On twelve days and twelve years – Tom Stevenson in LRB:

“The Syrian civil war lasted twelve long years, but it ended in twelve days. The speed of the rebel advance that brought down the regime of Bashar al-Assad was remarkable. On 27 November, the coalition of opposition forces based in Idlib province and known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham announced their first major operation for years. Within days they had swept through Aleppo, Hama and Homs. By 8 December they had taken Damascus and sent Assad fleeing for the safety of Moscow.
From a military perspective there was little to analyse. The government forces fled or collapsed. Even in Damascus there was no last stand by the Republican Guard or 4th Armoured Division, the core of the loyalist forces. It is unlikely that HTS itself expected such success.”

(…)

“Part of the reason for Assad’s rapid collapse is that his international backers – Russia, Iran, Hizbullah – were all at the same moment distracted or weakened. But that doesn’t explain why the regime had been unable to strengthen itself in the preceding lull. Since 2020, the intensity of the civil war had declined. The half-hearted attempt by the US and its allies to fell Assad was in the past. The armed opposition was for the most part contained in Idlib, and the Syrian Kurdish forces remained in the north-east. Under those conditions the regime might have consolidated its hold over the areas still under its control. It is now evident that it did not. Perhaps US sanctions, which came into effect in 2020 and doubled the number of Syrians without enough to eat, played some part. But clearly the Assad system of minority rule by brutal repression was also exhausted.”

(…)

“HTS is mostly composed of former al-Qaida figures and takfiri-jihadist veterans of the civil war. Julani is from a petit bourgeois Syrian background. Having grown up in Damascus’s wealthy Mazzeh district, he turned to religious fundamentalism in his youth. In 2003 he travelled as a volunteer to fight the Americans in Iraq. There he joined al-Qaida and spent five years detained by the US in Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca. In 2011 he was released, in time to travel back to Syria and found an al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, the forerunner to HTS. In 2016 he cut ties with al-Qaida and its transnational vision in favour of focusing on the more immediate problem of keeping the armed opposition going.
In the early years of the war I spent time in the border towns of southern Turkey. Hatay, Urfa and Mardin were regular haunts for both jihadist and religious-conservative militias (Western support for the armed opposition was run from Gaziantep). But HTS’s relationship with Turkey is complex and Turkey is unlikely to have foreseen that the group would bring down the Assad regime.”

(…)

“The speed of the march on Damascus meant that several wars (ethnic, political, petty material, regional) collapsed into one and were resolved as one. But in that resolution those conflicts will separate out and reassert themselves. Assad’s legacy is the death of hundreds of thousands of Syrians. It is difficult to imagine how to reconstruct a working Syrian state in these conditions, given the damage that has been done. The greatest risk might be a majoritarian correction to Assad’s sectarian system: that would be to rediscover the underlying forces which produced the Assad state.”

Read the article here.

In other words, civil war, Taliban-like rule, the Kurdish fighters might be once again the poor bastards, squeezed by Turkish forces and Jihadists.

What produced the Assad-state?

Tribalism, geopolitical interests, the leftovers of World War I and what came afterwards, corruption and an elite that lived quite well under the repression. (I.e. for them it was less repression and more a business opportunity.)

Note, that no Western state mentioned “nation-building”.

We happily let wounds fester.

And to be honest, I’m not sure what the alternative would be.