[The Red, White, Green, and Black Free Syrian Army flag flew over Damascus on Sunday as thousands of residents lined the main square in bursts of defiant jubilation – after President Bashar al-Assad relinquished his grip on power.
Over the past 11 days, a rebel alliance charged through Syria in the boldest challenge to the Assad rule in years – following decades of brutal reign by the Assad dynasty marked by fighting, bloodshed, and an oppressive political crackdown.
“This is a momentous moment, not just for the Syrian people, but for the people of the Middle East, Lebanese, Palestinians, or otherwise,” Firas Maksad, a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Middle East Institute, told CNN on Sunday.
“This is a regime that, for over 50 years, under the mantra of freedom, unity, and socialism, oppressed, tortured, and disappeared millions in Syria.”
Now, as the anti-regime coalition starts to disband Assad’s military and lays out its vision for a post-Assad Syria, experts wonder if the next phase will be a new dawn for a people strangled by a brutal autocracy – or whether sectarianism will bring a different type of authoritarian rule.
Syria’s armed opposition ultimately plans to form a government defined by institutions and a “council chosen by the people,” Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the militant figure driving the latest rebel swing, told CNN. He heads the dominant group in the coalition, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), a former Al Qaeda affiliate.
Jolani declared victory for the “entire Islamic nation” on Sunday, in his first public remarks since the rebel-led coup, which he said “marks a new chapter in the history of the region.”
But delegating a new governing system will be “extremely challenging” for a “diverse coalition” of armed fighters, according to Jerome Drevon, a senior analyst at the Brussels-based think tank International Crisis Group.
Some groups are more structured, more organized, including HTS and some of its allies, while others are “more local entities.”
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