Cartoon by Paolo Lombardi

Assad’s Rule Collapses in Syria, Raising Concerns of a Vacuum

By Summer Said, Isabel Coles and Stephen Kalin

The Wall Street Journal: The Assad family dictatorship that ruled Syria for more than 50 years collapsed Sunday, with rebel forces claiming control of Damascus and the whereabouts of President Bashar al-Assad unknown. The events set off celebrations among the long-repressed population but also sparked concerns about how the disintegration of the regime would reverberate in the region.

Rebel forces poured into the capital overnight, just over a week after launching a campaign that swept through Syria’s biggest cities with lightning speed. Assad fled in the early hours of Sunday local time, according to two Syrian security officials. His destination is unknown, they said.

The government had survived more than a decade of civil war and economic crisis, but its forces caved under the pressure of the fast-moving advances by various rebel groups closing in from the north, south and east.

The fighting was the latest dramatic turn in a series of interlinked conflicts that have roiled the Middle East for more than a year—all stretching back to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, assault on southern Israel that sparked the war in the Gaza Strip and then spread to Lebanon and Iran.

The Assads’ government fell victim in part to the wars in Lebanon as well as in Ukraine, which sapped the strength of Russia and Iran-backed Hezbollah, two key sponsors whose militaries had kept the family in power.

President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday on social media that Assad fled his country because Russia “was not interested in protecting him any longer.” Trump said Russia “lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine.”

Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, Arab governments and the U.S.—which has at least 900 troops in the country—are all closely watching events unfold, concerned that deeper disorder in the strategic Middle East country could undermine their own interests. There is concern that a rapid collapse of the regime without planning for succession could create a dangerous vacuum with spillover effects into neighboring countries.

The campaign that led to the Assad regime’s downfall was kicked off by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a U.S.-designated terrorist group commanded by Abu Mohammed al-Jawlani, who previously had links to Islamic State and al Qaeda. Jawlani has cut those ties and has pledged to protect Syria’s religious and ethnic diversity, but it is unclear to what extent his transformation is genuine.

The Assads were reviled but preserved a rough balance of power for years in a country divided by a host of sometimes-antagonistic rebel groups and under pressure from outside powers including Turkey, Russia and Iran. In recent days, neighboring countries rushed to solidify their borders to prevent possible spillover from the conflict.

Israel said it deployed its military on Sunday in the buffer zone between Israel and Syria in the Golan Heights. It said the move was necessary to defend its border.

Syria is a small, poor country but has played a central role in the region’s interlinked conflicts. It became a pipeline for weapons supplies to Hezbollah and brought Iran’s influence up to the borders of Israel. It also stockpiled—and used—chemical weapons, which now, it is feared, could wind up in the wrong hands.

Assad had said he would address the nation at 8 p.m. local time on Saturday, but the speech never occurred. His whereabouts couldn’t be determined. People close to the Syrian government were hiding from the fighting in Damascus as rebels rolled through the capital, said an official close to the Assad family.

“It is chaos. We are all under the tables,” he said. “There is shooting outside in the streets.”

“We declare the city of Damascus free from the tyrant Bashar al-Assad,” Lt. Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, of the rebel military command, said in a social-media post early Sunday local time.

Just hours earlier on Saturday, the rebels said they had seized Homs, a city of 800,000 people that has provided access to Assad’s stronghold in Syria’s coastal areas, where Russia maintains military bases.

Syrians driven into exile by the civil war celebrated its fall. Footage purportedly from the city showed residents tying a noose around a statue of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who led Syria for three decades, and toppling it.

Regime forces had said they had created an unbreakable security cordon around Damascus, but it broke down quickly under pressure from the north, where Hayat Tahrir al-Sham had entered, and from the south, where a separate group of rebels had taken up positions in the capital’s suburbs.

“We made it, we won. We are finally a free country,” said Abdulkafi Alhamdo, an English teacher from Aleppo who recently returned to the city after leaving it in 2016 >>>