Everybody was taken by surprise by the rapid collapse of the government in Syria. Political collapse is often like that: as long as the statues are in the squares, the flags are flying on public buildings and the portraits are on the walls inside, everyone assumes that the regime they symbolize is as stable as ever. Public opinion polls demonstrate unflagging public support for the regime, but that is misleading: as the end of a regime approaches, it works harder to suppress the more vocal parts of the opposition in order to keep up appearances.

Bashar Assad was a great leader — until he wasn’t. He won the civil war, reconquered territory from ISIS and largely eliminated it. He did get help from the Iranians and the Russians, but he, his army and his government deserve most of the credit. The US, on the other hand, which for two years struggled to do something about ISIS in Iraq or in Syria, deserves no credit at all. The US failed completely, and the Russians succeeded where the US had failed.

One major problem was that Assad, having won, then rested on his laurels instead of reforming the politics and rewriting the constitution to be inclusive of the entire population. Instead, he spent time feathering the nest of his Alawite clan while further alienating the Sunni and the Kurdish parts of the population. As a result, his government gradually lost all support from all parts of the disparate population — not just the Sunni and the Kurds, but also the Druze, Christians, Shia, Yezidi and what have you.

Another major problem was that Assad’s victory was incomplete: his government was not able to expel the Americans, who are squatting on Syria’s oil wells. Syria could have been self-sufficient in oil production; instead, it was forced to rely on the generosity of the Iranians, who sold it oil at a discount — until 2023, when their generosity ended rather suddenly. Past that point, the Syrian economy, already disrupted by the civil war, started steadily losing blood.

Yet another major problem was the Idlib province to which all ISIS remnants were bussed together with their families when the civil war ended. There they went through a process of selection, gradually eating each other, until only the best and the strongest was left: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Its leadership was clever enough to curry favor with the Turks, the Americans and the Brits, who helped equip it with some game-changing new military technology; namely, drones. They even got some Ukrainian Nazis to help train them in the use of drone technology. But HTS is quite small — somewhere between 20 and 30 thousand fighters by most estimates. It is far too small to take over and govern a country the size of Syria.

And yet it was able to overrun virtually all of government-controlled Syria in a very short time. The only reason it could do so was that it was virtually unimpeded. The border of the Idlib province, which runs not far from the city of Aleppo, was supposed to have been guarded by Syrian troops supported from the air by Russian ground support aviation flying out of the Hmeimim airbase. But the Syrian troops simply abandoned their positions, took off their uniforms and fled, abandoning their weapons and armor to the advancing HTS, leaving the Russian aviators with nothing to do.

The reason HTS could advance unimpeded was because, strange as it may sound, this band of cutthroat Jihadis turned out to be popular with the Syrian population. So craven and feckless was the government of Assad and his Alawite clan that most Syrians were very much looking forward to getting rid of it, never mind what comes next. Also, the HTS leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani (a most-wanted terrorist according to most of the world’s governments) was clever enough to sound peaceful and conciliatory, promising to be tolerant toward all religious and ethnic groups — even the Kurds, who seethed at not being recognized as citizens by the Assad government.

An additional factor that made the HTS rampage possible was lack of resistance by the Hezbollah, which was otherwise engaged in Southern Lebanon. The few Hezbollah columns that tried to advance toward Aleppo were attacked by the Israeli air force. But it is unclear whether a larger Hezbollah presence in Aleppo would have stopped the HTS advance since the population was by then quite tired of the Shia and Iranian influence there.

Since virtually none of the Syrians were willing to defend the Assad government, none of its external supporters (just Iran and Russia, actually) would have made any difference either. As Vladimir Putin said back in 2015, “We can’t be more Syrian than the Syrians.” The Russians did all they could to help Syria — while helping themselves, of course. Their task was to destroy ISIS before the spread of ISIS would reach Russia’s borders. It was able to neutralize this threat using an air campaign and some ground troops that consisted of the Wagner private military company, now disbanded and its two leaders dead.

The Wagner people did their best to whip the Syrian military into shape but gave up: the Syrians make absolutely hopeless soldiers, at least by Russian standards. They are always eager to set up checkpoints at which they can search and rob locals but run away as soon as the shooting starts. Their generals tended to be all Alawites from the Assad clan’s village — useless as officers but less prone to treason. After that, the Russians flew sorties in defense of Syrian ground forces from Hmeimim and used their naval station at Tartus in support of their Mediterranean training exercises and various missions to Africa.

To overstate the obvious, what happened is certainly a defeat for Assad (who, together with his family, is now in Moscow, guest of the Russian government). But who else lost and are there any winners? Is HTS a winner? Perhaps, but for how long? If they are not able to suppress a new civil war (and could they, given their small numbers?) then they will end up as dead as all of the previous al Qaeda and ISIS Jihadis.

Is Israel a winner? It will probably be able to grab some territory in the South of Syria (it has already occupied the rest of the Golan Heights) and the Druze minority that lives there probably won’t be opposed to being ruled by Israel. But on the other hand it may end up with an unholy mess on its border where before there was at least some semblance of order. The Israeli military is already depleted and overstretched after a year of Gaza genocide and its ill-fated Lebanon incursion. Being forced to contend with a new Syrian civil war will stretch its resources even thinner.

Is Turkey a winner? Most definitely! Turkey will be able to get rid of at least some of its Syrian refugee population (a lot of it chose exile as an alternative to living under the Assad regime). Some Syrians have already started streaming out of Turkey and back to Aleppo. Solving the Syrian refugee crisis was an election promise by Erdoğan and delivering on it will make him more popular. Also, Turkey may be able to annex Kurdish areas along the Turkish border, preventing the appearance of a Kurdish autonomy that could then spread across the border into Eastern Turkey.

Iran, on the other hand, does look like a loser in all of this. The Shia Crescent, which Iran had painstakingly constructed, and which ran from Aleppo to Yemen, is now in disarray and Hezbollah, which was its main fighting force, is much weakened. What is to become now of the Islamic Revolution that is a key part of Iranian state ideology? Will it have to give up on it and concentrate on more mundane tasks? On the one hand, export of the Islamic Revolution is something of a vanity project; it doesn’t exactly pay its own bills and is more of an expensive hobby than a must-have. On the other hand, ideology is important and if the Iranian state loses a key element of its ideology, it may lose some of the passion and commitment of its people along with it.

Is Russia a winner or a loser? Its involvement in Syria was in pursuit of three major goals (and some minor ones). First, it destroyed ISIS before it could reach Russia’s borders, succeeding where the Americans had failed. Second, it tested out its air force and a number of new weapons systems. Third, Russia’s stunning success gave the Americans great pause, buying Russia almost a decade during which to prepare for the inevitable conflict in the Ukraine and putting itself in better shape economically and militarily to fight off the inevitable onslaught when the Americans decided to finally launch their Donbass Genocide proxy war in early 2022. By all of these measures, Russia’s involvement in Syria was a huge success.

On the other hand, it lost its good friend Bashar Assad (and immediately regained him, since he is now in Moscow). But then Assad wasn’t exactly laying golden eggs and Syria was more of an expense and a liability than a profit center for the Russian government. It is also likely to have to evacuate and shut down its naval base at Tartus and its airbase at Hmeimim. The Hmeimim airbase now serves no purpose since there is no Syrian army for which it can provide air support and the Tartus naval base is not needed as a resupply point on the way to Africa and Southeast Asia now that the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC) is in operation. INSTC links St. Petersburg to Mumbai by rail and sea and runs through Russia, Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, and Iran. Thus, shutting down the Syrian military bases seems like an overdue cost-cutting measure for the Russian government with nothing of value being sacrificed in the process.

With Assad gone, civil war in Syria is rather likely to resume. He was the stopper in that bottle full of Hell. If the civil war does reignite, Syria will once again start sucking in Jihadis from the surrounding countries, especially from Central Asia, and will become valuable as a graveyard for vicious young idiots. Russia is gearing up to expel migrant laborers from Central Asia whose work permits have expired or who have broken some law, and now they’ll have a place to go. This may sound cynical, but, you see, there aren’t any Russians in Syria, so why should Russia care? I’ll leave answering this question as an exercise for the reader.