The collapse of President Bashar Assad’s dictatorship in Syria is a welcome development. With Russian support, Assad governed Syria as a totalitarian police state and when his people rose against him as part of the Arab Spring in 2011, he responded by attacking them with chemical weapons in the ensuing civil war.
Almost 600,000 have died in the conflict, half of them civilians. Assad’s forces were responsible for about 90 per cent of the civilian deaths. On Sunday morning, however, the dictator fled from his home in the capital Damascus and left the country for Moscow.
A wave of anti-Assad sentiment spread across the country and even extended to Belfast, where Syrian refugees joined in the celebrations.
The question now is who and what will replace the 54-year-old dictatorship? Removing a dictator inevitably creates a political vacuum which, if not addressed quickly, can lead to continuing instability and chaos.
This has happened in Iraq with the removal of Saddam Hussein and similarly when Colonel Gaddafi was overthrown in Libya. Neither state has yet returned to political stability.
Read more: Timeline of key events in Syrian rebels’ 13-year fight to take down Assad
That is the risk which Syria now faces. The challenge is made worse by the fact that Assad was overthrown not by one group, but by a coalition of various factions which was held together by the sole objective of removing him.
It was led by a group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, or the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant). Its allies included a number of jihadi factions under the umbrella of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army.
Removing a dictator inevitably creates a political vacuum which, if not addressed quickly, can lead to continuing instability and chaos
Now that Assad has gone, will these various interests stay united in building a new government, or will they compete with each other? Even if they stay together, what sort of society do they intend to create in Syria?
The leader of HTS, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jolani, has distanced himself from his previous ties with the terrorist group al Qaeda, in what quite literally appears to have been a conversion on the road to Damascus.
However, it is not clear if he has the influence or the inclination to build some form of inclusive society in a country which has a wide range of ethnic and religious groups.
The challenge for HTS now is to unite those groups. It will be difficult, but if it succeeds, it will bring much-needed stability to an increasingly volatile part of the world.
However, time is not on the side of the rebels. The longer it takes to form a replacement government, the greater are the risks that it might never materialise.
Assad’s downfall has given hope to the people of Syria. They have suffered too much not to take the next step towards a better society.
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