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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

On the streets of Damascus, uniforms of Syrian army soldiers were strewn across the pavement as soldiers quickly changed into civilian clothes and fled the capital.

It was a sign of the speed at which the rebel forces took over the country, triggering the end of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime after 13 years of civil war.

As celebrations spread, the Syrian people face the task of rebuilding a country now in the hands of rebel groups.

Today, Middle East Correspondent for The Economist Gregg Carlstrom, on Syria’s path forward and the implications for an increasingly unstable region.

It’s Thursday, December 12.

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RUBY:

So it seems like almost out of nowhere the Assad regime in Syria has fallen, and the scenes in Damascus have been incredible to watch. People toppling statues, mass celebrations. It all seems to have occurred at a remarkable speed. So can you talk me through the last week or so in Syria?

GREGG:

Remarkable, really. This is a war that has gone on for 13 years and then it came to its conclusion in less than 13 days.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 1:

“The more than decade old civil war in Syria appears to be reigniting as rebel forces breached Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, following a surprise large-scale offensive this week.”

GREGG:

There was a rebel offensive that began in northwestern Syria on November 27th. It was led by a group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. They started what they said was meant to be a limited offensive to push back the Syrian regime in northwest Syria but, at each stop along the way, they found that regime troops just melted away.

So the rebels reached Aleppo, Syria’s second city. The regime didn't defend it. They pushed south to Hama, the next major city to the south. Again, there was no real defence and they just kept going.

RUBY:

And then how did the capital, Damascus, fall?

GREGG:

There was a bit of a race for the capital on Saturday night as these rebels from the south reached some of the southern suburbs of Damascus. And there were these very moving scenes in places like Dera'a, which was a suburb of Damascus ten years ago that was subject to a brutal, years-long siege by the regime. People ended up eating grass because there was nothing else to eat.

Audio excerpt - Streets of Dera'a:
[Cheering and honking horns]

GREGG:

They came out into the streets. They welcomed these rebel groups. They tore down statues of the president, posters of the president. And that was repeated over and over in the belt of suburbs surrounding Damascus.

Audio excerpt - Streets of Dera'a:
[man speaking in Arabic]

Audio excerpt - News reporter 2 (translating):
“This man said they had been waiting for this day for 50 years, adding they had been living in what he described as a prison. A, quote, big prison called Syria.”

GREGG:

HTS reached the city. The Syrian prime minister put out a videotaped statement saying that he was still in the country and was prepared to hand over power. There was no word from Assad himself. He left that job to his prime minister. The Syrian army command told soldiers that the regime had fallen and so they abandoned their posts and people in Damascus said the streets were just lined with discarded Syrian army uniforms. People had just taken off their uniforms and thrown them on the street and gone home. And by Sunday morning, a celebratory mood in the capital.

Audio excerpt - Streets of Damascus:
[Cheering and speaking]

GREGG:

People came out to break into the presidential palace to look through Bashar al-Assad's DVD collection, to do things that, just two weeks ago, would have seemed unimaginable for so many Syrians.

Audio excerpt - Streets of Damascus:
[people singing ‘Syria is one’]

GREGG:

The Syrian regime had simply collapsed.

RUBY:

Okay, well tell me a bit more about the rebels who are now in control of the country and who's leading them.

GREGG:

HTS, this main group is an Islamist group; Al Qaida's one time affiliate in Syria, but it broke with Al Qaeda in 2016-2017 and has become a much more moderate entity in recent years. HTS has been running Idlib province in northwestern Syria, and so they set up, what they called, The Salvation Government. And in some ways this rebel government was better than the central government in Damascus. It provided better basic services. You know, the electricity stayed on more regularly in Idlib than it did in Damascus. The economy was growing more in Idlib than in Damascus. And they did this with help from Turkey, which provided some protection for these rebel held areas. But it was also, especially in the past couple of years, an increasingly authoritarian government. Many critics of Abu Mohammad Jilani, the leader of HTS, have disappeared into jails in northwestern Syria. So there's a mix of feelings right now, I think, when you talk to many Syrians. People, of course, thrilled, overjoyed, in shock, seeing the Assad regime gone. Some of them hopeful about HTS, but some of them sceptical both that this group really has broken away from its more extreme Islamist roots and also worried that it will turn out to be its own flavour of authoritarian regime in Damascus.

RUBY:

And a lot of that skepticism is around the motivations of the leader of the rebels Abu Mohammad Al Jolani. Can you tell me a bit more about him?

GREGG:

He's had a remarkable journey.

Audio Excerpt - CNN Interviewer:

“You are still a specially designated global terrorist by the United States with a $10 million bounty on your head. Your group is a proscribed terrorist organisation by the United States, by the UN, by the EU and others.”

Audio Excerpt - Abu Mohammad Al Jolani (through translator):

“I say to people don't judge by words, but by actions. I believe the reality speaks for itself.”

GREGG:

He is someone who, decades ago, went to Iraq to fight the Americans. Eventually came back to Syria, became involved in the fight against the Assad regime in Syria, had a falling out with a colleague of his, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, about 10 or 11 years ago. Baghdadi, of course, went on to lead Islamic State. Jolani went on to lead a group that was then called Al-Nusra Front, which at times clashed with Islamic State. And that break from Islamic State, and then subsequently his break from Al Qaida, did a lot to put him in the position that he is in today. He's someone that for years, when you spoke to people who know him in Syria, people who deal with him in Syria, they've always said that he's had his eye on eventually going back to Damascus. That he wasn't content with just running a rebel held administration in northwestern Syria, that, you know, he had designs on overthrowing the Assad regime. Not many people took him seriously in recent years, but it turns out he built up a force in northwestern Syria that was able to do exactly that.

RUBY:

And the regime, the Al-Assad family, they have been in power in Syria for more than 50 years. How do you think that history is going to remember them?

GREGG:

Not well. You know, I think the main thing that they are going to be remembered for is these scenes over the past few days. These incredibly moving scenes of Syrians going into prisons like Sednaya, the main prison outside of Damascus, where thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, were held. And discovering these barbaric dungeons where people were held underground for years, for decades. There have been families who thought their loved ones died in prison many, many years ago who are only now discovering that their relatives are still alive.

Audio Excerpt - Sednaya:

[People reuniting after being freed from prison]

GREGG:

The Assad regime ran an industrial scale torture machine and I think that, above all else, is going to be what he is remembered for. Just the absolute brutality that both he and his father displayed towards Syrians and for Bashar, I think, the fact that all of that over the past 15 years was in service of keeping his regime in power for just a little while longer. But in the end, this regime collapsed under its own weight. Assad fled to Moscow, you know, forget stand and fight, he didn't even say anything on his way out. He didn't even deliver a message to his supporters, to his people. He just turned and ran.

RUBY:

After the break - how the fall of the Assad regime is tipping the balance of power in the Middle East.

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RUBY:

Gregg, I want to ask about some of Syria’s closest neighbours and allies. It’s surrounded by Lebanon, Iraq, Israel and Turkey. And it’s long been seen as an important country in US and Russian foreign policy. So, who benefits the most from the fall of Assad?

GREGG:

The biggest beneficiary, I think, is Turkey, which gave some support to HTS and then gave much more support to another group called the Syrian National Army in northern Syria. They are quite happy to see Assad gone. They will have a lot of influence in a post-Assad Syria because it's likely that whoever comes to power will look favourably on the Turkish government. So Turkey has now gained a lot of influence in Syria and they will want to use that to try to push back the Syrian democratic forces, the mostly Kurdish militia that holds power in the northeast of Syria, near the Turkish border. So they're looking at this as a win for them. I think the biggest loser is Iran, which, of course, counted Assad as one of its closest allies as a key link in its so-called Axis of Resistance, this network of militias across the region. Not only has Iran now lost an ally in Assad, but they have lost a land route that they used to send weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Many of those went across Syrian territory and it's hard to imagine the next Syrian government being willing to let Iran use its territory in that way. So their influence, which was already shrinking after the Israeli-Hezbollah war over the past year, their influence has been further diminished.

Audio Excerpt - News Reporter 3:

“Meanwhile, Israel has carried out airstrikes in the country that targeted Syrian military facilities that have long possessed chemical weapons and long range missiles.”

GREGG:

For Israel, it has, over the past few days since the fall of Assad, been carrying out very aggressive airstrikes across Syria aimed at what it says are military targets, sites that used to be affiliated with Syria's chemical weapons program or sites where the Syrian regime had long range missiles or other advanced weapons. Israeli troops have also gone into Syria and seized patches of land. The Israeli argument is that they don't know who's going to come to power in Damascus and they're concerned about that and they want to make sure that this next government is not going to be able to threaten Israel. Now, there are some voices in Israel who are arguing that all of this is unnecessary and in fact, counterproductive, that no rebel group over the past 13 years in Syria has shown any interest in fighting Israel. They've only wanted to fight the regime. And there are some people in Israel arguing that by starting on this very adversarial note with the next Syrian government, Israel is spoiling a potential opportunity to have a better relationship with Syria. But those arguments seem to be going unheeded within the top levels of Israel's political and military establishment.

RUBY:

So there's still many competing interests playing out and it's in this context that the rebels have to actually establish a new system of governance in Syria. What do we know about their plans?

GREGG:

Very little, to be honest. I think, you know, you can look at HTS and this salvation government they ran in Idlib in the northwest, which again was a reasonably competent government. But they are going to struggle to expand that government to cover all of Syria. They just don't have the capacity to do that and Syria is a much more complicated, much more diverse place than Idlib province alone. So they are going to have to find some way to work with other factions. To work with, for example, rebels in the south who are not part of HTS, who are not really, in some cases, part of any organised group who just have their own localised grievances with the Assad regime. They will have to find a way to work with the Kurds in the northeast. They will have to find a way to co-opt the existing state institutions in Syria, which I don't think they want to tear down altogether. So what we've seen over the past few days is a series of statements and declarations from HTS sort of all saying the right things about how they and their fighters should behave. They've told their fighters not to loot, to protect public institutions and private property. They've tried to reassure women that no one will tell them how to dress, there won't be any compulsory Islamic dress code imposed. Yesterday, they issued a general amnesty for Syrian soldiers who were conscripted into the army. All of that is good. All of that is exactly what many Syrians want to hear right now. So the initial signs are encouraging. But what sort of political system they're going to set up, how they're going to share power with other factions in Syria, all of that, I think, it's much too early to say what they're planning to do.

RUBY:

How would you describe the national mood in Syria right now?

GREGG:

Joy and shock. You know, I think so many of the Syrians that I've spoken to over the past few days, their initial reaction was just disbelief. This is something that no one thought would happen. You know, people had given up. People inside of Syria had given up on the idea that Assad was going to be overthrown. People outside of Syria, people who were displaced, who became refugees during the Syrian civil war, never thought they were going to be able to go home and to wake up one morning and find that this regime that had been such a fixture of Syrian life, such an oppressive fixture of Syrian life for 54 years, had simply melted away in the middle of the night, people were in disbelief. And I think it's a very, very complicated mix of emotions right now for so many people.

RUBY:

Gregg, thank you so much for your time.

GREGG:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has pledged to spend 1 billion dollars on early education if Labor wins the next election.

The pitch includes expanding child care centres and removing the ‘activity test’ so that all families earning up to $530,000 can access a subsidy for three days a week.

The Prime Minister says the coming budget update will show more than $3 billion in childcare spending over four years, including a pay increase for early educators.

And,

In New Zealand, representatives of more than 80 Maori tribes are asking King Charles to intervene in parliament, over the government’s proposed changes to the Treaty of Waitangi.

Critics say the proposed amendments will rollback Maori rights. The collective of Maori tribal leaders are asking that the king ensure the government does not, quote, “diminish the crown’s honour”, by breaching the terms of the historic treaty.

I'm Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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