Fire crews battle to contain a large fire in Canterbury's West Melton overnight and Syria celebrates the end of the Assad family's 50-year regime. Video / NZ Herald
Analysis by Louisa Loveluck, Mustafa Salim
Louisa Loveluck is a London-based correspondent, covering global crises. Mustafa Salim is a reporter in the Post's Baghdad bureau.
THREE KEY FACTS
Sergei Lavrov faced pressure at the Doha Forum, responding testily to questions about Syriaand Bashar al-Assad.
Russia’s top diplomat was under pressure. At a high-level forum on Saturday in the Qatari capital, Sergei Lavrov, the world’s longest-serving Foreign Minister, turned uncharacteristically testy when his interlocutor kept asking him about the fate of Syria and its long-ruling dictator Bashar al-Assad. He scolded the interviewer, a veteran Al Jazeera English journalist, for describing Syria’s ascendant rebels as “opposition” groups rather than “terrorists”. And he grumbled about not being asked to speak more about Russia’s strengthening hand in Ukraine.
“I’m not in the business of guessing,” Lavrov sighed, responding to a question posed to him about what happens next in Syria. Rebel forces, led by an Islamist faction, were at that moment nearing Damascus. “We are trying to do everything not to allow terrorists to prevail,” Lavrov added.
Lavrov likely knew then that Assad was doomed. He took the stage at the Doha Forum after a meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, in which the diplomats are believed to have reached understandings about the timing and manner of Assad’s departure. Moscow and Tehran had long propped up Assad’s dictatorship; Ankara, Turkey’s capital, is a committed backer of a clutch of rebel factions.
By Sunday morning, Assad was gone. His regime had finally crumbled, bringing more than half a century of his family’s tyrannical rule to an end. In a video message, Assad’s Prime Minister Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali distanced himself from the runaway despot, who has left the country and landed in Moscow, and said he was on hand to help facilitate the transition of authority and state institutions to whatever entity fills the void. “A new page is being written in the history of Syria,” the country’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The suddenness of Assad’s demise has stunned regional diplomats and analysts. “We were living in a world where the Syrian issue was quite stagnant,” said Majed al-Ansari, chief spokesman of Qatar’s foreign ministry, noting that things in Syria, after years of ruinous civil war, had seemed relatively stable. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had, to varying degrees, worked to mend fences and normalise relations with Assad after rebuking his bloody crackdown on dissent in his country. “Now we have to deal with a situation where the regime is no more,” he added.
This picture shows a bullet-riddled portrait of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Photo / AFP
On Sunday, Qatari, Saudi, Egyptian and other Arab officials met in Doha to start thinking through the contours of a post-Assad world. Iran’s Araghchi, meanwhile, cancelled his commitments with journalists and a coterie of Western think tankers and left Qatar in the morning. The collapse of the regime in Damascus was prefigured by Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite organisation and Iranian proxy that played a key role in Assad’s brutal counterinsurgency a decade ago. Russia’s costly entanglement in Ukraine has also dented the Kremlin’s ability to protect an ally that’s been in the Russian orbit since the Cold War.
Fidan, whose country shares a long border with Syria and hosts millions of Syrian refugees, celebrated Assad’s exit at a news conference and outlined, as other officials in Doha also had, a desire for Syria’s transition of power to be as inclusive and peaceful as possible. “Syria has reached a stage where the Syrian people will shape the future of their own country,” the Turkish Foreign Minister said. “Today, there is hope.”
Onlookers elsewhere cheered on the end of one of the Middle East’s most entrenched regimes. “Assad’s fall is the Middle Eastern equivalent to the fall of the Berlin Wall,” wrote Nadav Eyal in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, gesturing to the depths of repression carried out by Assad’s calcified Baathist state. “Not because of him, a weak and failed dictator, but because of what he emblematises.”
There are other analogies swirling around Syria’s drama. In city after city, jubilant residents have set about toppling statues of Assad and his father, Hafez. The ecstatic scenes recall what followed the US-led invasion of Iraq, which brought down the regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. But more than two decades later, the events in Iraq’s neighbour are dictated not by a foreign invasion, but the culmination of a resurgent uprising driven by a patchwork of rebel groups that withstood vicious crackdowns, Russian bombardments and years of international neglect and indifference.
The melting-away of the regime’s forces in the face of the advance led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, an Islamist group once closely allied to al-Qaeda, recalled the rampant 2021 Taliban sweep through Afghanistan. The Taliban barely needed to fire a shot along their march to Kabul, brokering deals with local grandees as government troops meekly left their posts.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s stunning campaign has exposed the extent to which the Assad regime was “a paper tiger”, Renad Mansour, senior fellow at British think tank Chatham House, told me. Russia and Iran likely saw the frailty of the Assad regime and reckoned that a desperate effort with their depleted assets wouldn’t save it, he added.
“The next weeks will be absolutely crucial,” Mansour said, referring to the uncertainties about what comes next. “We know from the Iraq example that the vacuum that this creates could go many different ways.”
In Iraq, of course, the United States wholly dismantled the Saddam regime, a hollowing-out of state institutions that paved the way for a generation of instability. In Syria, initial signs point to a less drastic transition, though the country’s political landscape is complex and its territory controlled by a mosaic of competing groups. Already, Turkish-aligned fighters are battling Kurdish-dominated militias that hold sway in Syria’s northeast.
“For the last several years, Syria was divided into spheres of influence, and the militias in charge, along with the regime, regularly tested the balance of power through relatively contained fighting,” Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, told me. “In the best-case scenario, Syria’s factions ... will struggle for primacy through contained local battles. At the other extreme, the collapse of the state will spur a renewed period of total warfare in which factions target civilians.”
