“You are a father. Do you think your children will see a rebuilt Syria in their lifetime?” asks the blonde journalist from 60 Minutes walking through the ruins on the outskirts of Damascus, accompanying a relaxed bearded president who seems to understand English and in front of whom you no longer have to cover yourself with a veil.
“Of course, we Syrians are strong” – he answers Ahmed al-Sharaa in Arabic with a smile. Fireworks explode under a full moon to celebrate the first year of freedom after the horror of the Assad regime. But is the new regime moving in the right direction?
Ahmed al-Sharaa is, in himself, the first great dilemma of post-Assad Syria: a former jihadist leader who passed through the orbit of Al Qaeda and of Islamic State (ISIS) as Abu Muhammad al-Jolaniwho formally broke with Al Qaeda in 2016 and ended up leading his organization’s metamorphosis toward Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS) and a governance model in Idlib that today seems to escalate to the entire country.
Al-Sharaa tries to establish himself as interim president, an ally of Washington and centerpiece of a new Sunni nationalist axis.
The mutations of acronyms and nicknames attest to a chameleonic and pragmatic character, with which he built a civil administration based on Islamic law (Sharia) in Idlib – with some revolts against it – and under the protectorate of Turkey, and a deliberate strategy of moderation in the rest of the country to survive politically and militarily after his arrival in Damascus.
Al-Sharaa’s political biography cannot be read as a Hollywood redemption, but as an opportunistic and strategic evolution in an ecosystem of chronic and catastrophic war.
The first year of Al-Sharaa is a kind of transition with an unstable balance, with real improvements and existential risks. Observers agree on palpable advances: more international legitimacy, an attempt at minimal institutionalization, a somewhat more breathable daily life – especially due to the increase in electricity supply – and a framework of anti-terrorist cooperation with the US that did not exist in these terms under the old board of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
The West may err on the side of using an inappropriate lens and turn Al-Sharaa into a myth of political redemption: The fascination with the former jihadist in a suit and tie can cloud the account of facts, incentives and correlations of force, as an analysis of Syria in Transition.
The Islamist knew how to take advantage of the moment: the two great supporters of the house of Assad, Tehran and Moscow, were absorbed by their war with Israel and the invasion of Ukraine, respectively. Added to this were the desertions in an exhausted army and an endogenously rotten state.
From Idlib, HTS forces left on November 29 and They arrived in Damascus twelve days lateralmost no real resistance. Assad fled furtively to Moscow, where he has been hiding from public light for a year.
The former jihadist entered Damascus amid cheers from the Sunni majority, repressed for decades by a supposedly secular regime dominated by the Alawite (Shiite) minority, to resurrect a country sunk in ruin, with more than half a million dead, and the territory divided into irreconcilable spaces: the Islamic rebel Idlib, Damascus loyal to the regime, the Kurdish northeast, the Druze south with Israeli influence and the vestiges of the ISIS caliphate in the desert of Badia and embedded among the civilian population in poor neighborhoods of the cities.
Nine out of ten Syrians live below the poverty line, half of the pre-war population of almost 20 million has been displaced, and around 50% of infrastructure is totally or partially destroyed. The World Bank estimates the cost of reconstruction at more than 186.5 billion euros.
To close the circle, in November Al-Sharaa joined the Global Coalition against ISIS, its former comrades in arms, thus normalizing military cooperation that had already been underway since the fall of the regime, with eight joint operations between Washington and Damascus in eleven months.
The US objective is not only to degrade ISIS, but also to use that framework to build operational bridges with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) of the Kurdish northeast, which concentrates all the country’s oil wells, and push its integration into a national military architecture.
Aaron Y. Zelinexpert of Washington Institute for Near East Policyexplains to El Español that the greatest achievement of the interim government is having gained global legitimacy—with relevant exceptions such as Iran and Israel—and having generated “an international consensus that Syria needs to move forward.”
On the ground, a very concrete and socially decisive improvement stands out: electricity. Where the regime barely provided one or two hours of network a day in most areas, now the average is around 14 hours and in places like Aleppo it can occasionally reach 24. This type of change has a direct impact on the daily perception of normality after the collapse of the state.
However, Zelin highlights that Al-Sharaa faces a list of undeactivated mines and time bombs: the distrust of many minorities – after the massacres of Alawites on the coast and of Druze in Sueida – towards the government in Damascus, incapable of controlling their territories.
At the same time, Israel has carried out about a thousand strikes against Syria under the pretext of protecting the Druze. First order destabilizing variables.
The expert proposes an ideal scenario in which the SDF and the Kurdish Autonomous Administration would be integrated within the Syrian State in a kind of de facto federalism that would mean a solution without humiliation.
On the contrary, leaving this problem in limbo creates the perfect opportunity to perpetuate internal violence and proxy wars, even to a possible proxy war between Israel and Türkiye in Syrian territory, and opportunities for residual actors such as ISIS or pro-Iranian networks.
For its part, Devorah Margolinof the Washington Institute and specialist in terrorism and extremist violence, considers that the Al-Sharaa government has made significant progress: limited elections, efforts to reintegrate Syria into the international community, and now joining the counter-ISIS mission.
However, the hard core of their “gaps between rhetoric and reality” is organized around three points: talks with the SDF seem stalled; there is no real progress for Damascus to take over ISIS detention centers and prisoner camps in the northeast; and there is a lot of institutional construction missing, dependent on substantial sanctions relief, he tells this newspaper.
In his list of emergencies for the next 6-12 months there are almost textbook tasks of state reconstruction, in line with Zelin: integrate Kurds and Druze, prevent new episodes of sectarian violence, secure borders together with the US and regional neighbors, stop drug trafficking networks and weapons, and design a credible plan to custody of ISIS fighters and affiliates.
Ömer Özkizilcikan analyst at the Atlantic Council, indicates a very specific risk: the explosive file of Islamist foreign fighters and the economy as a geopolitical bridge. “If Al-Sharaa fails to integrate foreign fighters into the new state framework, that ambiguity can feed a recruitment pool for Al Qaeda or ISIS,” he explains to El Español.
Özkizilcik describes a parallel psychological war, with disinformation campaigns designed to attract these frustrated elements, and mentions the rumor that Al-Sharaa would hand over the Uyghur Islamists to China —denied by the Ministry of Information—as an example of how they are trying to erode the internal cohesion of the transition.
On the economic level, the Turkish expert sees potential in a Turkish-Qatari-American axis that could turn Syria into a commercial bridge between Türkiye and the Arab world. But it highlights the great obstacle: the sanctions of the Caesar Acttoday subject to temporary six-month exemptions that discourage long-term investments.
For reconstruction not to be an intermittent promise, that framework would have to disappear or be transformed in a more stable way.
The Syrian-British consultant Malik al-Abdeheditor of Syria in Transitionintroduces an uncomfortable but useful idea: Social peace as a truce has reached Syria due to exhaustion and the State does not yet exist. He emphasizes that many improvements in the last year do not respond so much to the strength of the new State as to collective exhaustion and the practical will of society not to return to the abyss of a bloody war.
Even his historic visits to the UN and Washington are the product of a diplomatic opening initiated by the previous regime. On the ground, the first thing that is observed is “greater freedom to speak and to associate than under the regime, although it is not perfect: there are worrying signs of emerging authoritarianism.”
Security has improved compared to the immediate chaos after the fall, but state control remains fragile and unequal.
At the political level, Al-Abdeh warns of a structural contradiction: Al-Sharaa must hold together its Sunni nationalist power bloc, some of whose members have committed massacres against other minorities (Alawites, Druze), and at the same time convince those minorities and the rest of the country (Kurds, Christians) that it will govern for all Syrians and not as the head of the victorious majority sect thirsting for revenge.
That’s the trap. The more you try to work with minorities, the greater the risk of attack from more radical Sunni Islamist factions, or even from Israel, as Özkizilcik also warns. Al-Sharaa cannot pacify Syria without diluting sectarianism, but neither can it consolidate its power without relying on its winning majority..
Al-Abdeh also recalls that remnants of the regime’s military apparatus continue to operate on the coast: “The war is not over”he asserts forcefully, “there are one hundred thousand troops under the Kurdish SDF, and the Druze factions also want to separate.”
The interim president faces the dilemma that if he gives privileges to one minority, another can also demand them. “The solution would be somewhere between hypercentralism and federalism.”
It also has an administrative metaphor to explain the distance between marketing and reality: the State displays new police cars, but in government offices there are no computers, all procedures are done by hand.