Syrian rebels appear to have entered the capital Damascus after facing scant resistance from regime forces, as President Bashar al-Assad’s decades-long grip on power seemed to wane by the minute.

Hours before, Syria’s main armed opposition group said it had “fully liberated” the major city of Homs, north of the capital. Syrians were seen tearing down and setting fire to posters of Assad after rebels had entered the city, in scenes reminiscent of pro-democracy protests in the city during the Arab Spring more than a decade ago.

Just a day ago, observers were saying Homs was of huge strategic importance to the rebels, as its capture effectively split the Assad regime in two, severing the government in Damascus from the coast. But by Sunday morning, it was not clear there was even a functioning regime left to speak of.

The rebels’ progress has been stunningly swift. After bursting out of their territory in the northwestern Idlib province, the main rebel group captured Aleppo and Hama in just over a week of fighting. After they were joined Friday by a fresh uprising in the southern Daraa province, both groups set their sights on Damascus.

“We were able to liberate four Syrian cities within 24 hours: Daraa, Quneitra, Suwayda and Homs,” said Lt. Col. Hassan Abdul Ghani, a spokesperson for the main rebel group. “Our operations are continuing to liberate the entire Damascus countryside, and our eyes are on the capital, Damascus.”

It had been expected that the regime would mount a firmer defense of Damascus, but the rebels said that senior Assad regime officials were preparing to defect to them in the capital.

Echoes of earlier protests

The scenes recall one of the most symbolic images from the Arab Spring in Syria, when pro-democracy protesters tore down Assad posters on top of the same gates in 2011.

Nearby, residents were also seen celebrating in Clock Tower square, one of the focal points of the original anti-government protests.

To stamp out those protests, the regime army launched a brutal assault on the city’s Khalidiya neighborhood in 2012, using tanks and mortars to attack civilian homes, causing some to collapse. Regime troops stormed the area, slaughtering families in their homes. Around 200 people are thought to have died in the massacre.

In a video live-streamed from Clock Tower square by a resident late Saturday, a resident threw a framed portrait of Assad on the ground, shattering its glass. Over the course of 10 minutes, Syrians filled the square, chanting in celebration at the growing apparent collapse of the Assad regime.

In every crisis lies opportunity, and in every opportunity lurks crisis.

The startling advance of Syria’s opposition in a week is the unintended consequence of two other conflicts, one near and one far. It leaves several key US allies with a new and largely unknown Islamist-led force, governing swathes of their strategic neighbor – if not most of it, given the pace of events, by the time you read this.

Syria has absorbed so much diplomatic oxygen in the past 20 years, it is fitting this week of sweeping change popped up as if from a vacuum. Since the invasion of Iraq, the US has struggled to find a policy for Syria that could accommodate the vastly different needs of its allies Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and its sometime partners Iraq and Lebanon.

Syria has always been the wing-nut of the region: linking Iraq’s oil to the Mediterranean, the Shia of Iraq and Iran to Lebanon, and NATO’s southern underbelly Turkey to Jordan’s deserts. George W Bush put it in his Axis of Evil; Obama didn’t want to touch it much in case he broke it further; Donald Trump bombed it once, very quickly.

It has been in the grip of a horrifically brutal dictatorship for decades. Hama, Homs, Damascus – all again in the headlines overnight because of the regime’s swift fall, yet too home to the most heinous parts of its history – respectively the 1982 massacre of 20,000 in Hama, or the 2012 siege and then starvation of Homs, or the gassing with Sarin in Ghouta, near Damascus, of children in basements in 2013. Then there was ISIS from 2014 to 2017. There seemed little more you could subject Syria to, until this week brought it liberation, thus far at an unknown cost, with vast caveats.

The swiftly changing fate of Bashar al-Assad was not really made in Syria, but in southern Beirut and Donetsk. Without the physical crutches of Russia’s air force and Iran’s proxy muscle Hezbollah, he toppled when finally pushed.

Israel’s brutal yet effective two-month war on Hezbollah probably did not pay much mind to Assad’s fate. But it may have decided it. Likewise, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 34 months ago, likely considered little how few jets or troops it might leave Moscow to uphold its Middle Eastern allies with. But the war of attrition has left Russia “incapable” of assisting Assad, even President-elect Donald Trump noted on Saturday. And indeed Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov cut a weakened figure this weekend, saying: “What is the forecast? I cannot guess. We are not in the business of guessing.” These are not the words of a steadfast and capable guarantor, rather those of a regional power seeing its spinning plates hit the floor.

Iran has been wildly hamstrung in the past six months, as its war with Israel, usually in the shadows or deniable, evolved into high-stakes and largely ineffective long-range missile attacks. Its main proxy, Hezbollah, was crippled by a pager attack on its hierarchy, and then by weeks of vicious airstrikes. Tehran’s pledges of support have done little so far but result in a joint statement with Syria and Iraq on “a need for collective action to confront” the rebels.

The Middle East is reeling because ideas taken as a given – like pervasive Iranian strength, and Russian solidity as an ally – are crumbling as they meet new realities. Assad prevailed as the leader of a blood-drenched minority, not through guile or grit, but because Iran murdered for him and Moscow bombed for him. Now these two allies are wildly over-stretched elsewhere, the imbalance that kept Assad and his ruling Alawite minority at the helm is also gone.

When established regional powers seem suddenly unable to act, there is often a moment of significant risk. But this is one seized by Turkey, a NATO member which has dealt with the most fallout from Syria’s turmoil.

Ankara has had to play the long game over Syria, and housed over three million of its refugees since 2012. It has had to see the Kurdish militants – the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that the US trained, equipped and helped to fight ISIS – develop a stronghold along its border. From Ankara’s perspective, the Syria problem has never gone away even though attention to it faded; it would one day need to alter the enduring mess in its favor.

The sweeping offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Shams (HTS) – with its impetus, equipment and inclusive communications strategy, telling Syria’s disparate and panicked ethnic groups their new society would view them all as one – spoke of a sophisticated hand behind it. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made his strongest suggestion to date whose hand that was when he said Friday he had tried to negotiate the future of Syria with Assad, failed, and he wished the offensive well, all the way to the Syrian capital. It was not a subtle message. But it does not need to be at a time of seismic change Erdogan has likely long awaited.

Exactly who Turkey has empowered remains unclear. HTS’s upper echelons, in short, began as al-Qaeda, found ISIS too extreme, and are now trying to suggest they’ve grown up. From Ireland to Afghanistan, the history of this sort of evolution is messy. It’s not always simple for extremists to reform, yet also possible sometimes they can change just about enough. Separately, while Turkey may have lit the touch paper of HTS assaults, the speed of Assad’s collapse may not have been anticipated. There is such a thing as too great a success.

The unknowable impact of vast, fast change left Syria mired in half-policies and US inaction before. Back in 2013, then-US President Barack Obama said he would retaliate militarily if Assad used chemical weapons, but did not enforce this “red line” when Assad deployed Sarin in Ghouta in 2013. His officials partially justified his walkback by suggesting too much further damage to the already frail Assad regime could let increasingly jihadist rebels to advance so fast, they could be in control of Damascus in months. It is possible they were right back then; it is yet more likely the failure by Obama to act emboldened Russia and Iran for years.

We don’t know a lot about what is happening now in Syria or what it means. HTS may prove a better governor of Syria’s ethnic mix than Assad was, which won’t be hard. Assad may melt away into exile in a lavish row of Moscow dachas, and his hollow autocracy may crumble fast. Russia may lick its geopolitical wounds and concentrate on the catastrophic bleed that is its invasion of Ukraine. Iran may pause to reflect, and instead ready itself for the possible tsunami of aggression that could come with Trump’s White House.

Obama’s argument was made to a Western audience exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan, and preoccupied by terrorism. And it marked a form of war-weary isolationism, in which an over-stretched US was reluctant to instigate more change it could not control. Obama ended up funding and arming the Syrian opposition so feebly it was slaughtered and – when its extremists joined up with radicals from Iraq’s long-running insurgency against the US occupation – metastasized into ISIS. That was about the worst possible outcome. The West had played its hand so weakly in one low-grade conflict, it won the four-year industrial-strength horror of a war against the ISIS caliphate.

This may prove the swift and severe change that Syria needed to stabilize – a shaking of the carpet that leaves society smoother. Syria’s past 13 years have been so brutal it deserves exactly that. Yet they have also proven how out of reach peace can be, and deep its suffering can go.

Syria’s iron-fisted leader Bashar al-Assad is the second generation of an autocratic family dynasty that held power for more than five decades and his disappearance amid a lightning rebel advance signals an astonishing reordering of power in a strategically vital Middle Eastern nation.

Assad is known for a brutal rule over Syria, which since 2011 has been devastated by a civil war that ravaged the country and turned it into a breeding ground for extremist group ISIS, while sparking an international proxy war and refugee crisis that saw millions displaced from their homes.

War began after Assad’s regime refused to bow to mass pro-democracy protests that year during the Arab Spring, instead mounting a brutal crackdown on the peaceful movement – killing and jailing thousands in the first few months alone.

Assad’s forces have since been accused of severe human rights violations and brutal assaults against civilians throughout the 13-year war, including the use chemical weapons against their own people. The United States, Jordan, Turkey and the European Union at the war’s start all called for Assad to step down.

But the heavily Western-sanctioned and internationally isolated regime has clung to power until now thanks to the backing of powerful allies Russia and Iran, and a merciless campaign against opposition.

Assad comes to power

Assad took power in an unopposed election in 2000 following the death of his father Hafez al-Assad, who rose from poverty to lead the Baath Party and seized power in 1970, becoming the country’s president the following year. The younger Assad grew up in the shadow of his father, a Soviet ally who ruled Syria for three decades and helped propel a minority Alawite population to key political, social and military posts.

Like the son who succeeded him, Hafez al-Assad tolerated little dissent with oppression widespread and periodic bouts of extreme state violence. In 1982 in the city of Hama – which rebels seized earlier this week – Hafez al-Assad had his army and intelligence services slaughter thousands of his opponents, ending an uprising led by the Muslim Brotherhood.

As a second son not poised to take up his father’s mantle, Assad studied ophthalmology in London until his older brother Bassel, who had been groomed to succeed Hafez, died in a car crash in 1994. Bashar al-Assad was then thrust into the national spotlight and studied military science, later becoming a colonel in the Syrian army.

After his father’s death in June 2000, it took just hours for the Syrian parliament to change the constitution to lower the presidential age of eligibility from 40 to Assad’s age at the time of 34, a move that allowed him to succeed his father after opposition-less elections the following month.

Many observers in Europe and the United States seemed heartened by the incoming president, who presented himself as a fresh, youthful leader who might usher in a more progressive, moderate regime.

Assad’s wife, Asma al-Assad, whom he married in 2000, a former investment banker of Syrian descent who grew up in London, helped burnish that view.

But Western hopes of a more moderate Syria sank when the new leader promptly maintained his country’s traditional ties with militant groups, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. They then turned to outright condemnation of the regime after he met the 2011 pro-democracy groundswell with brutal force.

In May 2011, then US President Barack Obama said Assad’s regime had “chosen the path of murder and the mass arrests of its citizens” and called on him to lead a democratic transition “or get out of the way.”

Assad has been re-elected by sweeping majorities every seven years, most recently in 2021 in what the US, UK, France, Germany and Italy deemed a “fraudulent election.”

Civil war

Assad’s forces were known for brutal tactics during the civil war that ensued after the crackdown on 2011 pro-democracy protests, when an armed opposition made up of small organic militias and some defectors from the Syrian military formed.

On 2013, UN weapons inspectors returned “overwhelming and indisputable” evidence of the use of nerve gas in Syria. Then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the August 21 attack described in the report, which took place in the Damascus suburbs, “the worst use of weapons of mass destruction in the 21st century.”

The United States said that attack may have killed more than 1,400, including hundreds of civilians. Syrian officials have repeatedly denied allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The attack and others galvanized world powers to work to dismantle the regime’s chemical arsenal and pushed the US in 2013 to up its support for Syrian opposition forces, following what Washington said was the crossing of a “red line.”

Assad warned Western nations against supporting rebel groups battling his armed forces, predicting the militants would one day strike against the US and others. Later, in 2015 the leader said Syria wouldn’t join a US-led coalition focused on destroying terror group ISIS, which took control of parts of the war-torn country during the war.

The conflict is now a cornerstone of Assad’s brutal legacy, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead, and what the United Nations earlier this year said was more than 7 million internally displaced and over 6 million international refugees.

South Korean prosecutors on Sunday detained a former defense minister who allegedly recommended last week’s brief but stunning martial law imposition to President Yoon Suk Yeol, making him the first figure detained over the case.

The development came a day after Yoon avoided an opposition-led bid to impeach him in parliament, with most ruling-party lawmakers boycotting a floor vote to prevent the two-thirds majority needed to suspend his presidential powers. The main opposition Democratic Party said it will prepare a new impeachment motion against Yoon.

On Sunday, ex-Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun was taken into custody at a Seoul detention facility after undergoing an investigation by prosecutors, a law enforcement official said, requesting anonymity in line with privacy rules.

The official gave no further details. But South Korean media reported that Kim voluntarily appeared at a Seoul prosecutors’ office, where he had his mobile phone confiscated and was detained. The reports said police searched Kim’s former office and residence on Sunday.

Repeated calls to Seoul prosecutors’ offices and police agency were unanswered.

Senior prosecutor Park Se-hyun said in a televised statement Sunday that authorities launched a 62-member special investigation team on the martial law case. Park, who will head the team, said the probe would “leave no suspicions.”

Yoon accepted Kim’s resignation offer on Thursday after opposition parties submitted a separate impeachment motion against him.

Kim is a central figure in Yoon’s martial law enforcement, which led to special forces troops encircling the National Assembly building and army helicopters hovering over it. The military withdrew after the parliament unanimously voted to overturn Yoon’s decree, forcing his Cabinet to lift it before daybreak Wednesday.

In Kim’s impeachment motion document, the Democratic Party and other opposition parties accused him of proposing martial law to Yoon. Vice Defense Minister Kim Seon-ho told parliament that Kim Yong-hyun ordered the deployment of troops to the National Assembly.

The Democratic Party called Yoon’s martial law imposition “unconstitutional, illegal rebellion or a coup.” It has filed complaints with police against at least nine people, including Yoon and Kim Yong-hyun, over the alleged rebellion.

In a statement Wednesday, Kim said that “all troops who performed duties related to martial law were acting on my instructions, and all responsibility lies with me.”

Prosecutor General Shim Woo-jung told reporters on Thursday the prosecution plans to investigate the rebellion charges against Yoon following complaints. While the president mostly has immunity from prosecution while in office, that does not extend to allegations of rebellion or treason.

The Defense Ministry said it has suspended three top military commanders over their alleged involvement in the martial law imposition. They were among those facing the opposition-raised rebellion allegations.

On Saturday, Yoon issued an apology over the martial law decree, saying he won’t shirk legal or political responsibility for the declaration. He said he would leave it to his party to chart a course through the country’s political turmoil, “including matters related to my term in office.”

Since taking office in 2022 for a single five-year term, Yoon has struggled to push his agenda through an opposition-controlled parliament and grappled with low approval ratings amid scandals involving himself and his wife. In his martial law announcement on Tuesday night, Yoon called parliament a “den of criminals” bogging down state affairs and vowed to eliminate “shameless North Korea followers and anti-state forces.”

The declaration of martial law was the first of its kind in more than 40 years in South Korea. The turmoil has sparked alarm among key diplomatic partners like the U.S. and Japan.

The scrapping of Yoon’s impeachment motion is expected to intensify protests calling for his ouster and deepen political chaos in South Korea, with a survey suggesting a majority of South Koreans support the president’s impeachment. Yoon’s martial law declaration drew criticism from the conservative ruling party, but it is determined to oppose Yoon’s impeachment apparently because it fears losing the presidency to liberals.

Ruling People Power Party leader Han Dong-hun said Sunday the PPP will work with the government to determine Yoon’s early and orderly exit from office in a way that minimizes confusion, but he didn’t say when that would happen. He also claimed Yoon will not be involved in state affairs, including foreign policy.

Yoon’s presidential office didn’t immediately respond. The Democratic Party criticized Han Dong-hun’s comments, saying that the exclusion of an incumbent president from state affairs isn’t supported by the constitution. The party said authorities should immediately arrest Yoon and all others implicated in the case.

The presidential office said Sunday that Yoon accepted the resignation offer by Safety Minister Lee Sang-min, who has also faced an opposition-led impeachment motion over his alleged role in the martial law enforcement.

In a parliamentary hearing on Friday, Lee, one of Yoon’s closest associates, defended Yoon’s martial law decree, saying the president exercised his powers “within the boundaries of constitutional processes and law.”

For more than 60 years Cuba has buckled under US economic sanctions and its own government’s missteps. Life on the communist-run island could soon become even more grueling.

One of the Cuban government’s most formidable adversaries, Sen. Marco Rubio is set to become secretary of state under Donald Trump, something that does not bode well for the already flatlining Cuban economy.

The son of Cuban exiles, Rubio has long made it his mission to ramp up the US trade embargo on Cuba. If confirmed, as is widely expected, Rubio will be perfectly situated to further tighten the screws on Cuba perhaps to the island’s breaking point.

“He has reached the pinnacle of power and position in the US government that he has never held before and he is going to be putting it to Cuba to prove his reputation as an extremist hardliner on Cuba,” said Peter Kornbluh, co-author of “Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Secret Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.”

If confirmed, Secretary of State Rubio will face far more pressing issues like Russia’s war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and countering growing Chinese influence in the world, particularly in Latin America.

But Cuba has been central to Rubio’s long climb from city commissioner in West Miami to state representative to US senator to Republican presidential candidate to now being selected for secretary of state. The second paragraph of Rubio’s Senate bio says he first entered government “in large part because of his grandfather who saw his homeland destroyed by communism.”

The decades-old joke in Rubio’s hometown of Miami, a refuge for exiles who fled socialist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, is that it is the only city in the United States with its own foreign policy.

That quip no longer seems so facetious as a son of exiles who fled their homeland prepares to become America’s top diplomat. As secretary of state, Rubio could run point on devising additional economic sanctions on Cuba, increasing funding for dissidents and pro-democracy programs that Havana considers tantamount to regime change, and further restricting US travel to Cuba.

Under the Biden administration, the US again expanded flights to destinations across the island, opened up online payment systems to Cuban entrepreneurs and relaxed restrictions on US citizens traveling to the island.

Rubio though has been a fierce critic of Americans visiting Cuba, saying in 2013, “Cuba is not a zoo where you pay an admission ticket and you go in and you get to watch people living in cages to see how they are suffering … You’ve left thousands of dollars in the hands of a government that uses that money to control these people that you feel sorry for.”

Raising the issue of Cuba

Those who have studied his career say there is no more personal issue for Rubio than ending what he sees as a tyrannical dictatorship 90 miles from US shores.

As secretary of state, Rubio would be able to apply pressure on the island’s communist leadership and their allies much more directly. It would be hard for a country as tied to the US as economically as, say, Mexico, which has in recent months sent Cuba hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and paid the island to supply them with doctors, to ignore requests from a US secretary of state to cut support to Havana.

And while Trump has hobnobbed with authoritarian heads of state like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, he has not shown any willingness to do so with socialist leaders in Cuba or Venezuela, which could hurt his growing support with the Latino community in the US.

Further sanctioning the already ailing Cuban economy could backfire though.

“There are no plans that I’m aware of for what to do with a failed state 90 miles off US shores,” says Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group that promotes dialogue between the two governments. “Which is what Cuba appears to be approaching or at least seems to be much closer to becoming — a failed state — than a Jeffersonian democracy.”

Cuban officials, who until recently often derided the Florida senator as “Narco” Rubio, a reference to his brother-in-law’s cocaine smuggling conviction in the 1980s, have shrugged off the threat of further Trump sanctions but said they are open to negotiating directly with any US official, even Rubio.

Still, Cuba’s leadership has made it clear that no amount of US pressure will force them to hold multi-party elections or release political prisoners, as US administrations going back to Eisenhower have demanded.

“The results of these elections are nothing new for us,” Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel told state-run media in November following Trump’s election. “The country is ready. We will continue on, without fear, trusting that with our own effort, with our own talent, we can get ahead.”

But the worsening economic reality on the ground stands in stark contrast to that bravado.

On Wednesday, a month before Trump is set to take office, once again the lights flickered off in all of Cuba. The latest blackout, caused by a power failure at an aging, Soviet-era plant, was the third island-wide outage in as many months.