By Donald Gilpin

On the morning of December 8, Islamist rebel troops entered Damascus, Syria’s capital. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, ending his 24-year regime, which had followed his father’s 29-year rule. Ahmed al-Shara, leader of the rebel faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was formerly linked to Al Qaeda, has called for their terrorist label to be removed and for the U.S. and others to lift all sanctions on Syria. Many other countries, in addition to Iran and Russia, which withdrew their support for Assad shortly before the coup, are involved in Syria with various conflicting agendas.

“We don’t know how that will end,” said one of the experts at a December 17 panel discussion on “A New Era for Syria,” sponsored by Princeton University’s School for Public and International Affairs. That was a sentiment that all could agree on.

Offering a wide range of knowledge and perspectives, the panelists included Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs Dean Amaney A. Jamal, who also moderated the discussion; Deborah Amos, Princeton journalism professor and a longtime international correspondent at National Public Radio and elsewhere; Zaid Al-Ali, a visiting research fellow and lecturer at Princeton and the Senior Program Manager on Constitution Building for the Arab Region at International IDEA; and Marwan Muasher, who is vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the former foreign minister (2002-04) and deputy prime minister (2004-05) of Jordan.

The hour-long discussion included abundant information and insight about Syria’s current situation and the possibilities for its future. And the four panelists, despite their diverse backgrounds, were in agreement that the sudden fall of the Assad regime was not completely surprising, though the sudden rapid December 8 overthrow was totally unpredictable; that the future of the new regime is also impossible to predict, but more instability in Syria’s near future is likely; and that, as Amos said, “what happens in Syria doesn’t stay in Syria,” or in other words, Syria’s future will affect the future of the entire Middle East, as well as that of the U.S., which will be forced to get involved.

“Nobody could have guessed that the regime would fall now,” said Muasher, but he went on to speculate on the future. “Are we going to see a regime that is going to be inclusionist, and keeping in mind all the components of Syrian society? Or are we going to have an Islamist jihadist regime along the lines of Al Qaeda? The answer is not clear.”

He emphasized that neighboring countries and others would be involved for better or worse, and that the situation provides many opportunities for foreign involvement. “The new regime in Syria does need the international community. It’s a regime that wants to reconstruct Syria, wants its refugees back, wants the sanctions lifted.”

The international community, said Muasher, should “conditionally support” the new regime, with the conditions including that they incorporate armed groups into the army, that they have an inclusionist Syria, with a transitional government that includes all components of Syrian society: Alawites, women, Christians, Druze, and Kurds; and that they have elections in which the people of Syria choose their government representatives.

“There are a lot of ifs and contingencies,” agreed Jamal. “HTS has never run a state. It is an Islamic militant jihadist group. All outside parties are very skeptical of working with Islamists, even mainstream Islamists, let alone Islamist jihadists. Is reform of this movement possible? Can Al-Qaeda become statesmen to lead and usher in a democracy, a new order in Syria?”

Amos shared the uncertainty of her fellow panelists. “I don’t have a crystal ball,” she said, and she went on to discuss some of the unusual possible clues in the background of Al-Shara, who was born in Saudi Arabia and whose father was a highly educated oil engineer.

She described how Al-Shara grew up in the Middle East in a time of chaos, went to Iraq, joined Al Qaeda, was arrested and convinced the authorities he was Iraqi.

“Is he Al-Qaeda in his bones?” Amos wondered. “What jihadi do you know who has a suit in his closet? He wore one to the mosque last Friday. That’s almost unimaginable. There are interesting things to watch about him. I don’t know. I can’t make a prediction. He doesn’t feel like Osama bin Laden. He doesn’t feel like Mr. Baghdadi. But can he navigate a state? I don’t know.”

Also acknowledging the impossibility of making any valid predictions, Al-Ali did offer a more pessimistic perspective on the situation and its possible outcomes.

“I don’t want to start by being a Cassandra, but…” he began and went on to enumerate some of the factors stacked up against Syria and its chances for success. He emphasized the economic hardship, the displacement already of about 50 percent of the Syrian population, the continuing conflict in a country that is still divided with “a plethora of armed groups ready to use force to achieve their aims.”

Al-Ali also noted the new regime’s inexperience in governance, the sanctions currently imposed on Syria, and “a long list of foreign powers that have interests and military forces and proxies in Syria, some of which are still continuing to bomb at will.”

Hopes and fears, opportunities and risks, and a huge measure of uncertainty are rife in present-day Syria, the panelists agreed. As Jamal concluded, “To be determined.”