Hope and despair have always been intertwined in the Arab world.

On 8 December 2024, Bashar Al-Assad’s dictatorship collapsed, giving many Syrians a renewed sense of hope after 14 years of Civil War that were marked by horrific crimes against humanity and mass displacement.

While hope survives in the hearts of many Syrians, despair is emerging as radical Islamist militias, armed by neighbouring Turkey and formerly associated with terrorist groups Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS), are stepping in as the new leaders of Syria.

A similar anguish is being observed among the peoples of the Levant and the wider Arab world. In the Palestinian Occupied Territories,despair persists over the continued war in the Gaza Strip, the continuously rising death toll across Palestine, and the refusal of the Israeli government to accept ceasefire arrangements, much of which occurs in the dark as global attention centres on Syria.

In Lebanon, a country battered by decades of brutal Syrian interference and wars between Hizbullah and Israel, hopes for a noninterventionist Syria after Al-Assad’s escape to Russia coexist with fears emanating from the terrorist past and the violent nature of Damascus’ new leaders, the potential risks their conservative outlook poses to the multireligious and multiethnic Syrian social fabric, and Syrian groups’ dependency on external actors’ support, Turkey for the Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) groupandthe United States for the Kurdish Democratic Syrian Forces.

Iraqis, whose misfortunes after the US-led invasion in 2003 have also beenlinked to Syrian developments—the rise of Islamist terrorism in its Al-Qaeda and IS waves, the destabilising impacts of Shiite militias backed by Iran and operating in both countries, and the constant movement of displaced communities across the borders—fear the potential domino effect of instability in Syria and whether their eastern neighbour, Iran, which defended the Al-Assad dictatorship until the very end, will resolve to challenge Damascus’ new rulers using its allies among the Iraqi militias.

However, if Iraqis after decades of bloodshed and instability in their own country are less hopeful about the prospects of stability in Syria, Jordanians, Syria’s southern neighbours, have a different lens. King Abdullah II’s government has positively embraced the change of leaders, convening an international conference to mobilise economic and diplomatic support for Syria.

Popular views in Jordan advance the Jordanian government’s view of hope, as according to many Jordanian opinion writers, the “new Syria” will never be as brutal to its citizens nor criminal vis-à-vis its neighbours (seen in Al-Assad’s leadership of the illicit Captagondrug trade between Syria and Jordan)as the former regime.

In the wider Arab world, the mix of hope and despair has also shaped popular views in a region torn by uprisings, civil wars, occupation, settlement activities, human rights atrocities, and terrorism.

Whereas Al-Assad’s escape has reminded many across the Arab world of the democratic transition euphoria that followed the first wave of Arab uprisings in 2011, many others have felt reminded of the post-uprising civil wars in countries such as Libya and Yemen.

Thehorrifying stories coming out of Al-Assad’s prisons have captured the collective interest of Arabs on social media and led regionally to public outrage and reckoning with the long and hidden histories of human rights abuses in our part of the world.

Syria, a sovereign state, has fallen victim to Israeli air raids and military ground operations leading to the capture of territory in the Occupied Golan Heights, to direct and proxy Turkish military interference from which a hegemonic Turkish role in post-Al-Assad realities is emerging, and victim to US attacks on IS strongholds areas around Syria.

Foreign interventions in Syria have led to a particular form of outrage—an Arab nationalist outrage over the inability of some Arab countries to defend their territories and over the total collapse of intra-Arab security arrangements that has resulted in the three non-Arab countries of the Middle East—Israel, Turkey, and Iran—becoming the regional hegemons.

Such is the complex reality of the intertwining of hope and despair in our part of the world following the significant Syrian shift of8 December 2024. As ever, we Arabs will continue to be torn between different aspirations, democratic transition and national sovereignty, inclusive social contracts in diverse multireligious and multiethnic settings and sustainable developmental trajectories, peaceful coexistence with our neighbours and outrage over lost Arab pride and lost roles.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly