Can victorious rebels rebuild a shattered Syria?

Last Sunday, Abdel Rahman was serving a 15-year sentence in a cramped cell in Syria’s notorious Saydnaya prison, after an altercation with a corrupt police officer last year in Damascus.

By Friday morning, he was in the ancient market of the old city selling the newly adopted green Syrian flag — the one anti-Assad rebels have flown during nearly 14 years of brutal civil conflict. At midday, he was able to listen to a sermon at the nearby mosque that called the deposed president Bashar al-Assad “a tyrant”.

“How great is Syrians’ joy, how great is this victory!” declared the prime minister, who was giving the unprecedented sermon, his words roaring over the speakers outside the Umayyad mosque. The message was greeted with cheers. Euphoria and some disbelief was etched on the faces of the thousands of people who are still coming to terms with the fall of a dictatorship that ruled them with an iron fist for more than 50 years.

Assad’s regime came to an abrupt end last Sunday when he fled to Moscow, following a lightning offensive by Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

The group immediately started to free prisoners held in the country’s grim warren of prisons. But the regime’s grip was so brutal that when men broke through the doors of Rahman’s cell block, the inmates held back and initially refused to stream out.

“We thought they were engaged in clashes and that they had come to use us as human shields,” he says, watching the stream of people leaving the mosque after Friday prayers chanting anti-Assad slogans. “I’m still in shock. I feel I’m in a movie.”

The sense of triumphalism and relief that has swept Syria over the past few days, however, is also mixed with realism about the challenges now facing the country. The HTS rebels are taking over a state devastated by more than a decade of civil war.

Many of the people who thronged to the Umayyad mosque in celebration delighted at the text message they received the previous night from a group calling itself “Free Syria”: “Syria has been reborn. Congratulations to our people. Congratulations to our country.”

But they also know just how complex such a rebirth will be for the rebels who have descended on the capital from northwestern Idlib — the province governed in recent years by HTS.

The Islamist group is assuming control of a complex, multi-ethnic country with institutions that have been hollowed out by corruption and patronage, an economy shattered by conflict and sanctions, and a palpable desire for revenge from some of the victims of Assad’s regime.

“For the past 13 years, nothing has worked: no electricity, shortages of everything and the complete choking of society,” says a civil servant in the Damascus governorate. “[HTS] has to get to work and organise things now and stop this corruption or people will turn on them, fast.”

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From the Assad regime’s inception, corruption, repression and brutality reigned: they were tools that kept the minority Alawi rulers in power in a predominantly Sunni Muslim country. Paranoia and a thirst for absolute control meant that Bashar’s father Hafez, an air force pilot who seized full power in a 1970 coup, crafted a centralised presidential system with absolute authority over the state’s affairs.

This created a bureaucratic system that fostered the public’s dependency on government jobs and allowed corruption at all levels of society to go unchecked. While not efficient, it worked — at least until 2011, when popular uprisings were brutally repressed by Bashar and morphed into a bloody civil war.

That period ushered in a transformation of the state from an antiquated system operated by Assad’s Ba’athist party into a patchwork of broken institutions. The country’s hospitals are in disrepair, the lack of funding visible in their decaying walls and overburdened departments; its dilapidated hotels are frozen in time. The majority of cars filling the streets of Damascus date back to the 1970s and 1980s, because parts for newer cars have been harder to source and more expensive to import.

Western sanctions targeting the Syrian state, the deposed president and his financiers mostly hit civilians, as the upper echelons of the regime found ways to circumvent restrictions.

The new prime minister, Mohamed al-Bashir, announced that an interim government will lead the country until March, but has not outlined what comes next and the topic of nationwide elections has yet to be broached.

HTS, the offshoot of a former affiliate of al-Qaeda designated a terrorist organisation by the US and others, is the most powerful of myriad armed groups in a country that is home to a diverse mix of religions and sects. Abu Mohammad al-Jolani runs the group as a strongman, and there are concerns that authoritarianism could descend on Damascus, whose residents are already wondering whether HTS will limit public displays of Christmas celebrations.

Despite everything we lost, we are now free

In a strategic move, Bashir invited Assad’s prime minister, cabinet and civil servants to be part of the process in order to facilitate a smooth transfer of power. On Tuesday, he gathered the outgoing ministers (or at least, those who showed up) with their rebel equivalents in the Assad government’s regular meeting room — a short but symbolic meeting to signal to a country so used to centralised power that the wheels of the state were turning.

Bashir has promised to fight corruption, restore order and protect Syria’s plethora of minorities despite the new administration’s politically Islamist roots.

The national oil company was ordered to resume operations within 24 hours of the rebel takeover, and instructed to continue sending electricity to coastal provinces not yet taken by the rebels. Government staff trickled back to ministries on Tuesday and Wednesday, and schools were ordered to reopen this Sunday. On Thursday night, the eve of the weekend in Syria, traffic returned to the streets as restaurants and parks teemed with people.

“Despite everything we lost,” says Abu Mohammed, a 54-year-old resident of a poor Damascus suburb, “we are now free.”

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One of the critical challenges ahead is rebuilding the economy, which has been in freefall for several years. More than 90 per cent of Syrians now live below the poverty line and most households in the country receive less than 6 hours of electricity a day. Pantries are frequently bare amid shortages of essential goods, sky-high inflation and the crumbling Syrian pound.

More than 80 per cent of the country’s oil products were imported from Iran, which backed Assad during the war, the deputy head of the national oil company Mustafa Hasawiyeh told the FT this week. While there were enough stores to last a month, he said, it was unclear where fuel would come from after that.

Domestic manufacturing has been severely hampered, with factories destroyed and workers sent to war during the decade of civil conflict. This will take time to jump-start: much of the country still lies in bloodied ruins, its people haunted by the ghosts of their loved ones, killed or disappeared.

Assad’s government haemorrhaged cash to fund military spending, public sector salaries and subsidised goods — the latter two an essential part of the basic social contract in the Ba’athist state.

When the regime’s benefactors, Russia and Iran, came calling for long past due war debts, Assad parcelled off segments of the state’s resources to Moscow and Tehran, including phosphates extraction. Other debts his government never repaid, including to Moscow, leave HTS with an unknown mountain of debt and a complex geopolitical calculus about who to repay and how.

The ruling family and their select cronies extended their dominance over the state in the twilight years of the civil war, operating “mafia-style” shakedowns on the business elite to line their pockets. This proved decisive in eroding Assad’s support among the mercantile elite.

Syrian citizens say they were also being shaken down on a daily basis at checkpoints scattered throughout regime-held areas, many of them linked to the army’s Fourth Division — a notoriously brutal unit run by Bashar’s brother Maher.

Those checkpoints have been unmanned since HTS took over, to the disbelief of many, as regime soldiers dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and fled the rebel advance.

Hours after Assad’s fall, the duty-free mall across the border from Lebanon, widely believed to be a Fourth Division revenue stream, was ransacked by looters. Hundreds of frenzied men, euphoric in their first few hours of relative freedom, carried out refrigerators, brand-new laptops and watches, calling it “justice” for years of torment.

The Fourth Division was also the central node in several of the illicit revenue streams that helped keep the regime afloat: weapons, oil smuggling, alcohol and sales of the illegal amphetamine Captagon.

Replacing this, as well as the entire state security apparatus, will be another key challenge facing HTS.

An army of impoverished conscripts was not prepared to die for a dictator who had long ago decided to use them as cannon fodder. Instead, those men threw off their military fatigues and walked off the job.

Within 48 hours of arriving in Damascus, HTS brought in traffic police from Idlib as well as government security forces. Two residents told the FT they had noticed a shift on the streets: people are obeying traffic lights again (in Assad’s Syria, stopping at a light was a sure-fire way of getting asked for a bribe by the traffic police). But there aren’t enough such individuals to secure the entire country, and reports of banditry on the highways connecting provinces have spread.

There are also fears of retribution, from Jolani’s forces, but more so from the hundred of thousands of people who might be looking to settle scores.

This is particularly true for families of the missing — untold thousands who were lost to Assad’s vast prison network. They descended on the country’s jails in a desperate search for their loved ones this week, with many coming away disappointed. In a nod to the mounting anger, Jolani said those involved with torture would face justice, while soldiers not involved would receive an amnesty.

In a crowded stationery store in an affluent Damascus neighbourhood, where a printer spat out photocopies of the new Syrian flag to be sold for 40 US cents, the owner gleefully discussed the recent overhaul of the regime with customers.

“But our question is, will they go after the criminals that [worked in prisons]?” he adds. “Will they hold accountable the people who tortured and killed our people?”

Cartography by Steven Bernard and data visualisation by Keith Fray