For over five decades, the Assad family has held power in Syria. Bashar Al-Assad took power after his father died in 2000, and held that power until December 2024, when Syrian rebels overthrew his cruel dictatorship.
This fall of the Assad Empire proceeded 2024 and has been in motion since early 2011. Following the Arab Spring, Syrian teenagers graffitied pro-democracy messages on public walls. Police arrested, held and tortured them for days, which resulted in more peaceful protests against the Assad regime throughout Syria. The military immediately fought back, shutting down each march and demonstration violently. Everyone who openly opposed the Assad government would be jailed, tortured or killed.
By 2012, Syria descended into a civil war, with many rebel groups seizing key cities. Russia, Hezbollah, and Iran had strong roles in Assad’s control over Syria, deploying fighters and weaponry.
Throughout this thirteen-year civil war, Al-Assad used chemical weapons to kill hundreds of women and children, as well as using forms of torture that have caused accusations of severe human rights violations. This war had extreme effects on the civilians of Syria, killing thousands and displacing nearly fourteen million people—more than half the pre-war population.
Bashar Al-Assad continued his father’s system of violence against minority populations, subjugation of poor people and “a kleptocratic system, meaning the government is stealing from the people,” remarked Fieldston History Teacher Karen Drohan, who is teaching a Modern Middle East class this semester. After the fall of the Assad empire, she said, “People start to go into the palaces and see how much wealth and power Al-Assad has accumulated in a country where the vast majority of the people are living in extreme poverty, and all of the wealth is concentrated with Al-Assad and his family.”
An alliance of Syrian rebel groups charged across Syria over eleven days, taking over cities and reigniting the fighting since the ceasefire began in 2020. Distracted by the wars in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza, Al-Assad’s allies, Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, were not able to offer support, and the coup was effective, with Al-Assad exiled to Russia.
Source: CNN
Now that Al-Assad is gone, the Syrians are celebrating freedom without their brutal former autocrat. But what happens next?
“Who can take power? And since there’s no history of democracy in Syria, what kind of system is going to get set up? Will it be a better system? Will it be a Democratic system? Is a democratic system even the right system?” Drohan questioned the future of Syrian rebel groups. There is no system in place to lead the Syrian civilians, who have been living in extreme poverty, with a collapsed economy.
“The Western World tends to think democracy is best, but we saw it in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US left, there was no structure for a Democratic system and it fell, and the Taliban took over,” said Drohan. Syria needs to rebuild its government in a constructive way that creates a system where the civilians can rebuild their lives, and the government becomes stable and autonomous.
Drohan emphasizes the need for support from the United States: “So is the US going to support this process? Is there going to be a global effort to stabilize the country? Or is it just going to be left to its own devices, most of which are not stable? There has to be some support, some genuine global support to stabilize that. Not, we are going to place this person in charge, but we’re going to underscore what happens.”
