When Islamist militants swept into her home town of Aleppo little over a week ago, Rama Alhalabi sheltered indoors as fear engulfed her. Forces loyal to president Bashar al-Assad, who had sought to reassure residents that nothing was happening, suddenly deserted the city. But as the insurgency pushed south, rapidly seizing control of the city of Hama on the road to Damascus, Alhalabi’s fears about life under militia rule have slowly ebbed. Instead they have been replaced by fears that her friends in the army will be abandoned by their commanding officers as Assad’s regime loses its grip.
“People in Aleppo are feeling more comfortable now we’re further from the areas under the regime’s control,” said the 29-year-old, while still using a pseudonym in fear Assad could retake the city.
“At the same time, I have many friends serving in the army and I don’t want them to get hurt. People with power inside the regime will protect themselves, and they will leave the poor fighters who were forced to join the army to face their awful fate alone.
“Things changed insanely fast,” she added. “We can barely believe what’s happening.”
As militants spearheaded by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) massed outside the city of Homs and rebel forces said they had entered the vast southern suburbs of the capital, rapid change swept across Syria. The Syrian army declared it had “redeployed,” its forces in two restive provinces south of Damascus in the latest thinly-veiled message of retreat, days after they withdrew from Hama. In under a week, five provincial capitals across the country were suddenly no longer under Assad’s control.
“We can hear the bombing nearby, and we are praying, hoping – and waiting,” said Um Ahmad, an elderly native of Homs, sheltering with her husband at home as the fighting drew close enough to be audible.
Assad loyalists fled the city, while people who stayed only have a couple of hours’ electricity each day and what goods are left in the shops are unaffordable. Those remaining in Homs waited to see if this might be the end of Assad’s rule, while an insurgent commander told his regime’s forces inside the city that this was their “last chance to defect before it’s too late”.
Um Ahmad was consumed by a single thought, that she might finally be able to see her sons again after a decade of separation and exile. “Most people are frightened but they fear the regime’s revenge more than anything else,” she said, as Russian and Syrian airstrikes pummelled the countryside around Homs and Hama.
When a popular uprising swept cities across Syria in 2011 calling for Assad to go, it initially looked as if demonstrations could topple another regional autocrat. But the Syrian leader swiftly turned the state’s weapons on his own people to crush dissent. As the uprising slowly morphed into a civil war, Assad freed jihadist prisoners from his fearsome detention system to alter the forces rising up against him, before relying heavily on his allies in Russia and Iran to provide the military muscle he used to reclaim control.
The civil war killed over 300,000 people in 10 years of fighting, with some estimates putting the true toll at twice that number. Tens of thousands remain in detention, including 100,000 believed missing or forcibly disappeared in Assad’s prisons since 2011, and subject to what United Nations monitors have described as systematic torture. Over 12 million people have been displaced.
Assad kept control of Syria’s major cities for years, as battle lines from the country’s years-long proxy war hardened. HTS ruled over a mountainous pocket in the northwest, cut off from the outside world. The group appeared a dim threat to Assad until they suddenly launched an offensive that saw them take control of Aleppo within days.
A few days after insurgents first entered Syria’s second city, the HTS leader known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani strode down the steps of its ancient citadel flanked by fighters among excited crowds. Jolani still retains a $10m bounty on his head from Washington due to the group’s former connections to al-Qaida, but his public appearances and direct communication with his followers have made him the figurehead of the insurgency. Meanwhile Assad has been largely absent, save for images of the Syrian president smiling while seated next to the Iranian foreign minister in Damascus. A statement from the Syrian presidency denied that Assad had fled the country or was making any sudden visit abroad, claiming that he was fulfilling “his national and constitutional duties” in Damascus.
“Assad is facing a moment of reckoning… yet he is missing in action at this crucial moment with the future of his regime on the line,” said Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics.
“What we have seen is not only a military earthquake but a political one, for Syria and its regional allies. This was unthinkable a year ago. Regardless of what happens in the coming days, weeks and months, I doubt whether Assad could remain at the helm of the Syrian state.
“Even though these events are surprising, I don’t think we appreciate just how much the Syrian state capacity has been degraded,” he said. “The army is demoralised, and starving.”
Assad appeared to be awaiting salvation as diplomats from Turkey, Russia and Iran convened in Doha to discuss a last-ditch political solution. While both Moscow and Tehran have pledged to support Assad as he attempts to muster a counter-attack, there were few signs that their backing has reached the levels that Syrian forces previously relied on to regain control.
Gerges pointed out that the Syrian president who has ruled for almost 25 years is yet to address his forces or his citizens amid the largest challenge to his control of the country for years.
“He doesn’t appreciate the gravity of this moment,” he said. “Not only for the lives and wellbeing of his supporters who are putting their lives on the line and are terrified, but his soldiers who have been left alone.”
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In Daraa and Suwayda to the south of the capital, residents set fire to portraits of Assad that towered over the streets. In Hama, the city where Assad’s father Hafez violently crushed an Islamist rebellion against him in 1982, a group of men decapitated a statue of the former president and dragged the head through the streets behind a truck, the hollow face riddled with bullet holes.
“No one in Hama can think about the future right now, but they are determined that whatever happens, it will undoubtedly be better than living under the Syrian regime they’ve experienced for decades,” said Mohamad Alskaf of the Syrian network for human rights, exiled from Hama.
He was watching with joy, he said, as opposition media showed insurgents flinging open the doors of prisons in each city they entered, allowing detainees held in the darkness of state detention facilities to walk free for the first time in years. “These special scenes from Hama, it’s like something from a film,” he said.
Adam, a former protest organiser exiled from Damascus who requested to withhold his family name, said he was also overjoyed to see images of political prisoners being liberated, but he feared what Assad might do to hold on to power as insurgents move towards the capital. When the Syrian president deployed the deadly nerve agent sarin against rebel forces in the Damascus suburbs in 2013, Adam recalled that the attack took place six miles away from the balconies of his presidential palace.
“This is a regime like no other,” he said. “They would rather burn the country to the ground than leave. It’s an all-or-nothing regime. I expect that they will barricade themselves in Damascus and try to stay, to wait it out, for years, as civilians pay the price.”
Those in Aleppo and Hama have been thrust into the newfound uncertainty of life without Assad but under HTS rule. Alhalabi, a member of Aleppo’s Christian community, said she was initially terrified that she would be the target of attacks by the militia. Instead, she said, the past week had surprised her, and local church leaders had sought to reassure their congregations that they would remain unharmed.
Ubayda Arnaout, a spokesperson for the political arm of HTS’ nominal authority the Salvation Government said fighters were withdrawing from Aleppo and ceding to civil authorities, who are focused on providing basic security and services. It remains too early, he said, to discuss how they might govern Aleppo with the fighting continuing elsewhere.
However, he added, their authority “in its current form won’t govern the newly liberated areas. Aleppo will be governed by its own residents.”
Alhalabi felt confident enough to leave her house the day after the insurgents seized control, although she feared airstrikes that targeted the city. But when she drove her relatives to visit another family member at work in a nearby hospital, a band of fighters were gathered outside as she approached, locking eyes with Alhalabi and her passengers. She waved – and they waved back.
“They were very kind. They asked me if I wanted to park my car in the hospital garage,” she said.
Her fear began to dissipate, and she wanted desperately to believe their rule would remain benign. Shops had begun to reopen, although prices had spiked, and Alhalabi had returned to her routine at a local coffee shop.
The militants looked scary enough, she said. “But now I see that they’re not hurting anyone, and they are respectful when you approach them. We imagined that they’d treat us badly,” she added. “But they haven’t terrorised us at all. They were actually very nice– they gave people bread for free.”