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Syrian President Bashar Assad fled the country on Sunday, bringing to a dramatic close his nearly 14-year struggle to hold onto control as his country fragmented in a brutal civil war that became a proxy battlefield for regional and international powers.
The exit of the 59-year-old Assad stood in stark contrast to his first months as Syria’s unlikely president in 2000 when many hoped he would be a young reformer after three decades of his father’s iron grip. At age 34, the Western-educated ophthalmologist appeared as a geeky tech-savvy fan of computers with a gentle demeanor.
But when faced with protests of his rule that erupted in March 2011, Assad turned to the brutal tactics of his father to crush dissent. As the uprising hemorrhaged into an outright civil war, he unleashed his military to blast opposition-held cities, with support from allies Iran and Russia.
International rights groups and prosecutors alleged widespread use of torture and extrajudicial killings in Syria’s government-run detention centers. The war has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half of the country’s prewar population of 23 million.
The conflict appeared to be frozen in recent years, with Assad’s government regaining control of most of Syria’s territory while the northwest remained under the control of opposition groups and the northeast under Kurdish control.
Although Damascus remained under crippling Western sanctions, neighboring countries had begun to resign themselves to Assad’s continued hold on power. The Arab League reinstated Syria’s membership last year, and Saudi Arabia in May announced the appointment of its first ambassador since severing ties with Damascus 12 years ago.
However, the geopolitical tide turned quickly when opposition groups in northwest Syria in late November launched a surprise offensive. Government forces quickly collapsed while Assad’s allies, preoccupied by other conflicts — Russia’s war in Ukraine and the yearlong wars between Israel and the Iran-backed militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas — appeared reluctant to forcefully intervene.
An end to decades of family rule
Assad came to power in 2000 by a twist of fate. His father had been cultivating Bashar’s oldest brother, Basil, as his successor, but in 1994, Basil was killed in a car crash in Damascus. Bashar was brought home from his ophthalmology practice in London, put through military training, and elevated to the rank of colonel to establish his credentials so he could one day rule.
When Hafez Assad died in 2000, parliament quickly lowered the presidential age requirement from 40 to 34. Bashar’s elevation was sealed by a nationwide referendum, in which he was the only candidate.
Hafez, a lifelong military man, ruled the country for nearly 30 years during which he set up a Soviet-style centralized economy and kept such a stifling hand over dissent that Syrians feared even to joke about politics to their friends.
He pursued a secular ideology that sought to bury sectarian differences under Arab nationalism and the image of heroic resistance to Israel. He formed an alliance with the Shiite clerical leadership in Iran, sealed Syrian domination over Lebanon and set up a network of Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups.
Bashar initially seemed completely unlike his strongman father.
Tall and lanky with a slight lisp, he had a quiet, gentle demeanor. His only official position before becoming president was head of the Syrian Computer Society. His wife, Asma al-Akhras, whom he married several months after taking office, was attractive, stylish, and British-born.
The young couple, who eventually had three children, seemed to shun the trappings of power. They lived in an apartment in the upscale Abu Rummaneh district of Damascus, as opposed to a palatial mansion like other Arab leaders.
Initially, upon coming to office, Assad freed political prisoners and allowed more open discourse. In the “Damascus Spring,” salons for intellectuals emerged where Syrians could discuss art, culture,e and politics to a degree impossible under his father.
But after 1,000 intellectuals signed a public petition calling for multiparty democracy and greater freedoms in 2001, and others tried to form a political party, the salons were snuffed out by the feared secret police, who jailed dozens of activists.
Tested by the Arab Spring, Assad relied on old alliances to stay in power
Instead of a political opening, Assad turned to economic reforms. He slowly lifted economic restrictions, let in foreign banks, threw the doors open to imports, and empowered the private sector. Damascus and other cities long mired in drabness saw a flourishing of shopping malls, new restaurants, and consumer goods. Tourism swelled.
Abroad, he stuck to the line his father had set, based on the alliance with Iran and a policy of insisting on a full return of the Israel-annexed Golan Heights, although in practice Assad never militarily confronted Israel.
In 2005, he suffered a heavy blow with the loss of Syria’s decades-old control over neighboring Lebanon after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. With many Lebanese accusing Damascus of being behind the slaying, Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from the country and a pro-American government came to power.
At the same time, the Arab world split into two camps — one of U.S.-allied, Sunni-led countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the other of Syria and Shiite-led Iran with their ties to Hezbollah and Palestinian militants.
Throughout, Assad relied largely on the same power base at home as his father: his Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10% of the population. Many of the positions in his government went to younger generations of the same families that had worked for his father. Drawn in as well were members of the new middle class created by his reforms, including prominent Sunni merchant families.
Assad also turned to his own family. His younger brother Maher headed the elite Presidential Guard and would lead the crackdown against the uprising. Their sister Bushra was a strong voice in his inner circle, along with her husband, Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat, until he was killed in a 2012 bombing. Bashar’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, became the country’s biggest businessman, heading a financial empire before the two had a falling out that led to Makhlouf being pushed aside.
Assad also increasingly entrusted key roles to his wife, Asma, before she announced in May that she was undergoing treatment for leukemia and stepped out of the limelight.
When 2011 protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, eventually toppling their rulers, Assad dismissed the possibility of the same occurring in Syria, insisting his regime was more in tune with its people. After the Arab Spring wave reached Syria, his security forces staged a brutal crackdown while Assad consistently denied he faced a popular revolt. He instead blamed “foreign-backed terrorists” for trying to destabilize his regime.
His rhetoric struck a chord with many in Syria’s minority groups — including Christians, Druze, and Shiites — as well as some Sunnis who feared the prospect of rule by Sunni extremists even more than they disliked Assad’s authoritarian rule.
As the uprising spiraled into a civil war, millions of Syrians fled to Jordan, Turkey, Iraq,q and Lebanon and on to Europe.
Ironically, on Feb. 26, 2011, two days after the fall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to protesters and just days before the wave of Arab Spring protests swept into his country, Assad emailed a joke he had seen mocking the Egyptian leader’s stubborn refusal to step down.
Bashar Barhoum woke in his dungeon prison cell in Damascus at dawn Sunday, thinking it would be the last day of his life.
The 63-year-old writer was supposed to have been executed after being imprisoned for seven months.
But he soon realized the men at the door weren’t from former Syrian President Bashar Assad’s notorious security forces, ready to take him to his death. Instead, they were rebels coming to set him free.
As the insurgents swept across Syria in just 10 days to bring an end to the Assad family’s 50-year rule, they broke into prisons and security facilities to free political prisoners and many of the tens of thousands of people who disappeared since the conflict began back in 2011.
Barhoum was one of those freed who were celebrating in Damascus.
“I haven’t seen the sun until today,” Barhoum told The Associated Press after walking in disbelief through the streets of Damascus. “Instead of being dead tomorrow, thank God, he gave me a new lease of life.”
Barhoum couldn’t find his cell phone and belongings in the prison so set off to find a way to tell his wife and daughters that he was alive and well.
Videos shared widely across social media showed dozens of prisoners running in celebration after the insurgents released them, some barefoot and others wearing little clothing. One of them screams in celebration after he finds out that the government has fallen.
Torture, executions, and starvation in Syria’s prisons
Syria’s prisons have been infamous for their harsh conditions. Torture is systematic, say human rights groups, whistleblowers, and former detainees. Secret executions have been reported at more than two dozen facilities run by Syrian intelligence, as well as at other sites.
In 2013, a Syrian military defector, known as “Caesar,” smuggled out over 53,000 photographs that human rights groups say showed clear evidence of rampant torture, but also disease, and starvation in Syria’s prison facilities.
Syria’s feared security apparatus and prisons did not only serve to isolate Assad’s opponents, but also to instill fear among his own people said Lina Khatib, Associate Fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at the London think tank Chatham House.
“Anxiety about being thrown in one of Assad’s notorious prisons created wide mistrust among Syrians,” Khatib said. “Assad nurtured this culture of fear to maintain control and crush political opposition.”
Just north of Damascus in the Saydnaya military prison, known as the “human slaughterhouse,” women detainees, some with their children, screamed as men broke the locks off their cell doors. Amnesty International and other groups say that dozens of people were secretly executed every week in Saydnaya, estimating that up to 13,000 Syrians were killed between 2011 and 2016.
“Don’t be afraid … Bashar Assad has fallen! Why are you afraid?” said one of the rebels as he tried to rush streams of women out of their jam-packed tiny cells.
Tens of thousands of detainees have so far been freed, said Rami Abdurrahman of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based pro-opposition war monitor.
Over the past 10 days, insurgents freed prisoners in cities including Aleppo, Homs, Hama as well as Damascus.
Families seek loved ones who have been missing for years
Omar Alshogre, who was detained for three years and survived relentless torture, watched in awe from his home far from Syria as videos showed dozens of detainees fleeing.
“A hundred democracies in the world had done nothing to help them, and now a few military groups came down and broke open prison after prison,” Alshogre, a human rights advocate who now resides in Sweden and the U.S., told The Associated Press.
Meanwhile, families of detainees and the disappeared skipped celebrations of the downfall of the Assad dynasty. Instead, they waited outside prisons and security branch centers, hoping their loved ones would be there. They had high expectations for the newcomers who will now run the battered country.
“This happiness will not be completed until I can see my son out of prison and know where he is,” said Bassam Masri. “I have been searching for him for two hours. He has been detained for 13 years,” since the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011.
Rebels struggled to control the chaos as crowds gathered by the Court of Justice in Damascus.
Heba, who only gave her first name while speaking to the AP, said she was looking for her brother and brother-in-law who were detained while reporting a stolen car in 2011 and hadn’t been seen since.
“They took away so many of us,” said Heba, whose mother’s cousin also disappeared. “We know nothing about them ... They (the Assad government) burned our hearts.”
Abu Mohammed al-Golani, the militant leader whose stunning insurgency toppled Syria’s President Bashar Assad, has spent years working to remake his public image, renouncing longtime ties to al-Qaida and depicting himself as a champion of pluralism and tolerance. As he entered Damascus behind his victorious fighters Sunday, he even dropped his nom de guerre and referred to himself by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa.
The extent of that transformation from jihadi extremist to would-be state builder is now put to the test.
Insurgents control Damascus, Assad has fled into hiding, and for the first time after 50 years of his family’s iron hand, it is an open question how Syria will be governed.
Syria is home to multiple ethnic and religious communities, often pitted against each other by Assad’s state and years of war. Many of them fear the possibility that Sunni Islamist extremists will take over. The country is also fragmented among disparate armed factions, and foreign powers from Russia and Iran to the United States, Turkey and Israel all have their hands in the mix.
Hours after Damascus’ capture, the 42-year-old al-Sharaa made his first appearance in the city’s landmark Umayyad Mosque, declaring Assad’s fall “a victory for the Islamic nation.” A senior rebel commander, Anas Salkhadi, appeared on state TV to declare, “Our message to all the sects of Syria, is that we tell them that Syria is for everyone,”
Al-Sharaa, who has been labeled a terrorist by the United States, and his insurgent force, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS – many of whose fighters are jihadis -- now stand to be a major player.
For years, al-Sharaa worked to consolidate power, while bottled up in the province of Idlib in Syria’s northwest corner as Assad’s Iranian- and Russian-backed rule over much of the country appeared solid.
He maneuvered among extremist organizations while eliminating competitors and former allies. He sought to polish the image of his de-facto “salvation government” that has been running Idlib to win over international governments and reassure Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities. He built ties with various tribes and other groups.
Along the way, he shed his garb as a hard-line Islamist guerrilla and put on suits for press interviews, talking of building state institutions and decentralizing power to reflect Syria’s diversity.
“Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, no one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions,” he said in an interview with CNN last week, offering the possibility that HTS would eventually be dissolved after Assad falls.
“Don’t judge by words, but by actions,” he said.
Al-Golani’s beginnings in Iraq
Throughout his rise through extremist ranks, al-Sharaa was only known by the jihadi nickname he adopted, Abu Mohammed al-Golani. His ties to al-Qaida stretch back to 2003 when he joined insurgents battling U.S. troops in Iraq. The Syrian native was detained by the U.S. military but remained in Iraq. During that time, al-Qaida usurped like-minded groups and formed the extremist Islamic State of Iraq, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In 2011, a popular uprising in Syria against Assad triggered a brutal government crackdown and led to all-out war. Al-Golani’s prominence grew when al-Baghdadi sent him to Syria to establish a branch of al-Qaida called the Nusra Front. The United States labeled the new group as a terrorist organization. That designation still remains in place and the U.S. government has put a $10 million bounty on him.
The Nusra Front and the Syrian Conflict
As Syria’s civil war intensified in 2013, so did al-Golani’s ambitions. He defied al-Baghdadi’s calls to dissolve the Nusra Front and merge it with al-Qaida’s operation in Iraq, to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
Al-Golani nonetheless pledged his allegiance to al-Qaida, which later disassociated itself from ISIS. The Nusra Front battled ISIS and eliminated much of its competition among the Syrian armed opposition to Assad.
In his first interview in 2014, al-Golani kept his face covered, telling a reporter for the Qatari network Al-Jazeera that he rejected political talks in Geneva to end the conflict. He said his goal was to see Syria ruled under Islamic law and made clear that there was no room for the country’s Alawite, Shiite, Druze and Christian minorities.
Consolidating power and rebranding
In 2016, al-Golani revealed his face to the public for the first time in a video message that announced his group was renaming itself Jabhat Fateh al-Sham -– the Syria Conquest Front -- and cutting its ties to al-Qaida.
“This new organization has no affiliation to any external entity,” he said in the video, filmed wearing military garb and a turban.
The move paved the way for al-Golani to assert full control over fracturing militant groups. A year later, his alliance rebranded again as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham -– meaning Organization for Liberating Syria -- as the groups merged, consolidating al-Golani’s power in northwest Syria’s Idlib province.
HTS later clashed with independent Islamist militants who opposed the merger, further emboldening al-Golani and his group as the leading power in northwestern Syria, able to rule with an iron fist.
With his power consolidated, al-Golani set in motion a transformation that few could have imagined. Replacing his military garb with a shirt and trousers, he began calling for religious tolerance and pluralism.
He appealed to the Druze community in Idlib, which the Nusra Front had previously targeted, and visited the families of Kurds who were killed by Turkish-backed militias.
In 2021, he had his first interview with an American journalist on PBS. Wearing a blazer, with his short hair gelled back, the now more soft-spoken HTS leader said that his group posed no threat to the West and that sanctions imposed against it were unjust.
“Yes, we have criticized Western policies,” he said. “But to wage a war against the United States or Europe from Syria, that’s not true. We didn’t say we wanted to fight.”
Syrians awakened on Monday to a hopeful if uncertain future, after rebels seized the capital Damascus and President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, following 13 years of civil war and more than 50 years of his family's brutal rule.
NOW TO REBUILD
WORLD STUNNED
VULNERABLE
GAZA FALLOUT
More than 50 years of Assad family rule in Syria collapsed with astonishing speed after insurgents burst out of a rebel-held enclave in the country’s north, capturing Aleppo and a string of other cities in a matter of days, before converging on Damascus.
Opposition forces entered the capital with little or no resistance on Sunday as the Syrian army melted away and President Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s ruler for 24 years, fled the country. His sudden demise marks a stunning development in Syria’s devastating 14-year conflict, which began with Assad’s brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring.
The speed of the rebels' victory has highlighted Islamist leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani's success in shoring up a rebellion that looked to be cornered in its last bastion in northwestern Syria. It also exposed the weakness of the Assad regime and just how reliant it was on support from Iran and Russia – which at the crucial moment did not come.
Army hollowed out
Assad's army has been reduced to little more than a hollow shell after a 14-year war that killed more than half a million people, displaced half of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million, and devastated the country's economy and infrastructure.
In the war's early years, experts said a combination of casualties, defections, and draft-dodging saw the military lose around half of its 300,000-strong force. Corrupt and demoralized, the army was caught unawares when rebels suddenly burst out of their redoubt in Idlib province on November 27, meeting little resistance.
![La gente se abraza mientras se reúnen en Trafalgar Square, después de que los rebeldes sirios anunciaron que han derrocado a Bashar al-Assad, en Londres, Reino Unido, el 8 de diciembre de 2024.](https://s.france24.com/media/display/2d70bd66-b574-11ef-9b5c-005056a90284/w:1280/p:16x9/m:{"brand":"FRANCE24","lang":"EN","program":"","cartouche":"SYRIA","hash":"0bd208e036d086d6f3f53ec0a59b26c6e2997eccc2f65b79934315d2c5966d6f","title":"Celebrations%20mark%250Aend%20of%20Assad%20rule","id":"25aba80c-45fb-11ec-90e2-005056bf30b7"}/17-1.webp)
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, reported soldiers repeatedly evacuating positions across the country as the insurgents pushed forward, seizing one city after another.
"Since 2011, Syria's army has faced attrition in manpower, equipment, and morale," said David Rigoulet-Roze, a Syria expert at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs. Underpaid soldiers reportedly looted resources to survive, and many young men evaded conscription, he told AFP.
On Wednesday, Assad ordered a 50 percent raise in career soldiers' pay in a desperate effort to bolster his crumbling army. But with Syria's economy in tatters, soldiers' salaries are almost worthless and the move had little impact.
Allies weakened and distracted
Over the years, Assad has relied heavily on military, political,l and diplomatic support from key allies Russia and Iran, without whom his regime would almost certainly have collapsed much earlier in the war. With their help, the regime clawed back territory lost after the conflict erupted in 2011, and Russia's 2015 intervention with air power changed the tide of the war in Assad's favour.
However, last month's rebel offensive came as Russia remains mired in its war in Ukraine, and its air strikes this time failed to hold back the Islamist-led rebels who swept across swathes of the country.
“The Russians would have liked to help the Syrian regime more – but their military resources in Syria are much reduced as a result of the ongoing war in Ukraine,” said FRANCE 24’s Middle East expert Wassim Nasr.
Assad's other key ally Iran has long provided military advisers to Syria's armed forces and supported pro-government armed groups on the ground. But Iran and its allied groups suffered huge setbacks in fighting with Israel this year and this presented Syria’s insurgents with a window of opportunity to strike at an isolated Assad.
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“The Syrian rebels have a long blood debt with Iran and the offensive happened now because Iran and its allies were too weak to keep bolstering the Syrian regime,” explained FRANCE 24’s Nasr.
Hezbollah out of action
Iran’s Lebanese proxy force Hezbollah has openly backed Damascus on the ground since 2013, sending thousands of fighters across the border to bolster the Syrian army. But the rebels launched their offensive late last month on the same day that a ceasefire went into effect between Israel and Hezbollah, after more than a year of hostilities in Lebanon.
Hezbollah had shifted many of its fighters from Syria to south Lebanon to face off with Israel, weakening its presence in the neighboring country. The fighting decimated Hezbollah's leadership, with the group's longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah, his presumed successor, and a string of senior commanders killed in Israeli air strikes.
On Sunday, as Syrian insurgents surged into Damascus unopposed, a source close to Hezbollah said the group was pulling its remaining forces from the outskirts of the capital and the Homs area near the border.
Reacting to Assad’s demise, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu described the Syrian regime’s fall as “a direct result of the blows we have inflicted on Iran and Hezbollah, Assad's main supporters”.
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US President Joe Biden has also claimed that the US and its allies had weakened Syria's backers – Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. He said that “for the first time” Assad’s allies could no longer defend his grip on power, adding: “Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East.”