Syria After Assad

Hope has been restored for many Syrians. But vigilance will be needed to ensure that democratic institutions emerge and withstand autocratic impulses.

Syrians search through scattered documents in Sednaya prison for information about people who were disappeared during the Assad era. (Lynsey Addario/Getty Images)

In 2015, a decade before the Assad family’s fifty-three-year rule over Syria ended, the Obama administration was spooked by the advances of a rebel alliance from Idlib, which seemed poised to topple the government in Damascus. The administration reviled Bashar al-Assad’s regime, but since the rise of ISIS in 2014, it had treated Syria as a front in the War on Terror, and it was loath to see Damascus fall to Islamists, some with links to Al Qaeda. When Russia intervened in September 2015 to shore up Assad, the White House was privately relieved. Then Secretary of State John Kerry spent the waning days of the Obama administration negotiating a counter-terror alliance with Russia. Not long after, Russia’s savage methods in Syria triggered the world’s largest mass exodus in half a century.

The West has viewed Syria through the lenses of terror and migration ever since. Syrians suffered at home, with their survival subordinated to security concerns, and in exile, with their presence seen as a burden to be offloaded. In 2020, when the Syrian regime, supported by Iranian-funded sectarian militias and the Russian air force, initiated a major military operation to seize Idlib, triggering the largest displacement of the war, the European Union rushed €700 million to Greece to erect a wall. In the end, Turkish military intervention halted the rampage, but Turkey also went no further than securing its interests, confining itself to northwest Syria, which served as a security buffer and a refugee sanctuary.

While Western leaders focused on terrorism, defined narrowly as political violence perpetrated by nonstate actors, they ignored the more consequential effects of state terror. In Syria, 90 percent of civilian deaths during the war came at the hands of the regime and its allies. State violence was also the main reason Syrians were fleeing the country. But even as the backlash against refugees caused a surge in authoritarian populism in much of the West, most Syrians never left Syria—and of those who did, the majority were dispersed in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan.

Ceding control of Syria to Assad had brought considerable misery to Syrians. Hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced. And the impunity enjoyed by Vladimir Putin in Syria encouraged him to invade Ukraine. Western governments’ decision to subordinate humanitarian concerns to the imperatives of “stability” ended up roiling much of the Northern Hemisphere.

When rebels finally captured Damascus on December 8, 2024, they did so with considerably less bloodshed than the “shock and awe” approach the United States had used in 2003 to capture Baghdad. Nor did their victory have the scorched earth quality of the U.S. campaign against ISIS, which left Mosul and Raqqa in ruins. For an army made up of disparate factions, including hardline Islamists, the rebel coalition conducted itself with surprising restraint. Unlike the United States in Iraq,...