Syria’s new rulers stepped up engagement on Tuesday (December 17, 2024) with countries that deemed ousted President Bashar al-Assad a pariah, with the French flag raised at the embassy for the first time in over a decade.

Mr. Assad fled Syria just over a week ago, as his forces abandoned tanks and other equipment in the face of a lightning offensive spearheaded by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

The collapse of Mr. Assad’s rule on December 8 stunned the world. It sparked celebrations around Syria and beyond after his crackdown on democracy protests in 2011 led to one of the deadliest wars of the century.

Rooted in Syria’s branch of al-Qaeda, HTS is proscribed by several Western governments as a terrorist organisation, though it has sought to moderate its rhetoric and pledged to protect the country’s religious minorities.

The EU will reopen its mission in Syria following “constructive” talks with its new leadership, the bloc’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said, describing it as a “very important step”.

Turkiye and Qatar, which backed the anti-Assad opposition, have reopened embassies in Damascus, while U.S. and British officials have launched communications with Syria’s new leaders.

France, an early backer of the uprising, sent a delegation to Damascus on Tuesday, with special envoy Jean-Francois Guillaume saying his country was preparing to stand with Syrians during the transitional period.

An AFP journalist saw the French flag raised in the embassy’s entrance hall for the first time since the mission was shuttered in 2012.

After meeting Syria’s new leaders, the United Nations humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said on Tuesday he was “encouraged”, and that there was a “basis for ambitious scaling-up of vital humanitarian support”.

German diplomats were also in Damascus on Tuesday, while Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni said her country was ready to engage with the new leadership.

Syria came under international sanctions over Mr. Assad’s crackdown on protests, which sparked a war that killed more than 5,00,000 people and forced half of the population to flee their homes.

Mr. Assad left behind a country scarred by decades of torture, disappearances and summary executions, as well as economic mismanagement that has left 70 percent of the population in need of aid.

Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, who heads HTS, stressed the need in a meeting with a delegation of British diplomats to end “all sanctions imposed on Syria so that Syrian refugees can return to their country”.

He also said Syria’s rebel factions will be “disbanded and the fighters trained to join the ranks of the defence ministry”.

“Syria must remain united,” he said, according to posts on the group’s Telegram channel. “There must be a social contract between the state and all religions to guarantee social justice”.

The EU’s Kallas said the lifting of sanctions and removing HTS from its blacklist would depend on “when we see positive steps, not the words, but actual steps and deeds from the new leadership”.

The United Nations expects one million people to return to Syria in the first half of 2025, after the war pushed six million people to seek refuge abroad.

‘Colour of peace’

In Damascus’s old souk, many shops had reopened more than a week since Assad’s ouster.

Some shopkeepers were painting their store facades white, erasing the colours of the old Syrian flag that under Assad’s rule had become ubiquitous.

“We have been working non-stop for a week to paint everything white,” Omar Bashur, a 61-year-old artisan said.

“White is the colour of peace,” he added.

Abu Imad, another vendor, was selling vegetables from his car at a square in central Damascus.

“Everything happened at once: the regime fell, prices dropped, life got better. We hope it isn’t temporary,” he said.

With Assad gone, the Syrian pound started to recover against the dollar, moneychangers and traders said, as foreign currencies again became available on the local market.

Iran, which backed Assad throughout the civil war, said its embassy in Syria — abandoned and vandalised in the wake of Assad’s fall — would reopen once the “necessary conditions” are met.

Russia was the other main backer of Assad’s rule.

On Monday, the ousted president broke his silence with a statement on Telegram saying that he only left to Russia once Damascus had fallen, and denounced the country’s new leaders as “terrorists”.

“My departure from Syria was neither planned nor did it occur during the final hours of the battles,” said the statement.

Several former officials had told AFP that Mr. Assad was already out of the country hours before the rebels seized Damascus.

‘My tears were dry’

Around the country, Syrians deprived for years of news of missing loved ones searched desperately for clues that might help them find closure.

In a war-ravaged Palestinian refugee camp near Damascus, Radwan Adwan was stacking stones to rebuild his father’s grave, finally able to return to the cemetery.

“Without the fall of the regime, it would have been impossible to see my father’s grave again,” said 45-year-old Adwan.

Yarmuk camp was bombed and besieged by Assad’s forces, emptied of most of its residents and reduced to ruins before its recapture in 2018, when access to the cemetery was officially banned.

“When we arrived, there was no trace of the grave,” said Adwan.

His mother Zeina sat on a small metal chair in front of her husband’s gravesite.

She was “finally” able to weep for him, she said. “Before, my tears were dry.”

Geir Pederson, the United Nations’ special envoy to Syria, center, listens to a woman who was looking for her missing relative in the Saydnaya prison, during his visit to the infamous Saydnaya military prison, in Saydnaya north of Damascus, Syria, on December 16, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The United Nations told the leader of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group which toppled Bashar al-Assad that Syria must have a “credible and inclusive” transition.

The UN special envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen who arrived in Damascus on Sunday, has met Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — who now goes under his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa — Mr. Pedersen’s office said Monday in a statement on Telegram.

He also met interim Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir, it said.

Mr. Pedersen met them after Saturday’s international meeting on Syria in Jordan, and stressed “the need for a credible and inclusive Syrian-owned and led political transition based on the principles of United Nations Security Council resolution 2254 (2015)”.

The UN envoy also underlined “the intention of the United Nations to render all assistance to the Syrian people”, and was briefed on their “challenges and priorities”, the statement added.

It said Mr. Pedersen had several engagements planned in the days ahead, but did not elaborate.

Mr. Assad was toppled by a lightning 11-day rebel offensive that swept down from northwest Syria, with fighters entering the capital on December 8.

Abandoned by his Russian and Iranian backers, Mr. Assad fled into exile in Moscow, bring to an end five decades of abuses by his clan.

The HTS group that led his overthrow is a former branch of al-Qaeda in Syria, and the United States and other Western governments still classify it as a “terrorist” group.

While hailing Mr. Assad’s downfall, several nations have said they will wait to see how Syria’s new Sunni Muslim authorities treat minorities in the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country.

Several countries including the United States and Britain have said they have already made contact with Jolani.

UN Special Envoy Geir Pedersen meeting with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, now using his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus.
| Photo Credit: AFP

The Syrian Islamist leader whose group led the offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad met on Sunday with U.N. envoy Geir Pedersen, who was visiting Damascus, said a statement on the rebels’ Telegram channel.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, now using his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa, discussed with Pedersen “the changes that have occurred on the political scene which make it necessary to update” a 2015 United Nations Security Council resolution “to suit the new reality”, the statement said.

Jolani’s HTS is rooted in Syria’s branch of Al-Qaeda, the Al-Nusra Front, designated a “terrorist” organisation by many Western governments.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254 of 2015, to which the rebel statement referred, set out a roadmap for a political settlement in Syria, and also mentioned Nusra’s “terrorist” designation.

On Tuesday, Pedersen said the fact that Nusra was listed by the U.N. Security Council as a terrorist organisation was “obviously a complicating factor” in efforts to find a way forward.

However, he stressed that it was important to view HTS, which broke with Nusra in 2016 and has sought to soften its image, through the events of the civil war.

The rebel statement on Sunday said Jolani had emphasised “the need to focus on Syrian territorial unity, reconstruction and achieving economic development”.

He also raised “the importance of providing a safe environment for the return of refugees and providing economic and political support for this”, said the statement.

Earlier on Sunday, Pedersen urged a “political process… that is inclusive of all Syrians.

“That process obviously needs to be led by the Syrians themselves” with “help and assistance” from the rest of the world, he said.

A Syrian fighter shouts at people suspect of looting at a residential complex of former Bashar Assad’s military officers at the village of Husseiniyeh, in the outskirts of Damascus, Syria.
| Photo Credit: AP

Britain on Sunday announced a 50 million pounds ($63 million) aid package to help vulnerable Syrians after rebels last week overthrew President Bashar al-Assad.

Millions of Syrians need humanitarian assistance after more than a decade of civil war that shattered much of the country’s infrastructure and displaced large numbers of people. Some of the many who fled the country are returning from neighbouring states.

By the numbers

– 30 million pounds will provide “immediate help to more than a million people including food, shelter, emergency healthcare, and protection for the most vulnerable”, Britain said in a statement.

That money, mostly distributed through U.N. channels, will support “emerging needs including the rehabilitation of essential services such as water, hospitals and schools”.

– To help Syrians in neighbouring countries, 10 million pounds will go to the World Food Programme (WFP) in Lebanon and 10 million pounds will go to Jordan via the WFP and the U.N.’s refugee agency.

“The fall of the horrific Assad regime provides a once-in-a-generation chance for the people of Syria,” foreign minister David Lammy said. “We’re committed to supporting the Syrian people as they chart a new course.”

Smoke billows, after Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was ousted, near Damascus, Syria.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Britain has had diplomatic contact with the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group that swept Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from power last week, British foreign minister David Lammy said on Sunday.

“HTS remains a proscribed organisation, but we can have diplomatic contact and so we do have diplomatic contact as you would expect,” Lammy told broadcasters.

“Using all the channels that we have available, and those are diplomatic and, of course, intelligence-led channels, we seek to deal with HTS where we have to.”

On Saturday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the United States has had direct contact with HTS.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. File.
| Photo Credit: AP

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Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. File.
| Photo Credit: AP

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Syrian children play next to a destroyed residential building at Hanano neighbourhood in the city of Aleppo, Syria.
| Photo Credit: AP

Top diplomats from the United States, the Arab League and Turkey met in Jordan on Saturday to discuss how to assist Syria ’s transition after the fall of Bashar Assad’s government a week ago. No Syrian representatives attended.

The collapse of the Assad family’s more than half-century of rule has sparked new fears of instability in a region already shaken by the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and hostilities between Israel and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah despite a tenuous ceasefire.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said American officials have been in direct contact with the Syrian insurgent group that led the overthrow of Assad’s government, but the group continues to be designated a foreign terrorist organization by the United States and others.

The insurgent leader in an interview with Syrian TV didn’t mention contact with the U.S., but he warned Israel about the hundreds of airstrikes it has carried out in Syria in the past week.

The U.S. is also making a renewed push for a ceasefire in Gaza, where the war has plunged more than 2 million Palestinians into a severe humanitarian crisis.

Gunmen attacks Syrian insurgent group members

A Syrian war monitor and a citizen journalist say gunmen attacked members of a Syrian insurgent group in the country’s coastal region, killing or wounding 15 of them Saturday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said loyalists to former President Bashar Assad killed and wounded members of the Failaq al-Sham group, which took part in the attacks that led to the overthrow of Assad a week ago.

The coastal region is home to many members of Assad’s minority Alawite sect.

Citizen journalist Taher al-Omar said Failaq al-Sham members were ambushed near the town of Jableh by “sectarian gunmen.” He said several were killed, without giving details.

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Hezbollah was a main backer of Assad and sent thousands of fighters to Syria over the past decade. And for decades, Hezbollah relied on Syria as a channel for weapons from the militant group’s main backer, Iran.

In his first public comments in the week since Assad’s fall, Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem in a televised speech on Saturday said Hezbollah has lost the military supply line through Syria but the new authority there might reinstate the route. Otherwise, he said, “we might find other ways.”

Kassem also said Hezbollah hopes the new authority in Syria will consider Israel an enemy.

U.S. officials have been in direct contact with the Syrian rebel group that ousted Assad, Blinken says

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Blinken is the first U.S. official to publicly confirm contacts between the Biden administration and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, which ousted Assad. Speaking at a news conference in Jordan, Blinken would not discuss details of the contacts but said it was important for the U.S. to convey messages to the group about its conduct and how it intends to govern in a transition period.

Turkey reopens its embassy in Syria

Turkey reopened its embassy in Syria on Saturday, becoming the first country to do so since the end of Bashar Assad’s rule last weekend. The Syrian insurgents who overthrew Assad had received vital help from Turkey.

The Turkish flag was raised above the compound in Damascus for the first time since diplomatic ties were cut in 2012. The embassy suspended operations 12 years ago due to insecurity during the Syrian civil war.

Several countries maintained diplomatic ties with Assad’s government during the 13-year conflict, while others reopened their diplomatic missions in recent years as they sought to normalize relations.

A torn posters shows the late Syrian President Hafez Assad and his son the ousted Syrian president Bashar Assad, that were set at the entrance of the notorious security detention centre called Palestine Branch, in Damascus, Syria, on December 14, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AP

The story so far:Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria for 24 years, has fallen. He and his family have taken refuge in Russia. Syria now has a transitional government, headed by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an Islamist militant group that was controlling the northwestern province of Idlib. Many Syrians are celebrating the collapse of Mr. Assad’s dictatorial regime, but remain anxious about what is to come. Turkey, as the main backer of the HTS, sees an opportunity to expand its influence in West Asia, while Iran and Russia, the main backers of the Assad regime, have taken a setback. Israel, in the meantime, is exploiting the vacuum in Syria to grab more territories.

Why did the Assad regime fall?

Mr. Assad held on to power for 13 years after the civil war broke out in 2011, only for his regime to collapse in 12 days. By 2017, the Assad regime had taken over most of its lost territories, with help from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. But he hadn’t defeated the militants. The strongest of them was the HTS, which was formerly called Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda arm in Syria. Abu Muhammed al-Jolani, today the ‘emir’ of the HTS, was an al-Qaeda leader. The HTS-controlled Idlib emerged as a rebel stronghold. Jolani established a mini-administration in Idlib — the Syrian Salvation Government. He had been planning a large-scale offensive against the regime forces for months, if not years.

Also read | Twelve days that shook Syria 

On the other side, a host of domestic, regional and international factors weakened Mr. Assad’s position. Syria’s economy is in a very bad shape. Its GDP shrank by 87% in the past 13 years, from $68 billion in 2011 to just $9 billion in 2023. Western sanctions stifled an already deteriorated economy further. The poorly paid soldiers of the Assad regime lacked motivation to preserve it. Syrian armed forces were also weakened by repeated Israeli air strikes, which picked up pace over the past year, after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack. Mr. Assad was heavily reliant on his external allies for security. However, their priorities also changed in recent years. Russia’s focus is now on the Ukraine war. Iran is involved in a hot and cold war with Israel. Hezbollah lost most of its leaders and thousands of fighters in its year-long war with Israel. The militants knew Mr. Assad was weak.

They launched an offensive on November 27 in the western outskirts of Aleppo, probably aimed at cutting the underbelly of his decaying regime. What happened next was a rapid collapse of the regime itself.

Who is in charge now?

Syria today has roughly four militant coalitions. The first one is the HTS, led by Jolani. The HTS says it has broken its ties with al-Qaeda, and promises to respect Syria’s ethnic and religious diversity. But its rank and file comprise transnational jihadists, who travelled to Syria from across the world, to fight “jihad” against the Assad regime. The HTS’s main ally is the Syrian National Army (SNA), another northern militia. The core of the SNA is the Free Syrian Army, a Turkish proxy that was formed with defected Syrian soldiers and officers. The HTS and the SNA launched the November 27 offensive together.

The second group is the Southern Front, a loose coalition of dozens of militias in Syria’s south (Daara and Quneitra). Some of them were backed by Jordan, which shares a border with southern Syria. When the HTS-SNA combine advanced towards regime-held cities from the north, the southern militias started an offensive from the south. And they reached Damascus first, on December 8. The third main group is the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The core of the SDF is the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the armed wing of Syrian Kurdistan. The SDF enjoys relative autonomy in the Syrian Kurdish region. The SDF was armed by the U.S. in the past in its fight against the Islamic State. The fourth group is the Alawite militias in the coastal region. Alawites are Mr. Assad’s sect, who enjoyed power for over five decades in the country. The HTS, a Sunni Islamist group, had in the past targeted Alawites, who make up roughly 15% of Syria’s population. The HTS has asked the Alawite community to cut ties with the fallen regime. Of these four, the HTS is the most powerful force now. The transition government in Damascus is a replica of the HTS Salvation government in Idlib.

Why does geopolitics matter?

Syria has immense geopolitical significance. It hosts Russia’s Mediterranean naval base in Tartus, its only naval base outside the former Soviet territory. Russia also has built an air base in Syria. For Russia to project force, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and then to the Atlantic, it is essential to retain access to the Tartus base. It could also be one of the reasons Russia made a military intervention in Syria in 2015, to protect the Assad regime. Now that the regime has collapsed, Russia’s focus would be on protecting its bases. For Iran, a sworn enemy of America and Israel, Syria was its only state ally in West Asia. Syria was also a key conduit between Iran and Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia. The fall of the Assad regime could disrupt Iran’s supply networks in the region, which could invariably weaken the country’s deterrence.

Turkey, on the other side, appears to be stronger. For years, it had tried to pull down the Assad regime. When the Russian intervention made it immediately impossible, Turkey shifted its focus towards playing a long game with its proxies. Now that Mr. Assad is gone and the HTS-SNA coalition is in Damascus, Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to have outwitted Vladimir Putin, and extended his influence from Ankara to the borders of Iraq, Jordan and Israel.

Will the militants build a new Syria?

Many think the fall of a dictatorial regime would lead to a new dawn. For now, Syria’s militants have made the right noises — about respecting the country’s diversity and rebuilding its dilapidated institutions and welcoming back refugees. But Syria still remains a complex case — with or without Mr. Assad. Before Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, captured power in 1971, Syria had seen multiple coups and counter-coups. It was Hafez and his Ba’ath party that stabilised the country and built its modern institutions. Today, the challenge the militants face is to rebuild the country once again, by demobilising the militias. But the HTS neither has ideological clarity for an inclusive Syria nor the resources to demobilise other militias. The HTS is a Salafi-jihadist outfit, which wants to remake secular Syria and retain its tight grip over state institutions. If the HTS’s rule in Idlib is an example, the group is not any less dictatorial than Mr. Assad. The southern militias, backed by Jordan, would want to get their due share of power. And in the east, the SDF, the Kurdish militia, wants to keep their hard-earned autonomy. But Turkey sees the SDF as a terrorist outfit, and Turkish-backed militias have already started attacking the SDF.

In Afghanistan, throughout the 1980s, the U.S. and Pakistan-backed Mujahideen fought together against the communist regime as well as the Soviet troops. But after the Soviet withdrawal and the collapse of the communist rule, Afghanistan fell into deeper chaos. In Libya, NATO made a military intervention in 2011 to “liberate” the country from Mohammed Gaddafi. After Gaddafi’s regime, one of the most stable governments in Africa, was toppled and he was killed, the country fell into a bloody civil war — which is still going on. Iraq never recovered from the scars of America’s regime change war of 2003. None of these examples are encouraging for Syria.

A worker tears down the pictures of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad, Lebanon’s late Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at a gas station in Nubl, a Shi’ite village seized by rebels, in rural Aleppo, Syria, December 11, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The head of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said the country has to live with the new “realities” of Syria after the ouster of Tehran-backed president Bashar al-Assad, state media reported on Thursday (December 12, 2024).

Regarding Syria, Iran “was really trying day and night to help in whatever way it could; we have to live with the realities of Syria; we look at them and act based on them,” Hossein Salami said, quoted by the official IRNA news agency.

“Strategies must change according to the circumstances; we cannot solve numerous global and regional issues with stagnation and employing the same tactics,” he added.

Iran has been a strong ally of the Assad family, whose decades-long rule of Syria ended on the weekend when a whirlwind rebel offensive took the capital Damascus.

Assad had long played a strategic role in Iran’s anti-Israel “axis of resistance”, particularly in facilitating the supply of weapons to Tehran’s ally Hezbollah in neighbouring Lebanon.

The axis of resistance includes Hezbollah as well as Hamas in Gaza, Huthi rebels in Yemen and some smaller Shia militia groups in Iraq.

Also on Thursday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps strongly condemned “the abuse of the current instability in Syria by the US and the Zionist regime,” which is Iran’s term for Israel.

“The Resistance Front will not be passive in confronting any plan or scheme that seeks to disrupt the resistance and weaken the power and authority of the countries in the region,” the Revolutionary Guards said in a statement.

Turkey has forces in northern Syria, while in the south the Israeli army has sent troops into a UN-patrolled buffer zone on the countries’ shared border, east of the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

The United States also has troops based in Syria, where they have worked with Kurdish-led fighters battling the Islamic State group.

Ties between Tehran and Damascus peaked during the Syrian civil war that started in 2011, with the Revolutionary Guards sending what it called “military advisers” to help Assad.