Syrian rebel fighters gather around the Clock Tower during celebrations in the heart of Homs early on December 8, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The sudden collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s rule over Syria marks the culmination of a nearly 14-year rebellion and a key moment in a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced half the population and drew in outside powers.

Syria War: Follow LIVE updates on December 8, 2024

This is how it unfolded:

2011

The first protests against Assad quickly spread across the country, and are met by security forces with a wave of arrests and shootings.

Some protesters take up guns and military units defect as the uprising becomes an armed revolt that will gain support from Western and Arab countries and Turkiye.

2012

A bombing in Damascus is the first by al Qaeda’s new Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, which gains in power and starts crushing groups with a nationalist ideology.

World powers meet in Geneva and agree on the need for a political transition, but their divisions on how to achieve it will foil years of U.N.-sponsored peace efforts.

Assad turns his air force on opposition strongholds, as rebels gain ground and the war escalates with massacres on both sides.

2013

Lebanon’s Hezbollah helps Assad to victory at Qusayr, halting rebel momentum and showing the Iran-backed group’s growing role in the conflict.

Washington has declared chemical weapons use a red line, but a gas attack on rebel-held eastern Ghouta near Damascus kills scores of civilians without triggering a U.S. military response.

2014

Islamic State group suddenly seizes Raqqa in the northeast and swathes more territory in Syria and Iraq.

Rebels in the Old City of Homs surrender, agreeing to move to an outer suburb – their first big defeat in a major urban area and a precursor to future “evacuation” deals.

Washington builds an anti-Islamic State coalition and starts air strikes, helping Kurdish forces turn the jihadist tide but creating friction with its ally Turkiye.

2015

With better cooperation and more arms from abroad, rebel groups gain more ground and seize northwestern Idlib, but Islamist militants are taking a bigger role.

Russia joins the war on Assad’s side with air strikes that turn the conflict against the rebels for years to come.

2016

Alarmed by Kurdish advances on the border, Turkey launches an incursion with allied rebels, making a new zone of Turkish control.

The Syrian army and its allies defeat rebels in Aleppo, seen at the time as Assad’s biggest victory of the war.

The Nusra Front splits from al Qaeda and starts trying to present itself in a moderate light, adopting a series of new names and eventually settling on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

2017

Israel acknowledges air strikes against Hezbollah in Syria, aiming to degrade the growing strength of Iran and its allies.

U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led forces defeat Islamic State in Raqqa. That offensive, and a rival one by the Syrian army, drive the jihadist group from nearly all its land.

2018

The Syrian army recaptures eastern Ghouta, before quickly retaking the other insurgent enclaves in central Syria, and then the rebels’ southern bastion of Deraa.

2019

Islamic State loses its last scrap of territory in Syria. The U.S. decides to keep some troops in the country to prevent attacks on its Kurdish allies.

2020

Russia backs a government offensive that ends with a ceasefire with Turkey that freezes most front lines. Assad holds most territory and all main cities, appearing deeply entrenched. Rebels hold the northwest. A Turkey-backed force holds a border strip. Kurdish-led forces control the northeast.

2023

The Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 triggers fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, ultimately reducing the group’s presence in Syria and fatally undermining Assad.

2024

Rebels launch a new assault on Aleppo. With Assad’s allies focused elsewhere his army quickly collapses. Eight days after the fall of Aleppo the rebels have taken most major cities and enter Damascus, driving Assad from power.

The fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government Sunday (December 8, 2024) brought to a dramatic close his nearly 14-year struggle to hold onto power as his country fragmented amid a brutal civil war that became a proxy battlefield for regional and international powers.

Mr. Assad’s downfall came as a stark contrast to his first months as Syria’s unlikely president in 2000, when many hoped he would be a young reformer after three decades of his father’s iron grip. Only 34 years old, the Western-educated ophthalmologist was a rather geeky tech-savvy fan of computers with a gentle demeanour.

But when faced with protests against his rule that erupted in March 2011, Mr. Assad turned to the brutal tactics of his father in an attempt to crush them. As the uprising haemorrhaged into an outright civil war, he unleashed his military to blast opposition-held cities, with support from allies Iran and Russia.

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International rights groups and prosecutors alleged widespread use of torture and extrajudicial executions in Syria’s government-run detention centres.

The Syrian war has killed nearly half a million people and displaced half the country’s pre-war population of 23 million. As the uprising spiralled into a civil war, millions of Syrians fled across the borders into Jordan, Turkiye, Iraq and Lebanon and on to Europe.

His departure brings an end to the Assad family rule, spanning just under 54 years. With no clear successor, it throws the country into further uncertainty.

Until recently, it seemed that Mr. Assad was almost out of the woods. The long-running conflict had settled along frozen conflict lines in recent years, with Mr. Assad’s government regaining control of most of Syria’s territory while the northwest remained under the control of opposition groups and the northeast under Kurdish control.

While Damascus remained under crippling Western sanctions, neighbouring countries had begun to resign themselves to Mr. Assad’s continued hold on power. The Arab League reinstated Syria’s membership last year, and Saudi Arabia in May announced the appointment of its first ambassador to Syria since severing ties with Damascus 12 years earlier.

However, the geopolitical tide turned quickly with a surprise offensive launched by opposition groups based in northwest Syria in late November. Government forces quickly collapsed, while Mr. Assad’s allies, preoccupied by other conflicts — including Russia’s war in Ukraine and the yearlong wars between Israel and the Iran-backed militant groups Hezbollah and Hamas — appeared reluctant to forcefully intervene.

Mr. Assad’s whereabouts were not clear Sunday (December 8, 2024), amid reports he had left the country as insurgents took control of the Syrian capital.

He came to power in 2000 by a twist of fate. His father had been cultivating Bashar’s oldest brother Basil as his successor, but in 1994 Basil was killed in a car crash in Damascus. Bashar was brought home from his ophthalmology practice in London, put through military training and elevated to the rank of colonel to establish his credentials so he could one day rule.

When Hafez Assad died in 2000, Parliament quickly lowered the presidential age requirement from 40 to 34. Bashar’s elevation was sealed by a nationwide referendum, in which he was the only candidate.

Hafez, a lifelong military man, ruled the country for nearly 30 years during which he set up a Soviet-style centralized economy and kept such a stifling hand over dissent that Syrians feared even to joke about politics to their friends.

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He pursued a secular ideology that sought to bury sectarian differences under Arab nationalism and the image of heroic resistance to Israel. He formed an alliance with the Shiite clerical leadership in Iran, sealed Syrian domination over Lebanon and set up a network of Palestinian and Lebanese militant groups.

Bashar initially seemed completely unlike his strongman father.

Tall and lanky with a slight lisp, he had a quiet, gentle demeanour. His only official position before becoming President was head of the Syrian Computer Society. His wife, Asma al-Akhras, whom he married several months after taking office, was attractive, stylish and British-born.

The young couple, who eventually had three children, seemed to shun trappings of power. They lived in an apartment in the upscale Abu Rummaneh district of Damascus, as opposed to a palatial mansion like other Arab leaders.

Initially upon coming to office, Mr. Assad freed political prisoners and allowed more open discourse. In the “Damascus Spring,” salons for intellectuals emerged where Syrians could discuss art, culture and politics to a degree impossible under his father.

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But after 1,000 intellectuals signed a public petition calling for multiparty democracy and greater freedoms in 2001 and others tried to form a political party, the salons were snuffed out by the feared secret police who jailed dozens of activists.

Instead of a political opening, Mr. Assad turned to economic reforms. He slowly lifted economic restrictions, let in foreign banks, threw the doors open to imports and empowered the private sector. Damascus and other cities long mired in drabness saw a flourishing of shopping malls, new restaurants and consumer goods. Tourism swelled.

Abroad, he stuck to the line his father had set, based on the alliance with Iran and a policy of insisting on a full return of the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights, although in practice Mr. Assad never militarily confronted Israel.

In 2005, he suffered a heavy blow with the loss of Syria’s decades-old control over neighbouring Lebanon after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. With many Lebanese accusing Damascus of being behind the slaying, Syria was forced to withdraw its troops from the country and a pro-American government came into power.

At the same time, the Arab world became split into two camps — one of U.S.-allied, Sunni-led countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the other Syria and Shiite-led Iran with their ties to Hezbollah and Palestinian militants.

Throughout, Mr. Assad relied for largely on the same power base at home as his father: his Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam comprising around 10% of the population. Many of the positions in his government went to younger generations of the same families that had worked for his father. Drawn in as well were the new middle class created by his reforms, including prominent Sunni merchant families.

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Mr. Assad also turned to his own family. His younger brother Maher headed the elite Presidential Guard and would lead the crackdown against the uprising. Their sister Bushra was a strong voice in his inner circle, along with her husband Deputy Defence Minister Assef Shawkat, until he was killed in a 2012 bombing. Bashar’s cousin, Rami Makhlouf, became the country’s biggest businessman, heading a financial empire before the two had a falling out that led to Makhlouf being pushed aside.

Mr. Assad also increasingly entrusted key roles to his wife, Asma, before she announced in May that she was undergoing treatment for leukaemia and stepped out of the limelight.

When protests erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, eventually toppling their rulers, Mr. Assad dismissed the possibility of the same occurring in his country, insisting his regime was more in tune with its people. After the Arab Spring wave did move to Syria, his security forces staged a brutal crackdown while Mr. Assad consistently denied he was facing a popular revolt, instead blaming “foreign-backed terrorists” trying to destabilize his regime.

His rhetoric struck a chord with many in Syria’s minority groups — including Christians, Druze and Shiites — as well as some Sunnis who feared the prospect of rule by Sunni extremists even more than they disliked Mr. Assad’s authoritarian rule.

Ironically, on February 26, 2001, two days after the fall of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to protesters and just before the wave of Arab Spring protests swept into Syria — in an email released by Wikileaks as part of a cache in 2012 — Mr. Assad e-mailed a joke he’d run across mocking the Egyptian leader’s stubborn refusal to step down.

“NEW WORD ADDED TO DICTIONARY: Mubarak (verb): To stick something, or to glue something. … Mubarak (adjective): slow to learn or understand,” it read.