We feared the regime's end would be accompanied by a bloodbath. Thank God, that hasn’t happened. In the end the regime collapsed without a fight, even in its supposed heartland on the coast.
There has been some looting in Damascus, which has been somewhat more chaotic than the northern cities, perhaps because there has been a smaller rebel presence. Otherwise, the news coming from liberated Syria has been surprisingly good.
On the social level, Syrians are talking the language of reconciliation. One typical video shows a bearded rebel admonishing surrendered regime fighters for standing with the side that slaughtered women and children. Then he tells them, "Go! You are free!"
The rebels have issued a general amnesty for military personnel. This does not extend to those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The intention is to hold those people to account.
Meanwhile, , who was the prime minister in Idlib’s Salvation Government, has been appointed to form a Transitional Government in Damascus. The Salvation Government ruled in HTS territory, but was civilian, largely technocratic, and fairly independent. It looks as if a similar logic is going to apply to the Transitional Government.
Having shed his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani is now known by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa. Instead of 'leader of HTS', he has been rebranded as "commander of military operations".
He wants to be seen as a national figure rather than a Sunni jihadist. Some fear that he will change direction as soon as Western states stop branding him a terrorist, but for now at least his direction is tolerant and democratic. Rebels have been told not to interfere in women’s clothing choices, for instance. And prominent opposition figures say that UN Resolution 2254 will be implemented. This will involve drafting a new constitution and holding free and fair elections under UN supervision.
So far so good. All of it inspires confidence in Syrians at home as well as the millions who were driven from their homes. Huge streams of people are leaving the tented camps on the country’s borders, and returning from Turkey and Lebanon, where so often they were subjected to racist abuse and violence.
The result is thousands of emotional reunions between siblings, or between parents and children, who in many cases haven’t seen each other in over a decade.
This is a blessing that nobody expected a fortnight ago, and it culminates a drama that has lasted almost 14 years. In 2011, millions of Syrians screamed Irhal! – Get out! – at Assad. His response was to drive them out instead. But today, at last, the Assad family are the refugees.
Healing Syria after Assad's hurt
It's also very good that tens of thousands of prisoners have been liberated from Assad’s dungeons. But it's bad – profoundly depressing, in fact – that so many are in such a bad state. Lots of women and children have been found behind bars. The children were either arrested by the regime along with their parents or were born in these dungeons to mothers who had been raped.
Some people have been found who were presumed to be dead. Many Lebanese have been liberated, and Jordanians and Palestinians, including Hamas members.
Some of the prisoners had been "behind the sun", as Syrians say, for over four decades. Some who were liberated thought Hafez al-Assad was still president (he died in 2000). Many of those coming blinking into the light are emaciated or disabled by torture. Some seem to have lost their memories or their sanity.
The worst images are coming from Sadynaya Prison. Amnesty International called Sadynaya 'the human slaughterhouse', and estimated that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extra-judicially executed there between September 2011 and December 2015 alone. It now seems the total number of murders is much higher than that.
At least 130,000 people were estimated lost in the Assadist gulag. Fadel Abdulghany, head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, said yesterday (December 9) he believes that the vast majority of prisoners have been murdered.
Subscribe Now and Listen to our Podcasts OnThe well-known activist Mazen Hamada has been found dead in Sadynaya. Rooms full of discarded clothes and shoes, presumably belonging to the murdered, have been discovered. One room was filled with bags of noosed rope, for hangings. An 'execution press' for crushing bodies has been found, and a mass grave packed with bodies partially dissolved in acid. Piles of corpses have also been uncovered at Harasta Military Hospital.
It is thought that these people were murdered at Sadynaya, and then their bodies moved. It seems that very many were murdered very recently, even as the regime was collapsing.
After over half a century, Syrians are finally emerging from the horror of one of history's worst torture states.
The legacy of death camps like Sadynaya is added – along with the cratered economy and the war-ravaged infrastructure – to the list of traumatising challenges facing the country. Syrians need help, solidarity and understanding from the rest of the world.
But what is the ill-named 'international community' giving Syrians instead?
Israel – armed by the US, UK, Germany and others – is giving them crazy bombing. The Zionist state has struck hundreds of targets, not only weapons sites – so that a free and independent Syria will be defenceless – but also buildings containing documentation. It aims to destroy, one must presume, evidence of its collaborations with the regime, and perhaps its American ally's collaborations too.
Israel is also advancing further into the Golan Heights, creating "a buffer zone" to protect the illegally occupied territory which Bashar’s father Hafez al-Assad withdrew from without a fight in 1967 (he was defence minister at the time). The Assad regime under both father and son protected Israeli security on the border better than the states which had signed peace agreements with Israel.
The regime also locked up any Syrian who organised against Zionism in any way at all. One of the prisoners freed yesterday was Tal al-Mallouhi. Tal was arrested in 2009, aged 19, merely for writing poems and blog posts which urged solidarity with Palestine. This is why the fall of Assad has enraged Israel.
No Western power has condemned Israel’s unprovoked assault on free Syria. They have made their enmity to Syrians clear from the first minutes of the liberation. And this potentially makes all of our futures not just bad, but very ugly indeed. May the Syrian people prevail.
Robin Yassin-Kassab is co-author of , and chief English editor of the
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