It was a 54-year reign that collapsed in just a few hours, like a house of cards. Faced with the encirclement of Damascus by Syrian rebels, Bashar el-Assad found himself forced to flee the country he had ruled since the death of his father Hafez el-Assad in 2000. Thus, on December 8, the regime has been “carried away by the wind”, writes the Moroccan daily Medias24. And while in Lebanon The Orient By Day makes “the autopsy of the kingdom of fear and silence”, Here Beirut proclaims “the beginning of a new era in the history” of Syria. A country that was “marked by barbarism”, according to the Hebrew newspaper formula Yedioth Ahronoth.
In the space of ten years, tens of thousands of civilians have been locked up in jails. The pan-Arab media Daraj is the voice of these millions of Syrians whose lives have been shattered. Like those of the inmates of the “sad prison” of Saydnaya, where some 30,000 prisoners were tortured to death or executed between 2011 and 2018. Among the stories reported by the daily which is the slayer of the “slaughterhouses of ‘Assad’, that of a three-year-old child “born within the walls of the prison, knowing nothing of the outside world – no trees, no fresh air, no games, just the stifling confines of Assad’s prisons.”
But from these prisons, the pure player Tunisian Business news fears that “thousands” of Tunisian terrorists detained by the Syrian regime will be released. The country would then risk being overwhelmed by the arrival of “waves of jihadists”, warns the daily which has little confidence in the rebels who could “unleash the terrorists”. And to point the finger at the personality as “scary as it is intriguing” of the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (HTC), the rebel group which brought down the regime of Bashar el-Assad, “known as the leader of Al -Qaeda, then Daesh and finally Jabhat Al-Nusra.” Reason why, perhaps, Yedioth Ahronoth asks: “What’s next” for Syria?
The “challenges” of post-Assad Syria
After more than a decade of civil war and a lightning overthrow of power, Syria’s future has never seemed more uncertain. “It is still difficult to imagine what the next day could look like and, even more so, what model of governance could emerge for a post-Assad Syria,” acknowledges Here Beirut. The Lebanese media wonders in particular about the consequences of the collision of “internal factions, grouped under the name of “opposition forces” […] a whole that is both heterogeneous and profoundly homogeneous” and “the determining influence of external powers”.
If like the Libyan press headline Libya Observersome are hopeful that the Syrian people will finally be able to freely choose their leaders, others are more pessimistic. The media Daraj draws a parallel in particular with the fall, twenty-one years earlier, of Saddam Hussein, who became mired in internal struggles without ever managing to constitute a unified state in Iraq. “In 2024, the toppling of the statues of Assad, his father and his brother Bassel echoed the scenes of demolition of the statues of Saddam in 2003. The burning of the images of Assad recalled the fate reserved for the portraits of Saddam.”
Therefore, to succeed in its political transition, and prevent it from ending up as a replica of the state of the masses, Syria will have to take up a certain number of “challenges”, warns the Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid. A paradigm shift which could, however, be facilitated by the “disappearance” of the Baath party, the partisan formation in power since the 1963 coup d’état and headed by Bashar el-Assad. “In power for sixty-one years in Syria” the Baath “has collapsed”, headlines the Turkish government press agency. Anadolu. Likewise, after a presence of several decades in Lebanon, “a probable end” of Baath is to be expected in the land of the Cedar.
What consequences for the Middle East?
If the consequences of the fall of the regime for Syria remain nebulous, those for the rest of the Middle East could be even more so. In this region of the world where conflicts overlap, everyone reacts according to their own reading grid. Thus, in Israel, The Jerusalem Post holds Iran, the main ally of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, responsible for the situation. And to castigate a regime which “is trying to turn the Syrian crisis to its advantage”.
For its part, the Iranian English-speaking newspaper Iran Daily accuses Israel of having “relentlessly sought to overthrow the ruling system in Syria through various means”, arguing that the “strategic partnership [NDLR : entre Téhéran et Damas] aroused the ire of many nations, particularly the Zionist regime and its allies.” And while the Turkish daily Yeni Akit deplores that the Syrian regime “did not listen to the peace initiatives” of Ankara, the Kurdish press agency ANF News slams the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, presented in its columns as “the most active participant in the collapse and division of Syria”.