When protesters started trying in 2011 to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, they were part of a cascade of revolutions, known as the Arab Spring, that aimed to oust authoritarian leaders across the Middle East.
While opposition groups elsewhere experienced swift success, the Syrian revolution devolved into a 13-year civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions and carved the country into competing fiefdoms.
Assad’s stunning fall finally allows Syrians to feel the joy that their counterparts experienced more than a decade ago in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen – the four Arab countries where dictators were toppled far more quickly.
Yet while those four states provided a template for revolutionary success, their trajectories since the Arab Spring also constitute a warning.
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In Egypt and Tunisia, new strongmen eventually rose to power, crushing efforts to build pluralist democracies. In Libya and Yemen, rival militias jockeyed for control, leading to civil war and the partition of both countries.
“The people who have survived the last 13 years deserve to enjoy the moment before they worry about the future,” said Alistair Burt, a former minister in the British government who helped spearhead its middle-east policy during the Arab Spring.
“At the same time, we all know the experience of the region since 2011,” Burt said. “We want to hope for the best but we prepare for something worse.”
The dynamics in Syria make for a particularly fraught transition of power. The Islamist rebel alliance that led the rapid advance on Damascus, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is one of several rival opposition groups that must now agree on how to run Syria in the post-Assad era.
While Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is now the most influential group in Syria, it is competing for influence with another Turkey-backed group based in northern Syria, as well as a secular Kurdish-led alliance in eastern Syria that is supported by the United States. And southern Syria is dominated by local rebel groups, including militias led by the Druze minority, an offshoot of Islam.
Once affiliated with al-Qaeda, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has tried to present itself as a moderate movement that seeks to preserve the rights of Syria’s many minorities, including its Christians, Druze and Alawites, the Shia sect that formed Assad’s base.
Unless the group, which the US has designated as a terrorist group, makes good on that promise, analysts say, it could end up prolonging the civil war: Militias from different minorities often feel obliged to defend their areas from the new central government.
“You can’t tell people that they’re safe: They have to believe it,” Burt said. “That’s why the conduct of HTS – and all those with guns at the moment in the liberated cities – is so important.”
Foreign powers such as Iran, Turkey, Russia and the US, which support different sides in the conflict, are expected to push to retain influence in the new era, potentially prolonging Syria’s internal disputes.
The role and intentions of Assad’s former generals and security chiefs also remain unclear. They could yet prove decisive in any new power play, as their counterparts did in the countries where leaders were toppled in 2011-2012.
After the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, the military leadership still controlled the pace of the political transition. After allowing elections, the military later took back power in a popular coup in 2013, ousting Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president. Morsi had himself angered many Egyptians through heavy-handed governance, leading some to lose faith in the democratic process.
Elections were also held in Libya after the ousting of Muammar Gadafy in 2011, but the country has been partitioned since civil war broke out three years later.
In Yemen, the departure of Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012 was also followed by a civil war, which allowed the Houthis, an Iran-backed movement, to seize the capital.
For years, Tunisia was the most successful of the Arab Spring countries, holding several elections after the downfall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. But Tunisia returned to a form of one-man rule in 2021, when President Kais Saied removed checks on his power and began to restrict the media, weaken the judiciary and exert greater control over the electoral authorities.
Given the complexity of Syria’s internal dynamics, some think that Assad’s departure is more likely to widen the rifts left by the country’s 13-year war than heal them.
But other analysts say that it is precisely because of their wartime experience that Syrians may be able to achieve what their counterparts in Egypt and elsewhere could not.
A side effect of suffering for so many years is that Syrians have had far longer to prepare for this moment and consider how to navigate a post-Assad transition, according to Sanam Vakil, head of the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House, a London-based research institute.
That is “what distinguishes this moment for Syria,” she said. “There’s also been a lot of learning, there’s been mobilising, there’s been activism.”
For now, though, many Syrians say they want to enjoy the euphoria of Assad’s departure.
Assad oversaw a cruel government that threw hundreds of thousands of opponents into dirty, overcrowded prisons, where thousands were tortured and killed. Assad’s forces dropped thousands of barrel bombs on his own citizens and gassed some of them with chemical weapons.
His refusal to relinquish power in 2011 led to a bloody civil war that displaced millions of people, destroyed much of the country and led to the rise of terrorist organisations such as the Islamic State group.
“No matter what comes next, it won’t be worse than Bashar al-Assad’s regime,” said Hashem Alsouki, a Syrian former civil servant detained and tortured early in the war who later sought safety with his family in Europe.
“Yes, there is concern for the future,” Alsouki added in a telephone interview. “At the same time, I have faith that we will overcome this stage. Because the Syrian people have learned a lot in these 13 years.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.