Is this the fall or the rise of Syria? Depending on where one stands, it foreshadows the answer to that question. Given the various interests involved, the different positions add complexity to understanding what is going on, the likely outcome and whether Syria is moving up or down.

For starters, many of the Syrian population are happy and optimistic about their future for the first time after decades of authoritarian rule. A rule that, at times, was brutal and totalitarian. The irony is that the liberators, who are a militia from a former Isis jihadist organisation, have been known in their past as even more brutal.

The further irony is that the United States was using Isis as a proxy in its battle against Iran and the Syrian regime under Assad. It’s hard to believe that the US or Israel anticipated Syria would fall almost without a fight in less than two weeks.

Many might have assumed this insurgency would have sparked a raging war with huge human casualties for several years. A united Syria was not what was expected, and has led to the next question of what a united Syria looks like today.

The new regime has reinstalled the former prime minister, as well as the former government apparatus. Oddly, Israel bombed the naval and army bases with 400 airstrikes, stripping away all the military assets available for the new regime to police and maintain security.

Turkey has a lot to gain, given there are several million Syrian refugees inside its borders, and has taken a new paternal role by supplying tanks, air defence systems and training for the new army.

Ideally, what emerges is a non-ideological democracy that recognises religious freedom and the equality of mankind. That ideal lay in stark contrast to both Isis and Zionism, which each support a religious statehood. The only compatibility they share is their idea of religious autonomy, which coincidently is the reason Israel supported Hamas originally to fight against the Palestine Liberation Organisation in its quest for a two-state solution.

In a strange way, modern-day Syria is a reincarnation of Palestine, except it has far more territory with a larger population and a huge economic engine boosted by oil reserves.

Yet the hope remains that the population chooses a democracy that is open and inclusive. At the moment, it is in the Syrian people’s hands, and it would be helpful if the rest of the world respected their right to self-determination and does not impede Syria’s progress because of other external concerns unrelated to its interests.

Syria draws its name from its glorious Assyria age of millennia ago that included it, Iraq, all of Israel, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt. But of late, owing to the Sykes-Picot Agreement that divided the former Ottoman Empire into nation states, Syria is a nation-state within defined borders.

In the grander scheme, the Syrian people — like all the people stretching from Constantinople to as far east as Iran and to South Medina and Egypt — are a people with a shared history of thousands of years stretching back to the Bronze Age. It has been a history of tremendous rivalry, but also the birthplace of several global empires. One can only imagine that Turkey, like many others in the region, sees this latest development as a trend towards reunification.