The historian’s occupational hazard is giving the impression that what happened must have happened, that the march of events was inevitably leading to a single destination. Recent events in Syria — and I do mean recent — show how unpredictable history actually is when seen in real-time rather than in retrospect.

Just two weeks ago, the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, was widely seen as a frozen conflict, and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was seen as firmly entrenched in power. Then, on Nov. 27, an Islamist group called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) launched an unexpected offensive to take Aleppo, the country’s most-populous city, which had been under regime control since 2016. Aleppo fell within days — and then just a few days later the rebels marched into Hama and Homs, two other major cities.

By Saturday, they were in Damascus, and Assad — after a quarter-century of ruthless rule — had fled the country. Syria was free at last.

The lightning speed of Assad’s downfall recalls the adage — often wrongly attributed to Lenin — that “there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen.” It was as though some cosmic hand had pushed “fast forward” on the narrative of our times, changing history in the blink of an eye.

The only comparable event in recent years was the downfall of the Afghan government, but that was a positively glacial process by comparison: The Taliban launched their final offensive in May 2021 and did not reach Kabul until mid-August. The Syrian rebels’ triumph — the 10 days that shook the Middle East — now appears inevitable. But even two weeks ago, it was still highly improbable.

How could Assad fall so quickly after so many years in power?

Recent history shows that homegrown dictatorships (e.g., Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran) have considerable resiliency and staying power.

They can survive any number of shocks, from massive street demonstrations to the loss of external assistance. By contrast, despotic regimes imposed by foreign forces are usually brittle. When Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made clear that he was not going to use force to keep in power the Soviet client regimes of Eastern Europe, they quickly collapsed in 1989.

The Assad regime in Syria was initially homegrown. It could be traced back to the takeover by the Baathist Party in 1963 — a branch of the same organization that also took over Iraq. Hafez al-Assad was an air force officer who became defense minister in 1966 and president in 1971.

When the Muslim Brotherhood rose up to challenge his rule in 1982, Hafez al-Assad crushed the uprising, centered in Hama, killing 20,000 people.

Upon his death in 2000, his son Bashar, a Western-educated ophthalmologist, took over.

The authoritarian regime proceeded as before, until the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011. Assad was soon on the verge of losing power, and likely would have, were it not for the intervention of two critical allies: first Iran and then, in 2015, Russia. Iran provided Assad’s ground forces, many of them coming from Hezbollah in Lebanon, while Russia provided air power. Assad and his backers perpetrated terrible war crimes, including the use of chemical weapons and the dropping of “barrel bombs” on civilians, to suppress the rebellion. The Obama administration, by contrast, did not provide much support to the rebel groups, and the regime was able to prevail. Or so it seemed.

Assad’s ultimate downfall came because he did not use the breathing space provided by the Russian and Iranian interventions to extend his base of power, to buttress his legitimacy, or to reach out to the rebels.

He continued to rule through terror, either killing or imprisoning anyone suspected of disloyalty. His secret police operated a vast network of prisons where suspects were subject to gruesome torture. The base of the regime never extended much beyond the Alawite minority, a Muslim sect whose members included Assad and many of his closest cronies. The Sunni majority was left to seethe in discontent.

Meanwhile, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of HTS, was busy transforming his group from an al-Qaeda affiliate into a broader Islamist organization capable of winning the support of more moderate Syrians.

He broke with al-Qaeda and sought to reassure Christians, Kurds, Shiites and other minorities that HTS rule would be no threat to them. “From the March 2020 ceasefire in Syria to last month, [Jolani] made concerted efforts to build more resilient institutions locally and reform Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s governance and military apparatuses,” Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy recently wrote for War on the Rocks.

Guerrilla wars are ultimately decided not on the battlefield but in the hearts and minds of the population. Assad did nothing to win popular support, while Jolani, considering his radical Islamist roots, had surprising success in this regard.

By the time the HTS offensive started, the Assad regime was an empty husk ready to collapse in a stiff wind.

There was almost no fighting in the past 10 days, because, as it turned out, almost no one was willing to fight for Assad. Charles Lister of the Middle East Institute wrote on Bluesky that the HTS triumph was primarily diplomatic, not military.

The organization “negotiated intensively with Ismaili notables, with Assad regime military commanders & with Sunni tribes — most resulting in peaceful takeovers, safe exits & some [publicly unacknowledged] regime defections.”

Assad was no doubt counting on Iran, Russia and Hezbollah to save him from his own people once again, but that was no longer possible.

The fall of Assad’s government can be seen as one of the unforeseen ripple effects of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Hamas’s assault last year on Israel — and the people of Syria can thank Israelis and Ukrainians for indirectly helping rid them of their bloody tyrant. Russia suffered such heavy losses fighting Ukraine — and Hezbollah fighting Israel — that they had no military power to spare in Syria. Absent foreign help, Assad was a goner. Russia and Iran, after having bolstered their aura of power by keeping Assad in his palace, have now suffered massive blows to their credibility and their ability to project power in the region. Imperial overstretch isn’t just an American problem.

This is a wonderful moment of liberation for the Syrian people after 13 hellish years of civil war. But they will have to struggle to avoid the dangers of a new conflict among the rebel factions.

That, after all, is what happened after two other Russian-allied despots fell — Mohammed Najibullah in Afghanistan in 1992 and Moammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. Jolani’s political skills will be severely tested in trying to put together a government of national unity, and trying to avoid clashes with Kurdish groups that will not be eager to submit to the authority of another Arab-run regime in Damascus.

It is impossible to predict what will happen next in Syria.

The situation could look very different two weeks from now, just as it looked very different two weeks ago. All we can do is marvel at the unpredictable path of history and extend our best wishes to the Syrian people as they emerge from the dark days of the Assad regime. Let us hope they do not trade one dictator for another.

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.