For many Syrians, the events of December 2024 had a surreal quality. After nearly a decade and a half of brutal civil war, it had seemed that the regime of Bashar al-Assad had fended off any serious challenges to its authority. Assad and his supporters may not have been able to deliver a killing blow to the various opposition forces in the country, but they had managed to confine them to the country’s periphery. That all changed in late November, when Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist group led by former al-Qaeda militant, Ahmad al-Sharaa, launched a lightning offensive from its stronghold on the Turkish-Syrian border, which brought an end to more than half a century of Assad family rule within a matter of weeks.
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