In the Middle East, the web of conflicts and interests is so vast and intricate that events occur which no observer would have ever imagined possible. For example, who could have foreseen the events of September 11 or even October 7, 2023, just moments before they unfolded?

The same can now be said about recent developments in Syria: the Assad regime, in power for over 50 years, which had withstood the civil war since 2011 and was considered victorious and firmly in control for at least four years, supported by Russia and Iran, collapsed and disappeared within days with almost no resistance. This was under the blows of a small group of very young fighters, estimated to number between 10,000 and 20,000.

Who could have predicted such a thing? At most, it seemed like a resurgence of the endless civil war that had been dragging on for 14 years. How could this happen? We do not know, but we attempt in hindsight to understand some of the reasons.

The most significant strength of the victors seems to have been their moderation—the continuous promise that no one should fear them, not even the Alawites, whom the Assads had represented for 50 years. And this promise came from a group originally connected to al-Qaeda, whose raison d’être had always been to return to a Salafist Islam (i.e., one of the origins) in a Wahhabi version (fundamentalist, promoted in the 1700s by Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb and later suppressed by the Sultan).

The leader of the group is al-Jolani (or al-Jawlānī, or al-Jūlānī: unlike Chinese, there is no official transcription from Arabic into Latin characters). He is a figure who began his political career as a member of bin Laden's al-Qaeda (Arabic for "the base"), then moved through various similar groups, eventually merging into al-Nusra. It is remembered that he opposed the caliphate (ISIS), which sought to unify all extremist Salafist groups, but the merger failed. The reason for his opposition to the merger is unclear, but it might be less about ideological subtleties and more about personal rivalries.

The promise of moderation, which even extended to allowing women to dress as they please (truly incredible given the symbolic value the veil has in the Islamic world), comes from such extremists. This leaves open the question of whether it is merely a propaganda tactic or a true cultural shift. Only time will resolve this doubt.

In this way, many groups in Syria, victims of one of the most atrocious conflicts in history, felt reassured and accepted the victory of the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham ("Organization for the Liberation of the Levant") as the end of a 14-year-long nightmare.

Iran, which has always supported the Assads, viewed as Shiites, could not send troops directly and instead provided aid, armaments, and, above all, Hezbollah militants. However, at this moment, these forces are occupied—or perhaps better said, overwhelmed—by the Israelis and entirely incapable of intervening.

The Russians attempted intervention, but without ground troops, they could only carry out indiscriminate bombings. Eventually, they focused solely on the air and naval bases they control in Syria, reassured that the new government would continue to recognize them.

Everyone, therefore, felt reassured—except the Israelis, who, amid the general confusion, are effectively destroying all of Syria's military assets, both aerial and naval.

What will happen now? Will we see the re-establishment of a peaceful and tolerant Syria, where many groups characterized by different religious faiths—majority Sunni Muslims, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, Alawites, Shiites, Druze, as well as the Kurds near the Turkish border—have coexisted? The Kurds, Sunni mountain people who have recently become the secular and Westernized group of the Middle East, are perpetually fighting for independence from the regimes of the post-colonial Middle Eastern order.

Or will we witness a Syria divided into spheres of influence, fragmented into small warring states?

We can only hope for the first scenario, which also seems the most likely. After all, the Islamic world has historically been tolerant in terms of religion. Syria's religious composition (like Lebanon’s) shows that religious groups have coexisted relatively peacefully since the Islamic conquest, almost up to the present day. However, the rise of extremist and intolerant Islamism has unleashed bloody conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis, among various fundamentalist groups, and between moderates and extremists.

In the West, tolerance has been historically less pronounced, as evidenced by the lack of religious minorities other than Christian ones in Europe—at least until the recent waves of migration.