The sound of celebratory gunfire filled the streets of Damascus in the hours following the collapse of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But the jubilant scenes at the weekend that greeted the end of half a century of tyranny could not mask the scale of the challenge facing the victorious Islamist rebels whose lightning advance on the Syrian capital captured the world’s attention. Those rebels – led by the group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) – must now try to unite a country cleaved apart by more than a decade of civil war, one in which dozens of heavily armed militias and remnants of the old regime linger. The chaos that followed in the hours after the capital’s fall gave a stark reminder of the enormity of that task. At least 28 people were killed by that celebratory gunfire, the Syrian health minister told Al-Arabiya news channel. Meanwhile, civilians broke into Assad’s…
