There is an instinctive joy in seeing despots fall from power. Like his ignominious regional counterparts, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, Bashar al-Assad of Syria has bit the political dust. He managed to flee to Moscow just as rebels closed in on Damascus, proving to be luckier than Saddam, who was hanged after a trial, and Gaddafi, who was brutalised to death by a mob. But Assad is gone, truly gone, and fated to live out the rest of his despotic life in disarmed exile. Good riddance.

What is surprising is not that the Assad regime has disappeared but that it lasted so long. The deposed despot's father, Hafez al-Assad, took power after a military coup more than five decades ago although he belonged to the minority Alawi sect, a Shia offshoot, in a country that is three-quarters Sunni. The proverbial iron fist kept him in power, which passed after his death to his son Bashar in 2000. In 2011, the Arab Spring erupted in Syria, and the son, no stranger to his father's habits, suppressed that eruption of popular protest with expected brutality. The transfer of power from father to son has ended.

However, the change of regime in Syria, like previous iterations of the phenomenon, is problematic. Assad's ouster will empower the most powerful opponents of his regime, the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the successor to the Nusra Front, which was an affiliate of Al-Qaeda and has deep ties also with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the de facto leader of Syria (for the time being), has declared that he has disavowed international terror, but many analysts do not buy that ear-pleasing story. Instead, observers hope that the HTS will be consumed in the coming fighting with other groups vying for power. They include the so-called Syrian National Army, a Turkey-backed rebel group meant to combat ISIS; and the YPG, a mostly Kurdish militia.

External actors

Stirring that infernal cauldron coming to a strategic boil are the United States, Turkey, Iran and Russia. Russia underpinned the military ability of the Assad regime to stay in power by initiating a bombing campaign in 2015 that blocked American attempts to add Syria to the Neo-Conservative map of a Middle East remade through instigated regime change. Russia has dumped the Assad regime now because of far more pressing needs in Ukraine. Ukraine is Russia's own war, whereas Syria was a proxy war waged with the United States. That said, Assad's departure marks a significant setback to Russia's engagement with the Middle East.

America has won a victory over Russia in Syria, but it could be a pyrrhic one. Bashar al-Assad has fallen because, like Saddam Hussein in 2003 and Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, he resisted America's writ in the Middle East, one manifested in its nearly-unconditional support for Israel. However, neither democratic Iraq nor democratic Libya has lived up to expectations of being viable American partners, except in the residual sense that they have stopped being threats to Israel. That might well be the case for Syria as well.

Now, though, there is the distinct possibility that ISIS, which is committed to the destruction of American interests in the Middle East, will re-emerge as a transnational force that links post-Saddam Iraq and post-Assad Syria. Americans will have a difficult time controlling the insurgent energies that Assad's fall has unleashed. It is hardly surprising that Americans have begun a bombing campaign in Syria to cut into the new balance of power between victorious militias to American advantage, but there is nothing to say at this moment that America's anti-Assad campaign will prove to be a political plus for Washington in the Middle East finally.

The crux of the matter is that, no matter how much domestic belligerents differ among one another in Syria, they hate and fear America and Israel even more. Assad's fall will not erase that fundamental feature of the political geography of the Middle East, where the presence of a Western-endorsed Jewish state in an essentially Muslim region has created a dual divide, first between insurrectionary Muslim polities in Arabia and Africa, and the rest of the world; and second, between oil-poor Arab states and oil-rich Arab states. Violent entities such as ISIS will never stop eyeing the oil wealth of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because that wealth holds the key to military power in the region, a power whose final goal is a Muslim neighbourhood that has expelled international Jewish and Christian influences on the destiny and direction of the region.

All this is very troubling. Iran leads the region in refusing to acknowledge the reality of Israel, something that moderate Arab states have done. It is not surprising, therefore, that Teheran stands to be the largest regional loser from Assad's downfall, whose chief regional beneficiary is Israel, Iran's nemesis. Israelis would not be wrong to believe that their country's resounding attack on the Hezbollah militia, Iran's chief means of influence beyond its borders, in Lebanon in response to Hezbollah's missile attacks on the Jewish state (along with Israel's attack on Iran itself) played an important role in containing Teheran as the drama in Syria came to a head. If there is one lesson for Iran, it is that it must reconsider its existential hostility towards Israel, not out of regard for Israel's security but for its own. Iran remains within the crosshairs of the residual American neocon dream of remaking the Middle East.

By contrast, Turkey has emerged from the Syrian crisis as something of a winner. Ankara would not wish to over-extend itself by taking responsibility for a Syria that could fall to pieces, but it will benefit because the coming civil war there will give Turkey an opportunity to crush the restive Kurds and create a buffer zone on its border.

Meanwhile, Syrians will suffer as a despotic order gives way to ethnic anarchy.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow at the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com