Over a decade of war is over in Syria. Who has won — and what comes next?
The early days of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime – which came to a stunning end this weekend after 13 long years of civil war as rebel forces entered the capital of Damascus and Assad fleeing into exile – were defined by two famous pieces of graffiti.
The first was written by a group of teenage boys on a school wall in early 2011 in the city of Daraa. Inspired by the Arab Spring protests then seemingly sweeping away the old order in longtime dictatorships like Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, they wrote “You are next, doctor,” referring to Assad, who had trained and worked as an ophthalmologist in London in his early years before returning to take over the family business of ruling Syria with an iron fist. The boys were then arrested and tortured by the regime’s security forces, an event credited by many with sparking the mass protest movement against Assad.
The message proved to be overly optimistic: Assad didn’t flee and he didn’t compromise, instead opting to crush the uprising by force, leading to a civil war that would kill as many as half a million people and displace millions more.
The second graffiti message was a slogan scrawled by pro-regime militias throughout the country in the early days of the uprising: “Assad or we burn the country.” The phrase signaled the regime’s complete unwillingness to compromise with its enemies and the lengths it would go to stay in power.
Over the past week, even as the rebels took the ancient city of Aleppo on Nov. 30 and began streaming down the highway south toward Damascus, it still seemed far-fetched that the Syrian regime would fall, that a family that had been in power since Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad carried out a coup 54 years ago and was willing to go so far as to use chemical weapons on its own people and reduce its own cities to rubble to preserve that power, would simply crumble in a matter of days.
But that’s exactly what happened: as the rebels advanced there were numerous reports of government forces simply abandoning their positions and discarding their uniforms. The Russian government says it has offered Assad and his family asylum. US officials say they have not confirmed that Assad is in Russia, but have no reason to doubt it.
Today, footage from Damascus is showing the kind of celebrations not seen since the heady early days of the Arab Spring. Videos on social media show prisoners, including small children and people who’ve been imprisoned for decades being released from the regime’s notorious prisons. The events of the past week have raised hopes among at least some of the more than 6 million Syrians who’ve fled the country – forming the world’s largest refugee population — that they may be able to return home.
The White House initially distanced itself from the events in Syria, after the fall of Aleppo.
