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Final Sunday, Abdel Rahman was serving a 15-year sentence in a cramped cell in Syria’s infamous Saydnaya jail, after an altercation with a corrupt police officer final 12 months in Damascus.
By Friday morning, he was within the historical market of the previous metropolis promoting the newly adopted inexperienced Syrian flag — the one anti-Assad rebels have flown throughout practically 14 years of brutal civil battle. At noon, he was capable of hearken to a sermon on the close by mosque that referred to as the deposed president Bashar al-Assad “a tyrant”.
“How nice is Syrians’ pleasure, how nice is that this victory!” declared the prime minister, who was giving the unprecedented sermon, his phrases roaring over the audio system outdoors the Umayyad mosque. The message was greeted with cheers. Euphoria and a few disbelief was etched on the faces of the hundreds of people who find themselves nonetheless coming to phrases with the autumn of a dictatorship that dominated them with an iron fist for greater than 50 years.
Assad’s regime got here to an abrupt finish final Sunday when he fled to Moscow, following a lightning offensive by Islamist insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
The group instantly began to free prisoners held within the nation’s grim warren of prisons. However the regime’s grip was so brutal that when males broke via the doorways of Rahman’s cell block, the inmates held again and initially refused to stream out.
“We thought they had been engaged in clashes and that that they had come to make use of us as human shields,” he says, watching the stream of individuals leaving the mosque after Friday prayers chanting anti-Assad slogans. “I’m nonetheless in shock. I really feel I’m in a film.”
The sense of triumphalism and aid that has swept Syria over the previous few days, nevertheless, can also be blended with realism concerning the challenges now going through the nation. The HTS rebels are taking up a state devastated by greater than a decade of civil warfare.
Most of the individuals who thronged to the Umayyad mosque in celebration delighted on the textual content message they acquired the earlier evening from a bunch calling itself “Free Syria”: “Syria has been reborn. Congratulations to our individuals. Congratulations to our nation.”
However additionally they know simply how complicated such a rebirth might be for the rebels who’ve descended on the capital from northwestern Idlib — the province ruled lately by HTS.
The Islamist group is assuming management of a fancy, multi-ethnic nation with establishments which have been hollowed out by corruption and patronage, an economic system shattered by battle and sanctions, and a palpable want for revenge from a number of the victims of Assad’s regime.
“For the previous 13 years, nothing has labored: no electrical energy, shortages of all the pieces and the whole choking of society,” says a civil servant within the Damascus governorate. “[HTS] has to get to work and organise issues now and cease this corruption or individuals will activate them, quick.”
From the Assad regime’s inception, corruption, repression and brutality reigned: they had been instruments that saved the minority Alawi rulers in energy in a predominantly Sunni Muslim nation. Paranoia and a thirst for absolute management meant that Bashar’s father Hafez, an air pressure pilot who seized full energy in a 1970 coup, crafted a centralised presidential system with absolute authority over the state’s affairs.
This created a bureaucratic system that fostered the general public’s dependency on authorities jobs and allowed corruption in any respect ranges of society to go unchecked. Whereas not environment friendly, it labored — at the very least till 2011, when fashionable uprisings had been brutally repressed by Bashar and morphed right into a bloody civil warfare.
That interval ushered in a metamorphosis of the state from an antiquated system operated by Assad’s Ba’athist social gathering right into a patchwork of damaged establishments. The nation’s hospitals are in disrepair, the shortage of funding seen of their decaying partitions and overburdened departments; its dilapidated motels are frozen in time. The vast majority of vehicles filling the streets of Damascus date again to the Seventies and Eighties, as a result of components for newer vehicles have been more durable to supply and costlier to import.
Western sanctions focusing on the Syrian state, the deposed president and his financiers largely hit civilians, because the higher echelons of the regime discovered methods to avoid restrictions.
The brand new prime minister, Mohamed al-Bashir, introduced that an interim authorities will lead the nation till March, however has not outlined what comes subsequent and the subject of nationwide elections has but to be broached.
HTS, the offshoot of a former affiliate of al-Qaeda designated a terrorist organisation by the US and others, is essentially the most highly effective of myriad armed teams in a rustic that’s house to a various mixture of religions and sects. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani runs the group as a strongman, and there are issues that authoritarianism may descend on Damascus, whose residents are already questioning whether or not HTS will restrict public shows of Christmas celebrations.
In a strategic transfer, Bashir invited Assad’s prime minister, cupboard and civil servants to be a part of the method with the intention to facilitate a clean switch of energy. On Tuesday, he gathered the outgoing ministers (or at the very least, those that confirmed up) with their insurgent equivalents within the Assad authorities’s common assembly room — a brief however symbolic assembly to sign to a rustic so used to centralised energy that the wheels of the state had been turning.
Bashir has promised to battle corruption, restore order and defend Syria’s plethora of minorities regardless of the brand new administration’s politically Islamist roots.
The nationwide oil firm was ordered to renew operations inside 24 hours of the insurgent takeover, and instructed to proceed sending electrical energy to coastal provinces not but taken by the rebels. Authorities employees trickled again to ministries on Tuesday and Wednesday, and faculties had been ordered to reopen this Sunday. On Thursday evening, the eve of the weekend in Syria, site visitors returned to the streets as eating places and parks teemed with individuals.
“Regardless of all the pieces we misplaced,” says Abu Mohammed, a 54-year-old resident of a poor Damascus suburb, “we are actually free.”
One of many vital challenges forward is rebuilding the economic system, which has been in freefall for a number of years. Greater than 90 per cent of Syrians now reside under the poverty line and most households within the nation obtain lower than 6 hours of electrical energy a day. Pantries are continuously naked amid shortages of important items, sky-high inflation and the crumbling Syrian pound.
Greater than 80 per cent of the nation’s oil merchandise had been imported from Iran, which backed Assad throughout the warfare, the deputy head of the nationwide oil firm Mustafa Hasawiyeh advised the FT this week. Whereas there have been sufficient shops to final a month, he mentioned, it was unclear the place gasoline would come from after that.
Home manufacturing has been severely hampered, with factories destroyed and staff despatched to warfare throughout the decade of civil battle. It will take time to jump-start: a lot of the nation nonetheless lies in bloodied ruins, its individuals haunted by the ghosts of their family members, killed or disappeared.
Assad’s authorities haemorrhaged money to fund army spending, public sector salaries and subsidised items — the latter two a necessary a part of the essential social contract within the Ba’athist state.
When the regime’s benefactors, Russia and Iran, got here calling for lengthy overdue warfare money owed, Assad parcelled off segments of the state’s sources to Moscow and Tehran, together with phosphates extraction. Different money owed his authorities by no means repaid, together with to Moscow, go away HTS with an unknown mountain of debt and a fancy geopolitical calculus about who to repay and the way.
The ruling household and their choose cronies prolonged their dominance over the state within the twilight years of the civil warfare, working “mafia-style” shakedowns on the enterprise elite to line their pockets. This proved decisive in eroding Assad’s assist among the many mercantile elite.
Syrian residents say they had been additionally being shaken down every day at checkpoints scattered all through regime-held areas, a lot of them linked to the military’s Fourth Division — a notoriously brutal unit run by Bashar’s brother Maher.
These checkpoints have been unmanned since HTS took over, to the disbelief of many, as regime troopers dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and fled the insurgent advance.
Hours after Assad’s fall, the duty-free mall throughout the border from Lebanon, broadly believed to be a Fourth Division income stream, was ransacked by looters. Tons of of frenzied males, euphoric of their first few hours of relative freedom, carried out fridges, brand-new laptops and watches, calling it “justice” for years of torment.
The Fourth Division was additionally the central node in a number of of the illicit income streams that helped maintain the regime afloat: weapons, oil smuggling, alcohol and gross sales of the unlawful amphetamine Captagon.
Changing this, in addition to your complete state safety equipment, might be one other key problem going through HTS.
A military of impoverished conscripts was not ready to die for a dictator who had way back determined to make use of them as cannon fodder. As a substitute, these males threw off their army fatigues and walked off the job.
Inside 48 hours of arriving in Damascus, HTS introduced in site visitors police from Idlib in addition to authorities safety forces. Two residents advised the FT that they had observed a shift on the streets: individuals are obeying site visitors lights once more (in Assad’s Syria, stopping at a light-weight was a sure-fire means of getting requested for a bribe by the site visitors police). However there aren’t sufficient such people to safe your complete nation, and experiences of banditry on the highways connecting provinces have unfold.
There are additionally fears of retribution, from Jolani’s forces, however extra so from the hundred of hundreds of people that is likely to be seeking to settle scores.
That is notably true for households of the lacking — untold hundreds who had been misplaced to Assad’s huge jail community. They descended on the nation’s jails in a determined seek for their family members this week, with many coming away dissatisfied. In a nod to the mounting anger, Jolani mentioned these concerned with torture would face justice, whereas troopers not concerned would obtain an amnesty.
In a crowded stationery retailer in an prosperous Damascus neighbourhood, the place a printer spat out photocopies of the brand new Syrian flag to be offered for 40 US cents, the proprietor gleefully mentioned the latest overhaul of the regime with prospects.
“However our query is, will they go after the criminals that [worked in prisons]?” he provides. “Will they maintain accountable the individuals who tortured and killed our individuals?”
Cartography by Steven Bernard and knowledge visualisation by Keith Fray
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