The news spread first across Syria, and then the world. The regime once referred to as being "forever" during the rule of former president Hafez al-Assad [1930-2000, Bashar Al-Assad's father] is no more. The death machine built up over 40 years has been brought to a halt with the takeover by an armed rebel coalition, supported in recent days by spontaneous demonstrations. The Syrian uprising of 2011, violently suppressed for many years, regained its momentum, as if the groundswell of support that drove it could not be crushed.

At the dawn of this new era, although uncertainty has remained, a sense of joy has been making a widespread comeback. One image after another has conveyed this feeling, while at the same time also unavoidably revealing a violent reality: that of the world of prisoners, who, as they have staggered out of prison − the living dead, some of whom have been gone for decades − have begun reentering a world they don't recognize and which doesn't recognize them. On the morning of December 8, 2024, Syria, upon waking up to this unexpected day, showed the world the horror from which it had tried to avert its gaze.

Within a period of 10 days, following intensive fighting around Aleppo, a coalition force from the north had broken the stranglehold. More so than that of the perpetrators of the attack, it is once again the violent reality of authoritarian power that has been laid bare: brute force offering nothing for the future. And so it was that once the regime's pillars − those external forces that al-Assad had trained in Syria to ensure its survival − were withdrawn, the regime vanished at a single stroke.

For many commentators, a sanctions-weary al-Assad had actually won the war. According to them, the fact that military confrontations had subsided − despite skirmishes and activity on the fronts between the four zones (Idlib under the main leadership of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham [HTS], the pro-regime zone around Damascus, the partisan zone of the FDS, close to the Kurdish PYD party around the northeast, and the fragments under the Islamic State) − and that the vast majority of the population was in the pro-regime zone was enough to conclude that he had won.

Widespread extortion

This ignored, however, the fact that even in 2011, the entire country was under the regime's military control, which did not prevent it from losing its foothold. In fact, it was the very foundations of the regime that led to its inevitable weakening. Widespread extortion and systematic control brought about, starting in 2012, the creation of checkpoints − the regime's only real checkpoints throughout the country − and to arrest campaigns. The latter, which were key, served as much to feed the horrors of Saydnaya prison atrocities as to generate resources for the regime's apparatus. Every piece of information had to be paid for; every release even more so, and families dipped into their last savings to prevent their loved ones from going through hell. As these measures of control became insufficient for maintaining the network of militias and armed groups close to the regime, and as the al-Assad family had to constantly find new resources, a new source of wealth was found in the production and sale of captagon.

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