How did the rebels manage to topple Bashar al-Assad’s regime so quickly? How inclusive will any new government realistically be? Who in the region wins and who loses? Andrew Mueller speaks with Syrian-born writer Rime Allaf, counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen, Middle East security analyst Burcu Ozcelik and Russia expert Mark Galeotti. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
President, now former President Bashar Al Assad of Syria well understood that dictatorship is an all or nothing proposition.
Once you wield total power, you either keep wielding it or take your pick of exile, imprisonment or death.
This was why, as the Arab Spring wobbled and toppled tyrannies across the Middle east in the early 2010s, Assad was willing to fight so hard to keep his job, even if he had to burn his country, scatter his people to do it.
Assad's ruthlessness won him a decade or so longer in office than certain of his fellow quarries of the Arab Spring.
Zin Al Abedin Ben Ali of Tunisia, banished to Saudi Arabia.
Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, tried and imprisoned.
Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, murdered in a drainpipe.
And in the end, Assad timed his departure wisely, fleeing for Moscow before the rebel army reached his capital.
But 53 years of miserable misrule of Syria by the Assads Bashar and his father Hafez before him is over.
As of this broadcast, it is not entirely clear what comes next.
The group who led the charge to Damascus, the debatably reformed Al Qaeda offshoot Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, or hts, are trying to establish some sort of provisional government while fighting continues on several fronts across the country, involving players both in internal and external.
Even when Syria stops being a military battleground, hopefully sooner rather than later, it will remain a diplomatic and strategic one upon which most of its neighbours will attempt to project themselves one way or another.
What do Russia, Turkey and Iran want from Syria now?
How much of a chance will a new Syria get to establish itself?
And how do you overrun an entire country in a week?
This is the foreign desk.
Most of the Syrians, they really want to go back and if left to their own devices, the Syrians would truly try to rebuild this country.
But don't push them out.
Help them so that they can help the others and that we don't have, God forbid, in another five or ten years, a repetition of a bad situation.
The decisive moment, I think, in the campaign was the fall of the city of Hama, and that triggered lots of other rebel groups to rise up against the regime.