Act I: The Vanishing Regime
On December 8, 2024, Damascus didn’t fall. It evaporated. After years of stale frontlines, HTS—those cave-dwelling Islamist revolutionaries or, depending on your marketing, freedom fighters—marched into Syria’s capital without firing a bullet. They passed through Aleppo, Hama, and Homs like ghosts through walls. The world watched in awe. Or confusion. Or indifference. Pick your poison.
HTS, with their illustrious leader Abu Muhammad al-Jolani—now rebranded as Ahmed al-Shara, the Middle East’s finest chameleon—emerged from Idlib to claim divine victory. They attributed their unopposed parade to divine intervention and revolutionary willpower. It was neither. In truth, they were simply told: “Go.” No resistance, no negotiations. Assad had already packed his bags and slipped out through Latakia en route to Moscow, where he now presumably reflects on geopolitics over tea.
So, who gave the green light? No one knows for sure, but all fingers point west—and a bit south. Israel had been steadily dismantling the so-called axis of resistance: hammering Hamas, pushing back Hezbollah, and parrying Iran’s influence. Assad, isolated and unsure of who still supported him—Russia, Iran, the Arab League?—was left with one option: disappear. Rumor has it, a phone call came. Perhaps not to him, but to someone who matters. And the voice on the other end said: “It’s time.”
Back to 2009: Pipelines and Broken Peace
Once upon a time—2009, to be exact—someone had a dream. A Mediterranean dream. An economic union, uniting Europe with its sun-kissed neighbors, including Syria. It was called the Union for the Mediterranean. France, Qatar, Turkey all played hosts in a diplomatic carnival that nearly brought Syria and Israel to the negotiation table.
Nearly.
But then Iran happened. And Hezbollah. And Hamas. Syria, too entangled with the Ayatollah’s proxies, couldn’t break free. Qatar, ever the visionary, tried persuasion. Diplomacy. Investment. But Syria wouldn’t budge. Not over a peace treaty. Not even over a gas pipeline. And that’s what Qatar really wanted—a pipeline to Europe, slicing through Syria, bypassing Iran, bypassing Russia. Naturally, Moscow wasn’t thrilled. Their monopoly on European energy was at stake.
So when the Arab Spring arrived—marketed under the hopeful banner of democracy and reform—Qatar seized the chance. What began as modest protests became, very quickly, something else. Something armed. Something Islamic. The revolution was hijacked. Not by the people who wanted human rights, but by the ones who wanted the caliphate.
The Free Syrian Army was born. Then it mutated. Islamists took over. Then ISIS arrived and claimed it all. Assad, in response, clung to power with the help of Iran and Russia. He survived ISIS. He crushed the rebels. By 2017, things settled. By the 2020s, Arab nations began pretending like nothing had ever happened. Assad was shaking hands again, as if he hadn’t flattened entire cities.
The President Who Wasn’t Supposed to Be
Let’s rewind further. Hafez al-Assad dies in 2000. Syria has a constitution. It says presidents must be 40. Bashar is 34. So, naturally, the parliament—ever the democratic beacon—changes the law. Overnight. Bashar, trained in London to be an eye doctor, becomes president of a military dictatorship.
Of course, this wasn’t Plan A. Bassel, the older son, was supposed to take over. But then his car exploded. Suspiciously. And so Bashar got the job. But not without help. Hafez had engineered a brilliant balance of power between Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas and Vice President Abdelhalim Khaddam. Neither could dominate the other. So neither could stop Bashar.
And Bashar delivered. For a while. From 2000 to 2011, Syria opened up. Mobile phones! Internet! Investment! For a moment, it looked like Damascus might join the 21st century. Then came the protests. Then came the guns. Then came the delusion. Bashar, once modernizer, became tyrant. Absolute power, it turns out, doesn’t just corrupt. It hallucinates.
The Father, the War Criminal, the Legend
Hafez al-Assad wasn’t a doctor. He was a soldier. He climbed from obscurity through the military ranks, eventually becoming Minister of Defense, then president. It wasn’t pretty. The road was paved with blood, betrayal, and what Syrians call “politics.” He ruled with an iron fist. And oddly, the world respected him for it. Even U.S. presidents admitted they couldn’t touch him.
He ended the Lebanese civil war. He also killed a lot of people doing it. His brother razed Hama in 1982. Thousands died. But hey, at least they got rid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Or so they said.
The Road to Power: Coups and Corrections
Before Hafez became the man no one could depose, he was part of a club—the Military Committee of the Ba’ath Party. In 1963, they helped seize power in what was cheerily called the 8th of March Revolution. Except it wasn’t much of a revolution; it was an internal coup masked as liberation. By 1966, the military wing, led by Salah Jadid and backed by Hafez al-Assad, overthrew the civilian Ba’athists, including President Amin al-Hafiz. Yes, the same Amin who once rubbed shoulders with Israel’s favorite spy.
But power-sharing was never sustainable. Jadid took control of party ideology and domestic policy, while Assad took the military. A fatal division. In November 1970, Assad made his move. The “Corrective Movement,” as he lovingly called it, was a bloodless coup that ousted Jadid and installed Assad as the man in charge. President in everything but name—until he fixed that too.
Where It All Began
It all started with a man named Kamel Amin Thabet. Except he wasn’t really Kamel. He was Eli Cohen—Israel’s most successful spy in Arab territory. Sent by Mossad, Cohen embedded himself into the highest levels of Syrian political and military life in the early 1960s. Fluent in Arabic, elegant in dress, and ever-so-charming at dinner parties, Cohen managed to befriend top officials in the newly rising Ba’ath Party, including Amin al-Hafiz, who would soon become Syria’s first Ba’athist president.
Cohen’s rise wasn’t just social—it was strategic. He gained unprecedented access to military briefings, national infrastructure projects, and even front-line fortifications near the Golan Heights. He reportedly advised the Syrians to plant eucalyptus trees near military posts to provide shade—advice that later helped Israeli jets target them precisely in the 1967 war.
But perhaps his most infamous contribution was facilitating the 1963 coup that brought the Ba’ath Party to power. With his encouragement and information, certain factions within the army moved against the old guard. During the coup, Syria’s sitting Minister of Defense and several senior officers were brutally assassinated, paving the way for a new regime. Eli Cohen wasn’t pulling the trigger, but he was in the room, pouring drinks for the men who did.
Amin al-Hafiz, elevated by the chaos, soon found himself as president. But he proved more effective at speeches than governance. And when things began to unravel, someone had to take the fall. Whether Amin always knew Kamel Amin Thabet’s true identity or not remains a matter of speculation, but in 1965, Cohen was exposed as a Mossad agent—likely through Soviet-supported signal intelligence.
He was arrested, interrogated, and after a rushed trial, publicly hanged in Sahat al-Marjeh, the central square of Damascus. It wasn’t just justice—it was theater. A televised, choreographed warning to other would-be infiltrators. But the damage had already been done. Israel had learned everything it needed to know.
The irony? Eli Cohen helped usher in the very regime that would eventually oppose Israel on the battlefield for decades. Or perhaps that was the point all along. Plant the seeds. Let them bloom. Then burn the orchard.
And Now?
Now Syria belongs to HTS. Or to Israel. Or to Turkey. Or Qatar. Or maybe even France, just for old colonial times’ sake. Or maybe—just maybe—it belongs to no one at all. Because who really wants the keys to a broken house with no plumbing, shattered windows, and a history of arson?
HTS may wave the black flag and talk about justice, but let’s be honest: they were handed the capital like a house sitter who didn’t know the owner had skipped town. Israel watches from the sidelines, smiling politely. Turkey watches the north. Qatar counts its pipelines. And France? France is probably still confused about why they got involved in the first place.
The people danced in the streets on December 8, 2024. They thought the nightmare had ended. But as with all stories in this land, the credits never roll. There’s always a sequel, and it’s never better than the original.
So here we are. Syria is free—sort of. Peaceful—briefly. And victorious—if you count surrendering power as a form of strategic genius.
Welcome to the Failure State. Don’t worry, it’s not contagious. Unless you have natural resources.