On Sunday, the world received news it perhaps had stopped thinking was possible. The murderous regime of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, is gone and the Syrian civil war may be coming to an end after 13 years of suffering.
In just a few days, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – an armed Islamist group based in Idlib in the north of Syria – swept south, overrunning Aleppo and Homs and then taking the capital Damascus. Assad, meanwhile, is reported to have fled with his family to Moscow.
The most optimistic observers view this moment as a chance for peace. Assad has finally been toppled, his key allies Russia and Iran are engaged elsewhere and a fragile calm is emerging between Syria’s various armed factions. Others caution that the resulting vacuum may lead to a prolonging of chaotic violence of the kind that has plagued Libya since that country’s dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was overthrown and killed in 2011.
