Watch: Who is Mohammad al-Bashir, Syria’s caretaker Prime Minister?

After 13 years of brutal war, Syria’s divided and devastated nation faces a new chapter. Mohammad Al-Bashir, an engineering graduate turned rebel leader, steps into the spotlight as caretaker Prime Minister. But can he unite a fractured country and navigate the immense challenges of rebuilding Syria? Let’s dive into the story of this pivotal leader.

Born in 1983 in Jabal al-Zawiya, Idlib Province, Mohammad Al-Bashir has a background that’s as layered as Syria’s ongoing conflict. A graduate of Aleppo University in electrical and electronic engineering, he also studied Islamic and civil law at Idlib University. Before the war, he worked for Syria’s state gas company—a career path far removed from his current reality.

Al-Bashir became the head of Idlib’s rebel administration—known as the “Salvation Government”—in January 2024. This government, established in 2017, operates ministries, departments, judicial, and security systems for a population of over five million. It was a lifeline for people in rebel-held areas cut off from national services. But running a local government is a far cry from leading a war-torn nation.

The dynamics shifted dramatically after the rebel coalition’s lightning offensive on November 27. In a matter of days, they captured key territories, including Aleppo and Damascus, effectively toppling Bashar al-Assad’s decades-long dynasty. Al-Bashir’s new role as caretaker Prime Minister now places him in the traditional seat of power: Damascus.

In his first public appearance outside Idlib, Al-Bashir, wearing a grey suit and gold watch, sat beside rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. While Jolani praised Idlib’s governance as “highly experienced,” he acknowledged the monumental task ahead: managing a divided country, poverty, and competing factions vying for control of former government strongholds.

Radwan Ziadeh, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington DC, called Al-Bashir “the closest” to the rebels’ joint operations room. But he stressed that Syria’s transitional process must involve all Syrians to ensure a peaceful shift to democracy. Al-Bashir’s success will depend on unity, inclusivity, and addressing the basic needs of a war-torn population.

As Mohammad Al-Bashir steps into national leadership, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Rebuilding Syria requires more than political maneuvering—it demands a collective effort to heal a nation torn apart. Will he rise to the challenge? Only time will tell.

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.

Damascus, Syria:

Syria should have an 18 month transition period to establish “a safe, neutral, and quiet environment” for free elections, Hadi Al-Bahra, the head of Syria’s main opposition abroad, said to Reuters on the sidelines of the Doha Forum on Sunday.

In a seismic moment for the Middle East, Syrian rebels seized control of Damascus on Sunday, forcing President Bashar al-Assad to flee after more than 13 years of civil war, ending his family’s decades-long rule.

The lightning offensive sparked concerns in Arab capitals and raised fears of a new wave of regional instability, as well as questions over whether the rebels will be able to ensure an orderly transition.

Al-Bahra, President of the Syrian National Coalition, said Syria should draft a constitution within six months, on which the first election would be a referendum.

“The constitution will say, are we going to have a parliamentary system, presidential system, or mixed system? And based on this, we do the election and the people choose their leader,” said Al-Bahra.

He added that the opposition had asked state employees to continue to report to work until the power transition, and assured them that they would not be harmed.

Assad’s swift toppling followed a shift in the balance of power in the Middle East after many leaders of Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, a lynchpin of Assad’s battlefield force, were killed by Israel over the past two months. Russia, Assad’s other key ally, has been focused on the war in Ukraine.

“It was like a domino effect. So it was clear that (Assad) decided to leave. I felt relief, but also a little sad. He should be held accountable for all the crimes that he did,” Al-Bahra said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Paris:

More than 13 years since Bashar al-Assad’s security forces opened fire on protesters demanding democratic reforms, the Syrian president’s grip on power may finally be weakening.

The 59-year-old son and heir of late dictator Hafez al-Assad has faced several setbacks during the long civil war triggered by his brutal crackdown in March 2011, but has so far managed to cling on to power.

Now, with his Lebanese ally Hezbollah reeling from an Israeli onslaught and his great power backer Russia distracted by its invasion of Ukraine, Assad is running short of friends on the battlefield.

Key cities in the north, including Aleppo and Hama have fallen to opposition fighters in just a matter of days.

And on Saturday the rebels said they are now encircling the capital where Assad has ruled since the death of his father in 2000.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has welcomed the rebel advance; Israel is reinforcing its forces in the occupied Golan; and Syria’s southern neighbour Jordan is organising an evacuation of its citizens.

In a further sign of Assad’s isolation, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) group, which controls much of northeast Syria, said it was ready to speak to its foes among the Turkish-backed rebels.

But international observers have repeatedly predicted the isolated former ophthalmologist’s fall since the earliest months of the uprising, and they have repeatedly been incorrect.

The 2011 protests against Assad’s rule began after a teenager was arrested for allegedly scrawling anti-government graffiti in the southern town of Daraa.

Stunning advance

Now, for Assad’s rule, the “writing is on the wall”, Joshua Landis, of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma told AFP. “Things are folding very quickly.”

The rebel advance has been stunning.

After Aleppo and Hama fell in quick succession, the rebels and government forces were clashing Saturday near the major city of Homs.

Its capture would effectively cut Assad’s capital off from his support base in the Alawite minority community in the coastal highlands.

“The Alawite minority has lost faith in Assad,” Landis said. “There are serious questions about whether the Syrian army has any fight left.”

But some caution is merited. After all, haven’t world leaders underestimated Assad before?

As early as November 2011, Turkey’s Erdogan urged Assad to hold free elections and warned that his “office is only temporary”.

In October 2012, during a re-election campaign debate, US president Barack Obama also warned Assad that his “days are numbered”.

The next month, Nabil Elaraby, then the head of the Arab League, declared “everyone knows that the regime in Syria will not remain for long”.

The Syrian strongman defied them all, even as international lawyers drew up arrest warrants for war crimes and rights groups denounced Syria’s use of chemical weapons and aerial bombardment in civilian areas.

As the civil war spiralled into overlapping regional conflicts — government versus rebels, Turkey versus Kurdish fighters, US-backed militias against Islamic State group jihadists — Assad retained his grip.

At first he was ostracised by many fellow Arab leaders, leaning instead on Iranian and Russian support, but as it became clear he was not leaving the stage diplomatic ties quietly resumed.

Rebel victories

And meanwhile, Russia and Iran had Assad’s back. Lebanon’s pro-Iran Hezbollah sent thousands of fighters, backed by Iranian advisers, to bolster Syrian government forces. Russia carried out air strikes.

But the speed of this week’s rebel victories seems to suggest that without his powerful foreign friends, Assad’s Syrian army is a hollow shell.

Russia has such little confidence in its ally that its embassy has acknowledged a “difficult military and political situation”.

Before the recent ceasefire in its conflict with Israel, Hezbollah lost thousands of fighters and weapons and its long-standing chief Hassan Nasrallah.

It appears to be in no position to help, despite a Hezbollah source saying Saturday it had sent 2,000 fighters into Syria’s Qusayr area “to defend its positions”.

“The Assad government is in its most precarious position since the summer of 2012,” Nick Heras, an analyst at the New Lines Institute, told AFP.

“There is a real risk that the Assad government could lose power in Damascus, either through battles or through a negotiated retreat.

“Ultimately, the Assad government’s ability to survive will depend on the extent to which Iran and Russia see Assad as useful to their strategies in the region.”

Heras said that Russia, which has a naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus, would be loath to withdraw its military personnel and assets from the country, and Iran would be similarly reluctant to abandon Assad.

“If either or both of those allies decide they can advance their interests without Assad, then his days in power are numbered,” Heras said.

The winners would be Assad’s main regional opponents: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkey’s Erdogan, who both faced periods of intense domestic criticism only to emerge victorious in war.

Turkey-backed rebels are now spearheading the opposition advance on Homs, and Israeli air strikes against Hezbollah and Iranian targets in Syria have effectively neutralised Assad’s most potent backer.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

WASHINGTON:

President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday the US should not be involved in the conflict in Syria, where rebel forces are threatening the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.

Trump said because Russia, an Assad ally, is tied up fighting a war with Ukraine it “seems incapable of stopping this literal march through Syria, a country they have protected for years.”

If Russia were forced out of Syria, it “may actually be the best thing that can happen to them” because “there was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia,” Trump said.

Trump’s comments appeared to reflect his opposition to the presence of some 900 US troops in Syria, mostly of them in the northeast, where they have backed a Syrian Kurd-led alliance in preventing a resurgence of Islamic State militants.
Trump announced in 2018 during his first term that he wanted to withdraw the US troops because he said Islamic State was near defeat.

But he held off as advisers warned that a pullout would leave a void that would be filled by Iran and Russia.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Beirut:

Syrian government forces have lost control of Daraa city, a war monitor said, in another stunning blow for President Bashar al-Assad’s rule after rebels wrested other key cities from his grip.

Daraa was dubbed “the cradle of the revolution” early in Syria’s civil war, after activists accused the government of detaining and torturing a group of boys for scribbling anti-Assad graffiti on their school walls in 2011.

While Aleppo and Hama, the two other main cities taken from government control in recent days, fell to an Islamist-led rebel alliance, Daraa was taken by local armed groups, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“Local factions have taken control of more areas in Daraa province, including Daraa city… they now control more than 90 percent of the province, as regime forces successively pulled out,” the Britain-based Observatory, which relies on a network of sources around Syria, said late Friday.

Daraa province borders Jordan.

Despite a truce brokered by Assad ally Russia, the province has been plagued by unrest in recent years, with frequent attacks, clashes and assassinations.

Waves of violence

Syria’s civil war, which began with Assad’s crackdown on democracy protests, has killed more than 500,000 people and forced more than half the population to flee their homes.

Never in the war had Assad’s forces lost control of so many key cities in such a short space of time.

Since a rebel alliance led by the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched its offensive on November 27, the government has lost second city Aleppo and subsequently Hama in central Syria.

The rebels were on Friday at the gates of Homs, Syria’s third city, as the government pulled out its troops from Deir Ezzor in the east.

In an interview published on Friday, the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, said the aim of the offensive was to overthrow Assad.

“When we talk about objectives, the goal of the revolution remains the overthrow of this regime. It is our right to use all available means to achieve that goal,” Jolani told CNN.

HTS is rooted in the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. Proscribed as a terrorist organisation by Western governments, it has sought to soften its image in recent years.

Sudden Withdrawal

As the army and its Iran-backed militia allies pulled out of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, Kurdish-led forces said they crossed the Euphrates river and took control of the territory that had been vacated.

The Observatory said government troops and their allies withdrew “suddenly” from the east and headed towards the oasis town of Palmyra on the desert road to Homs.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, who are backed by the United States, expressed readiness for dialogue with both Turkey and the rebels, saying the offensive heralded a “new” political reality for Syria.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called for a “political solution to the conflict” and for the protection of civilians and minorities, his spokesperson said Friday, in a call with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan.

The rebels launched their offensive the same day a ceasefire took effect in neighbouring Lebanon in the war between Israel and Hezbollah.

The Lebanese group has been an important Assad ally, alongside Russia and Iran. 

Turkey, which has backed the opposition, said it would hold talks with Russia and Iran in Qatar this weekend.

Ahead of the talks, the foreign ministers of Iran, Iraq and Syria met in Baghdad, where Syria’s Bassam al-Sabbagh accused the government’s enemies of seeking to “redraw the political map”.

Iran’s Abbas Araghchi pledged to provide Assad’s government with “whatever (support) is needed”. 

But Tehran has started to withdraw its military commanders and personnel, including some diplomatic staff, from Syria, the New York Times reported Friday, citing unnamed regional officials and three Iranian officials.

Fear

In Homs, the scene of some of the war’s deadliest violence, tens of thousands of members of Assad’s Alawite minority were fleeing, fearing the rebels’ advance, residents and the Britain-based Observatory said.

Syrians who were forced out of the country years ago by the initial crackdown on the revolt were glued to their phones as they watched current developments unfold.

“We’ve been dreaming of this for more than a decade,” said Yazan, a 39-year-old former activist who now lives in France.

Asked whether he was worried about HTS’s Islamist agenda, he said: “It doesn’t matter to me who is conducting this. The devil himself could be behind it. What people care about is who is going to liberate the country.” 

On the other side of the sectarian divide, Haidar, 37, who lives in an Alawite-majority neighbourhood, told AFP by telephone that “fear is the umbrella that covers Homs now”.

‘Our Joy Is Indescribable’

The army shelled the advancing rebels as Syrian and Russian aircraft struck from the skies. At least 20 civilians, including five children, were killed in the bombardment, the war monitor added.

At least 826 people, mostly combatants but also including 111 civilians, have been killed since the offensive began last week, according to the Observatory’s figures, while the United Nations said the violence has displaced 280,000 people.

Many of the scenes witnessed in recent days would have been unimaginable earlier in the war.

In Hama, an AFP photographer saw residents set fire to a giant poster of Assad on the facade of city hall.

“Our joy is indescribable, and we wish this for every honourable Syrian to experience these happy moments that we have been deprived of since birth,” said Hama resident Ghiath Suleiman.

Online footage verified by AFP showed residents toppling a statue of Assad’s father Hafez, under whose brutal rule the army carried out a massacre in the city in the 1980s.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)