Martine Gozlan

The capital of “Sham,” the heart of the Arab Orient, a mythical city of poets and warriors, has changed hands. Bashar, the last of the Assads and butcher of his people – with more than 500,000 dead between 2011 and 2016 and six million exiled – has taken refuge in Moscow.

The Russian patron, overwhelmed by events and preoccupied with the Ukrainian front that absorbs most of its troops, has acknowledged receipt of the former tyrant and ally in a curt statement. Iran, the other sponsor of the defeated regime, is gripped by anxiety. Following the collapse of Hezbollah, heavily struck by Israel, it is now Syria that slips from its grasp. Tehran issues a painful declaration calling for “an inclusive government” and “friendly relations” with Damascus.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Pasdaran) shiver under their turbans at this Sunni revolution, which surged forth from Idlib province and the Turkish border, orchestrated by Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

If Assad’s fortress crumbled like a house of cards, abandoned by its own defenders – soldiers paid mere tens of dollars a month while the dictator’s entourage flaunted their blood-red Ferraris – what will become tomorrow of Khamenei’s citadel, infiltrated by Mossad, and despised by millions of young Iranians?

This is the first lesson of this tremendous geopolitical upheaval: tyrannies never last.

The second lesson is more bitter. Why does the liberation of Damascus, celebrated in all the capitals of the Syrian diaspora – Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Stockholm, Athens, and Istanbul – bear the colors of the harshest Islamism? So much hope lights up the faces of the women and men who have lost their country that it pains us to see it tarnished by doubt and fear.

And yet! The great journalist and historian Samir Kassir, whom I had the honor and joy to meet in Paris in 2004 upon the French publication of his masterpiece Considerations on Arab Misery (Actes Sud), had keenly showed the anguish that devastates souls in the world where he was born.

“Why can we only choose between two sorrows?” he asked me. I had just returned from Baghdad, torn apart by sectarian clashes and the American war, and he was heading back to Beirut, where a Lebanese spring seemed to be blooming. Samir Kassir was assassinated a year later, in June 2005, in a bombing by Syrian secret services.

His words still resonate in my memory now that the instigators of his murder have been vanquished. But by whom? By the groups that have hunted Christians and Kurds, imprisoned women, and beheaded secular opponents? Al-Joulani may claim to have repudiated this past and now presents himself to Western cameras not under his nom de guerre but his real name, Ahmed Hussein al-Chara. But has he truly changed his political and religious DNA?

In Idlib, the Syrian province Erdogan helped him seize, priests can hold mass, but crosses are forbidden. Al-Joulani, explains Fabrice Balanche – a geographer and one of the best experts on the region – “imposes, through his Salvation Government, an Islamic totalitarianism modeled after ISIS in Raqqa, but without the media coverage of bloody excesses and with a strong diplomatic sense toward Turkey and the West.”

This man has just taken Damascus. Messages of relief over the fall of the tyrant and calls for a “transition” that will respect all Syrians – be they the Sunni majority, anxious Christians, defeated Alawites, or resistant and wounded Kurds – are pouring in from all chancelleries.

An exile in Paris, celebrating in Place de la République, spoke of a “Syrian Christmas.” It is highly unlikely this will appear on Abu Mohammed al-Joulani’s calendar!