Bashar al-Assad’s fall to Islamist rebels in Syria unsettles region’s autocrats

CAIRO - The scenes that emerged from Syria this week recalled some of the headiest days of the Arab Spring. Rebels had toppled a dictator and people danced in the streets.

At the same time, crowds of Syrians broke open regime prisons, freeing their loved ones and hundreds more political detainees.

The renewed revolutionary fervour, in a region still ruled by autocrats, has unsettled Arab leaders, many of whom had recently resumed ties with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The leaders - from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates - are worried that Assad’s ouster could stir unrest at home, say analysts, officials and diplomats. They are also concerned that Syria could plunge into chaos, and watching warily as Islamist rebels, led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, gain power in Damascus.

“We do not wish Syria to fall into a quagmire of chaos or anarchy,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said Saturday from Aqaba, where Jordan hosted the region’s foreign ministers, as well as Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to discuss Syria’s transition.

In the days since HTS took the capital, causing Assad to flee to Moscow, the predominantly Sunni Arab states have been cautiously engaged. In public statements, they have urged Syrians to maintain state institutions and to ensure that the political transition is inclusive. Earlier this week, the ambassadors of seven Arab countries met with HTS representatives in Damascus, according to a media office affiliated with the group.

The rebels sought to reassure the ambassadors that they were safe, according to a diplomat in the region who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. “We want to have positive relations - you are not at risk,” the diplomat said HTS told the attendees.

But the apprehension toward the rebels was apparent from the start: Last Saturday, as the opposition closed in, foreign ministers from several Arab countries huddled for an emergency meeting on the sidelines of a conference in Doha, later releasing a plea to the rebels to halt their advance and hold talks with the regime.

“They’re concerned about vacuums of power in Syria,” said Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “They are concerned about the ability of the Islamists to fill this vacuum, and entrench themselves in Syria and spread their influence.”

Arab states have long feared the political appeal of Islamist movements, whose discipline, organization and popular social welfare programs pose an enduring threat to autocrats in the region. Nowhere is that fear more pronounced than in Egypt, where President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi seized power in a military coup in 2013, ousting the Muslim Brotherhood government elected after the Arab Spring.

He ordered a sweeping security crackdown that shattered the movement. But “a big part of the population is silently sympathetic with the Brotherhood still,” said the diplomat in the region. And the prospect of HTS, a like-minded group, gaining a foothold in Syria is “an ideological, existential threat” to Sisi, the diplomat said.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE share those concerns, according to Hesham Youssef, a former Egyptian diplomat. In fact, the two gulf monarchies drove the region’s counter-revolution in the wake of the Arab Spring, using their vast wealth to thwart popular movements and stand up authoritarian governments in Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Yemen.

But while the Arab states were wary of Islamists, for years they also shunned Assad and his government, expelling Syria from the Arab League in the fall of 2011. It was a time of revolutionary change in the Middle East and even the region’s other autocratic leaders were appalled by the horrors Assad was inflicting on his own citizens.

By that time, about eight months into the uprising, Assad’s brutal crackdown on protesters had already killed thousands of civilians.

What came next was a bloody, years-long civil war, one that prompted Russia and Iran, key allies of Assad, to intervene to shore up the regime. Soon after that, when it appeared Assad was there to stay, Arab states began restoring relations.

Just last year, Assad was welcomed back to the Arab League. At the organization’s summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, footage showed Assad embracing the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman - images portraying the stunning rehabilitation of one of the world’s most repressive leaders.

Arab governments hoped that their diplomatic and financial support would persuade Assad to make several changes, including moving away from Iran, their longtime regional rival, and potentially curbing Syria’s lucrative and illicit trade in the synthetic stimulant captagon. The mammoth drug sales were bankrolling Assad’s regime while also fueling crime and addiction in neighboring countries.

In return for his reintegration, Arab countries also expected Assad to engage the more moderate of his political opponents to prevent groups like HTS - which controlled some Syrian territory - from expanding their reach, Youssef said.

But Assad didn’t follow through on his end of the bargain. “Bashar had disappointed us anyway. He hadn’t delivered on any of his promises,” said Ali Shihabi, a Saudi businessman with close ties to the royal family. Behind closed doors, he said, relations remained strained.

Now, Arab states are approaching Syria with caution, still seeking to project influence but also waiting to see if the post-Assad tumult can be contained.

“Usually when a dictator falls, we see chaos,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a Dubai-based political analyst.

He said the UAE and its allies are worried that Syria’s drug production could fall into the hands of one of the many armed groups now operating in the country. Under Assad, Syria was churning out $10 billion in captagon exports each year, with much of it smuggled through Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Despite their reservations, Arab governments have little choice but to engage with HTS, analysts and officials said.

For Jordan, at the end of the day, “there is no other choice,” said Jordanian writer and political analyst Tareq al-Naimat.

“If you want to maintain your borders, you have to deal with de facto powers inside Syria,” he said.

But it’s Syria’s potential influence outside its borders that is worrying countries such as Egypt, where Sisi has jailed as many as 20,000 political detainees, according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), a local rights group.

The country is also in the throes of a major economic crisis, and Egyptians, frustrated with their circumstances, are increasingly sharing their outrage on social media.

Earlier this week, a news site affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood shared a video of protesters yelling at Sisi during his visit to Norway. They shouted at the president that after Assad, he would be next.

“It’s frankly likely terrifying to an authoritarian regime watching the scenes [in Syria] and knowing that they, too, have been unable to deliver on the needs of their citizens,” said Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the D.C.-based Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.

Police also arrested dozens of Syrians who were celebrating Assad’s overthrow in the streets of Cairo, EIPR said. About 20 have since been released, while three others were told they would be deported to Syria, according to EIPR. Egypt’s Interior Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

On Sunday, as the scenes in Damascus unfolded, Egyptian human rights defender Mona Seif thanked Syrians for storming Sednaya prison, a notoriously brutal facility, to liberate detainees.

Seif’s brother, writer and activist Alaa Abd El-Fattah, is Egypt’s most prominent political prisoner. Their mother, Laila Soueif, has been on hunger strike for more than 70 days to protest her son’s incarceration.

“Thank you to the hands that opened Sednaya prison and filmed the release of the detainees,” Seif wrote in a post on X.

It “instilled hope in the hearts of many families who are waiting everywhere in the world,” she added, “dreaming of the gates of other prisons opening and their loved ones being released from them.”

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