Travelling from Syria’s Highway 42, which runs from Tabqa to the city of Homs, you can see the corpse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Getting to Homs and from there to Damascus requires driving across 300km of desert. Once, huge and imposing checkpoints festooned with the symbolism of the regime greeted travellers seeking to reach Syria’s west from its tribal and Sunni south east. Now, the last position of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces is 370 km from Damascus.
The first roadblock of Syria’s new rulers, the Sunni jihadis of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), is about 100km from the capital. Between the two is an uneasy no man’s land. Ever’ few kilometres, one passes enormous, dead structures of the vanished regime, which held power from 1963 to December 2024. The Assads and the Arab Baath Party from which they stemmed from were keen on flags and symbols. So the Military Intelligence checkpoint on Highway 42 is a veritable riot of red, green and black. Boulders painted in the colours of the regime stand by the roadside.
Travelling from Syria’s Highway 42, which runs from Tabqa to the city of Homs, you can see the corpse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
By a deserted checkpoint, an abandoned T72 tank waits forlornly, its cannon turned up toward the sky. I counted seven tanks, three artillery pieces and five infantry fighting vehicles deserted along the road from Tabqa to Homs. None were deployed during the regime’s rapid collapse. Outside Homs, I ran into living soldiers of the new dispensation in Syria. It was an abrupt awakening. Songs familiar from the days of the Islamic State blared out. The armed young men manning the post, many with the long hair often sported by Sunni jihadi combatants in the Mid-East, were still beaming, evidently surprised by their sudden victory as everyone else.
A closing of accounts is underway. The Sunni jihadis of HTS are presiding over widespread acts of retribution against the remaining adherents of the sect to which the Assads and their closest associates belonged. It isn’t surprising, given the depth and breadth of the brutality of the fallen regime. In Saydnaya jail, outside Damascus, a throng of relatives of former inmates loiter by the entrance, seeking information regarding relatives lost in Assad’s system of incarceration and murder. Inside the jail there is a foul smell of human waste and rotting vegetables. I spoke there to Mohammed Kasem al Bakri, a former Saydnaya inmate. Captured in 2017, he had been sentenced to death, and consigned to await the execution of the sentence. Held for two months in a tiny cell kept dark 24 hours a day, he had awaited the hangman. His death sentence was commuted to a life tariff in 2022, when the regime began to feel that its victory was assured. That was how it continued until his sudden liberation at the end of last year. Al-Bakri described a day-to-day routine in Saydnaya in which killing was reduced to a simple physical act, removed from all ceremony or moral dimension. He pointed to a ledge about a foot from the ground. ‘You see that? They’d lie a person down with their head resting on that. Then they’d stamp three times on the man’s neck, and that was all it took.’ That, with considerable cruelty in return, is what is now being avenged.
Inside Damascus, you can feel the stark absence of the state. The new government has decided not to re-employ the regime’s force. Instead, the jihadis themselves have been hastily mustered in an improvised gendarmerie. The famous landmarks of the city have been garlanded with symbols of the new power. The face of Abdel Baset Sarut, a famous jihadi killed in 2019, adorns the Sword Monument in Umayyad Square.
It seems more likely, however, the current phase is a passing moment. The movement, slow as it may be, is all in one direction – toward greater Islamisation.
Damascus exists in an odd sort of limbo. HTS has yet to firmly cement its grip on the city. You can witness drinkers outside the bars on Mustaqim Street, watching as armed and masked HTS fighters swagger by. This odd co-existence is in stark contrast to the rigid and oppressive Islamic regime that HTS maintained during its seven years of rule in Idlib Province. There, music and alcohol were banned and women were required to wear hijabs. Thousands were incarcerated and many tortured in a prison system that one report called ‘Saydnaya of the north.’ So why the difference between what pertained in Idlib and what may now be witnessed in Damascus? Some observers have waxed poetic about the capacity of the unique spirit of Damascus to round off the sharper edges of its conquerors. Perhaps. It seems more likely, however, the current phase is a passing moment. The movement, slow as it may be, is all in one direction – toward greater Islamisation. Segregation of the sexes on public buses, for example, is due to be introduced in Damascus in the coming days, with men, inevitably, seated in the front and women at the back.
The position of Syria’s new regime in some ways resembles that of the Russian Bolsheviks in Moscow in early 1918. Lenin’s forces held the capital at that time. But Russia was still full of rival armed political groups, as well as forces loyal to various foreign governments. It would take a further half decade of strife before communist rule was firmly clamped on the country for the next 70 years. Similarly, HTS now controls Damascus, but a variety of rival forces are still present on Syrian soil. The redoubtable, Kurdish dominated Syrian Democratic Forces hold the land east of the Euphrates. In Daraa province in the south, Ahmed al-Oda, a Salafi militia leader, commands 15,000 fighters and the reputed support of the United Arab Emirates. In neighbouring Sweida a Druze militia, the Rijal al Karameh, maintains its independent capacity. In the western coastal area, there are rumours of Alawi armed groups emerging, with the support of Iran and former regime elements.
Will HTS succeed in stamping its authority and its bleak vision throughout Syria in the period ahead? This question will now be tested. Over the dead body, so to speak, of Hafez Assad and the regime he created.
