As jubilant Syrians celebrated the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad this week, dire warnings spread across Arab social media: that this joyous moment could lead to a bleak future.
That the Assad dynasty was brought to an end by an armed Islamist group with former al-Qaeda ties, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, deepened concern even among Arabs aware of the Assad regime’s bloody record.
“People who are optimistic about the future of Syria, haven’t they been with us for the past 14 years?” Ezzedine Fishere, an Egyptian political science professor at Dartmouth University in the US, wrote on Facebook.
Another Egyptian social media user posted: “Isn’t what happened in Iraq and then the Arab uprising (2011) enough to make you afraid of what’s to come?”
In 2011, a wave of popular uprisings swept the Arab world, toppling despots in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and igniting hopes for democratic government and economic prosperity – hopes that were later dashed by new autocracies or civil wars. An uprising in Syria began at the same time, but its government did not fall until 13 years later.
Zaina Erhaim, a Syrian journalist who moved to London in 2017, said the warnings she received from Tunisian and Egyptian friends were “simplistic and did not take into account the Syrian context. As if to say: ‘Those poor people are happy, but they don’t know what awaits them’.
“I’m kind of hopeful,” she said. “We Syrians are aware of our failures even more than we are aware of other people’s. I hope we learn not only from the lessons of others, but also from our own experiences.”
For Syrians, this is a moment of intense hope, even if it is tinged with trepidation. Many Syrians are experiencing the same exhilaration that others in the region felt when they shook off their oppressors in 2011.
When Hosni Mubarak, the autocrat who ruled Egypt for 30 years, stepped down in 2011 after 18 days of peaceful protests, ecstatic crowds poured into Cairo’s Tahrir Square, chanting: “Keep your head up, you’re Egyptian.”
The Muslim Brotherhood subsequently won parliamentary elections, and in 2012 Mohamed Morsi, one of the group’s leaders, was elected president with a slim majority. His short reign alienated many, including pro-revolutionary groups. Secular parties, Mubarak-era elites and a number of Egyptians alarmed by the rise of Islamists have agitated against his rule.
This gave Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, then defense minister and now president, the opportunity to oust Morsi in a 2013 coup with broad popular support. Since then, Egypt’s democratic experiment has been restricted, demonstrations are banned and there is little room for dissent.
Hisham Kassem, an Egyptian publisher and critic of the Sisi regime, said the transition failed because the Islamists “tried to heat up the situation and the economy was not taken seriously.”
“The military stood by and was not really ready to relinquish power, but the failure was largely due to the poor performance of the political forces in the country,” he said.
After its own rebellion, Tunisia’s fledgling democracy survived a decade but collapsed when Kais Saied, the democratically elected populist president, closed parliament in 2021, rewrote the constitution to concentrate power in his hands and began imprisoning critics.
The autocratic change was welcomed by Tunisians fed up with chaotic politics, falling living standards and ineffective government. In October, Saied won the last presidential election with 90 percent of the vote after shutting down the more credible of the two candidates allowed to run against him.
The lesson from Tunisia, said Olfa Lamloum, a Tunisian political scientist, is that “democratic freedoms cannot survive without the basics of a dignified life.
“The protests of the unemployed and others in the past 10 years were about social and economic rights,” she said. “People need to see their lives change for the better.”
After the uprising in Libya that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the country split under two rival governments. They fought a civil war in 2019, in which Russia and regional powers armed and supported various sides.
The rival ruling elites have since settled into a dysfunctional coexistence, financed by extracting Libya’s oil revenues.
Syria’s trajectory appears unlikely to follow in the footsteps of other so-called “Arab Spring” countries, analysts say. Its fragmentation under different armed rebel groups, along with a mosaic of minorities, means the challenges will be different.
Also, the collapse of the Assad regime followed a 13-year civil war in which half a million people were killed, mostly by the regime, and millions became refugees.
Assad’s brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrations in 2011 transformed the Syrian revolution into an armed insurgency in which Islamist factions ultimately emerged as the strongest groups. Assad called on foreign allies: first Iran and Iran-backed militants, including Hezbollah, then Russia, whose air force bombed rebel-held areas.
After Assad’s fall, Isis still has active cells in parts of Syria; US-backed Kurds have established an autonomous enclave in the northeast; and Turkey, which controls parts of northern Syria, is backing other rebels to keep Kurdish militants in check. Ankara views the Syrian Kurdish militants as an extension of its separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, which has been fighting the Turkish state for four decades.
Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of the Sunni HTS, has sought to rebrand himself as a moderate Islamist who will not trample on the rights of Syria’s minorities, including the Christians and Alawites who formed the foundation of the Assad regime. The Assad family were themselves Alawites, a branch of Shiite Islam.
But he did not promise democracy or outline a vision for the future, while the US labels him and his group as terrorists.
Yassin Haj Saleh, a Syrian writer and political dissident who spent 16 years in prison, wrote on Facebook that the “new Syria” cannot be a country “ruled by Islamist Sunni Assad.” . . in which people remain followers without political rights and public freedoms including freedom of religious belief”.
There are also fears that Jolani would fail to unite the country, leaving rebel groups to fight over the spoils of Assad’s ruined state, reigniting the conflict and attracting foreign interference.
Paul Salem, vice president of the Near East Institute in Washington, said that while Syria’s future is likely to be “bumpy,” it is a positive sign that the Syrian state has not dissolved, unlike the Libyan state after the fall of Gaddafi.
“Keep in mind that the opposition forces are protecting all government offices, all public institutions. They are not attacking any of them,” he said.
Salem said Syria’s neighbors, including Turkey, “have no interest in a failed state” on their doorstep. While the presence of US-backed Kurdish militants and the self-governing Kurdish enclave could become a problem, it could be solved by “good diplomacy between Washington and Ankara,” he said.
“It is definitely the case that the removal of a tyrant, while welcome and celebrated, is very different from an actual transition to something better,” Salem said.
“But in the Syrian case (due to) the extreme evil of the Assad regime, you cannot blame the Syrians. He had to go.”
