The unforeseen and unforeseeable end of the Assad era, almost a year ago, presented Syria with a momentous new beginning. It’s not hard to imagine how 54 years of family rule — more than half the history of the country as a modern political entity — weighed heavily on Syrians, almost breaking their backs. It appears heavier yet when we consider that the last 14 years of that “abad” (an Assadist notion one might translate as “eternity”) were brutally violent and destructive.
It’s useful to examine the challenges facing Syria today against the background of three previous beginnings. The first — the beginning of beginnings — came with the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, which for the first time in history marked the contingent, indeed artificial, appearance of Syria as the name of a modern nation-state. The second came with independence in 1946 after World War II and the fall of European colonial empires. The third was that of the regime of Hafez al-Assad in 1970, who would bequeath his position as a suprahuman leader to his “narcissistic” and “psychopathic” son, as Farouk al-Sharaa, Syria’s foreign minister from 1984 to 2006 and vice president until 2014, called Bashar al-Assad in a recently published memoir. Other students of Syria may map the country’s history differently, but I think the beginnings I have just sketched out are the most consequential ones.
When the Assad regime was overthrown with such ease in a mere 11 days, many Syrians characterized it as a miracle. It surprised everybody, even the “liberators” themselves. Wide swaths of society had lost hope of change years before, and in the months preceding Operation Deterrence of Aggression — the offensive launched in late November 2024 by armed opposition factions led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) — they saw regional and international powers normalize their relations with the Assad regime, albeit reluctantly in some cases.
So Dec. 8, 2024, came to many as a gift from heaven (or heaven’s agents). The liberators were Islamists who were originally Salafist-jihadists affiliated with al Qaeda. In 2016, they started something like a “perestroika” process, but HTS remained an umbrella coalition of conservative and authoritarian Sunni militants. Idlib, the small Syrian governorate that the Islamists seized in 2015, can be seen in retrospect as a hotbed of sorts. It was a base for militants well versed in arms, well disciplined and with a powerful motivation: a combination of religious zeal, anger at the Assad regime for targeting their social environments and a sense of communal solidarity (“asabiyyah”). In Operation Deterrence of Aggression, they were joined by factions of the Turkish-backed fighters from the Free Syrian Army, corrupt and far less disciplined armed groups that had been instrumentalized by Turkey in the areas under its control in the northern part of the country, inhabited by Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs alike.
The first challenge facing the new Syria comes from the complex interaction of the ideological composition of the rebels and the freighted legacy of the Assad regime. Here, one can discern an irresistible dynamic of concentrating power in conservative Sunni hands, which can be explained by a deep-seated sense of vulnerability and insecurity among the ranks of the Sunni majority. But this tendency runs counter to reckoning with the legacy of the past, which requires a broader national coalition. Sectarianism is one of the Assad regime’s most venomous legacies. In consolidating his regime in the 1970s, Hafez al-Assad assigned people he trusted — especially fellow members of the Alawite community — to key posts in the security apparatus and to military units with security functions. He justified this on the grounds that the country’s Alawites had been marginalized and discriminated against in previous generations and centuries, which was true. In its long decades in power, the Assad family transformed sectarianism from prejudice, narrow-mindedness and parochialism into a basic dynamic of the production and reproduction of power, with the state as its generator.
On this level, the Ahmad al-Sharaa regime seems to be a continuation of the Assad regime. Its rationale is also similar: securing power. The “Sunnification” of post-Assad Syria derives from an entrenched sense of Sunni victimhood that has gained currency in Syria (and the broader region) since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
This founding contradiction of the present political era in Syria is already a source of social tension, and is responsible for the massacres on the coast in March and in Sweida in July. The new government’s personnel seem to be unaware of how significant the toppling of the Assad regime was — it represented a second independence, with all the challenges of building a nation, especially cultivating national unity. A possible reason for this lack of awareness is their instinct for monopolizing power, bolstered by the fact that they hardly know Syria’s history beyond a few hackneyed cliches. Their political imaginary is Islamist rather than nationalist, and their knowledge of modern world history is quite slim. Against this background, politics tends to dissolve into visionless, cunning games of maneuvering and gambling. Al-Sharaa seems to be a bold gambler who might lose it all while trying to win everything. Fidel Castro once said that the Cuban revolutionaries had made a revolution bigger than themselves. In a way, this applies to the people in power in Syria now. It is quite probable that they will reduce Syria’s stature, for it is doubtful that they will rise to the occasion of the great changes that the country has undergone, even though they were its agents.
So far, the new team has prioritized regional and international normalization, getting sanctions lifted and making progress on the economic level over pacifying the country and sending positive signs to other Syrian communities (with the prominent exception of the Christians). By concentrating power in the hands of a certain Syrian genos (a Greek term for tribe, race, dynasty — inherited rather than voluntary bonds — ethnic, religious and sectarian groups in the Middle Eastern context), the country’s new rulers have not only alienated wide sectors of non-Sunni Syrians, but are following along the same path that Hafez al-Assad paved two generations ago. I think of the genos as opposed to the demos: While the latter is the collective agent of democracy, the genos is the agent of genocracy, of religious, sectarian or ethnonationalist rule, and can even pave the way to genocide.
The existential problems that Syria is facing today — divisions and separation on the one hand and Israeli interventions and expansion into Syrian territory on the other — are related in different ways to the “genocratic” formation of the new power.
The priority of being recognized as legitimate rulers corresponds to some recurring tropes in Syria’s history after independence, Syria’s second beginning. The country was notoriously unstable, suffering from many coups, often with foreign involvement. That was the time of the early Cold War, the establishment of Israel in Palestine and at the expense of its people, and what the late British journalist and author Patrick Seale called “the struggle for Syria” among regional and international powers.
The country’s political and military elites were divided and unable to solve their own or the country’s problems. In 1958, Syria separated from itself in favor of a union with Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser. The United Arab Republic was dismantled by yet another coup in Damascus, in September 1961. The first Baathist coup happened in March 1963, and failed to stabilize the country. This would be achieved by the third Baathist coup led by Hafez al-Assad in 1970. Supporters of the latter, among them Seale himself, who authored a book titled “Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East,” would say that he transformed Syria from a playground to a player. True — but Syrians were relegated to a passive crowd whose sole role was to cheer the ruthless leader.
Many of those who did not enjoy the game were arrested, tortured and even summarily executed in the first wave of violent struggle in the country that took place around the end of the first decade of his rule. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, genocidal massacres were introduced for the first time in Syria’s modern history. Tens of thousands of people were killed in that wave (at the Aleppo Artillery School massacre in 1979, the Tadmur Prison massacre in 1980 and the Hama massacre in 1982, among others). Syria was transformed into a permanent exhibition of the leader’s images, statues and sayings. Starting in the mid-1980s, talk of eternal rule was impressed on people’s minds. In 2000, this would take the form of installing Bashar al-Assad in place of his deceased father.
A decade after Bashar assumed the presidency, a second round of violent struggle erupted in the country, with a death toll that exceeded half a million. The country once again became a playground for many states and substate actors. Assad’s Syria, which since the mid-1970s had exported violence beyond its borders to Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, and against Palestinians, started to import violence from outside, with Iran, the U.S., Russia and Turkey all intervening to put boots on the ground in Syrian territory. In addition, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the PKK and various Shiite militias from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan (sponsored and patronized by Iran) were present in the country. Sunni extremists from dozens of countries poured into Syria starting in late 2011. Israel started bombing in Syria whenever it thought suitable, starting in early 2013, targeting Iranian military facilities (or those of Iran’s satellites).
I offer these remarks to indicate that Syria’s history between the second and fourth beginnings (the first and second moments of independence) had a pulse-like rhythm, whereby it imported intervention before starting to intervene in other countries in its own right, then going back to importing interventions. Assad senior, the systole, sent violence outward, a trend that would be turned inside out in his son’s days: Violence was imported, and with this diastole the Syrian heart completed a full beat before its final failure in late 2024.
Today, Syria is an unstable and probably unstabilizable country because of a combination of external interventions and what I have called internal “exterventions” in the form of ethnic or religious communities requiring or being pushed to receive protection from foreign powers. This combination also characterized French rule in Syria, which justified itself with two complementary principles: protection of minorities (especially the Christians) and a “mission civilisatrice” (civilizing mission). The former principle descended to us from the days of the “Eastern question,” during the second half of the 19th century, when the predatory imperialist European powers started snatching parts of the Ottoman Empire and “altruistically” protecting minorities from the Muslim majority. This has proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the massacres of Damascene Christians in 1860 had shown (the historian Eugene Rogan discusses this in his 2024 book “The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Making of the Modern Middle East”).
The Middle East, of which Syria is an integral part, was formed through imperialist campaigns and occupation, and the issues of external interventions and internal exterventions are inscribed in the very DNA of its states. Syria has failed to deal with this chronic challenge, and the new regime has so far proved itself to be an additional failure.
Insecurity is presently rampant and multilayered, with many incidents of killings, abductions and disappearances taking place, some of them motivated by sectarianism or revenge. The security forces have a mixed record in dealing with the populace. In addition, the possession of arms and an acquired condition of delinquency among wide sectors of the population are converging to nurture societal violence. Syria suffered from a decivilizing process during the Assad eternity, a process that has extended into the first year of post-Assad Syria.
In addition to these structural problems, and as a direct consequence of long years of war and sanctions, Syria’s economy is in tatters, and with it the social conditions of the majority of Syrians. More than 2 million houses are wholly or partly destroyed. Close to 90% of the population lives in poverty, 25% in extreme poverty. The cost of reconstruction is estimated at between $250 billion and $400 billion. In September in New York, al-Sharaa’s estimate was between $600 billion and $900 billion. Not even 1% of this amount has been made available in this first year.
One menacing aspect of this problem is that between 2.8 million and 3.5 million children are out of school, and some of them have been so for many years. As I mentioned, part of the insecurity issue is connected to the delinquency of so many young people, some of whom are drug addicts. The neoliberal vision of the country’s current rulers will only aggravate the social problems. The combination of religious conservatism and bias toward wealthy and well-connected people is destined to promote instability.
Among the three principal problems facing Syria today — economic, security and political — I tend to prioritize the political. An inclusive political system is the prerequisite for successfully shouldering the heavy burdens of the past, for national reconciliation and for gaining the trust of possible international credit sources and aid agencies. Before all this, an inclusive and accountable political order will be the benchmark of a genuinely new beginning that would reward the long and bitter suffering of Syrians during the Assad eternity. So many expatriate Syrians, some of whom are highly qualified in diverse fields, would join hands if there were a sensible political system. That is not the case now.
The second problem is security. The problem here is that the security apparatus of the new regime is responsible for a great many sectarian crimes. It is quite doubtful that a disciplined army can be built from the factions that joined HTS and toppled the Assad regime. Some of these factions are foreign and have a jihadist mindset; some have a history of corruption and thuggery. The country’s internal security force — the General Security Service, as it is now called — has so far failed in combating crime and has also carried out torture and murders in its headquarters.
Economic and social issues are more likely to be dealt with rationally when governance is better regulated. Power corrupts, and only limiting power limits corruption.
Obstructions on the path to inclusivity go back to the legacy of colonialism, consolidated later by the long tyrannical rule of the Assads. In her book “How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs” (2020), the American historian Elizabeth Thompson has shown how the French and British mandates in Syria and Iraq weakened the liberals in both countries and led to a schism between them and the Islamists. The former cooperated with colonial powers, and the latter allied themselves with the populist Islamist groups.
The Baathist regimes in the two countries decades later would have a similar impact on the relationship between these two political orientations. Thompson agrees that the mandatory states were templates for future dictatorships in both countries. There were endeavors in Syria to find rapprochement between the two currents, but without tangible results. The Salafist Islamists who developed nihilistic tendencies after the uprising in 2011 are now exclusionary, even toward other Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood, while some liberals and secularists allied themselves to the murderous Assad regime, or are now trying to find foreign sponsors.
The space of independent and oppositional politics has been emptied in this way. Those who defend secularism resort to securitized states (which happen to be sectarian as well) against the Islamists, sacrificing democracy and human rights, and those who prioritize the struggle against dictatorship and for democracy propose undermining secularism for a broader coalition that does not exclude Islamists. Developing a constitutional Islamism and equally constitutional secularism is the challenge of today for an inclusive political system in Syria.
Now that we have a Sunni dictatorship in power, it seems that democracy and secularism can be brought together. One sees, however, growing nihilist tendencies among some of the secularists, even pushing to divide the country on ethnic and religious lines rather than having Islamists in power. The space for an opposition that struggles for inclusive and pluralistic politics is still empty.
These three challenges — economic, security and political — lie within the capacity of Syrians to solve, at least in part. Yet there are two problems that wholly challenge this capacity: the actions of Israel and the environmental issue.
The very day the Assad eternity came to an abrupt end, Israeli warplanes made hundreds of attacks on Syrian military capabilities, something that had not previously happened since Israel started bombing in Syria in early 2013. In 2025, Israel expanded its occupation into Syria’s territory, and every now and then Israeli patrols now arrest Syrians or impose curfews in some southern Syrian villages. A few days ago, on Nov. 28, the Israelis massacred 13 Syrians and injured many more in Beit Jin. They used the all-legitimating pretext for their heinous crime: An Islamic terrorist group was supposedly active there.
Previously, in July, Israel started to take on a traditional colonial “altruistic” stance of protecting the Druze community that was being targeted by the new government’s armed forces and paramilitaries. This traditional colonial conduct happened at a point when the Israelis were decimating Gaza and had been starving its people for close to two years. The Israelis know quite well that Syria is not a threat to their insatiable security needs, something which the new Syrian rulers have reiterated several times (as if they really think that Israel is worried about their intentions). Only recently was al-Sharaa able to say that the aggressive Israeli behavior is motivated by expansionist tendencies and not security needs.
Other than occupying more land, what the Israelis want can be described as a sort of conditioning of the new Syrian regime to consider the inferiority of their situation as a permanent state of affairs (as the Assad regime had done), as well as to force them to forget the occupied Golan Heights and confine any possible negotiations to the newly occupied territory. Israel’s internationally normalized extremism is most probably what lies behind the failure to reach a security agreement that was supposed to be signed when al-Sharaa was in New York last September, then again in Washington earlier this month. Syria shares with Palestine and Lebanon a long-term “istibaha” — the condition of being brutalized and left at the mercy of the most selfish politico-theological entity in the world. It is a desperate and despairing situation, one that has always nurtured nihilism in the whole Arab world.
One problem for Syria that is not well articulated by commentators is environmental. Last year, the rainfall was between 20% and 25% of the average, which is catastrophic for the agricultural sector, on which 45% of the population depends for a living. It has hardly rained this year, and last Friday there were calls for “salat istisqaa” — prayer for rain. Between 2006 and 2010, Syria suffered from a severe drought that affected 300,000 families, especially in the northern and eastern parts of the country, which have the highest concentrations of poverty and are the least developed regions (internal colonies, defined by three benchmarks: They are exploited economically, underrepresented politically and despised culturally).
Professor Marwa Daoudy of Georgetown University studied this in her book “The Origins of the Syrian Conflict: Climate Change and Human Security” (2020), aiming to disprove the climate change explanation of the Syrian revolution. Her work provides more efficient tools to explain the Syrian struggle. Yet Syria, along with other countries in the region, is suffering from a long-term tendency toward drier seasons, related to global environmental degradation. The country also suffers from a long-term mismanagement of water resources. Additionally, the geopolitics of water has played a negative role in Syria, with Turkey controlling the water level of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The Israeli-occupied Golan Heights are among the best watered and most beautiful sites in Syria. Finally, Syria lacks any demographic policies. In half a century, the population rose from 6 million to 23 million or maybe 25 million. The country cannot maintain its fatalistic position.
The situation today remains volatile, with no guarantees that Syria will survive. Again, we have something like a state of nature that began around the end of 2011, due to the regime’s brutal violence, the politically engineered weakness of the opposition and the inaction of the international community. Now, 14 years later, Syria really seems to be in another state of nature: Raw emotions are driving millions of people and diminishing the role of the more reasonable actors. Angry sectarianism is the dominant framework in Syria today. This Hobbesian condition calls for a new Syrian “social contract.”
Or, to put it differently, for peace to be possible in Syria, there should be justice for Syrians (social and political justice, as well as transitional justice). What is true regarding Israel and Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese is also true in Syria and for its people. Again, an inclusive political system — that is, political justice — is the basis for a permanent Syrian peace.