How will HTS rule Syria?

Yesterday we woke to the astonishing news that the rebels from the Syrian opposition had taken Damascus and President Assad had fled. The joy is huge and infectious, even if tempered with trepidation. In 2007, I was assured by a soldier in Damascus that the Ba’athist regime had the solidity of rock. That could be said to be the line Assad repeated throughout the civil war from 2012 onwards. Yet in a few days from 27 November to 8 December this year, opposition forces spearheaded by HTS – Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (‘the Organisation for the Liberation of the Levant’) – swept out of their bases in rebel-held Idlib and the Turkish controlled north, and the rock-solid regime crumbled to dust. Although its ideology of Ba’athism began with high principles, these had long since decayed through repression worthy of Stalin, combined with bribery at all levels and crowned by kleptomania at the top.