Fall of the Assad Regime
Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow on 8 December 2024, ending fifty-four years of rule by his family and a civil war that had been frozen for four. The offensive took eleven days. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist faction governing Idlib in the north-west, launched an attack on 27 November alongside Turkish-backed factions, and Aleppo — Syria's largest city, which the government had spent four years and Russian airpower retaking in 2016 — fell in three days with almost no fighting. Hama followed, then Homs, then Damascus. The collapse was a collapse of the props rather than of the army. Hezbollah, which had supplied the government's best infantry since 2013, had been badly damaged by Israel that autumn; Iran's supply lines through Syria were under repeated Israeli attack; and Russia's airpower and attention were committed to Ukraine. The army itself had been hollowed out by a decade of conscription, corruption and unpaid wages, and units dissolved rather than fought. Sednaya prison was opened, and the scale of what had been done there became visible. Ahmed al-Sharaa — who had fought with al-Qaeda in Iraq as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, founded the Nusra Front, and spent years recasting himself — became the head of a transitional administration, and was removed from terrorist designations by several states within months. Israel struck Syrian military assets and moved into the buffer zone on the Golan. Some 500,000 people had died and half the population had been displaced. Hafez al-Assad had taken power in 1970 and his son had inherited it in 2000. Whether the new government can hold a country of Sunni, Alawite, Kurdish, Christian and Druze communities together is the open question.
- Year: 2024 CE
- Category: Military
