It’s been a week since Syrian rebels overtook the country’s capital and forced out the longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad. This has all been a long time coming, but now a lot is happening very quickly. In this week’s How We Got Here, Max takes a look at the handful of other countries whose governments have also been overthrown by rebels to understand what it means for Syria that the guys with guns are now in control. Will they be tolerant and pluralistic — or despotic and cruel? Will they govern wisely or capriciously? How will they align Syria within the politics of the Middle East, and what will that mean for the rest of the world?

TRANSCRIPT

Max Fisher: It’s been a week since Syrian rebels overtook the country’s capital and forced out the longtime dictator, Bashar al-Assad. This has been a long time coming. Syria has been mired in civil war for 13 years. The fighting has killed 600,000 people and displaced millions. And now, hopefully it’s over. But a lot is happening very quickly. You may have heard a clip that’s been going around of a CNN crew touring one of the country’s infamous secret prisons. Syrians lived in fear of these places for decades. Just during the war, about 100,000 people were locked up in them, and most of them never came out. Rebels have mostly freed the survivors. So when that CNN crew went into one of those prisons on Wednesday, they expected to find it empty. But instead, the reporter and her team found a man hiding under a blanket, said he’d been there for days, hadn’t realized the government had even fallen. So the CNN crew picked him up, gave him some water, and they walked him outside into a liberated Syria. Here he is. 

[clip of unnamed released Syrian prisoner translated] [speaking in Arabic] My God the light he says. Oh God. There is light. My God there is light. 

Max Fisher: This seems to be sort of the mood in Syria right now. It’s a moment of hope and relief, but also of uncertainty and change, because pretty much everyone is happy that the old dictatorship is gone, but no one knows what to expect from the new government, which is made up, of course, of the rebels who just took the capital. Will they be tolerant, pluralistic or despotic and cruel? Will they govern wisely or capriciously? How will they align Syria within the politics of the Middle East? Put another way, that guy we just heard, the released prisoner. What sort of country is he walking back into? [music break] I’m Max Fisher. Erin Ryan is out this week, and this is How We Got Here, a series that explores a big question behind the week’s headlines and then tells a story that answers that question. This week, what does it mean for your country when the guys with guns suddenly take over? How does that work and what does it look like? To answer that, we’re going to tell stories from the very, very small handful of other countries where rebels have taken over like this. As in maybe seven or so ever. Some of those you’ve heard of, like the communist fighters who took over China in 1949 and whose successors still rule it, or more recently in Afghanistan by the Taliban just three years ago. We’ll also hear from a guy named Sam Heller. Sam’s a Syria expert based in Beirut with a U.S. think tank called the Century Foundation. He’s been following this rebel group for a long time, and he had some interesting insights about how they behave and what to expect from their sudden rise to power. But first, I want to play you a clip that highlights one of the things that rebel run governments, not all of them, but many of them tend to be good at, and that’s running the economy. Yeah, that’s right. The guys who stormed the presidential palace with Kalashnikovs under those fatigues, they might be a bunch of Warren Buffett’s. This clip is from a segment that ran a few years ago on CNBC Africa, about rising incomes and investment in Rwanda. Rwanda, of course, was the site of a terrible genocide in the ’90s, which ended with the country being taken over by ethnic rebels who have ruled it ever since. 

[clip of CNBC Africa host unnamed] Joining me to take a look at why the country is referred to as the beacon of East Africa, Brian Dlamini, a sovereign risk analyst at RMB. Brian, just give us your views right now on the fantastic growth story that we have heard in Rwanda. 

[clip of Brian Dlamini] The country prides itself, as um you know, the Singapore of Africa, and that is primarily premised on the fact that it’s relatively open to foreign investors. And um in addition the ease of doing business um there is is amongst the best. 

Max Fisher: This is actually an entire series that CNBC Africa ran called doing business in Rwanda because it had become so attractive to investors. So what’s going on here? There’s this line by a political scientist named Terrence Lyons. Quote, “A successful rebel group is simultaneously a political party, a military organization, and a business.” The reason for this is that path from rebellion to victory can take years, maybe decades. And that takes money. It takes a lot of it. You’ve got to buy guns, cars, gear. You got to pay your fighters. You got to feed them. And as rebels advance, they also have to rule within the territory that they take over. That means collecting taxes, providing services, keeping businesses open, and doing it all effectively enough that the people in your territory will prefer you to the actual official government. This is a good time to introduce the rebel group that’s taking control in Syria, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. You also hear them called Tahrir al-Sham or just HTS. And, well, HTS has a lot of experience operating as a business. They spent the last basically ten years running an entire region of Syria called Idlib Province. Here’s Sam Heller, the Syria expert I spoke to, on the group’s time in charge of the mini Syria within Syria. 

[clip of Sam Heller] Part of what has sustained this experiment in governance is and they control, I mean, you know until recently, about three million people, I think about half of them were displaced from elsewhere in the country. So, HTS, they’ve done smart work, kind of imposing a number of taxes, fees in ways that you know make their governing project more sustainable and I think also likely feed into their military capability. But they’ve also done everything they can to maintain flows of internationally supported humanitarian assistance via Turkey. Right. I think that that equilibrium there, that balance has been essential to keeping this HTS controlled pocket afloat. 

Max Fisher: Later in our conversation, I was asking Sam how HTS managed to come out on top of all the different rebel groups that control these little patches all over Syria. And he told this story that seemed pretty revealing. It’s not a story about their bravery in combat or their strategic genius. It’s a story about them being good at bureaucracy. Here’s Sam. 

[clip of Sam Heller] There were definitely like points to recommend their administration. I think, you know, in Idlib they managed to rationalize checkpoints so you could kind of enter at the start of HTS controlled territory. I think maybe pay a duty if necessary, but then like receive a uh a paper that would allow free passage through subsequent checkpoints without like incurring new predatory tolls. Whereas, you know, in like North Aleppo, it sounds like you would get extorted by various checkpoints. There was no coordination between them, um which was like obviously unpleasant, but then also, I think, lead to a sort of security chaos, too. 

Max Fisher: You hear a lot like this about Tahrir al-Sham’s rule over its rebel enclave, they’re organized, disciplined, focused on services. That does not mean that they are enlightened or benevolent of course. It just means they see the value of governance in achieving their aims. And this really comes through in interviews with the group’s leader, a guy named Ahmed al-Sharaa, or better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al Julani. To hear Julani talk, he sounds like a poly sci grad student. Here he is speaking last week to CNN. Quick note, the voice you hear is a translator. 

[clip of unnamed CNN reporter] In the past, you have talked about strict Islamic rule. Is that still the plan? 

[clip of Abu Mohammed al Julani translated] [speaking in Arabic] People who fear Islamic governance either have seen incorrect implementations of it or do not understand it properly. We are talking about something that aligns with the traditions and nature of the region. The most important thing is to build institutions. We are not talking about rule by individuals or personal whims. It’s about institutional governance. Syria deserves a governing system that is institutional, not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions. 

Max Fisher: This actually tracks with how rebel governments typically behave in power. Some of them govern better or worse than others, of course, but they all tend to be highly bureaucratic, highly institutionalized, lots of rules, procedures. Like think of China, this huge, sprawling government with all these big technocratic ministries. And this makes sense, right? Insurgencies are military outfits. They run on hierarchies and internal order. So they tend to set up states that work along the same principles. But that doesn’t mean they wield those bureaucracies to do good, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re democratic. Of the seven rebel groups to ever take power. According to one classification, every single one became a single party autocracy, every one. And there are a few likely reasons for that. One is, again, it’s a military organization, so it governs like one with a strict chain of command and an emphasis on order. And again, remember that before rebels come to power, most will have spent years running some patch of territory they’ve taken over as they have advanced. Even if they’re greeted as liberators, they’re still taking that territory by force. They’re ruling by fiat, and they’re holding on to it through violence. So they learn to govern as authoritarians. To show you what I mean. Here’s a clip from a 2017 BBC reporter who traveled into Taliban held territory in Afghanistan. This was before the group took over the country as a whole. But it ended up being a pretty good guide for how they’d rule. 

[clip of unnamed BBC reporter from 2017] That evening we are taken to see what passes for nightlife in [?]. Since the end of the Taliban’s bloody campaign, some security has returned to the district. But freedoms are limited. Away from the minders. One teenager tells me he got 40 lashes for watching a Bollywood film. Mobile phones are banned for ordinary people, as is filming and playing instruments, but many rules are not enforced. This man is open about being an opium dealer. 

Max Fisher: But there’s more behind the authoritarian impulse that rebel governments seem to have a hard time shaking, even when they make big promises about ushering in democracy, because rebel run governments know when they come into power that they are vulnerable. No one voted for them. They can’t trust anyone outside their own ranks. A lot of the country took up arms to keep them from power and could take up arms again if things go poorly. So they’re insecure. Insecure about dissent, about tolerating competing political actors, about holding elections that might see them lose the hold on power they sacrificed so much to win. Here again is Sam Heller, the Syria analyst on how the Syrian rebel group Tahrir al-Sham has ruled over its enclave in northern Syria. 

[clip of Sam Heller] One by one, they crushed like either like fully dismantled or just kind of subordinated any sort of rival factions inside Idlib. They also eliminated a number of uh like a dissidence uh like kind of uncooperative elements within HTS itself, including some more like extreme or al Qaeda loyal elements that were intransigent. And it seems like they they carried out detentions, torture. I mean, they had their own Idlib sized security apparatus. I think, like not on the scale of Damascus’s. And then, like not responsible for the same type of, like, systematic mass torture and death. But authoritarian nonetheless. And it was only I mean, it was earlier this year that I think they faced protests across Idlib demanding liberation of detainees. And Julani stepped down and then they met those with with violence. [music break]

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Max Fisher: There’s a lot of variation across rebel controlled countries as to how free they are or aren’t. What kinds of rights people have and what sorts of avenues for genuine political activity. So I don’t want to give the impression that it’s a foregone conclusion that Syria’s new rebel government will be iron fisted authoritarians. Still, I would not hold your breath for real elections in that country. Here’s a clip from just a few days ago of a reporter from Britain’s Channel four news asking the Syrian rebel spokesman about their plans for a political transition. And listen to him dodge the question about elections. 

[clip of unnamed reporter from Britian’s Channel four news] Do you have a timescale for elections? 

[clip of translated HTS spokesperson unnamed] Currently, we are in the three month interim phase before forming a new government. These are the steps we are working on. It is still too early to talk about the details of how that government will be formed. Now we have to focus on reactivating Syria’s institutions. 

Max Fisher: This is a good moment to raise a question that has followed this Syrian rebel group for years and years. What do they actually believe? Are they, you know, violent religious extremists? And the answer, I gotta tell you, it’s not a clean no. Like a lot of Syrian armed groups, it’s changed names and affiliations over time. It’s merged with other groups and splintered off. But early in the war, around 2012, Julani and his group were associated with the Islamic State and then broke off from them and switched allegiance to al Qaeda. That didn’t last. The group broke off from al Qaeda two years ago and became more of a traditional rebel group. Julani has talked about moderating and his group’s rule over that Syrian mini state is a far cry from anything resembling like ISIS ultraconservative caliphate rule. But still, it’s not exactly comforting to hear that an entire country has been taken over by a group that used to pledge allegiance to al Qaeda. Right. I asked Sam about it.

[clip of Sam Heller] People talk about these questions about to what extent they’ve moderated or like fully divorced themselves from transnational militancy, from extremism. I mean, it is really an open question at this point. What they do believe, they seem smart and pragmatic. It’s hard to know if uh like what is their at base if the their real kind of bedrock ideology. It seems like there is some sort of basic Islamism on which they have been unwilling to compromise or abandon. The more they kind of evince like real opportunism and transactionalism, I mean, in some cases like that is good right because it means that they’re like people that you can you could deal with and then you can arrive at like real productive agreements. But then, yeah, look how that balances with their ideological priors is still, you know, remains to be seen. 

Max Fisher: Remains to be seen. That is a phrase you hear a lot when rebels come to power. And it’s not just because they’re sort of blank slates, it’s because they almost always come to power, promising reconciliation, national unity, all coming together in forgiveness and tolerance. The rebels who took over Uganda in the ’80s did this as one of their first official acts. The rebels, who took over a few years later in Ethiopia, held Peace and Stability committees. In Rwanda, they promised to share power in a pan ethnic unity government. There’s a reason they do this. Rebel governments crave, above all else, building a sense of legitimacy because they’re not really the government until the country collectively accepts them as the government. Until then, they’re just a bunch of guys in fatigues, occupying some office buildings in the capital and promising national reconciliation, it’s a way to get people bought in quickly by promising forgiveness if they accept your one time offer to lay down arms and accept that you are in charge. So wouldn’t you know it? Julani, the Syrian rebel leader, is promising something similar. His government is talking about amnesties for government soldiers and national unity. Here he is again in that CNN interview. 

[clip of unnamed CNN reporter] Many Syrians are happy and will be happy to see the end of the Assad regime, but they’re also worried about what HTS rule um would mean, including minorities. 

[clip of Abu Mohammed al Julani translated] No one has the right to erase another group. These sects have coexisted in this region for hundreds of years and no one has the right to eliminate them. There must be a legal framework that protects and ensures the rights of all. Not a system that serves only one sect, as Assad’s regime has done. 

Max Fisher: Here’s the thing about all those national reconciliation promises we get from rebel governments, a lot of them turn out to be kind of fake. Those promises of power sharing, forgiveness, governing for everyone. They don’t always get made good. Here’s one really infamous example. In China, a few years after the communist insurgents took power, their leader, Mao Zedong. Maybe you’ve heard of him, said that he wanted to, quote, “let 100 flowers bloom in social science and arts and let 100 points of view be expressed in the field of science.” And what he was saying is that he was basically asking for academics and intellectuals to freely criticize his new government so that he could learn what they were doing wrong and improve. This was a big step since these social groups were seen as allied with the old regime. Felt like a way to win their buy in to the new order. They called it the 100 Flowers campaign. And it worked at first. Newspapers ran editorials offering constructive criticism. Scientists and researchers wrote long letters on how Mao could fix various problems facing the country. Somewhere along the way, though, Mao changed his mind about allowing all this criticism. Or maybe it had always been a ruse. But either way, he purged about 300,000 people, stripping them of their jobs and sending many of them to death sentences at forced labor camps. It’s not unusual when rebels take over to see these kinds of recriminations against whole social groups seen as loyal to the old order. Consider what happened in Cuba when, after years of fighting, communist insurgents led by Fidel Castro took over in 1959. Here first is a news clip from the first days of Castro’s takeover. 

[clip of 1959 news clip] Joyous followers of Fidel Castro sweep triumphantly through the Cuban capital hours after their rebellion had toppled the regime of Fulgencio Batista. Rebel fighters fresh from the battlefield in central Cuba, pour into the capital to impose martial law and quell the rioting. Beards, a style established by Castro himself are the uniform of the day for the rebels. 

Max Fisher: So sounds nice, right? Celebration, parades, order, stability. Castro also promised justice for the worst offenders in the old dictatorship, and that is something that Julani has promised, too. But Castro’s justice turned into summary executions of former government officials and then more executions by the hundreds, along with torture and mass arrests. Here’s another news clip from Cuba just a few weeks after his takeover. 

[clip of vintage clip about Cuba and Castro] In Havana’s Sports palace, the Castro regime’s controversial showpiece trials got underway before a turbulent throng of 18,000. Batista aid Major [?] Blanco charged with 200 murders. Based as a military tribunal, new judges still wearing the revolutionary’s jungle battle dress. Emotions climb in the nine hour trial as the testimony piles up. This woman charges Blanco murdered her husband. The decision is death. Later comes word the trials will continue, but not in the sports arena. 

Max Fisher: I’m not saying this is for sure going to happen in Syria, too, but it would not be unusual if it did. What starts as truth and reconciliation as a way to bring people together can spiral into this mass scale revenge because the top priority of any new rebel government, remember, is winning people over, winning public legitimacy and stamping out any potential rivals. And if the rebel rulers come to believe that show trials and public executions are the best way to do that, then that’s usually what happens. I asked Sam whether we’ve gotten any hints as to which path Tahrir al-Sham seems likely to take mass reconciliation or mass purges. 

[clip of Sam Heller] They said that basically there is a class of uh like top former regime leadership, including some names I saw a like an infographic circulated, but I haven’t checked if it was official um where like they promised to prosecute and then likely punish capitally, whereas they’ve announced a like a broad amnesty for conscript soldiers and Syrian government officials. As they were marching South they issued a number of statements reassuring like Syria’s different kind of demographic sectarian constituencies that they considered them part of Syria, that they would not, you know, face reprisal. I mean, the question is like how long that obtains. And then also, again, like there’s this question that I have of control and then just how much they can really keep a lid on like more spontaneous acts of retribution. There’s definitely people in the armed opposition that I think do not have a nuanced understanding of which Syrian social groups they hold accountable for uh the conduct of the Assad government and they want to get revenge. 

Max Fisher: A lot of people share Sam’s concern about the rebels targeting or marginalizing minorities seen as allied with the old dictatorship. Again, it’s something that rebel governments do a lot when they take power. They’re paranoid about uprisings or facing their own rebellion. I mean, who would know better how deadly that can be? So they often look askance at whole social classes they see as potential sources of opposition. Sometimes that just means treating them as second class citizens, and sometimes it’s more drastic. Let’s go back to China. When Mao’s Communist Army took over in 1949, one of the first things they did, one of the very first things was to round up rural landowners. Why rural landowners? They had a lot of money and power in China at the time, and they generally supported the old government, which made them a potential threat. Here’s a clip from a PBS documentary about it. 

[clip from PBS documentary, unnamed] Speak Bitterness Meetings were held in which the landlords and others linked to the defeated nationalists were confronted and denounced by the peasants. 

[clip of translated person from PBS documentary, unnamed] We were told to get together and ask the landlords to return land to us. We stated how much they should return and how they should return it. There was a denunciation meeting every day.

Max Fisher: These show trials got held in villages around the country. Mao actually bragged that the campaign killed two million people. Historians think it was closer to 200,000, but that is still four times as many people who have been confirmed killed in Gaza so far. Most rebel governments have been less brutal than that, but they still tend to do some version of it. In Cuba, Castro’s rebels made clear to landowners and middle class people that they were not welcome anymore. And about a quarter of a million Cubans fled the country, mostly for the US. Syria’s rebels are promising not to do this kind of thing. But when I asked Sam about it, he pointed out that the rebels definition of what counts as inclusive might still mean putting the country’s Sunni Muslim majority on top. Here’s Sam. 

[clip of Sam Heller] HTS is a Sunni sectarian [?], that is how they define themselves and their political project. It hasn’t allowed space for like real participation by minorities in Idlib previously. You know, absent some new change, it doesn’t seem like it would accommodate Syrian minorities now or also Sunni Muslim Syrians who are not on board with more conservative political Islam and who want to live a secular existence. So that’s like an obvious point of future tension. 

Max Fisher: So there are exceptions to this trend. When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021, they made a big show of saying they wanted people to stay even if they had supported the old government, and they were open about why. The Taliban had actually taken power once before in 1996. They’re the only rebel group to ever take power twice. And that first time, like Mao or Castro, they declared a lot of groups unwelcome. Most educated people fled, and without them, the Taliban had a harder time, you know, running the economy or staffing out hospitals. Julani, the Syrian leader, has said that he’s been studying the Taliban’s experience in taking power. Like what worked and didn’t. And his rebel mini state in northern Syria has been recruiting educated Syrians who’d fled abroad during the war to help them run it. But that’s not all Julani has been trying to learn from Afghanistan. He’s focused, he said, on understanding how the Taliban dealt with winning over foreign governments like the United States. This is a really tricky challenge for rebel rulers, and it’s an existential one. World governments tend to be really hostile to rebel takeovers. They just don’t want to legitimize them for fear of emboldening more, maybe even within their own borders. We’re already seeing this from some of Syria’s neighbors like Jordan. So rebels often come to power finding that the world has locked them out of global trade and finance. That is especially true for rebels like the ones in Syria who are designated by foreign governments as terrorists and so legally cannot receive most foreign aid or trade. At the same time, rebels by definition, come to power in the wake of long civil wars. These are places that can’t grow their own food or produce their own electricity. They need to get in foreign aid. They need global investment for reconstruction, and they need to do it fast. Or they can see their economy collapse as quickly as they took it over. This is why Julani is so focused on learning from Afghanistan. When the Taliban came to power, one of the very first things they did was to turn around and tell foreign governments, basically we will do or say whatever you want. We’ll be friendly this time. Just please let us access the global economy. And the United States and the United Nations like mostly agreed. They said they wanted to cut through the sanctions and get aid into the country quickly. But it took months and months to carve out legal permission just for aid groups to operate in Afghanistan. During the wait, the country actually ran out of currency, ran out of money. Here’s a clip from the UK’s Channel four News on what that does to a country. 

[clip of unnamed reporter from Britian’s Channel four news 2] Four months after the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan is in a state of economic catastrophe, with more than half its people unable to feed themselves. 60% of the population is in acute hunger. 

Max Fisher: And that was with the world actually trying to open up Afghanistan’s economy. So you can imagine how bad things would get in Syria if world governments decided not to try. Which is why Julani is trying so hard to show a friendly, non-threatening face to the world. Is it genuine? Is it sincere? I mean, it might be years before we find out, but his incentives at least all point towards at least playing at moderation. So where does all this leave us? I think what I keep coming back to is that, yeah, rebel governments are not the nicest. But the thing they just opposed in Syria, the Assad dictatorship really was one of the cruelest and most oppressive in the world. It genuinely was that bad. So I think where I’m left is that, sure, I’d rather live in the United States than under any of the rebel run governments we talked about, especially in those first years after they took power. But I’d also rather live under any of those rebel governments then under the Assad dictatorship, or definitely amid the Syrian civil war. Sam’s feelings were also mixed when I asked about Syria’s future. Here he is.

[clip of Sam Heller] I think like the normal response to this is like excitement. I don’t know. I’m just very caught up with I think my concerns about this and what’s next. Informed by, you know, my previous work when I was trying to understand more about how Syrian insurgent control had functioned, something I came away from with like a pretty jaundiced view of like, how that worked in practice. So I’m like very worried for what comes next. 

Max Fisher: Okay, let’s go out with a lighter look at the hardships of rebel rule. Here’s Bill Maher last year, reading a Vice news story about what the Taliban learned when they put down their guns and picked up their government ministry office passes. 

[clip of Bill Maher] Husafa, a former sniper, said life was simple and free during jihad. The Taliban used to be free of restrictions. But now we sit in one place behind a desk. Don’t you hate that when you’re [laughter] uh [?, great guy um complained about how he’s had it up here with the traffic. I am not making this up, he said. Last year was tolerable, but now it’s become more congested. We had a great degree of freedom. These days you have to go to the office before 8 a.m. and stay there till four. [laughter] [music break]

Max Fisher: How We Got Here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher and Erin Ryan. 

Erin Ryan: Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank.

Max Fisher: Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. 

Erin Ryan: Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landes, and Vasilis Fotopoulos.

Max Fisher: Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto and Adriene Hill. [music break]

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