What will Syria become now – Half a century of Assad family rule are over.

Just before the Syrian civil war broke out in 2010, I finished writing my doctoral dissertation on the identity of society and state in modern Syria. At the beginning of my dissertation, I wrote that all signs showed that Bashar al-Assad would not be able to maintain his father’s regime for long, as Syria felt to me like a volcano about to erupt, and indeed, the volcano erupted.

At the time, I saw that the entire intelligence community in Israel continued to look mainly at the regime’s basic military data. I chose to listen to Dr. Hussein Fawzi’s words to the poet Haim Guri: “If Israeli intelligence had read the Egyptian poetry written after ’67, it would have known that October ’73 was inevitable. Every good intelligence officer must read poetry.”

So, I read a lot of Syrian poetry, plays, novels, and short stories. The internal criticism in the 1990s was very clear, and the feeling of disorientation was visible, even among the regime’s intellectuals.

In the first round of the civil war in 2011, Bashar lost most of the country and became the “mayor of Damascus.” At the last minute, the Russians decided that they were not willing to lose this strategic asset. Together, they destroyed most of Syria’s cities with carpet bombings, and when they ran out of missiles, they simply dropped explosives on the heads of the residents until they surrendered.

This round begins in a completely different reality. The crushing blow that the IDF dealt Hezbollah in Lebanon was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The rebels understood more than anyone else that security in Syria had been maintained for the past decade by the Shiite militias from Lebanon and Iraq under the command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. When Israel severely hit this entire axis, the first shot of the current attack was fired.

The Syrian opposition also knew that the regime had stopped providing the communities that supported it with basic living conditions. The Alawites, in particular, but also the Christians, Ismailis, and Druze, saw Bashar and his gang getting richer, and they were getting poorer year by year.

The current attack by the opposition is called Radaa al-Adwan, meaning the counterattack. It supposedly began with a Turkish attempt to stop the regime’s latest attack on the Idlib region. The Turks do not want to see millions more Syrians running for their fences.

But it quickly became clear to the rebels, as they themselves say, that the weak spider’s webs described by Nasrallah were the Syrian regime, not Israel. They encountered a Syrian army that was tired, heavy, outdated, and, most importantly, unmotivated. But let’s not be mistaken—the Syrian opposition has learned the lessons of the previous round well. It arrived with organized forces, good intelligence, and even light drones.

The biggest change the opposition has undergone is in its unifying message and moderate Islamism. Its leader, al-Julani, who was previously one of the leaders of ISIS and walked around with a long beard, hat, and Afghan cloak in the style of Bin Laden, has undergone a metamorphosis. He changed into military or civilian clothes, cut his beard very short, and seemed more like Zelensky in Ukraine.

Syrian opposition protested in front of the White House. (Courtesy)

Al-Julani issued instructions to his people not to harm minorities, and they did not stop uploading videos about the respect they give to Christians in Aleppo. He even sent a reassuring message to the Alawites in the coastal region, saying that the regime was the target, not them. In recent days, he has increased his efforts and abandoned his aliases from the ISIS era. He even returned to signing all his messages with his original name, Ahmed al-Shara.

Asad is gone, and 54 years of his Family dictatorship are over. The Syrian people have created a new opportunity for building a modern and democratic state. The question now is whether the new leaders can keep Syria united and accommodating to the multicultural and multiethnic Syrian society.