Syria feels close to a zone of anarchy

Travelling from Syria’s Highway 42, which runs from Tabqa to the city of Homs, you can see the corpse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Getting to Homs and from there to Damascus requires driving across 300km of desert. Once, huge and imposing checkpoints festooned with the symbolism of the regime greeted travellers seeking to reach Syria’s west from its tribal and Sunni south east. Now, the last position of the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces is 370 km from Damascus.

The first roadblock of Syria’s new rulers, the Sunni jihadis of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS), is about 100km from the capital. Between the two is an uneasy no man’s land. Ever’ few kilometres, one passes enormous, dead structures of the vanished regime, which held power from 1963 to December 2024. The Assads and the Arab Baath Party from which they stemmed from were keen on flags and symbols. So the Military Intelligence checkpoint on Highway 42 is a veritable riot of red, green and black.