After fourteen years and incredible destruction, Bashar al-Assad’s fall came more quickly than anyone could have anticipated. Without the support of his foreign backers, it took eight days for rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), translated as the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, to advance from Aleppo to Damascus.

“After all of these years and all of this blood, no Syrian even in his own army wants to die for Bashar al-Assad,” a Syrian friend told me three days before the regime’s collapse. In the hours since his fall, many Syrians online have shared the phrase “Nothing is forever,” reframing the chants they had been forced to repeat in their youth.

If the Assads are not forever, it is far too soon to know what comes next.

Assad’s fall is unlikely to end Syria’s violence. As scholars often note, the most likely outcome of any civil war is another civil war. But while many are quick to draw parallels with grim outcomes in settings like Iran or Afghanistan, these can only travel so far.

While Assad’s exit did not come through the staged negotiations long hoped for, Assad’s arrival in Moscow and HTS’s communication with his prime minister has spared Syria grisly scenes like those of Muammar al-Qadhafi’s death in 2011, which helped to first set Libya on its path to violence.

While some rightfully fear that HTS will impose the same autocratic control that it has in Idlib across the rest of Syria, it is not clear the group has the capacity to do so. The first opposition groups to enter Damascus came from the south, where rebels had earlier “reconciled” with Assad, have fewer ties to HTS, and stronger links to Jordan. As Assad’s regime fell, Turkish-backed militias seized territory from U.S.-backed Kurdish groups, who in turn advanced on positions long held by Assad and Iran near Deir al-Zour, while Israel immediately seized more land in the Golan Heights and launched hundreds of airstrikes across Syria. None of these actors will be quick to disarm, nor will militias empowered by Assad, Iran, or Russia. Syria could remain fragmented. Any bloc that does emerge will be far weaker than the prewar Assad regime, which sustained itself not only through military supremacy but also via entrenched intelligence services that, over several generations of wanton violence, torture, and mass imprisonment, enforced dystopian levels of self-censorship and fear.

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