Briefing Syria after Assad

The Middle East’s most brutal dictator has fallen, but it is not clear how benign or stable the new regime will be 

Syria is finally free of Mr Assad’s brutality. A rebel offensive, led by Islamist group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham(HTS), began progressed on November 27th with lightning speed. By December 8th they had reached Damascus, the capital, and Mr Assad had fled to Russia, ending his family’s 53-year rule.
Many of the detainees freed from Saidnaya, the most notorious prison in Syria. Some prisoners had been there for decades and there was a young boy who may have spent his whole life in jail.
The rebels were able to topple Mr Assad in 13days because of the steady decay of the previous 13 years. After his suppression from 2011, many young Syrian men lost their lives and millions more fled to neighboring countries, or to Europe.
The regime’s foreign backers- Iran, Russia and Hizbullah, a Lebanese militia- declined to come to its aid because they were also busy with their own problems. It was close to a bloodless coup, a few hundred people died in the final days of war that had killed half a million.
What comes next is uncertain but most Syrians doubt it can be worse than what came before. Many shops swiftly reopened in Damascus.
Not everywhere was peaceful, though. Syria remains divided between several different groups. HTS was not the first militia to reach Damascus - rebels from the south were- but it is now the strongest faction in the capital. Until now HTS has governed only Idlib province which located in the north-west, where it proved to be competent but authoritarian.
Syrian worries that HTS might try to impose its vision of Islamic rule or seek to monopolise power. With good reason: HTS emerged from al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, though it cut ties with the jihadists in 2017. Moreover, it is one things to govern rural, conservative Kofu and another to run the whole country, with cosmopolitan cities and big religous and ethnic minorites.
HTS has said the right thing so far. They forbade its fighters from “interfering in women’s dress” and a message to the Kurds declared “Diversity is our strength”.
For several years HTS was arguably better at providing basic services than the central government: electricity was more reliable in Idlib than Aleppo, for instance. But the group knows that it lacks the capacity to administer all of Syria and needs help from the existing civil service.
The Syrian diaspora has spent years making detailed plans for how they might be govern after Mr Assad’s fall. There was also a UN-led effort to bring together the regime and the opposition to write a new constitution.
The problem is that many of these activists are outside the country and none of them has any guns. A source close to HTS thinks democracy will not be high on Mr Sharaa’s agenda, the leader of HTS. Still, many Syrians treated it with forbearance: it was far better than Mr Assad.
Syrian’s needs are enormous. The cost of reconstruction is thought to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The country is still under strict Western sanctions, even though Mr Assad’s departure seems to make such measures obsolete.