After decades of brutal rule, Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been toppled. Here’s what you need to know

By Rob Picheta and Helen Regan, CNN

(CNN) — The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship seemed a distant prospect two weeks ago. But Syria’s rebels completed a speedy and stunning march to power on Sunday, starting an uncertain new era for the country.

For half a century, the Assad family ruled over Syria with an iron fist, with long-documented reports of mass incarceration torture, extra-judicial killings and atrocities against their own people.

On Sunday, after 13 years of civil war that fractured the country, the regime came crashing down. Rebel fighters declared Damacus “liberated” in a video statement on state television, sending Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fleeing to Russia.

Many in the country are hopeful for Syria’s next chapter. But the rebels who stormed into Damascus have a complicated past and offer an unpredictable future.

It is an “open question” who is currently running Syria, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told CNN on Monday, illustrating the caution permeating the watching world.

Here’s what happened in Syria, what it means, and what might come next.

What happened?

An armed rebel alliance charged across Syria over 11 days, sweeping through major cities and reigniting a conflict that had been largely static since a 2020 ceasefire agreement.

A new rebel coalition, led by the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched a surprise attack and took control of Syria’s largest city Aleppo on November 30, a seismic move that met little resistance from the Syrian army.

Syrian and Russian jets targeted rebels in Aleppo and Idlib but opposition forces seized a second major city of Hama and quickly advanced on Homs – the gateway to the capital Damascus.

As Homs fell, rebels encircled and marched into Damascus. Video showed prisoners being freed from Assad’s notorious detention facilities, rebels and civilians were seen ransacking the presidential palace, with footage revealing his luxurious lifestyle and large car collection.

An official source in Russia told CNN the deposed president and his family fled to Moscow and were granted political asylum.

Who are the rebels?

Syria’s rebel coalition is a new grouping called the “Military Operations Command.” It’s made up of various Islamist and moderate factions who, despite their differences, are united in fighting the Assad regime, ISIS and Iran-backed militias.

They’re led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of militant group HTS who has a complicated past.

Once bedfellows with al Qaeda and an apprentice of the future-ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Al-Jolani has sought to distance his forces from the radical Islamism that his former allies pursued.

He announced a split from Al Qaeda in 2016 to create what he said was a Syria-focused anti-regime front with other local factions, called Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (the Front for the Conquest of the Levant), which later changed to Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant.

HTS had been the de facto rulers of Idlib, the northwestern Syrian city from which the recent offensive was launched.

But HTS is only one of numerous armed groups operating in Syria. Other groups controlling territory in the country include the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, elements of which Turkey views as a terrorist organization.

The United States, Turkey, the United Nations and several other Western nations continue to designate HTS as a terrorist organization, and the US has placed a $10 million bounty on Jolani.

As his offensive rapidly gathered pace, Jolani accelerated his own years-long effort to redefine himself as a pragmatic statesman. He gave interviews to Western news organizations, telling CNN his opposition ultimately plans to form a government defined by institutions, and a “council chosen by the people.”

It draws parallels with the Taliban, whose rapid return to power in Afghanistan in 2021 was accompanied by a Western-friendly push to appear moderate, forgiving and forward-looking, even as the group implemented a draconian return to Sharia law and a crackdown on the rights of women and minorities.

The West is hopeful that HTS will follow through on its promises. But millions of Syrians, including those from minority Christian and other religious communities, remain haunted by a legacy of persecution suffered at the hands of extremist groups like al Qaeda and ISIS.

Who is Bashar al-Assad?

Assad is the second generation of an autocratic family dynasty that held power in Syria for more than five decades.

A former ophthalmologist who studied in London, Assad took power in an unopposed election following the death of his father Hafez al-Assad, who had led the Baath Party since seizing power in 1970.

Like his father, Assad tolerated little dissent and throughout the 13-year civil war, he and his forces have been accused of severe human rights violations and brutal assaults against civilians, with reports of using starvation as a weapon of war, enforced disappearances and killings, and the deliberate bombing of civilian buildings like schools and hospitals.

Among Assad’s worst atrocities was the 2013 sarin gas attack in the city of Ghouta, which killed more than 1,400 people and was labeled a war crime by the then-UN secretary general.

Assad’s notorious detention facilities were black holes where anyone deemed an opponent of the regime disappeared, with widespread reports of torture and inhumane conditions. In 2017, an Amnesty International report claimed as many as 13,000 people had been hanged from 2011 to 2015 at Saydnaya Prison.

Why now?

The conflict in Syria had remained deadly but largely dormant over the past several years, defined by low-level clashes between the rebels and Assad’s regime rather than dramatic changes in territory and control.

But then the rebels seized an opportunity, capitalizing on a weakened government whose key allies are heavily preoccupied with other conflicts.

Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine since 2022 has sucked in manpower and resources. Unlike in 2014, when Moscow stepped in to save Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s energies – and most of his jets, troops and mercenaries – are elsewhere.

Iran has meanwhile been hamstrung by war with Israel, which has escalated dramatically in the past year. Its main proxy Hezbollah, which also came to Assad’s aid in the past, has been decimated by Israeli attacks and airstrikes.

Rebels used that vacuum to advance in Syria, and their calculation paid off; an offensive that might have led to another months-long eruption in hostilities instead took days, ending with a march into the capital that was met with little resistance.

The anti-regime coalition is now disbanding Assad’s military, laying out its vision for a post-Assad Syria.

But 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.

US President Joe Biden described the fall of the Assad regime as an “historic opportunity for the long-suffering people of Syria to build a better future” but cautioned it was also a moment of risk and uncertainty in the region.

Iran’s ambassador to Syria Hossein Akbari warned that the fallout from the collapse of Assad’s regime will be beyond American control and could lead to a conflict involving regional countries and Turkey.

What comes next in Syria?

Many in Syria are celebrating a stunning and unexpected political turn that caught much of the world off guard.

Jolani declared victory for the “entire Islamic nation” on Sunday, in his first public remarks since the coup, which he said “marks a new chapter in the history of the region.”

“My heart longed for this moment,” added Jolani. “There is not a single household in Syria that the war has not touched.”

But the change in power is shrouded by uncertainty, too. It’s unclear what a new governing system in Syria would look like, how it will work given the disparate groups and interests involved, and whether the reordering of power will only lead to further instability.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin cautioned on Monday that ISIS could attempt to “take advantage” of a power vacuum in the country.

Jolani has gone to great lengths to reassure Christian and Kurdish Syrians as his offensive spread across the country, but HTS has a history of harsh treatment against political enemies, and it is an open question whether his outreach will continue once the eyes of the world have moved elsewhere.

A video shared by the rebels Monday shows Jolani meeting with the regime’s outgoing prime minister, Mohammad Ghazi al-Jalali, to discuss the transfer of power. Mohammed al-Bashir, the HTS-linked prime minister of the Salvation Government, which administers the rebel-held Idlib area of northern Syria, was also at the meeting.

The meeting in Damascus came after the outgoing prime minister pledged to cooperate with the rebels and endorse “a smooth and systematic transition of government functions” and preserve “state facilities,” in a message recorded after the rebels took Damascus.

What does this mean for the world?

The fall of Assad has huge reverberations throughout the region and around the world, too.

The development has left Iran weakened and will broadly be celebrated in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Assad’s collapse as “a historic day in the history of the Middle East.”

Israel will welcome Iran’s sudden loss of influence in Syria. But Netanyahu’s forces have, at the same time, already moved to bolster the country’s border with Syria, a reflection of the trepidation that underpins events of the last few days.

In Russia, where Assad fled to, Putin will also be nursing the effects of Assad’s fall from power. There are obvious military effects – Russia used two bases in Syria to project strength in the Middle East – and potential repercussions for Ukraine, with Putin’s hand weakened in any future negotiations.

And for many of the 14 million Syrians forced to flee their homes since the civil war began, the question is whether they can and will return home – either voluntarily or against their will.

Germany and Austria paused asylum applications for Syrians within hours of Assad’s regime falling, amid a Europe-wide hardening in sentiment towards asylum seekers, but a European Union spokesperson has said the conditions are not yet met for a safe return. The UK also “temporarily paused” decisions on asylum claims from Syria nationals, the Home Office confirmed to CNN on Monday.

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CNN’s Sana Noor Huq, Simone McCarthy, Nick Paton Walsh, Sophie Tanno, Nic Robertson, Madalena Araujo, Catherine Nicholls, Mostafa Salem, Lex Harvey, Lucas Lilieholm, Manveena Suri and Adam Renton contributed reporting.