Rajan Menon
A new political chapter has opened in Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow, where he has been granted asylum. And the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by Abu-Mohammed al-Jolani, the nom de guerre of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, has captured Damascus, barely ten days after launching its offensive on 27 November.
Brace for numerous theories about why Assad’s regime fell suddenly, with little more than a whimper, and even claims that its downfall was inevitable. In truth, no one predicted HTS’s lightning advance from its redoubts in the north-western province of Idlib, adjacent to Turkey – not Assad, not Iran and Russia, his principal patrons, perhaps not even Al-Jolani himself. The House of Assad was built in 1971 by Bashar’s iron-fisted father, Hafez, who ruled until 2000. Having brought it down, Al-Jolani has a country to run – most of it anyway.
HTS’s military success was breathtaking. From Idlib, the group moved southward, taking Aleppo, Hama and Homs, the capital cities of eponymous provinces, and entered Damascus’s outskirts by 7 December, sweeping a hapless Syrian army from its path. Elsewhere, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) attacked Kurdish positions in the north, and rebel militias overran Daraa in the south-west. And the US-supported, Kurd-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), led by Mazloum Abdi – who presides over the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), located across the north-east bank of the Euphrates river – chased Assad’s army from Deir ez-Zor province, which abuts Iraq and has been a conduit used by Iran and the Iraqi Shia’s militias backing Assad.
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