Fall of Assad: a regime that dissolved before it fought

In the final week of November 2024, a coalition of armed groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham opened an offensive from the rebel-held north-western province of Idlib. Within days it had taken Aleppo, Syria’s second city, which the government had recovered in 2016 and held for eight years. By 5 December the column had swept south through Hama. On the morning of 8 December it took Homs, the city that links the coastal heartland to Damascus. That evening, opposition fighters entered the capital and announced on television that they had ‘liberated Damascus’ and toppled the regime. Bashar al-Assad was gone; Russian state media reported that he had flown to Moscow and been granted asylum. Six decades of Baath rule were over in a fortnight.

What is striking is not that the regime fell, but how little it fought. Damascus did not endure a siege; it simply stopped being defended. Units of the elite Republican Guard reportedly abandoned their positions after the loss of the central command, and there was no last stand of the kind that the regime’s reputation for brutality had led outsiders to expect. A government that had killed tens of thousands to hold ground in 2013 and 2018 melted away in days. The defences evaporated because the coercive apparatus underneath them was far weaker than it looked.

Several explanations deserve attention, and none of them is sufficient on its own. The first is the draining of external support. Iran had been Assad’s most important arms and logistics backer since 2011, but the summer’s war with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the wider confrontation with Israel had stretched Tehran’s proxies thin, and the supply lines into Syria were no longer what they had been. Russia, Assad’s air power of choice in 2015, was absorbed in its war on Ukraine and offered far less intervention than it had in past offensives. A regime that could not survive without foreign air power found, in 2024, that the air power was no longer forthcoming.

The second explanation runs through the army itself. A force built on sectarian patronage and fear, rather than on popular legitimacy, tends to fray precisely when patronage is strained. Conscripts from majority Sunni areas had little reason to die for a government that treated them as cannon fodder, and defections and refusals to fight accelerated as the rebels advanced. When the outcome began to look obvious, calculation did the work that coercion once had. Soldiers who might have fought for a winner declined to die for a loser.

That last point is where the event matters beyond Syria’s borders. The offensive succeeded not because it was overwhelming in firepower but because it exposed how much of the regional order rested on patron-client relationships that were quietly fraying. The Assad project was a pillar of the ‘axis’ that ran from Tehran through Damascus to Hezbollah, and its removal rearranges the map on which that axis operated. Turkey, which had backed elements of the opposition, found its influence suddenly enlarged; Israel, already prosecuting the war against Hezbollah, watched a long-standing adversary’s state collapse with what amounted to satisfaction; and the Gulf states, which had begun to rehabilitate Assad in 2023, were left adjusting their bet within weeks.

Fairness requires the point that the fall of a tyrant is not the same as the arrival of a stable order. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the HTS leader also known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, has emerged as the country’s de facto ruler, and a transitional administration drawn largely from the Idlib-based government has taken over the ministries. Mohammad al-Bashir, formerly of that Idlib administration, was named prime minister of the transitional government. Whether a movement with roots in al-Qaeda’s former Syrian affiliate can govern a multi-confessional country, and whether it can hold the Kurds, the Druze and the business class in a single settlement, are questions the speed of the victory has not answered. The detainees released from regime prisons, the shattered infrastructure, and the sanctions that have isolated the economy for years are inheritances that no amount of triumphal speechifying dispels.

The episode will be studied for how quickly a police state of four decades could dissolve. The regime’s foreign backers are now the ones explaining themselves, and its former subjects are left to negotiate whatever comes next. The lesson that should not be missed is that authoritarian governments built on fear and patronage are brittle in a specific way: they look unbreakable until, suddenly, they are not.