Photo © Sasha Gusov Charles Glass was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1973, he has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of Syria Burning, Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, The Northern Front, Americans in Paris, The Deserters, They Fought Alone and Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. His website is www.charlesglass.net.

There were fissures within the Assad regime, which was maneuvering between its Russian and Iranian backers to obtain maximum leverage with both. It turned out to be a game not worth playing. Russia pulled most of its air force from Syria to bomb Ukraine. Israel’s decimation of Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Syria over the course of 2024 led the Iranians to withdraw vital military assets. Without Russian and Iranian support of the kind that led to Assad’s “victory” in 2016, he was liable to defeat in 2024 if the jihadis in Idlib attacked. And attack they did.

Led by their largest militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with the aid of the Turkish-supplied Syrian National Army, they targeted the nearby regime-held city, Aleppo. Hezbollah had already withdrawn from western Aleppo to concentrate on its battle for survival against Israel in south Lebanon. Poorly paid Syrian Army units there were insufficient to mount meaningful resistance. The jihadists, having been expelled from the city in 2016 in what appeared to be victory for Assad, advanced from the west. They killed the Iranian commander in Aleppo, Brigadier General Keyomarth Pourhashemi, and seized villages on the city’s periphery. Three days into their offensive, the jihadists had conquered the western half of Aleppo and were flying their flag over the ancient Citadel in the city center. As they completed their occupation of the city, Israel launched air strikes on Syrian and Hezbollah forces all over Syria. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a warning to Assad not to allow Hezbollah weapons into Lebanon from Syria and declared, “Don’t play with fire.”

The warning was superfluous. Assad’s forces were falling back everywhere. On December 3, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham moved south to Hama, the lovely town on the River Orontes with its famed Roman aqueducts and giant water wheels. It was in Hama that the Muslim Brotherhood raised the flag of Sunni Islamist insurrection in 1982. Inspired by the Iranian revolution’s success in establishing the region’s first Islamic republic, the Brothers had fought to end secular, Baathist Party rule. Hafez al Assad crushed their rebellion, killing as many as ten thousand people in the process of restoring his control of the mostly Sunni city. For HTS, Hama represented a reversal of the prior Islamist defeat—neglecting the irony that, far from taking Iran as the inspiration its predecessors had, it was driving Iran out of Syria.

On other fronts, Kurdish forces about three hundred miles to the east, backed by American air strikes, seized Deir ez-Zour on the River Euphrates from the Syrian Army. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham would capture the town and its oilfields from the Kurds four days later. In the south near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Druze militias from Suweida joined the revolt. In nearby Dera’a, where the uprising began in 2011, Sunni rebels expelled government forces. The Kurds and the Druze, who had fought the Islamists earlier in the war, found themselves aiding HTS—perhaps with a view to claiming a stake in the new order.

With speed that shocked not only Assad and the outside powers, but the rebels themselves, they advanced into Homs the next day. Assad promised a counter-offensive that failed to materialize. A friend of mine, who left Homs ahead of the rebel breakthrough, told me over the telephone that he watched government soldiers fleeing the front with their tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery intact. The rebels he saw had only small arms that were no match for the army’s firepower. In a matter of four hours from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., he said, the regime lost the war. He could not understand why the army did not fight, one of many puzzles surrounding the old regime’s final days. One theory had it that the rebels paid senior officers, who earned only forty dollars a month, hundreds of dollars to disappear.

On December 7, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s irregulars assumed control of Homs. Their leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa—using the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—told his followers, “Damascus awaits you.” Damascus lay only a hundred miles south through sparsely populated farmland and desert. His men made it there in a day.

As the rebel forces raced south from Homs on Sunday, December 8, the Syrian Army abandoned Damascus. Bashar al-Assad, whose family had ruled Syria for fifty-four years, fled to Moscow. The city gates were open, as they had been when Ottoman forces pulled out in 1918 before the invading British Army with its Arab nationalist auxiliaries under Prince Feisal of the Hejaz and T. E. Lawrence. The British betrayed the Syrians, denying them their promised independence. When Damascus fell to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in 2024, Jolani was making promises of his own. They contrasted with the strict governance he had enforced for years in Idlib: to preserve state institutions, protect private property, and respect the rights of minorities.

As thousands of Damascenes celebrated the end of the dictator’s rule, others feared that dictatorship in another guise would replace it. Turkey, Israel, and the US aggravated the country’s plight with an escalation of air bombardment throughout the country. Turkey intensified its attacks on Kurdish forces in the northeast, despite the Kurds’ alliance with the US. American forces with the Kurds bombed Islamic State fighters in the eastern desert, as they had for the previous five years without notable success. Israel, taking advantage of the demise of the Syrian Army, moved troops into the Syrian Golan Heights and seized the summit of Mount Hermon—abrogating the Syria-Israel ceasefire accord that then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated in 1974. The Israeli Air Force struck Syrian naval ships in Latakia harbor and weapons depots in Damascus. Russia declared it would maintain its naval base at Tartous and its Hmeimim airfield in northern Syria, pledging to defend them against anyone attempting to remove them.

With so many external actors, whose interests conflict more than coincide, and internal antagonists hostile to one another—Sunnis, Druze, Alawites, Ismailis, Arab and Armenian Christians, fundamentalists, and secularists—the disappearance of the Assad regime may presage not so much the end of the war as the beginning of a new one.

Photo © Sasha Gusov Charles Glass was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993. Since 1973, he has covered wars in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of Syria Burning, Tribes with Flags, The Tribes Triumphant, Money for Old Rope, The Northern Front, Americans in Paris, The Deserters, They Fought Alone and Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. His website is www.charlesglass.net.

There were fissures within the Assad regime, which was maneuvering between its Russian and Iranian backers to obtain maximum leverage with both. It turned out to be a game not worth playing. Russia pulled most of its air force from Syria to bomb Ukraine. Israel’s decimation of Iran and its proxies in Lebanon and Syria over the course of 2024 led the Iranians to withdraw vital military assets. Without Russian and Iranian support of the kind that led to Assad’s “victory” in 2016, he was liable to defeat in 2024 if the jihadis in Idlib attacked. And attack they did.

Led by their largest militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with the aid of the Turkish-supplied Syrian National Army, they targeted the nearby regime-held city, Aleppo. Hezbollah had already withdrawn from western Aleppo to concentrate on its battle for survival against Israel in south Lebanon. Poorly paid Syrian Army units there were insufficient to mount meaningful resistance. The jihadists, having been expelled from the city in 2016 in what appeared to be victory for Assad, advanced from the west. They killed the Iranian commander in Aleppo, Brigadier General Keyomarth Pourhashemi, and seized villages on the city’s periphery. Three days into their offensive, the jihadists had conquered the western half of Aleppo and were flying their flag over the ancient Citadel in the city center. As they completed their occupation of the city, Israel launched air strikes on Syrian and Hezbollah forces all over Syria. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a warning to Assad not to allow Hezbollah weapons into Lebanon from Syria and declared, “Don’t play with fire.”

The warning was superfluous. Assad’s forces were falling back everywhere. On December 3, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham moved south to Hama, the lovely town on the River Orontes with its famed Roman aqueducts and giant water wheels. It was in Hama that the Muslim Brotherhood raised the flag of Sunni Islamist insurrection in 1982. Inspired by the Iranian revolution’s success in establishing the region’s first Islamic republic, the Brothers had fought to end secular, Baathist Party rule. Hafez al Assad crushed their rebellion, killing as many as ten thousand people in the process of restoring his control of the mostly Sunni city. For HTS, Hama represented a reversal of the prior Islamist defeat—neglecting the irony that, far from taking Iran as the inspiration its predecessors had, it was driving Iran out of Syria.

On other fronts, Kurdish forces about three hundred miles to the east, backed by American air strikes, seized Deir ez-Zour on the River Euphrates from the Syrian Army. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham would capture the town and its oilfields from the Kurds four days later. In the south near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, Druze militias from Suweida joined the revolt. In nearby Dera’a, where the uprising began in 2011, Sunni rebels expelled government forces. The Kurds and the Druze, who had fought the Islamists earlier in the war, found themselves aiding HTS—perhaps with a view to claiming a stake in the new order.

With speed that shocked not only Assad and the outside powers, but the rebels themselves, they advanced into Homs the next day. Assad promised a counter-offensive that failed to materialize. A friend of mine, who left Homs ahead of the rebel breakthrough, told me over the telephone that he watched government soldiers fleeing the front with their tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery intact. The rebels he saw had only small arms that were no match for the army’s firepower. In a matter of four hours from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., he said, the regime lost the war. He could not understand why the army did not fight, one of many puzzles surrounding the old regime’s final days. One theory had it that the rebels paid senior officers, who earned only forty dollars a month, hundreds of dollars to disappear.

On December 7, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s irregulars assumed control of Homs. Their leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa—using the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—told his followers, “Damascus awaits you.” Damascus lay only a hundred miles south through sparsely populated farmland and desert. His men made it there in a day.

As the rebel forces raced south from Homs on Sunday, December 8, the Syrian Army abandoned Damascus. Bashar al-Assad, whose family had ruled Syria for fifty-four years, fled to Moscow. The city gates were open, as they had been when Ottoman forces pulled out in 1918 before the invading British Army with its Arab nationalist auxiliaries under Prince Feisal of the Hejaz and T. E. Lawrence. The British betrayed the Syrians, denying them their promised independence. When Damascus fell to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in 2024, Jolani was making promises of his own. They contrasted with the strict governance he had enforced for years in Idlib: to preserve state institutions, protect private property, and respect the rights of minorities.

As thousands of Damascenes celebrated the end of the dictator’s rule, others feared that dictatorship in another guise would replace it. Turkey, Israel, and the US aggravated the country’s plight with an escalation of air bombardment throughout the country. Turkey intensified its attacks on Kurdish forces in the northeast, despite the Kurds’ alliance with the US. American forces with the Kurds bombed Islamic State fighters in the eastern desert, as they had for the previous five years without notable success. Israel, taking advantage of the demise of the Syrian Army, moved troops into the Syrian Golan Heights and seized the summit of Mount Hermon—abrogating the Syria-Israel ceasefire accord that then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated in 1974. The Israeli Air Force struck Syrian naval ships in Latakia harbor and weapons depots in Damascus. Russia declared it would maintain its naval base at Tartous and its Hmeimim airfield in northern Syria, pledging to defend them against anyone attempting to remove them.

With so many external actors, whose interests conflict more than coincide, and internal antagonists hostile to one another—Sunnis, Druze, Alawites, Ismailis, Arab and Armenian Christians, fundamentalists, and secularists—the disappearance of the Assad regime may presage not so much the end of the war as the beginning of a new one.