Syrians look to a future without Russia, but Moscow still hopes to survive

For years Russia and Syria have been key partners, with Moscow gaining access to air and naval bases in the Mediterranean, while Damascus has received military support in its fight against rebel forces.

Now, after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime, many Syrians would like to see Russian forces leave, but their interim government says it is open to further cooperation.

“Russia’s crimes here are indescribable,” says Ahmed Taha, a rebel leader in Douma, six miles northeast of the capital, Damascus.

The city was once a thriving place in an area known as the “breadbasket” of Damascus. Ahmed Taha was once a civilian, working as a merchant, when he took up arms against the Assad regime following the brutal suppression of protests in 2011.

Entire residential neighborhoods in Douma are now in ruins after some of the fiercest fighting in Syria's nearly 14-year-old civil war.

Moscow entered this conflict in 2015 to support the regime when it was losing ground. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later claimed that at the time of the intervention, Damascus was only weeks away from being overrun by the rebels.

The Syrian operation demonstrated Russian President Vladimir Putin's ambition to be taken more seriously after widespread international condemnation of his annexation of Crimea.

Moscow claimed to have tested 320 different weapons in Syria.

It also secured 49-year leases for two military bases on the Mediterranean coast – Tartous Naval Base and Hmeimim Air Base. This has allowed the Kremlin to rapidly expand its influence in Africa, serving as a launching point for Russian operations in Libya, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Burkina Faso.

Despite the support of Russia and Iran, Assad was unable to prevent his regime from collapsing. But Moscow offered him and his family asylum.

Now, many Syrian civilians and rebel fighters see Russia as a partner of the Assad regime that helped destroy their homeland.

“The Russians came to this country and helped tyrants, oppressors and invaders,” says Abu Hisham, celebrating the fall of the regime in Damascus.

The Kremlin has long denied this, saying it only targets jihadist groups such as ISIS or Al Qaeda.

But the United Nations and human rights groups accused the regime and Russia of committing war crimes.

In 2016, during an assault on densely populated eastern Aleppo, Syrian and Russian forces launched relentless airstrikes, “taking hundreds of lives and reducing hospitals, schools and markets to rubble,” according to a UN report.

In Aleppo, Douma and elsewhere, regime forces surrounded rebel-controlled areas, cut off food and medicine supplies, and began bombing them until armed opposition groups surrendered.

Russia has also negotiated ceasefires and agreements to surrender rebel-controlled towns and cities, such as Douma in 2018.

Ahmed Taha was among the rebels there who agreed to surrender in exchange for safe passage out of the city after a five-year siege by the Syrian army.

He returned to Douma in December as part of a rebel offensive led by the Islamist group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham and its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Taha says: “We returned to our homeland despite Russia’s will, and despite the regime and everyone who supported it.”

He has no doubt that the Russians must leave: “For us, Russia is an enemy.”

It's a sentiment echoed by many of the people we spoke to.

Even leaders of Syria's Christian communities, whom Russia has pledged to protect, say they have received little help from Moscow.

In Bab Touma, the old Christian neighborhood of Damascus, the Patriarch of the Syriac Orthodox Church says: “We did not have the experience of Russia or anyone else from the outside world to protect us.”

“The Russians came here for their own interests and goals,” Ignatius Avram II told the BBC.

Other Syrian Christians were less diplomatic.

“When they first came, they said: ‘We came here to help you,’” says a man named Asad. But instead of helping us, they destroyed Syria more.”

Al-Sharaa, now Syria's de facto leader, said in a press conference: Interviewed with the BBC last month that he would do so He does not rule out allowing the Russians to stay, and described the relations between the two countries as “strategic.”

Moscow seized on his words, with Foreign Minister Lavrov agreeing that Russia “has a lot in common with our Syrian friends.”

But untangling relations in a post-Assad future may not be easy.

Rebuilding the Syrian army will require either a completely fresh start or continued reliance on Russian supplies, which means at least some kind of relationship between the two countries, says Turki al-Hassan, a defense analyst and retired general in the Syrian army.

Hassan says that Syrian military cooperation with Moscow precedes the Assad regime. He explains that almost all of the equipment produced was produced by the Soviet Union or Russia.

He added, “Since its inception, the Syrian army has been armed with Eastern Bloc weapons.”

Between 1956 and 1991, Syria received around 5,000 tanks, 1,200 combat aircraft, 70 ships and numerous other systems and weapons from Moscow worth more than $26bn (£21bn), according to Russian estimates.

Much of this was to support Syria's wars with Israel, which have largely determined the country's foreign policy since its independence from France in 1946.

More than half of this amount remained unpaid when the Soviet Union collapsed, but in 2005, President Putin wrote off 73% of the debt.

For now, Russian officials have taken a conciliatory but cautious approach toward the interim rulers who ousted Russia's old ally.

Vasily Nebenzia, Moscow's envoy to the United Nations, said that recent events constituted a new stage in the history of what he called “the brotherly Syrian people.” He said that Russia would provide humanitarian aid and reconstruction support to allow Syrian refugees to return to their homes.