The Syrian dictator’s last stand

Eleven days have passed since rebels launched an offensive in north-west Syria, ostensibly to retaliate for the shelling of rebel-held areas. As they pressed forward, the regime’s army melted away, so the rebels kept going. They took Aleppo, Syria’s second city, on November 29th, and then Hama to the south on December 5th. Now they are in the outskirts of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city.

The rebels are led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a former al-Qaeda affiliate that broke with the jihadist group in 2017 and has for years governed a slice of north-west Syria. They have met stiffer opposition around Homs than in Hama or Aleppo. But it seems probable that the city will fall in the next day or two. That would allow the rebels to sever the highway that links inland Damascus to the coast, the heartland of Mr Assad’s Alawite sect. The regime would struggle to resupply its capital, while the rebels would have a clear path to it. Damascus lies 160km south of Homs, less than the distance the rebels have already travelled.

Other insurgents have beaten HTS to Damascus, though. Over the past few days the rebellion has spread to southern Syria. The fighting there does not involve HTS; instead it is led by local groups that have their own long-standing issues with the regime. They claimed control of the three governorates south of the capital, including Daraa, where the Syrian uprising began in 2011. Then they started driving north. By the evening of December 7th they had reached the southern suburbs of Damascus. There were poignant scenes in places like Daraya, a Damascus suburb where civilians were forced to eat grass to survive a four-year regime siege that ended in 2016. In Jaramana, to the east of Damascus, residents pulled down a statue of Hafez al-Assad, the president’s father.

Meanwhile, in the north-east, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a mainly Kurdish militia, is on the march as well. It is pushing the regime out of Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in the east. The SDF has also seized al-Bukamal, a border crossing that has been a vital conduit for smuggling weapons and drugs. The mayor of al-Qaim, a border town in Iraq, says thousands of Syrian troops have sought refuge there.

The regime’s ever-shrinking rump state, consisting of Damascus and the coast, is now almost totally encircled. Nobody has seen Mr Assad in days. His office claims he is still in Damascus, working as usual; but there are no images to confirm it, and many Syrians think that means he is long gone. His family is already thought to be in Russia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Rumours that he might address the nation on December 7th proved untrue. Instead his army chief gave a brief, half-hearted statement: trust us, everything is fine.

A few loyalists still believe the regime can hold out, if not in the capital, then on the coast. Many others seem to have accepted that Mr Assad is toast. Fares Shehabi, a former MP from Aleppo and a staunch Assad propagandist, tweeted that it was time for Syrians to “put all of our differences aside". A decade ago people like him warned “Assad or we burn the country"; now they want to let bygones be bygones.

The regime’s foreign allies have offered only token help. Russia has carried out some scattered air strikes in northern Syria, while Iran said it would send missiles and drones. But Mr Assad would need much more than that to repel the rebel offensive. His allies are voting with their feet. On December 6th the Russian embassy in Damascus told its citizens to leave Syria while they still could. Iran has also reportedly evacuated some of its military personnel.

A desperate Mr Assad has tried courting Arab states. Multiple sources say he made a personal appeal to Muhammad bin Zayed, the president of the UAE, who has a well-known hatred of Islamist groups like HTS. He has also begged for help from Egypt, Jordan and other countries. But nobody is willing to help a regime that now seems a lost cause. “He’s telling everyone he wants to fight," one well-connected Syrian says of Mr Assad. “The problem is that no one else wants to fight for him."

What happens next is impossible to predict. If the dictator really does fall, or has already fled, HTS will want a big role in governing a post-Assad Syria. It already runs a reasonably competent government in Idlib, in north-western Syria, and it is trying to enforce discipline among its fighters. An edict on December 7th warned them not to loot government offices or private homes, and to avoid firing their guns in the air.

But HTS probably lacks the resources to govern a big, diverse country. The farther it gets from Idlib, the more it will need to work with others. Rebels in the south might want a degree of autonomy; so will the SDF in the north-east. Though HTS has tried to reassure Christians, Alawites and other minorities, it is likely that some of them will flee the country.

As the rebels advanced on Damascus, officials from Iran, Russia and Turkey met on the sidelines of a conference in Qatar to discuss Syria’s future. They did not agree on much. Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, called for dialogue between the regime and the opposition; events on the ground may swiftly make that moot. Whoever governs Syria next, Russia’s priority will be to keep its naval base at Tartus, its sole port on the Mediterranean.

Turkey, which has backed the rebels in northern Syria, will have the most influence over how they act. Donald Trump, America’s president-elect, seems content to let others sort out the mess: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT," he wrote on social media.

For many Syrians, though, such questions can wait. There is great unease about the future—but greater relief that the end of the Assad regime, which brought so much death and destruction, seems nigh.