'In the last week, there were no attempts to kill anyone'

Sitting in the police headquarters of Homs, in an office that, until last week, was run by the feared intelligence network of Bashar al-Assad, Alaa Omran is holding court.

- Bel Trew

A former regime police chief turned Islamist rebel commander, he faces an unenviable task: managing a tricky transition from five decades of brutal rule by the Assad family. Their stunning defeat, by a hodgepodge of rebels led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – a group that was previously aligned with al-Qaeda – has left a security vacuum that needs to be filled quickly. It is a quandary facing every city across Syria: who will rule and how?

Homs, Syria’s third city, is nicknamed the “cradle of the revolution”. It witnessed some of the fiercest battles of the 13year civil war – the scars of which are chiselled into many neighbourhoods.

Homs’s population is diverse, composed of Sunni Muslims, Christians, and the Alawite minority to which the Assad family belonged. Omran was recruited by HTS – which has spent years distancing itself from its jihadi past – to lead the group’s police force in a city in the northwest before Assad’s fall. Even he is somewhat bewildered by the calm here, although it is still tense.

“Because Homs has a wide variety of religions, we thought it would be difficult to control,” he says at his new desk, as his police force – a mixture of ex-rebel fighters and formerly displaced Homs residents – works downstairs to handle a myriad of complaints from anxious citizens gathered outside. “But now everything is under control. During the last week, there have been no attempts to kill anyone.”

Omran attributes the success of the extraordinary assault against Assad’s forces not just to military tactics and newly developed military hardware – there is much talk of new “Shaheen” (Falcon) drones – but to years of planning for the “day after”.