The Syrian regime dated back to the Baath Party coup of the 1960s. The government that emerged out of it undertook land reform and won a social base among the peasantry. When Hafez al-Assad seized power in a coup in 1970, he halted the radical redistributive measures of his predecessors and forged a state based on an alliance between an Alawite security apparatus and the Sunni bourgeoisie.

Hafez al-Assad’s regime provided basic social welfare services that protected the poor and working class from the free market and offered millions of peasants the chance to rise to middle-class life. In exchange, however, people were to surrender all political rights whatsoever. The regime was incredibly brutal and allowed zero dissent. Assad built a network of prisons that were truly fascistic in horror. So there was a perverse social compact that underpinned the Hafez regime: a modicum of economic redistribution for the poor, in return for accepting extreme dictatorship.

When Bashar al-Assad assumed power in 2000, that model was fraying. He launched a wave of neoliberal reforms that dismantled the welfare state while not undertaking any meaningful political reforms. Now the only basis people had for supporting the regime was gone — they had neither economic security nor political rights. This led to the 2011 uprising, which was a mass peaceful movement composed primarily of working- and middle-class people.

Assad’s forces responded to the protests with brutality, opening fire into crowds and arresting and torturing tens of thousands. To defend themselves and their families, protesters picked up guns and formed rebel groups, broadly operating under the name the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The regime responded with a campaign that included the bombing and gassing of civilians.

In the beginning, the Assad regime’s loyalist base was Alawites and the Sunni bourgeoisie in Damascus and Aleppo. As the revolution militarized, the regime expertly exploited fears of various minority communities, such as Christians. People in these communities did not necessarily like Assad, but believed they would be exterminated if Assad fell. So by 2012, the regime’s social base comprised Alawites and other minority communities.

We should look first at the context in Syria before the revolution. The Assad regime had co-opted and eradicated the Left over fifty years, so what remained of the Syrian left was not rooted in working-class communities, and left-wing language was alien to these communities. Of course, Syria is hardly unique here — this is the story the world over.

Beginning in the 1990s, the regime allowed Islamic discourse to pervade society as part of its neoliberal turn. It encouraged the proliferation of Islamic charities to carry out the duties once performed by the state. Around the same time, millions of Syrians went as migrants to work in the Gulf and returned with a more Islamic outlook.

So by 2011, political Islam had become an authentic mode of expression among the Syrian working class. Still, at the outset of the revolution, the protesters were demanding a secular, democratic state. However, from the very beginning, there were two currents within the uprising. The majority were working-class people, often living in shanty towns ringing major cities or in small provincial towns. Their demands were for political freedom and a better livelihood. And a minority were middle- and upper-middle-class activists, often with university degrees, who focused primarily on demands for political freedom and saw class-based demands as secondary or irrelevant. This latter group was tapped into international NGO networks and adopted the Western neoliberal language of human rights and individual rights.

As the revolution wore on, and as towns and cities became liberated from the Assad regime, these two currents moved in different directions. The secular FSA rebels were corrupt and ineffective, and they did not offer an ideology that could paint for the poor and working class a positive vision of a different kind of society, where people’s needs would be met. It was the Islamists who offered a coherent program to respond to these grievances. They distinguished themselves from the secular rebels by being far less corrupt, and in areas they controlled, they prioritized issues like bread distribution. This is one important reason Islamists became hegemonic in the revolution.

So the dominance of Islamism in the revolution was not simply because of outside intervention — although foreign states, especially Turkey and Qatar, certainly pushed things along in that direction. It was due, ultimately, to the nature of the Assad regime and to the class divisions within the uprising itself.

There are few meaningful left-wing groups anywhere in the Middle East, and the reason for that is partly due to the failures of the Left, partly because of state repression, and partly because of the changing political economies. That means the Western left should not apply purity tests, but should analyze conditions on the ground based on a realistic understanding of the context. The Islamist rebels themselves are a mixed bag; some are truly reactionary, while others have moderated themselves and are meaningful vehicles for national liberation.

The Assad regime had nearly fallen twice before. In 2013, as rebels were pressing onto Damascus, the regime was saved by Hezbollah. The Lebanese group poured into the country and bolstered Assad’s forces while committing horrific massacres, including rape and beheadings. Then in 2015, rebels captured Idlib province and were threatening the coast, the heartland of Assad’s loyalists. This time, Russia intervened, with its air force dropping bombs that killed thousands of men, women, and children.

So the regime was quite weak all along. And in the years since the 2015 intervention, even as battle lines got frozen, it grew even weaker. The state was hollowed out and given over to what were effectively gangs and warlords under the auspices of various individuals connected to the Assad family and its henchmen.

The licit economy collapsed, partly due to sanctions and partly due to the impossibility of attracting investment. One of the regime’s chief exports was the illicit drug Fenethylline. The corruption in regime ranks was immense — absolutely nothing could move or happen without bribery. The regime’s conscripts were sometimes not paid or even fed. Communities such as the Alawites saw their boys on a conveyer belt of privation and death. The regime claimed to be part of the “Axis of Resistance” against Israel, but in reality it was little more than a gang with no ideology, centered on Assad and his family, in which everyone else — working-class Alawites, Christians, and so on — was cannon fodder. The only thing stopping an uprising from within Assad’s own social base was fear of the opposition.

This is the context for the events of the past few weeks. Hezbollah was greatly weakened by Israel, and Russia is embroiled in Ukraine. When rebels launched an offensive, the regime ranks dissolved. Bereft of Russian air support, and with zero morale, people simply refused to die for Assad. It was therefore the regime’s deep rot, not the opposition’s strength, that led to Assad’s collapse.

It’s too early to say, but one thing we know for sure: the Assad dictatorship was one of the most brutal regimes of the twenty-first century. Whatever comes next will be better than what came before. Syria has been mired in civil war for thirteen years, in which upward of 500,000 people were killed and even more were displaced. Now for the first time, there’s a real chance the suffering will end. And after fifty years of dictatorship, in which nearly every family knows someone who has been killed or disappeared by the regime, the sense of catharsis among Syrians is profound — even among Assad’s erstwhile social base.

Contrary to Assadist propaganda, there have been no massacres and no ethnic cleansing in former regime territories; in fact, Christian neighborhoods have been sites of joyous celebrations. In what are generally dark times around the world, the victory of the Syrian revolution is something every leftist, and indeed every human being, should celebrate.

None of that is to say that it’s all roses ahead. While HTS, the group leading the rebel coalition, has gone to great lengths to portray themselves in a positive light to Syrians and the world, it has a track record of suppressing dissent in Idlib province, the corner of the country it has controlled for the past few years. There’s no reason to expect that HTS will establish a democracy, unless they are forced to by popular movements. Meanwhile, another rebel alliance, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), is waging war on the Kurdish autonomous regions.

Whereas HTS is a disciplined and semiprofessional cadre force, the SNA are mercenaries and thieves. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have signaled that they will not support the Kurds, which means the autonomous zone will likely be overrun by the SNA. The possibility of Turkish-supported ethnic cleansing of Kurds in cities like Kobani is high. Finally, Israel is taking advantage of the situation to eviscerate Syria’s weapons depots — and therefore the country’s means of defending itself — while also possibly expanding from the Golan Heights to steal more Syrian land.

So many challenges lie ahead. But it’s important to keep in mind that for fifty years, it was effectively impossible to do politics, or be political, in Assad’s Syria. Only now, with the fall of the regime, can the struggle for democracy truly begin.