A daunting future Assad's murderous regime has fallen-but what will fill the void?

For once, use of the word "historic" is justified in describing the toppling of Bashar al-Assad's regime after more than 50 years of brutal dictatorship, 13 years of on-off civil war and a world of suffering.

- Simon Tisdall

The people of Syria, or most of them at least, are jubilant.

They should enjoy the moment. They deserve it. It recalls the celebrations that accompanied the fall of Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Yet such memories carry a warning and a threat.

The warning is that joy can quickly turn to tears, and liberation to renewed repression, should the sudden collapse of hated but relatively stable authoritarian structures trigger a descent into chaos. The threat is that the ensuing political and military vacuum will be contested by self-seeking actors interested not in justice and reconciliation, but power and retribution.

The beginning of the campaign to oust Assad can be traced back to Daraa, in south-western Syria, the scene of a popular revolt in 2011. In that context, the successful advance of the militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) from its base in Idlib, in north-west Syria, to the capital, Damascus, is a fitting ending: a popular revolution by the people, for the people. Yet no one can yet tell what kind of Syrian future is envisaged by the HTS leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, formerly an al-Qaida-linked jihadist and a wanted terrorist now rebranded as national liberator. HTS has a record of human rights abuses and authoritarian rule in Idlib.