For 53 years, the Assad family ruled Syria with an iron fist. In the civil war that erupted against them in 2011, the Assad regime responded by brutally killing at least 500,000 people, and imprisoning and torturing thousands alongside numerous other human rights violations. On November 27, 2024, to the surprise of the entire world, an offensive would begin that would bring the Assad regime to a stunning end in just eleven days. For the Islamist HTS and its anti-Assad allies, this was an opportunity like no other. The Syrian government was already weakened thanks to demoralized soldiers, and Assad’s allies were otherwise preccupied in their own conflicts: Hezbollah with Israel, Russia in Ukraine, and Iran, demonstrably incapable and unwilling to intervene on behalf of its proxies. With this unprecedented opening, a coalition of rebel forces led by the Islamist faction HTS, which had controlled Syria’s Idlib province for years, seized control over all of Syria’s major cities and decisi