Assad’s collapse was coming – everyone just looked away

Starvation, sanctions, and military disintegration broke the former leader’s hold on Syria – but no one was paying attention

Until a few weeks ago, the skies over Syria seemed deceptively cloudless. That illusion shattered on 27 November when the armed group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) launched a sudden offensive on Aleppo.

By last Monday, they had seized the city. Three days later, the official Syrian army abandoned the strategic city of Hama. In the south and southeast, dormant rebel cells rose up, striking a final blow against Assad’s hollowed-out regime. On Sunday, opposition forces stormed Damascus from several directions. Bashar al-Assad, whose regime withstood over a decade of civil war, finally fell from power.

The speed of the collapse invites parallels with Afghanistan three years ago, when Ashraf Ghani’s US-backed government crumbled like a house of cards. But unlike Ghani, whose weakness was obvious, Assad was still widely perceived as Syria’s dominant force – making his sudden downfall all the more staggering.

So what went wrong? Everything.

Assad’s Syria had been rotting from within for years. The country was locked in a perpetual humanitarian and economic crisis, with 90% of Syrians living in poverty and widespread malnutrition. Desperate families took out loans just to buy food but couldn’t pay them back. Power outages crippled even Damascus, sometimes leaving the capital dark for 20 hours a day. Electricity prices soared by up to 585% in the spring of 2024 alone, pushing an already destitute population deeper into despair.

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The Assad government offered no solutions – only mounting repression. Under crushing sanctions, Damascus couldn’t secure foreign loans, and with its oil fields under US-Kurdish control, there was nothing left to trade. Even Syria’s illicit drug trade, once a lifeline, couldn’t plug the gaping holes in state finances. Profits disappeared into the pockets of warlords and traffickers, not the state treasury.

Meanwhile, Assad’s underpaid, demoralized army, bled dry by years of civil war, continued to disintegrate. For a time, Iranian proxies like Hezbollah propped up his forces, but by 2024, they’d shifted their attention to fighting Israel. Attempts to draw Russia further into Syria’s quagmire fell flat. Moscow, busy elsewhere, had no interest in bailing Assad out.

So when the final crisis hit, Assad found himself alone. His allies stayed away, his army scattered, and an enraged, starving populace turned on the government. There was no one left to protect him.

What happens next?

Assad’s fall leaves Syria’s future dangerously uncertain. HTS has already staked its claim for power, likely aiming for a Taliban-style takeover backed by its patron in Ankara.

But Syria is not Afghanistan. The country is a mosaic of hostile factions, many with longstanding grudges. The SNA and HTS themselves once battled for dominance in Idlib, despite both being pro-Turkish. There are also the Kurds in the northeast, the Alawites on the coast, the Druze in the south, and various US-backed factions in the southeast. Then there’s ISIS, still lurking in the desert, ready to exploit the chaos.

Syria seems destined to follow Libya’s post-Gaddafi trajectory: a failed state fractured into zones of influence, ruled by warlords and foreign proxies. This would be a disaster not only for Syrians but for the Middle East as a whole.

But that is a subject for another conversation.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team