John McHugo

Recent weeks have seen a political and military earthquake in Syria. Nearly 14 months after driving Bashar al Assad from Damascus, President Ahmad al Sharaa is on the point of extending his transitional government’s complete control over the third of Syria east of the Euphrates. For all practical purposes, this will mean the end of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, the SDF, which had been the West’s allies against Is is. Time is being called on the semi-independent and self-declared autonomous Kurdish province of Rojava which has been created by the SDF during Syria’s civil war.

Yesterday we woke to the astonishing news that the rebels from the Syrian opposition had taken Damascus and President Assad had fled. The joy is huge and infectious, even if tempered with trepidation. In 2007, I was assured by a soldier in Damascus that the Ba’athist regime had the solidity of rock. That could be said to be the line Assad repeated throughout the civil war from 2012 onwards. Yet in a few days from 27 November to 8 December this year, opposition forces spearheaded by HTS - Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (‘the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant’) - swept out of their bases in rebel-held Idlib and the Turkish controlled north, and the rock-solid regime crumbled to dust.

In April 2018 I was taken on a coach through miles of war-wasted urban landscape in the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Homs. They looked much like the photos of Gaza today, except the shattered streets were always empty and sometimes there were longhand Arabic signs chalked crudely on broken concrete slabs: ‘for sale’, or ‘water disconnected’. The people had fled the crude barrel bombs. Where had they gone? The war had ended in these cities over a year before, which was why we were allowed to visit. Deaths in Gaza are counted – in Syria they were not. We only have estimates. Somewhere between 25,000-30,000 civilians and 10,000-15,000 combatants died in Aleppo. The dead were not even real statistics.