Last Sunday, Abdel Rahman was serving a 15-year sentence in a cramped cell in Syria's notorious Saydnaya prison, after an altercation with a corrupt police officer last year in Damascus.
By Friday morning, he was in the old market in the Old City selling the newly adopted green Syrian flag, the only flag flown by anti-Assad rebels in nearly 14 years of brutal civil conflict. In the middle of the day, he was able to listen to a sermon in the nearby mosque that described ousted President Bashar al-Assad as a “tyrant.”
“How great is the joy of the Syrians, and how great is this victory!” The prime minister, who was delivering an unprecedented sermon, announced his words blaring over loudspeakers outside the Umayyad Mosque. The message was received with cheers. Ecstasy and some disbelief were etched on the faces of thousands of people still coming to terms with the fall of the dictatorship that had ruled them with an iron fist for more than 50 years.
The Assad regime came to an abrupt end last Sunday when it fled to Moscow, following a lightning attack by the Islamist rebel group Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham.
The group immediately began releasing prisoners held in the country's bleak prisons. But the regime's grip was so brutal that when the men stormed the doors of Rahman's cell block, the inmates retreated and initially refused to come out.
“We thought they were engaged in clashes and that they had come to use us as human shields,” he said as he watched a crowd of people leaving the mosque after Friday prayers, chanting anti-Assad slogans. “I'm still in shock. I feel like I'm in a movie.”
A feeling of triumph and relief swept over me Syria However, what happened over the past few days was also mixed with realism about the challenges facing the country now. Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham rebels control a country devastated by more than a decade of civil war.
Many people who gathered at the Umayyad Mosque to celebrate were delighted by the text message they received the previous night from a group calling itself “Free Syria”: “Syria has been reborn. Congratulations to our people. Congratulations to our country.”
But they also know how complicated such a rebirth would be for the rebels who descended on the capital from northwest Idlib – the province that Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham has ruled in recent years.
The Islamist group assumes control of a complex, multi-ethnic country, whose institutions have been hollowed out by corruption and nepotism, an economy ravaged by conflict and sanctions, and an apparent desire for revenge against some of the Assad regime's victims.
“Over the past 13 years, nothing has worked: no electricity, shortages of everything, and complete suffocation of society,” says a government employee in Damascus Governorate. “(Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) must start working and organize things now and stop this corruption, otherwise people will quickly turn against them.”
From the Assad regime From the beginning, corruption, repression and brutality prevailed: these were the tools that kept the Alawite minority rulers in power in a country with a Sunni Muslim majority. His megalomania and thirst for absolute control meant that Bashar's father, Hafez, an air force pilot who seized total power in a 1970 coup, forged a centralized presidential system with absolute authority over affairs of state.
This created a bureaucratic system that reinforced the public's dependence on government functions and allowed corruption at all levels of society to go unchecked. Although it was ineffective, it worked — at least until 2011, when popular uprisings were brutally suppressed by Bashar and turned into a bloody civil war.
That period heralded the state's transformation from an antiquated regime run by Assad's Baathist party to a patchwork of broken institutions. The country's hospitals are in poor condition, and the lack of funding is evident in their dilapidated walls and overburdened departments. Its dilapidated hotels are frozen in time. The majority of cars filling the streets of Damascus date back to the 1970s and 1980s, because new car parts were more difficult to obtain and more expensive to import.
Western sanctions targeting the Syrian state, the ousted president, and his financiers have mostly hit civilians, as upper echelons of the regime find ways to circumvent the restrictions.
The new Prime Minister, Mohamed Al-Bashir, announced that an interim government would lead the country until March, but he did not specify what would come after that, and the issue of nationwide elections has not yet been addressed.
Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, an offshoot of a former al-Qaeda affiliate designated as a terrorist organization by the United States and others, is the most powerful of countless armed groups in a country that is home to a diverse mix of religions and sects. Abu Muhammad Al-Julani He runs the group like a strongman, and there are fears that authoritarianism could reach Damascus, whose residents are already wondering whether HTS will limit public displays of Christmas celebrations.
In a strategic move, Al-Bashir invited Prime Minister Assad, the government and civil servants to be part of the process in order to facilitate a smooth transition of power. On Tuesday, he brought together the outgoing ministers (or at least those who attended) with their rebel counterparts in the Assad government's regular meeting room — a brief but symbolic meeting to signal a country so accustomed to centralized authority that the wheels of war have set in motion. The country was transforming.
Al-Bashir promised to fight corruption, restore order, and protect minorities in Syria despite the political Islamist roots of the new administration.
The National Oil Company was ordered to resume operations within 24 hours of rebel control, and was also instructed to continue sending electricity to coastal governorates not yet controlled by the rebels. Government employees returned to ministries on Tuesday and Wednesday, and schools were ordered to reopen on Sunday. On Thursday evening, the eve of the weekend in Syria, traffic returned to the streets, while restaurants and parks were filled with people.
“Despite everything we lost, we are now free,” says Abu Muhammad, 54, a resident of a poor suburb of Damascus.
One of the crucial challenges What lies ahead is rebuilding the economy, which has been in free fall for several years. More than 90% of Syrians now live below the poverty line, and most families in the country receive less than 6 hours of electricity per day. Warehouses are often empty amid shortages of basic goods, high inflation, and the collapse of the Syrian pound.
National Oil Company Vice President Mustafa Hasawiya told the Financial Times this week that more than 80 percent of the country's oil products are imported from Iran, which supported Assad during the war. He added that although there is enough stock to last a month, it is unclear where the fuel will come from next.
Domestic manufacturing was severely hampered, with factories destroyed and workers sent to war during a decade of civil war. This will take some time to begin: much of the country remains in bloody ruins, its residents haunted by the ghosts of loved ones, killed or disappeared.
The Assad government has drained money to finance military spending, public sector salaries, and subsidized goods, two essential parts of the basic social contract in the Baathist state.
When the regime's backers, Russia and Iran, came to demand long-owing war debts, Assad divided parts of the state's resources to Moscow and Tehran, including phosphate extraction. Other debts that his government never repaid, including debts owed to Moscow, left HTS with an unknown mountain of debt and complex geopolitical calculations about who should repay it and how.
The ruling family and its chosen agents expanded their control over the state in the final years of the civil war, operating in a “mafia style.” Blackmail On the business elite to fill their pockets. This was crucial in eroding Assad's support among the business elite.
Syrian citizens say they are attacked on a daily basis at checkpoints spread throughout regime-controlled areas, many of which are linked to the army's 4th Division – a notoriously brutal unit run by Bashar's brother Maher.
These checkpoints have remained unguarded since Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham took control of the city, much to the disbelief of many, as regime soldiers laid down their weapons, took off their uniforms and fled the advancing rebels.
Hours after Assad's fall, the duty-free mall across the border from Lebanon, widely believed to be the Fourth Division's source of revenue, was ransacked by looters. Hundreds of rabid men, rejoicing in the first few hours of relative freedom, carried refrigerators, new laptops and watches, calling it “justice” for years of torment.
The Fourth Division was also the central node in several sources of illicit revenue that helped keep the regime afloat: weapons, oil and alcohol smuggling, and sales of illegal amphetamine Captagon.
Replacing this apparatus, as well as the entire state security apparatus, will be another major challenge facing HTS.
An army of poor conscripts was not willing to die for a dictator who had long ago decided to use them as cannon fodder. Instead, these men shed their uniforms and quit their jobs.
Within 48 hours of its arrival in Damascus, Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham brought in traffic police from Idlib in addition to government security forces. Two residents told the Financial Times that they had noticed a shift in the streets: people were obeying traffic lights again (in Assad's Syria, stopping at a traffic light was a surefire way to get bribed by the traffic police). But there are not enough of these individuals to secure the entire country, and reports have spread of banditry on the highways that connect the provinces.
There are also fears of retaliation from Golani's forces, but even more so from hundreds of thousands of people who may be looking to settle scores.
This is especially true for the families of the missing, the thousands who went missing in Assad's vast network of prisons. They descended on the country's prisons in a desperate search for their loved ones this week, and many emerged disappointed. In a sign of the growing anger, Al-Julani said that those involved in torture would face justice, while soldiers not involved would receive a pardon.
In a crowded stationery shop in an upscale Damascus neighborhood, where a printer was printing copies of the new Syrian flag to sell for 40 US cents, the owner happily discussed the latest reform of the system with customers.
But our question is: Will they pursue criminals who “worked in prisons”? He adds. Will they hold accountable the people who tortured and killed our people?
Mapping by Steven Bernard Data visualization before Keith Fry
