to escape the shelling — shocked the world. Then-President Barack Obama declared that the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons had crossed a “red line,” and vowed to take action.
In reality, Obama’s response was tepid. The U.S. fired long-range cruise missiles against a handful of military targets, while the White House secured a promise from Assad not to do it again. Damascus agreed to let an international organization oversee the destruction of chemical weapons stock and dismantle production facilities.
But the U.S. and the West had shown their impotence, lacking the will to meaningfully support the Syrian rebels amid accusations of warmongering that grew in the shadow of the WMD lies that had led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq.
The West wrung its hands over what to do, going back-and-forth for years over whether to support the revolution, and who to train and arm if it did so. Secular rebels — the “moderate” opposition preferred by Western leaders who parachuted in and toured refugee camps along the Turkish border, or met with opposition leaders with little real influence — struggled to assemble an effective fighting force amid vague visions of a democratic Syria and sporadic supplies of weaponry from abroad.
But conflicts inevitably create power vacuums, and something always fills a vacuum.
Insurgents and jihadis who had fought against American occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan flooded into Syria, sensing opportunity. The jihadis had a clear idea of what they wanted and how to achieve it. Armed with Gulf Arab cash and Salafi extremism, the worst of the lot swept aside its opponents and flooded across the country.
They declared the establishment of the Islamic State in 2014.
The same year, Russia — convinced by Western weakness, alarmed by Ukraine’s lurch toward Europe — annexed Crimea and sent its proxies into Donbas. The next year, it sent its forces to Syria to prop up Assad, joining the Iranians, who needed Syria as a bridge to funnel arms, training, and equipment to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Syria became a cauldron of violence. American warplanes were bombing the Islamic State in the east. Russian warplanes were bombing the Islamic State and rebels in the northwest. The Turks were bombing the Kurds in the north. Iranian proxies fought the Islamic State and rebels in the east, occupying key towns along the Euphrates River corridor.
Millions fled renewed fighting. On Sept. 2, 2015, the body of 2-year-old Alan Shemu — widely named as Aylan Kurdi in initial news reports — washed ashore in Bodrum, Turkey. His family paid human traffickers nearly $6,000 to board a rubber dinghy to escape to Greece, and the overloaded boat capsized at sea. Photos of the lifeless toddler spread across the world, a heartbreaking exclamation point reminding the civilized world it had failed the people of Syria.
The millions of people making their way out of Syria joined throngs of refugees from other conflicts and economic migrants trying to get into Europe, and the political consequences were seismic. Amid fear of terror attacks from the Islamic State and nativist fear-mongering about alien hordes, there came a surge of anti-Muslim bigotry as far-right, anti-immigrant political movements grew in popularity.
On June 23, 2016, standing outside the Houses of Parliament in London, I watched as the Brexit referendum results came in, affirming that the U.K. would leave the European Union. Many Brits felt they were losing their country, and they wanted to do something about it. I wondered the degree to which fears about migrants and terrorism created by the war in Syria had played a role.
Less than a month later, the morning after Bastille Day, July 14, I stood on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, France, looking at a still-wet bloodstain on the asphalt, that marked where a child had died — one among 86 people who had been run down by a madman in a truck, inspired by the Islamic State. I thought again of Syria.
I had been in Brussels in March earlier in the year, when the airport was bombed; I had been in Paris the November before that when people were gunned down drinking at cafes or listening to a heavy metal concert in the Bataclan. Both attacks had been the Islamic State. It all went back to Syria.
Around the same time as the attack in Nice in July 2016, rebel forces in Aleppo — Syria’s second largest city — had been cut off by Assad’s forces. The Russian air force was pounding the rebels. I spoke to people in the besieged city regularly — rebel fighters, aid workers, and doctors.
In September, I spoke with a nurse who went by Umm Mohammed, an honorific pseudonym, while investigating the use of cluster munitions by the Russians. The maternity ward she worked in had just been bombed.
“I didn’t know what to do with the children in the incubators,” she said, so she grabbed them two by two, using a small penlight to navigate the rubble and carry them to safety with the help of another nurse. “These kids are innocent, and they came into this world under very difficult circumstances. They came into this world during a war.”
Few choose to live amid war. But when it comes, it is always the innocent who suffer the most. By December 2016, Aleppo had fallen to Assad’s regime. More than 30,000 people died before it was taken, two-thirds of them civilians.
As war raged across Syria, the Kurds sought to forge their own enclave, along the lines of Kurdistan in Iraq. The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were instrumental in defeating the Islamic State; now the SDF provided the firepower to maintain a multi-ethnic autonomous region home to Kurds, Syrian Arabs, Turkmen, Circassians, and Yazidis, among other ethnic groups, free from Assad’s rule.
The success of the revolutionary Kurdish project in Syria, known as Rojava, drew the ire of the Turks, long wary of Turkey’s own Kurdish independence movement. Turkey, with its well-equipped military, had taken to intervening in the north of Syria with regular incursions when it felt its interests demanded action.
In 2019, Turkey secured a promise from President Donald Trump to withdraw support for the SDF while Turkish-backed militias created a buffer zone separating the Kurds in Syria from those in Turkey. In Mardin, overlooking the Tigris and Upper Mesopotamia, I listened to Kurdish refugees sing songs of freedom and loss as their misty dreams of a transnational homeland were dispelled in the thunder and fire of Turkish artillery, and they were cut off from their homes in Syria.
In 2022, when war came to Ukraine, I was there, too. I went to the front with elite Ukrainian Marines and airborne infantry, and with civilians who knew nothing of soldiering but volunteered to bear the burden of arms to defend their homes. I saw Russian fighter-bomber aircraft, and knew many of them were being piloted by the same men who had bombed hospitals in Aleppo.
Little did anyone know at the outset of that invasion, Ukraine’s dogged resistance would sap the strength of Russia’s military machine. When Syrian rebels made their move starting last week, Moscow lacked the resources to send an expeditionary force to rescue Assad. Tehran, too, had seen its fortunes shift: its main proxy supporting the regime in Syria, Hezbollah, was decapitated by Israel after throwing in its lot with Hamas, after the surprise attack on Israel of Oct. 7, 2023.
When contemplating current events, it can never be quite correct to say: “It all started here.” Everything that happens is a knot of the overlapping skeins that weave the pattern of history, and each individual thread can be traced back for generations, until we’re all sitting around arguing about the choices made by people who went to dust 1,000 years ago.
We live in the now, and Syria is a nexus for our times. Syria’s civil war is an intricate web of violence, inhumanity, and unfulfilled dreams — whose pattern became the shape of modernity.
Bashar al-Assad and the decisions he made have been at the center of that web, and it has touched the lives of millions.
A Syrian friend who has been living in London returned to Damascus a few weeks ago, on her first visit to family in years. She was there when the offensive led by the militant Islamist group Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham (HTS) began. She changed her flight to leave earlier than originally planned, and tried to get out on Friday, but it was too late. She’s stuck there now, hoping for the best.
There have been millions of Syrian stories like hers over the long years of war — of people compelled to make compromises; of being forced to abandon families and possessions; of getting trapped as a cyclone of violence descends.
My colleague Anthony Shadid was a correspondent for The New York Times who died covering the war in Syria in 2012. The last time I saw him in person was as he visited the newsroom in New York with his son in his arms. He wrote once: “Cultures that may seem as durable as stone can break like glass, leaving all the things that held them together unattended. I believe that the craftsman, the artist, the cook, and the silversmith are peacemakers. They instill grace; they lull the world to calm.”
No one can say what the future holds for Syria. Russia, the U.S., Turkey, and Iran all have a presence there. Every one of Syria’s neighbors will try to shape its future to their liking; every outside power will say it knows best what Syrians should do as they untangle 50 years of dictatorship.
The myriad rebel groups that overthrew Assad represent a dizzying array of ideologies, religious sects, and ethnicities — Sunni Islamists, Kurdish separatists, Druze militias, Shia defectors. The group that led the charge which finally brought the dictator down, HTS, has a vision for Syria under sharia law. Its leader presents himself as a reformed jihadist, willing to accommodate Syria’s polyethnic, multi-religious reality.
The dissident writer Yassin al-Haj Saleh — hated by the regime and jihadis alike — writes that the group’s “worldview is hostile to modernity and its values.” But he isn’t giving up. As thousands of prisoners are freed from Syria’s prisons, some for the first time in decades, and statues and photos of the dictator are torn down, there is cause for celebration, and hope.
“Jihadists can’t be countered with despair, liberal critique, or secular sloganeering. We need a strong social and political coalition mobilizing across society,” al-Haj Saleh says. “Millions of politically active Syrians are the best safeguard against any extremist hijacking of the revolution.”
Syria will need its peacemakers now. It will need those who instill grace and lull the world to calm. The only thing uniting Syria’s opposition forces over the past 10 days as they have taken the country has been hatred of Assad and his vile regime.
And now he’s gone.
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