Författare: Scott Lucas Professor of International Politics Clinton Inst

Dressed in a modest grey suit and tie with a light blue shirt, bald and bearded, 41-year-old Mohammed al-Bashir addressed his fellow Syrians on Tuesday from behind a desk in an empty conference room. Asking for “stability and calm”, he announced that he would serve as the head of a transitional government until March 1.

Less than two weeks ago, any such address would have been given by Bashar al-Assad, the brutal dictator who had overseen the killing of hundreds of thousands of Syria’s citizens and the displacement of more than 11 million.

But Assad’s regime and 54 years of single-family rule collapsed after an 11-day rebel offensive. He and his wife Asma were smuggled out of Damascus by Russian intelligence officers, who flew them to Moscow.

Bashir was speaking to countrymen full of hope, but also wary about what may come next. He owes thanks for his position to the Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the rebel coalition that toppled Assad. Since the start of 2024, Bashir has been the political head of the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG), the administration of the HTS-led opposition area in north-west Syria.

Supported by Turkey, the HTS and SSG had ensured governance and a measure of stability in parts of Idlib and Aleppo provinces since November 2017. But they had also been accused by human rights groups of abuses of power and discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities. Despite breaking from Al-Qaeda in 2016, HTS is also designated as “terrorist” by the UN, US, UK, and some European countries.

In an interview with Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper on December 11, Bashir was asked about HTS’s past. He responded: “The wrongful actions of certain Islamist groups have led many people, especially in the west, to associate Muslims with terrorism and Islam with extremism. There were mistakes and misunderstandings that distorted the true meaning of Islam, which is ‘the religion of justice’. Precisely because we are Islamic, we will guarantee the rights of all people and all communities in Syria.”

Syrian rebels pose with a Syrian opposition flag in Homs, Syria.
MOHAMMED AL RIFAI Mohammed al Rifai / EPA

Moving towards stability

Born in Idlib province, Bashir graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Aleppo in 2007. He worked for the state-owned Syrian Gas Company, and after the start of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, was director of an institution providing education to children affected by the conflict. In 2021, he obtained a second degree in Sharia and Law from Idlib University.

The prime minister is the essential technocratic contrast to HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammed al-Golani. It is the latter who has reaped all the international attention and questions after Assad’s downfall.

In an interview with Sky News after the ousting of the previous government, al-Sharaa addressed other countries: “Their fears are unnecessary, God willing. The fear was from the presence of the [Assad] regime. The country is moving towards development and reconstruction. It’s going towards stability.”

Bashir is the face of that stability. As rebels moved south from Idlib and Aleppo to liberate Hama city earlier this month, he hailed not only “a new dawn of freedom and dignity”, but pledged: “We promise you in the Salvation Government that we are committed to living up to your expectation, rebuilding your city to return it to its leading civilised status … This is a day of joy and pride, but it is also a day of work and responsibility.”

That quest for responsibility and legitimacy involves many more than the prime minister. Soon after his Tuesday address, Bashir reported meeting with members from the old government and some directors from the administration in Idlib and its surrounding areas “to facilitate all the necessary works for the next two months”.

The technocrats are already developing plans for administration, reviewing the regime’s bureaucracy. Mohammad Yasser Ghazal, seconded from Idlib to head the Damascus City Council, said: “It’s all going to become one. All the government bodies will be dissolved: no Salvation Government, no factions, nothing. It will all soon be dissolved into one Syrian republic.”

Facing the regime’s legacy of corruption, cronyism, and centralised power, the new officials have asked department chiefs to list their remits and explain their department’s functions. They have encountered staff quoting government handbooks from the 1930s and 1960s, while failing to answer direct questions about their duties or decision making.

Rapid moves in early days

It is early days, but so far the rapid transition to rebel and now government rule has been largely peaceful with the continuation of services and daily business. The rebels issued a statement pledging respect for all minorities. And facing the possibility of looting, they warned against any destruction of public or private property and imposed an overnight curfew.

Utilities have been maintained. In Aleppo city, one of the first acts was to install new mobile phone towers. The financial system has been secured, and airports will soon reopen. Salaries, which averaged around US$25 (£19.80) per month under the regime, will be increased in line with SSG wages to around US$100 per month.

A total amnesty for army soldiers, police, and security personnel was declared, provided they submitted paperwork for official clemency and identification cards. Hundreds of men queued up in the hours after Aleppo fell to complete the process.

Two armed men keep watch over a road in Damascus, Syria, on December 11.
Hasan Belal / EPA

Individual acts of retribution have been reported against certain figures connected with the regime. One of those executed was Jalal al-Daqqaq, who was implicated in the killing of more than 200 Syrian detainees, reportedly feeding their throats to his pet lion.

However, there has been general adherence to the rebel injunction to avoid violence. Posts on X suggest that sources from minority sects, including Druze, Ismailis and Alawites (whose members include the Assads), confirm that any revenge operations have not been ethnically motivated.

The new government is aware that the maintenance of security and services is good politics. With the Assad regime leaving a basket-case economy as well as a crippled society, international assistance will be valuable.

For that to be obtained, HTS will need to be taken off the UN, US, and European blacklists. Ghazal summarises that the plans of the technocrats “require political recognition [and addressing] the terrorist designation, which I think is soon”.

But good politics will also have to convince ordinary Syrians who lived under the regime. At a store selling freshly printed Syrian revolutionary flags in Damascus, shopkeeper Fadi al-Mously was asked by the Washington Post to identify the new prime minister. He couldn’t. But whoever he is, “We don’t want him,” Mously said. “We want elections.” Läs mer…

The so-called “axis of the vulnerable” is breaking in Syria. Starting in 2016, Russia and Iran, propping up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, needed more than a year of bombing, ground assaults and siege to break the rebel opposition in the east of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.

Now, in 2024, the rebels needed less than four days to liberate the city and most of Aleppo province. They also regained territory in neighbouring Idlib province and moved south into northern Hama before the Assad regime established defensive lines.

Russian forces remained in their bases on the Mediterranean. And Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah were caught by the rebel advance in their positions in north-west Syria. They abandoned them, but not before at least two commanders were slain.

Since 2020, after Russia and Iran helped his forces roll back the opposition in much of Syria, Assad has presided in name over part of a fractured country. He and his allies held most of the largest cities, including Aleppo and the capital Damascus, while Turkish-backed opposition groups controlled most of north-west Syria and US-backed Kurdish factions had autonomy in the north-east.

Now Assad does not even preside over his share of the partition. And his Russian and Iranian enablers, overstretched and isolated by much of the world, are not in a position to restore his paper rule.

Propping up Assad

From the start of Syria’s uprising against the longtime rule of the Assads in March 2011, Russia and Iran provided political, logistical, intelligence and propaganda assistance to the Assad regime.

Iran effectively took over the Assad military from September 2012, training tens of thousands of militiamen to fill depleted forces. Hezbollah sent in its fighters from 2013 to save the Assad regime near Lebanon’s border. And Russia intervened with special forces and air power from September 2015.

Much of the success of Assad and his allies lay in their ability to wear down the international community. The Kremlin spread disruptive disinformation to cover for the regime’s deadly chemical attacks and to denigrate opposition activists and Syria’s White Helmets civil defence.

The Obama administration, rather than holding the regime to account, was led by the nose into fruitless discussions of a ceasefire. The EU was sidelined, the UN rendered impotent, and Arab governments eventually sat on their hands.

The regime’s greatest triumph was perhaps the portrayal of the anti-Assad movement’s downfall as extraordinary. East Aleppo was reclaimed in December 2016. Daraa province, the original site of the protests, and the rest of southern Syria succumbed in 2018. And an 11-month offensive reoccupied Hama province and parts of Idlib before a ceasefire, brokered by Russia and Turkey, in March 2020.

Aleppo has been severely damaged over the course of the conflict.
Vagabjorn / Shutterstock

But that portrayal was also an illusion covering up weakness. Russia’s bombing and sieges had levelled and choked much of the country, yet Moscow, Iran and Hezbollah still did not have the forces to help the regime claim the rest of north-west Syria or to remove the Kurds in the north-east.

“Reconstruction” was a deceptive label in areas retaken by the regime. Long burdened by the kleptocracy of the Assad elite, the Syrian economy lost more than half of its GDP between 2010 and 2020. The Syrian pound, which was valued at 47 to the US dollar in 2011, has now collapsed to 13,000 to the US dollar and is unofficially far weaker. And international sanctions, imposed because of the regime’s mass killing and repression, are still in place.

While the regime could count on outside assistance, it could maintain the illusion of power. But then Russian president Vladimir Putin gambled on his invasion quickly conquering Ukraine in 2022. Almost three years later, he has poured most of Russia’s resources into operations there and has put the country under international economic pressure.

Iran’s leadership has been beset by mass protests over social issues including women’s rights. The economy is still staggering between inefficiency and sanctions. And targeted assassinations and covert operations by Israel and the US have weakened the military.

Hezbollah has been decimated by Israel’s attacks in the past three months, from exploding pagers to the killing of commanders including overall leader Hassan Nasrallah. A shaky ceasefire has not freed fighters from the threat of Israeli airstrikes and ground assaults.

So, when the rebels attacked last week, they were not facing a vaunted axis of resistance. They saw only the disappearing shadow of Assad’s supposed authority.

Turkey’s pivotal role

Where next for Assad and his backers? The answer could now lie with Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdoğan may not have launched the rebel offensive – sources say Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of the Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, made the decision – but he is the beneficiary of the outcome. Turkey’s political and economic reach in north-west Syria has expanded since 2016 to include the country’s largest city.

Ankara has leverage over the terms of negotiations. It can encourage and even equip the rebels to press on, or it can call for a halt and consolidation in preparation for a sit-down with the Russians and Iranians. The Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, has already hosted his Iranian counterpart in a show of diplomacy.

But that raises further questions. Erdoğan’s primary foe in Syria is not Assad but the Kurdish authorities, whom he views as part of the Turkish-Kurdish insurgency group, the Kurdistan Workers’ party.

So far, the Turkish-backed rebels have not had serious clashes with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF and Kurdish officials have reportedly pulled out of areas in Aleppo province, retrenching in north-east Syria.

But will Turkey accept this or, as in 2019, will it pursue an attack on the north-east? Ankara has reportedly initiated talks with the Assad regime about a Turkish-controlled “buffer zone” well inside the border.

That brings in the US, which has been the essential backer of the Kurds and the SDF. For now, Washington is likely to maintain that commitment. But from January, all bets are off because Donald Trump is returning to the White House.

After a phone call with Erdoğan in late 2018, Trump tried to withdraw all US troops from Syria. He was outmanoeuvred by the Pentagon, but another call with Erdoğan in October 2019 green-lit a Turkish cross-border invasion.

The axis of the vulnerable is breaking, but Syria’s era of uncertainty continues. Syrian citizens can only hope that now it is not so deadly or destructive. Läs mer…