They were scenes that brought back memories of a statue of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein being felled in Baghdad in March 2003 as troops belonging to the invading US Army looked on – an act that millions of Iraqis regret today.

In Libya, the country’s then leader, Muammar Gaddafi, was arrested, publicly humiliated, and later shot and his body buried somewhere in the Libyan desert in October 2011. If the place where he is buried were known today, I have no doubt whatsoever that hundreds of thousands of Libyans, not necessarily all followers of Gaddafi, would visit it to pay their respects to him.  

The Syrian people will likely do the same not years but months after the events of 8 December this year after so-called “armed opposition groups” swept across the country to Damascus from 27 November to 8 December as the news spread that Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad had flown out of the country for an “unknown destination.”

Later that same evening, the Russian Tass News Agency reported that the Russian government had granted him and his family political asylum. Luckily, Al-Assad escaped the tragic fate of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. We will now wait for Al-Assad to write his memoirs, if the Russian government agrees to their publication, to find out his version of the methodical and programmed destruction of Syria from 2011 to 27 November this year.

Syria will now revert to the political instability that it witnessed before former president Hafez Al-Assad seized power in 1970. On 8 December, the rule of the Al-Assad family ended and left the future of the country in the hands of outside powers that for more than a decade have been the masters of the destiny of Syria and its valiant people.

It was not a surprise, though it was no less shocking, to see one of the leaders of a terrorist organisation, Abu Muhammad Al-Golani, someone whom the US has accused of being the mastermind of the September 11 attacks and has put a $10 million bounty on his head, leading the group that swept through Syria. It was not a surprise, at least for me, to learn that the US network CNN had interviewed him a few days before his group and its pro-Turkish allies, the so-called “Free Syrian Army,” and dozens of other armed groups entered Damascus.

While the interview with Al-Golani was being broadcast, Turkish President Recep Tayyep Erdogan told reporters that “armed opposition groups” were on their way to Damascus.

People have been asking how these armed groups managed to overcome Syrian defences from Aleppo to Hama, Homs, and finally Damascus itself without resistance. I will venture an explanation. I believe that certain powers including Russia and Iran reached an agreement with Al-Assad that the time had come for him to relinquish power without further bloodshed. If he did not do so, they likely said, they would no longer guarantee his rule or his personal safety.

The Syrian Army had courageously fought dozens of armed groups for more than a decade, with these being financed, aided, and given the seal of approval by an ad hoc alliance of regional and international powers. Turkey was the main contractor and conduit for arms and ammunition to these groups.

No army, no country, has been able to withstand such enormous and destructive pressures in living memory. They included the crippling US and Western sanctions imposed on Syria after 15 March 2011 that led to the impoverishment of the Syrian people and the dismemberment of what was a powerful, proud, and prosperous Syria before the so-called “Arab Spring” in 2011.

Fewer than 24 hours after the end of the rule of the Al-Assad family, Israel invaded the buffer zone with Syria and waged air attacks against military and intelligence infrastructure as well as destroying Syria’s surface-to-air missile batteries.

How can Syria be rebuilt from the ashes of the “Arab Spring”?

At the present moment, it is difficult to provide an answer, as Syria is now opening another sad chapter in its tortuous history since its independence in the mid-1940s. Let us never forget, as Egyptians, that we fought the 1973 October War against Israel side by side with the Syrian Army.

The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly