In Qardaha, in the Alawite lands of Latakia on the Mediterranean, stands the sumptuous and pristine marble mausoleum worthy of an Arab monarch. It is here the founder of the brutal Assad dynasty, Hafez al-Assad, is buried in magnificence.
Assad was not the original family name. Hafez’s grandfather was a powerful character known as Sulayman al-Wahhish—the al-Wahhish meaning the wild beast—for his strength; one of his sons was Ali, another formidable figure, a farmer and leader known for his toughness, he had eleven children; Hafez was his ninth son. His nickname was al-Assad—the Lion—and he adopted that as his family’s name.
Hafez’s chosen heir was his swaggering eldest son, Bassel. Always promoted as the “golden knight” and depicted on horseback, he died young in a car crash and was buried alongside his father, leaving the succession to his younger brother—a gawky, chinless eye surgeon named Bashar. He turned out to be just as murderous as his father.
I have seen no footage yet of the fate of the mausoleum and the bodies that lie there, just as I have seen no footage of Bashar al-Assad as he fled the lightning-fast overthrow of his country. But his father’s and brother’s bodies are unlikely to remain untouched—unless he has taken them with him.
For 53 years, the Assad dynasty ruled Syria with savagery—and with internal family politics that resembled a toxic cross between a Mafia family and the court intrigues of a medieval monarchy, combined with a Stalinist cult of personality. Case in point: When Hafez had a heart attack, his brother and praetorian commander, Rifaat, tried to seize power and was exiled. (It was Rifaat who, in 1982, carried out the massacre of the city of Hama, killing around 40,000 civilians in a few days—a slaughter that still ranks as the bloodiest killing of civilians in modern Arab history.)
When Bashar gained control, he, too, struggled to control a wilder brother, Maher, who ultimately became the murderous enforcer of the regime. The Mafia parallel became even more striking in recent years as the dynasty degraded into an organized crime family selling Captagon across the region.
When the dynasty was faced with the uprisings of the Arab Spring in 2011, the cruelty of the Assad reign changed to barbaric, nihilistic slaughter under the leadership of Bashar Assad, who held power only thanks to the backing of a murderous alliance of Iran, its vassal militia Hezbollah, and Russia. Around 600,000 Syrians were killed as Assad perpetrated by far the worst butchery in the Middle East in modern times, symbolized by the slogan: “Assad or the Country Burns!”
What we have witnessed over the past 48 hours—the toppling of Assad statues in various cities; the opening of the hellish prisons (in which some benighted prisoners had survived for decades); the fleeing of many of the secret police; the departure of Russian and Hezbollah troops; and now the vanishing of the dictator himself—is astonishing. It is impossible to watch the fall of the brutal tyranny of the House of Assad without feeling joy.
But this is the Middle East. Anyone who remembers the Arab Spring knows that things can always get worse. And anyone who studies history knows that predictions are for fools.
The warlord Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—formerly of al-Qaeda, then al-Nusra, and now the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, known as HTS—now rules Damascus and much of Syria—but far from all. On Wednesday, his faction announced that “Muslims and Christians in all their diversity will be respected.” Whether this suggests a genuine wish, or whether this is simply the latest chameleon twist in al-Jolani’s long history of deception on the road to creating an Islamist state, has yet to be seen. (Of course, the Western media are easily manipulated by small details. Yesterday, CNN actually analyzed al-Jolani like this: “How Syria’s rebel leader went from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing ‘revolutionary’.” Never has a blazer, or any sartorial triviality, assumed such geopolitical significance.)
It is also yet to be seen what al-Jolani—a terrorist who fought the Americans in Iraq and was imprisoned, for a time, at Abu Ghraib—has in mind for Syria. What we know is that for decades, the fate of Syria has been in the hands of ruthless faraway contenders, chiefly the Iranian tyrant Ayatollah Khamenei, Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, and Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, whose airpower enabled Assad to survive. They long used the Syrian people as puppets in their anti-American, anti-Israeli resistance axis.
These men weren’t the only ones exploiting Syria. So was Turkish president Recep Erdoğan, who is bombing Kurdish civilians in Syria as I write these words.
It is worth recalling the other outside player here: the now-dead Hamas chieftain Yahya Sinwar. His reckless invasion of Israel and savage butchery on October 7, 2023, was meant to unleash the liquidation of the Jewish republic. Instead, his pogrom has been a disaster not just for the Palestinians, whose civilians have suffered grievously, but also for the entire Axis of Resistance. The war he started has shattered the vassals of Iran’s would-be empire—Hamas and Hezbollah—and ultimately, perhaps, the regime itself.
Russia, too, is a big loser. Ever since Catherine the Great, the Russian empire has aspired to Near Eastern power. In the 1770s, Catherine sent a Russian fleet that bombarded Lebanon and backed Arab leaders to bring down the Ottomans. In the late 1940s, Stalin initially backed the creation of Israel in the hope that the socialistic Jewish republic would be a Soviet ally. When Israel became a French, then U.S., ally, the Soviets aggressively backed Arab dictators: Hafez al-Assad became a major ally of Leonid Brezhnev and frequent visitor to Moscow, giving the Soviets naval bases on the Mediterranean.
For those who remember this history, it is no surprise that Putin came to Bashar’s aid after the Arab Spring. Brutal Russian bombardment and civilian slaughter won the civil war for Assad and earned Putin continued possession of the Tartus naval base and other infrastructure in Latakia that, until now, made Russia a regional arbiter. Russia’s easy and bloody success in Syria was one factor that gave Putin the confidence of a military supremo to invade Ukraine.
A catastrophic failure of U.S. policy also plays a role in this unfolding story. President Obama’s failure to enforce his famous “red line” when Assad used chemical weapons against his own people was a disaster for American power in the region and part of his administration’s abandonment of the region to Iranian hegemony. To paraphrase Talleyrand, not just a moral disgrace—even worse, a bad mistake. President-elect Trump says he wants no part of this conflict. Yet with fairly minor deployments of U.S. power, he will be able to influence Syria. Keen to win the golden laurels of Middle East peacemaker already gilded by the Abraham Accords, he will not be able to keep out of Syria, which will need to be part of any grand deal for the region.
Turkey and Israel are the other two major regional contenders. Israel feared Assad’s aggressive Syria—and for understandable reasons. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Syrian commandos and tank forces performed well against Israel in their surprise attack. When Syria sank into civil war, Israel preferred the fragmented Syria nominally under a broken Assad to an Islamist one. Now it appears it may be getting an Islamist Syria. On Sunday, Israel bombed fleeing Hezbollah forces and chemical weapons facilities now unprotected by Russia. It also occupied more of Golan to prevent HTS forces seizing positions there. Israel will take no chances and now faces Turkish power taking the place of the Iranians and the Russians.
As for Turkey: The military forces of this NATO member are formidable, and it sees a huge opportunity to exert its influence over Syria. It is one of the many ironies of the region that while President Erdoğan rants against Israeli warmongering and occupation of Palestinian lands, he backs his Muslim Brothers in Hamas, occupies his own zone of northern Syria, and regularly bombs Kurdish civilians and towns. Part Islamic leader, part Turkish nationalist, part Ottoman heir, the ambitious autocrat Erdoğan is keen to project power into former Ottoman territories, and as a traditional Turkish leader, he also fears Kurdish terrorism and, even more, Kurdish self-determination.
For the departing Russians, it is clear what has happened: Turkey is replacing Russia as the hegemon of Syria. Israel will now have to cope with a newly empowered Turkey that is a match for Israeli military sophistication and ruthlessness. It is here that Trump’s dealmaking could be essential.
It is worth recalling that during his reign, Hafez al-Assad was lauded by Western admirers, particularly British and American “Arab experts,” as the wise “Sphinx of Damascus,” as was his son Bashar after him. They were praised by an ignoble array of illiberal progressives, ignorant journalists, anti-Western academics, pro-Soviet and then Putinist “tankies,” Foreign Office and State Department apologists, fake “human rights activists,” overstuffed and underinformed BBC panjandrums, and footling fashionistas (the famous Vogue magazine “Desert Rose” piece on British-educated fashion maven Mrs. Assad remains a classic) as shrewd Arab modernizers and leaders of the “resistance” against wicked U.S. and Israel. That astonishingly illiberal hypocrisy has continued up to today, including by a certain discredited, rabidly anti-Israel U.N. rapporteur.
Another way to see the events—as I do—is with a longer time frame: the continuing disorder emerging from the fall of the Ottoman empire that ruled the Arab world from its conquest by Sultan Selim the Grim in 1517 and that ended in 1918 with the division of the region between the victors France and Britain. Russia, which had been promised a share of the Ottoman Near East, had fallen under Bolshevik rule. That left Britain and France under the ambitious liberal imperial premiers David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau, who called their new provinces “Mandates,” as confirmed by the League of Nations. Britain was given a new entity called Iraq and another named Palestine (today’s Israel, Palestinian Authority, and Kingdom of Jordan). France received Greater Syria (Syria and Lebanon). Initially, Paris planned to divide its Mandate into smaller states for its favored allies the Maronite Christians (Lebanon), the Druze, the Alawites, and the Sunnis in Damascus. The Kurds—the largest people in the region—were promised their own state, but that was prevented by the creation of the new Republic of Turkey in 1922–23. In the end, the French decided against creating several smaller states and instead created Lebanon to be ruled by their Maronite Christian allies in partnership with Sunnis and Druze; and Syria.
None of these new “Mandate” states, which became independent after World War II, had explicitly existed before. Most have failed as states—except, ironically, the British Mandate of Palestine, now Israel and the stable, if frail, Kingdom of Jordan. (The other successful states of the region are the oil-rich monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, which were never colonized and were created organically.) The two most successful states of the post–Ottoman Middle East are the two created against the wishes of the Imperial powers, in active rebellion against Britain, and formed by war, ethnic partition, and population transfer: Turkey and Israel. Those are now the two chief arbiters of the future of Syria.
The failure of all these states—Iraq, Lebanon, Syria—are just part of a wider instability created by the failure of many of the postimperial, postcolonial states formed by the Great Powers after 1945 in the Middle East and Africa in the 1960s. Many of the latter, from the Sahel to Sudan and Congo, will either degrade into chaotic warlands and exsurgencies, ruled not by states but militias, become protectorates of new colonial powers such as China, or survive as federalized states made up of autonomous entities. True in Africa, it may also be true for the Middle East.
Syria may emerge as a single state, tolerant of all its many ethnic minorities—but that is very unlikely—or it may be further federalized into autonomous entities ruled by the Kurds, the Alawites, and a central sector under Sunni rule, hopefully not of repressive Islamists. Each will be protected by or dominated by outside powers, and this may just be the start of another round of civil war. Turkey already has its army in its own Turkish-occupied zone, plus its own Syria proxy militia in Syria, and it is unclear what relationship will develop with HTS. Israel may develop its own relationships with the Kurds and others. Russia, most likely, will depart—though the possibility of an enclave around Tartus could be delivered in agreement with the Turks. Al-Jolani will either try to remake himself as a Syrian leader for all sects, or stay true to the die-hard Islamism of his career, with disastrous results for all Syrians, but especially women.
The U.S. is already involved in this imbroglio; as well as Turkish and Israeli air strikes, America is bombing Islamic State targets. Trump, despite his own desires, will inevitably be drawn in as the world arbiter keen to shape a new Middle East.
As for Bashar al-Assad? He will settle into his new Russian dacha far from the Syria he raped and ruined.
It is only human to praise the fall of a tyrant. Watching people emerge from the dark dungeons of his prisons is moving and impossible to look away from. But the possibilities here are endless, and no one knows how this may play out.
Simon Sebag Montefiore is the best-selling, prize-winning author of Jerusalem: The Biography; The World: A Family History of Humanity; and The Romanovs: 1613–1918 (Knopf). Follow him on X @SimonMontefiore.
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