Is it conceivable that Assad would be less horrible than jihadist rebels?

The global ambivalence about Assad's fall reflects just how great the fear and loathing of Islamism is.

UPDATE: Early Sunday morning the Syrian army and rebel forces both announced the collapse of the regime of Bashar Assad, who appears to have fled the country.

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In 2012, then-President Barack Obama declared a "red line," warning that the use of chemical weapons by Bashar al-Assad’s regime would prompt direct U.S. intervention in Syria’s then one-year-old civil war. A year later, Assad’s forces unleashed sarin gas on civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, killing over 1,400 people. Instead of military action, what followed was a Russian-brokered deal to dismantle Assad’s chemical arsenal that, with American acquiescence, allowed him to survive.

This moment laid bare the deep ambivalence toward Assad's downfall that has persisted ever since, and is very much in the air this weekend, amid indications that the regime is crumbling. Ever since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, Assad clung to power with the fanaticism of a dictator whose only alternative may be the gallows. But even as the West decried Assad's atrocities, there was no rush to dismantle the brutal system he represents.

Now rebel forces appear to be closing in on Damascus — but in the West, and indeed in the wider Middle East, there is not much jubilation at the potential fall of a butcher. Instead there is fear, because the multifaceted rebel forces have a very strong Islamist component. So great is the fear and loathing of jihadism, and what political Islam has wrought in the past four decades or so, that even a ruthless and despicable tyrant seems to many the less bad option.

That was always the quiet calculation: Would the removal of a dictator lead to a better world – or unleash more chaos and extremism? Dictators, naturally, will always claim that their methods are needed for stability. And it isn’t always untrue: Saddam Hussein’s (bungled) ouster unleashed madness in Iraq.

That’s the question over the past week or so in Syria as rebels occupied Aleppo, the country’s second city, and then the town of Hama, in a stunning offensive – marking the collapse of a four-year-old Russian- and Turkish-brokered truce in northern Syria. There are reports that the military is crumbling, and of other groups seizing other towns, and speculation that Assad may flee. He may not make it through the week — but then again he might, perhaps with help from Iran and Russia, who are mulling options.

While few would mourn Assad himself, the unspoken reality is that many in the world community — perhaps even among his regional adversaries — may not be so enthused about a triumph by the rebels. Reflecting that, in a way, Donald Trump has called on the US not to intervene; an oddity of the American system, with the lengthy post-election transition.

Butcher though he be, the Syrian dictator has maintained some support both in the region and in his country – especially among the Christians and Druze, who fear persecution under Islamist rule. Assad’s secular regime has refrained from direct provocations against Israel, and seems sanguine about Israel’s continued occupation of the Golan Heights. The civil war destabilized Lebanon which took in hundreds of thousands of refugees, but has not spread to Jordan – a primary U.S. concern.