The Assad family dictatorship, which ran Syria for 53 years and withstood 13 years of bitter civil war, collapsed in just over a week. A sweeping series of Islamic rebel attacks, starting in late November, captured key cities from Aleppo in the north to Homs and Hama, which fell like dominos, creating an unstoppable military momentum on the road to Damascus.
The recent round of dizzying Mideast events confronts the current lame-duck Biden administration with complex policy challenges amid a looming power vacuum. Bashar al-Assad's regime was both brutal and brittle. In the early stages of the so-called "Arab Spring" in 2011, it appeared that it would crumble quickly. It almost did. But the core of the Assad security state held, with Russian and Iranian support, to roll back or at least freeze rebel gains. Bashar al-Assad never won, but neither did the gaggle of Islamic fighters opposing him until now.
Hundreds of thousands were killed on all sides during the civil war that created one of the world's largest refugee crises. Among the Syrian population of 24 million, there are staggering numbers of more than 6 million refugees and 7 million internally displaced persons. The spillover of the Syrian crisis has been the massive number of asylum seekers flooding into Europe and neighbouring Turkey.
Under the Assads, Syria was a secular Arab dictatorship which had close ties to Islamic Iran but not to the majority of the Arab world, nor Turkey. Nonetheless, Mr Assad allowed his socialist regime to allow limited freedoms for Christians not seen in much of the region except for Lebanon and Jordan.
Let's look at some losers and winners in this confusing Mideast puzzle.
Losers:
Islamic Republic of Iran: The Alawite Syrian minority to which the Assads belong is considered an offshoot of Shia Islam, which dominates Iran. Significantly, Tehran has supplied weapons, cash and fighters from the Revolutionary Guard to support the Syrian regime. Equally, Lebanon's Hezbollah terrorists (largely Shia) have provided military units to underpin Mr Assad's rule.
Today, Iran faces a series of setbacks due to its corruption and military weakness. The Tehran leadership is increasingly nervous about its survival. Moreover, Hezbollah's calculated gamble to attack Israel massively backfired. The Israelis decimated its leadership and fighters as they faced major setbacks throughout their southern Lebanese bases.
Russia: In the beginning, the Assads were a classic Soviet client regime in the Arab world. Among the most extremist of the Arab states, they supported the ultra-radical Palestinian factions. Syria was one of Moscow's most valued assets long before Vladimir Putin became Russia's leader. Thus, Soviet conventional and chemical weapons were put at the regime's disposal since the 1970s. During the civil war, when the Syrian army was losing, the Russians intervened with massive air power and some troops reinforcing the Latikia/Tartus enclave in the northwest. Since the Russian intervention in 2015, Islamic rebel forces were often vanquished, and the country "stabilised" along sectarian lines.
But following Mr Putin's attack on Ukraine in 2022, Russian military resources and forces are focused closer to home. Russia saw its Syrian proxy as expendable.
Winners:
Turkey: The Turks share a long frontier with Syria and have borne the brunt of supporting Syrian refugees. To be fair, Turkey has hosted over three million Syrians with the caveat that you shall return home when the situation stabilises. Well, President Recipe Tayyip Erdogan has many reasons to support the Islamic rebels, one of which is that he sees the return of these refugees to Syria.
Mr Erdogan supports a callous calculus here, too. Turkey is playing its cards by supporting Kurdish factions to possibly create a Kurdish "state" carved from Syria.
The Al Nusra Front, an Al Qaida affiliate, morphed into the militant Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which toppled Mr Assad and is designated as a terrorist group by the US, UK and the United Nations. Many of the insurgents are Islamic jihadis, not aspiring Arab Jeffersonian Democrats. This is likely an accident waiting to happen.
Few in the West understand the magnitude of a largely Sunni Muslim militant movement seizing Syria. The HTS group is a witches' brew of hardline factions that we have yet to decipher. As HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani proclaimed in Damascus, the new Syria would "be a beacon for the Islamic nation." Is any dialogue likely?
John J. Metzler is a longtime United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defence issues. He is the author of "Divided Dynamism The Diplomacy of Separated Nations; Germany, Korea, China".