Syria has just endured decades worth of change in two weeks, and Fin DePencier was there for it first hand.
When the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham rebels toppled Bashar Assad’s brutal dictatorship on Dec. 8, DePencier sped from Lebanon to Damascus, passing abandoned military vehicles and vacant border checkpoints. He found people dancing, crying, and shooting off guns in celebration. When GZERO spoke to him over a week later, there was an incessant popping of gunfire in the background. The rebels hadn’t stopped partying. DePencier said they had been shooting off celebratory rounds “around the clock” ever since their victory.
But that party could be coming to an end. On Tuesday, the leader of the rebel coalition, Ahmed al-Shara, aka Abu Mohammed al-Golani, announced that all rebel groups would be disbanded and reorganized under the defense ministry, a clear sign that the group – which most Western countries consider a terrorist organization – is trying to rebrand as a legitimate government.
Legitimization will be key to stabilizing Syria, and lifting sanctions that have crippled its economy. Syria is currently the third most sanctioned country in the world, but the EU laid out conditions for lifting sanctions on Tuesday which include al-Golani fostering peace, protecting minority groups, and reorienting the country away from Russia and Iran – which backed Assad but remain prominent forces in the country with much to lose.
With Assad gone, 30 years worth of questions have flooded in. Can the rebels restore order, or will they be side-tracked seeking vengeance against those who helped carry out Assad’s atrocities? Will they continue Assad’s ostensibly secular society or seek a harder Islamist line? How are the foreign powers invested in the country – like Russia, Iran, Turkey, the US, the EU, and Israel – responding? Here’s DePencier’s take from the ground.
Riley Callanan, GZERO: What kind of government do you see HTS establishing?
Fin DePencier: Preliminarily, the fact that they haven't been executing a lot of former regime officials and that they're mostly executing a peaceful transition of power, tells me that they view governing Syria as their most important goal. I think retribution is a lot less important.
Most Western countries view HTS as a terrorist organization. In 2016, they broke off from Al-Qaeda, but they definitely retained a lot of Islamist elements. Al-Golani did say that there's going to be a morality police established.
But how far are they going to take it? Under Assad, Syria was a secular country. You can find alcohol here and you can see lots of women on the streets who are unveiled. It is very much up in the air, and not everyone feels the same way, but I do think the broader Syrian society wants a secular democratic state.
Callanan:Do you see foreign powers like Russia, Turkey, the US or other countries invested in the region on the ground?
DePencier: We actually saw al-Golani driving around with a senior Turkish official in Damascus on Thursday. Turkey was one of the most important backers of the rebels.
Ukrainian officials also held meetings with the rebels. It’s a great investment for them because the Russians now have to abandon one of the Tartus naval bases, one of their most important imperial projects. You can see Russian military columns on the streets just evacuating very orderly.
As for the United States, it's going to be interesting to see how Trump deals with the 900 troops that are still stationed in the Kurdish territories. He made a Truth Social post saying that we should have nothing to do with Syria. But last time he was president, he also talked about bombing ISIS, which he did. That's one of the stated reasons for why the American troops are still in Syria is to defeat remnants of the Islamic State. Maybe Trump will allow those forces to remain under that pretense.
Meanwhile, the Israelis bombed the country the first night we were here. They don't want all this military equipment to get into the rebel's hands, but they're also leaving the door open for a good relationship with them, and the rebels have said they don’t want a war with Israel after 13 years of conflict.
Lebanon already has more than a million Syrian refugees living within borders. And yesterday when I went back to Beirut, I saw the next wave of the Syrian refugee crisis beginning. There were Alawites and Shiites and other regime supporters trying to escape the new regime because we've already seen persecution of those religious minorities by the rebels and they don't want to take any chances.
Callanan: There is a very real fear that minority groups will be made to pay for the brutality of Assad’s security forces and his actions during the civil war.
After the civil war broke out, the Assad regime arrested 100,000 people, and tortured at least 15,000 people to death, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A lot of those people were taken to Sednaya prison, could you tell me about what you saw on your visit there?
DePencier: It was just absolutely shocking and you hopefully only have to see a concentration time liberated once in your life, but that’s what Sednaya is for the regime. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that 30,000 people were killed throughout the entire duration of the war.
It's hard to overstate how infamous this place was. I was speaking with some friends in Lebanon who said they'd been hearing stories about Sednaya for their entire life. People would get kidnapped inside Lebanon and end up in Sednaya and then they'd never see them again. I know that Jordanian prisoners have been found in Sednaya. It was this execution point for enemies of the regime.
We went in there, we saw the catacombs, we saw this torture room where there was a human sized hydraulic press.
This is all horrible, but it's also nothing that the world didn't already know. But over the last few days we’ve seen the families of people who were sent to the prison trying to find them. And almost no one has been found alive.
Families dug into the ground and the walls looking for secret underground caverns, because of rumors that there were still people being held in these secret places in the prison. The Syrian White Helmets used construction equipment to search for 48 hours and didn’t find anything. But people just keep coming back to prison, desperately running around this abandoned concentration camp trying to find any trace of their loved ones.
Callanan:Could you encapsulate how it feels to be on the ground right now in an object you've come across?
DePencier: I think it would be the new Syrian flag that is already being erected on so many flag poles and painted on so many walls across the country. As soon as the rebels took over, they painted the flag everywhere.
Today in Umayyad Square, central Damascus, I saw one estimate that over a million people were celebrating the fall of the regime. Everyone was waving this new flag, even though no one really knows what it represents yet because the rebels could take this country in so many different directions. But people are just so jubilant right now. Assad’s regime had been around for more than 50 years, one of the world's most repressive. Even if the rebels do end up engaging in similar repression, they're at least giving everyone some time to breathe.