Making Sense of Syria: Can the Nation Rebuild After Assad?

Rebuilding Syria was never going to be an easy process, but four months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, you would be well within your right to believe Syria is doomed. From brutal sectarian violence in the nation’s northwest, to growing mistrust of a leader with an exceptionally dark history, to the crush of international sanctions and the ongoing tug-of-war over Syria waged by more powerful nations, this fragile country faces a grim set of circumstances. Right now, it feels as if Syria sits on a knife’s edge, still capable of growing into something greater than it once was, but just as likely, if not more so, to descend yet again into madness.

Yet in 2025, just as it was throughout the Syrian Civil War and even before it, explosive headlines across the globe miss one absolutely critical fact about this nation. Syria, now as much as ever, is complicated, and the reality on the ground is far more nuanced than breathless and rightfully shocked global reporting would have us believe.

This analysis honors a request the WarFronts community made in the days after the fall of the Assad regime: to stay in tune with Syrian reconstruction, to watch affairs there closely, and, in time, to explore the process of rebuilding in all its detail. The aim here is to pull back the curtain, revealing not only the shock and horror of Syria’s recent ordeal, but the countless hopeful developments unfolding at the very same time.

Key Takeaways

In early March 2025, an estimated 1,600 or more Syrian civilians, the vast majority of them members of the Alawite minority, were massacred in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus, in violence amounting to ethnic cleansing.
The massacres were deliberately provoked: pro-Assad insurgents attacked the Sunni population first, triggering a swift, predictable, and brutal reaction from government-aligned security forces and opportunistic civilians.
A pro-Assad insurgency, possibly directed by hidden Major General Suhail al-Hassan, persists across Syria, while ISIS exploits weakness in the northeast and Israel maintains an indefinite occupation in the south.
A landmark mid-March deal will integrate the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into Syria’s state institutions, reunifying a vast swathe of the country.
Polling published by The Economist found roughly 70 percent of Syrians feel positive about the country’s future, even as Western sanctions, mostly unlifted, threaten to strangle the recovery before it can take hold.

The honest assessment is this: nothing currently afflicting Syria dooms the country, but the path to recovery is narrowing by the day, and whether it stays open depends on choices being made right now by both Syrians and the wider world.

Did the War Actually End?

Did the Syrian Civil War ever actually end? It is a fair question, and one that can be answered several ways. Yes, it ended: Bashar al-Assad has been ousted, Damascus has been claimed by a new government, and the situation across Syria is fundamentally different from years of civil war. Or no, it didn’t: the conflict, always multidimensional and chaotic in terms of who is fighting whom, is still ongoing, and only the details of who fights whom have changed.

Either answer is justifiable, as is the argument that Syria has entered a liminal space between civil war and not-civil-war. But it is largely semantics. Call it the civil war or don’t, the thing happening in Syria today is an ongoing cycle of low-grade violence in several directions at once, with the potential to spiral out of control in entirely new ways. To understand that violence, one must start with the aftermath of the massacres of early March.

The Massacres in Latakia and Tartus

Starting on March 6, 2025, units from the state security forces of the Syrian transitional government, along with government-allied militias and civilians operating independently or in groups, massacred an estimated 1,600 or more civilians in the coastal provinces of Latakia and Tartus. The vast majority killed were members of Syria’s Alawite minority, the same ethno-religious group to which the deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad and his father Hafez belonged. Across roughly a week of intense violence, hundreds of security forces and hundreds of pro-Assad insurgents were also killed. But the bulk of the bloodshed amounted to ethnic cleansing: the systematic extermination of Alawites, especially men and boys of fighting age, but also women, children, and the elderly.

One clarification must be made with total firmness. At no point in the effort to understand, contextualize, and explore these massacres and their aftereffects can any of the violence be justified. There is a massive difference between understanding why atrocities happen and excusing them.

Understanding is vital; excusing is not something WarFronts is interested in, whether the perpetrators are factions in Syria, Russian or Ukrainian troops, the IDF or Hamas, or any other party in any conflict. With that established, the focus here is on the context and the response, rather than a day-by-day account of the killings themselves, which has been covered in prior WarFronts reporting.

The Loyalist Insurgency and a General in Hiding

The Alawite massacre was not the first sign of trouble in Syria’s northwest. Regime loyalists had been active since the days after Assad fled, and loyalist ambushes of Syrian security forces began in Tartus as early as mid-December. Those attacks grew more brazen and effective as the weeks wore on. By February, loyalists were launching frequent attacks on checkpoints, ambushing pairs or small groups of soldiers loyal to the interim government, and conducting targeted assassinations against a range of targets.

These insurgents are called loyalists because they are remnant factions of the Assad regime, though the depth of their personal loyalty to Assad himself is debated. Regional experts, working with disparate scraps of information, have concluded the forces appear to be directly loyal to Major General Suhail al-Hassan. Al-Hassan spent years as one of Assad’s most effective and favored generals, even seen as a potential successor. He is now in hiding and has not been seen since the fall of Assad, but he is thought to be coordinating perhaps thousands of regime loyalist soldiers, including a high proportion of former special-operations personnel.

This matters because of a crucial distinction. The average Syrian soldier before Assad’s fall was underequipped, undertrained, and quite possibly conscripted against his will. But the best soldiers of the old regime were highly competent operators, often with the deepest loyalty and the most to personally gain from the system that empowered them.

A Powder Keg in the Coast

In the weeks before the massacres, violence ran both ways in Latakia and Tartus. Soldiers of the new government and allied militias carried out arrests, assassinations, and raids against loyalist factions they could track down. The geography is essential here, because these two provinces are where Syria’s Alawite population forms a local majority. The area has long been a center of power for the Assad regime, and a place where insurgents fighting for Assad’s cause could expect real local support.

But Syrian Alawites are not an ideological monolith. Many detest the Assad regime and always have. At the same time, many do harbor a lasting fondness for the dynasty, and many owe their personal and community wealth to well-compensated positions within the sprawling Assad-era bureaucracy. That mixed reality fed two dangerous perceptions at once: it convinced loyalist factions they would draw more public support in the area, and it convinced other Syrian communities that Alawites are uniformly loyal to Assad and uniformly hostile to anti-Assad factions, when that simply isn’t true.

That combination created a powder keg. In the aftermath, it has become clear that the spark that blew it up was entirely deliberate.

The Spark and the Reaction

The pro-Assad insurgency was operating largely out of highland areas, harder to track in large numbers, and as cells in population centers where fighters could blend in and work in a highly decentralized way. Those same areas were patrolled by security forces under the new government, an organization that must itself be understood.

The new Syrian military is a patchwork. It brings together fighters from a wide range of ex-rebel factions with varying ideologies, backgrounds, motivations, and priorities. These fighters are now nominally under the control of the interim government, but the truth is far more complicated. With Assad gone, the government inherited a situation in which tens of thousands of ex-rebels were already organized into their own fighting groups, with their own armament and their own agendas.

Left unchecked, that is a recipe for all-out anarchy.

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The government’s answer has been to offer those groups a place as members of, or semi-autonomous partners with, the new security forces. But that is very much a band-aid solution. Because of internal ruin and international sanctions, Syria cannot provide salaries to most of these ex-rebels. Because of ongoing violence, decentralization, and in-group loyalties, it has not been able to offer large-scale training.

As a result, fighters have remained loyal to their own commanders, who found their own ways to compensate them. When those commanders pursue a course of action unsanctioned by Damascus, the transitional leadership has little means to stop them. The danger is even greater with semi-autonomous, generally pro-government militias that Damascus controls even less.

The pro-Assad insurgents demonstrated a profound ability to exploit exactly this dynamic. In a wave of attacks immediately before the massacres, insurgent factions appear to have deliberately targeted the Sunni Muslim population in Latakia and Tartus, the same ethnoreligious group to which a large proportion of the nation, and especially anti-Assad factions, belong. The response by security forces was swift, reactionary, informed by deeply held resentment against the Alawite community, and entirely predictable.

Who Carried Out the Killing

Two ex-militias integrated into Syrian security forces appear to have played an outsize role in what followed: the Suleiman Shah Brigade and the Hamza Division Brigade, each with a known history of committing other atrocities as recently as 2023. They were joined by a range of nominally pro-government militias, firebrand Islamist and pro-Turkish factions that had integrated into the government, and foreign fighters. Mixed in were other groups with little or no direct connection to the government, along with ordinary civilians who grabbed weapons, traveled to the coast in groups or alone, and took advantage of the chaos to exact indiscriminate vengeance for old wounds.

Local fundamentalist imams, militia leaders, and others inflamed the violence through rhetoric, while firestorms of online disinformation accelerated the carnage further. The results were horrific: mass killings of Alawites, the use of torture, mass arson, mass looting, and a range of other crimes against humanity, amounting to an act of ethnic cleansing.

How Culpable Was the Government?

Explaining what happened is not the same as excusing it. Understanding the sequence is the only way to form a reasonable personal or policy response, and the most important open question has been just how culpable the transitional government was.

There were unquestionable failures. The government allowed groups with a known recent history of atrocities to operate on its behalf in an armed role, in an especially sensitive region. It proved unable to stop the violence for far too long once it began. And it failed to get ahead of an explosion of sectarian violence that was entirely foreseeable.

But the gravest possibility would be that the government chose to let the violence continue rather than simply being unable to stop it, or, worse, that it actively facilitated it.

A full month after the massacres began, it is still not fully certain that the government did not do exactly that. Yet both at the time and afterward, the vast majority of Syria experts agreed the transitional government did not act to inflame or knowingly permit the killings. This is not merely academic opinion. Internationally, countries that supported all sides of the civil war, and that operate at cross purposes more broadly, all declined to place blame on the interim government, presumably informed by far better intelligence than is available in the public domain.

The notable exception was Israel.

The government has made repeated commitments to fully prosecute everyone involved and appears to be taking early action, though, like everything else it must do, it operates with very little bandwidth. Insurgent leaders, meanwhile, have publicly taken credit. As one Alawite insurgent commander wrote on March 18: “Our first round was a round of revenge for our people and martyrs, not a battle of liberation. With simple capabilities and small numbers we destroyed our enemy’s entity.

He did not realize this and took revenge by killing women and children. It was a tour of blood triumphing over the sword.”

No Better Alternative

Even if the transitional government was truly not complicit, it was utterly incapable of stopping or preventing what happened, and that is damning in itself. But ousting the current leadership in response would be counterproductive, because there is no clear better alternative to lead Syria right now. There are options that might be marginally better or worse, and there are options that would be apocalyptically bad for everyone. That is about it.

Most diplomats and regional experts have either stayed quiet or openly admitted that some degree of retributive violence across Syria was to be expected. Every group in the country now carries its own deep scars from nearly a decade and a half of war, and modern history is littered with examples of mass bloodletting just like this. The real question is what Syria’s leaders do in the aftermath.

Foreign powers have made clear that the nation’s future hangs in the balance. European envoys visited Syria during the height of the massacres and impressed upon the interim foreign minister that, unless the fighters perpetrating the killings were dealt with, there would be no international support for the new government. A spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry, asked what French envoys conveyed in Damascus, said: “The abuses that have taken place in recent days are truly intolerable, and those responsible must be identified and condemned. There is no blank check for the new authorities.”

A Community Living in Fear

In the weeks after the worst violence subsided, it became clear the pro-Assad insurgency would not vanish. In the final week of March, fighting flared repeatedly, including a large-scale loyalist attack on a police station in Latakia city, several ambushes in and around Tartus city, and multiple security raids on insurgent hideouts. The insurgency is not confined to the two coastal provinces. Across the country, pro-regime cells are appearing, launching ambushes, raids, and sabotage, including in and around the capital, Damascus.

At the same time, the transitional government has taken early steps to make things right with the Alawite community: agreeing to release detainees, suspending arrests of people who pose no imminent threat, and working with Alawite community leaders to have excess firearms and ammunition handed over in areas that do not support the insurgents. Still, a high proportion of Alawites now live in deep fear of the interim government, and fairly so. Under Assad, Alawites were told constantly that if the regime fell, retributive attacks against all of them would follow, a message that bought Assad a measure of loyalty even from people who disagreed with his treatment of other Syrians.

Now those worst fears have come true. The insurgency can lean on the Alawite community more heavily and position itself as a protector against a government that cannot be trusted not to commit ethnic cleansing again.

ISIS and the Fight in the Northeast

Beyond the coast, violence continues elsewhere, starting with the persistent threat of ISIS. Since the destruction of its landholding caliphate, ISIS remnants have waged a pragmatic, asymmetric campaign against all parties to the conflict, and even before Assad’s fall they were rapidly regaining strength. Despite the intermittent deaths of senior figures, the group runs extortion rackets against rural civilians, ambushes and steals oil tankers, and uses targeted assassinations to establish local dominance where government control is practically nonexistent.

During March, ISIS launched attacks against the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast, including numerous assaults on checkpoints and patrols and pointed strikes on specific SDF officials. SDF fighters captured several ISIS commanders and low-level fighters, at times alongside US troops, and the group lost its emir of operations in Syria and Iraq to a targeted airstrike on Iraqi soil. The jihadis remain undeterred, forcing several large skirmishes in recent weeks. Sensing weakness in the SDF’s position, ISIS appears to be pushing toward the prospect of jailbreaks for its nearly ten thousand detained fighters in SDF custody, along with tens of thousands more people with ties to the organization.

The SDF-Damascus Deal

The SDF, however, recently secured an agreement with Damascus that should be a major boon to both the Kurdish-led paramilitary and the larger autonomous government of northeast Syria. In mid-March, the SDF agreed to join Syria’s new state institutions, integrate its civil and military apparatus into Syria, concede the oil and gas fields it controls, assume direct control of border crossings in the northeast, and fold its paramilitaries into the Syrian defense ministry.

The announcement was a major victory for both sides. The Kurdish-led government gains the protection of a sovereign national government, while the interim Syrian administration reunifies a very large swathe of the country. Some details remain to be settled, and full implementation will take the better part of a year, but it is a massive development.

It also frees Kurdish fighters from other obligations to better wage their counterinsurgency against ISIS. For months after Assad’s fall, Kurdish forces stood on high alert for a potentially massive Turkish assault, but thanks to separate developments in Turkey, those fears now appear unlikely to materialize anytime soon, allowing forces in a defensive posture to resume their work.

Turkey, the Tishreen Dam, and Ongoing Clashes

Even so, Turkish-backed forces have continued to clash intermittently with Kurdish forces after the deal was announced. The clashes center on battle lines near the strategically critical Tishreen Dam and have been accompanied by attacks from Turkish-backed groups against Kurdish civilians and journalists involved in the effort to secure the dam. Recently, an attack by as-yet unidentified assailants enabled a prison break in an area controlled by Turkish-backed militants, with numerous inmates, including Kurdish fighters, ISIS militants, and violent criminals, escaping a detention center.

The fighting between the SDF and Turkish-supported forces has yet to resolve in north-central Syria, even despite the broader developments in both Syria and Turkey that would ordinarily be expected to bring it to a close.

Israel’s Indefinite Occupation

In southern Syria, Israel has made good on its promise of an indefinite occupation of lands south of Damascus. After expanding into that territory in the days following Assad’s fall, Israel has slowly and incrementally enlarged it and launched an ongoing air campaign against targets across the country. The occupation is highly controversial, drawing condemnation from much of the world, including traditional allies of Jerusalem, while gaining support from advocates who argue Israel is a vital stabilizing force.

Some of Israel’s early actions did prevent what could have been a massive loss of life. Its first waves of airstrikes as the Assad dynasty crumbled, and some strikes since, targeted what Israel claimed were stockpiles of chemical weapons held by the regime. Assad’s government was indeed known to have created and deployed chemical weapons during the civil war, and ensuring nobody could use them amid the chaos of the collapse may have averted devastating chemical attacks.

Israel’s stated objectives in the south appeared straightforward: securing a buffer zone and nearby strategic points to prevent a spillover of violence, preventing Iran-backed groups from reconsolidating smuggling lines, and protecting Druze communities. Still, those acts constituted a land invasion of a sovereign nation, a major problem in itself, widely condemned as a land grab that uses the safety of Druze communities as a convenient pretext. Yet on paper, at least early on, there remained room for an outcome that minimized harm, did not interfere too badly with reconstruction, and resolved in the relatively near future.

Why Disarming Syria Backfired

Four months on, it has become increasingly clear that Israel’s occupation seems likely to continue indefinitely, and that it has real potential to destabilize Syria for the long term, as in many ways it already has. Consider the destruction by airstrike of much of the former regime’s military equipment. That is equipment nobody would want falling into the wrong hands, and in the early days of the rebel takeover, when there were few guarantees about how the new authorities would behave, its destruction functioned as an insurance policy against far worse violence. The March massacres have even been cited as a retroactive justification: how much worse would the killing have been if Syrian forces had heavier weapons?

That argument misses a larger set of problems. Reducing the new Syrian military to an organization fighting with little more than the weapons of a non-state insurgency means that when an actual insurgency emerges, it fights something much closer to a peer adversary. That hands insurgents enormous tactical and strategic advantages, makes them far more effective as an asymmetric force, and forces the government to deploy its troops, including the less trustworthy ones, in ways that put them into far greater contact with civilians.

It emboldens not just pro-Assad insurgents but groups like Hezbollah, organized criminals, and ISIS, letting them level the playing field. And destroying Syria’s military infrastructure does not magically create a better alternative government to lead the country.

Pushing Syria Toward Turkey

There are larger geopolitical problems too. One thing Israel did not want was for the new Syrian government to fall in with Turkey as an international backer. The transitional government was initially inclined to resist Turkish influence and create distance with Ankara, but its lack of military power, and therefore its inability to guarantee its own security, forced it to accept Turkish influence to a far greater degree than it appeared to want.

Israel’s determination to keep Hezbollah and other Iranian-backed groups from gaining a foothold in post-Assad Syria is consistent with its prior actions across the region, but it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of internal dynamics. The groups that led the rebel coalition into Damascus have been bitter enemies of Hezbollah and other Iran-sponsored militias for a long time. By all accounts, the new transitional government would have been more than happy to root them out and deny them Syrian territory, potentially without Israel needing to urge it. Now, the government has neither the military equipment nor the goodwill toward Israel that such an arrangement would have required.

Druze Communities and Resistance in Daraa

Even where Israel has framed itself as a defender of the Druze, it faces growing opposition from local fighters with a long history of defending their own villages. On Wednesday, April 2, the governor’s office of the southern province of Daraa acknowledged that at least nine locals had been killed in firefights as Israeli forces advanced on a town called Tall al-Jabiye. According to sources in the area, those locals were civilian volunteers trying only to defend their town.

Israel framed the men as militants guarding “terrorist infrastructure,” but those claims conflict starkly with reports from locals long part of the resistance in Daraa. The death toll later rose to eleven, with five critically wounded.

Local mosques in Daraa began calling people to arms to resist future Israeli advances, while the provincial government warned that public anger was nearing an all-time high. The last time an unwelcome force ignored boiling public anger in Daraa, local militias launched a large-scale, semi-organized campaign to kidnap soldiers and intelligence officers of the Assad regime, forcing the release of detainees. These local groups are creative, capable, and bold.

That same day, Israel launched another wave of airstrikes against military bases and infrastructure, and its defense minister appeared to accuse the transitional government of planning to let Turkish troops establish bases on Syrian soil. Syria’s leaders have accused Israel of deliberately undermining their efforts to rebuild, a claim Israel rejects out of hand. Israeli claims of protecting Druze civilians do still carry local weight, especially after the Alawite massacres, when Syria’s Druze community condemned the government and rejected future cooperation with Damascus.

Led by the spiritual leader of Syrian Druze, Hikmat al-Hijri, who called the government “extremist in every sense of the word,” much of the community has signaled it prefers Israeli protection. But like the Alawites, the Druze are not a monolith, nor are they anywhere near the only ethnoreligious group living in this part of Syria.

A Constant Deluge of Violence

Sporadic attacks continue across the country in every direction. Former Assad officials and ex-soldiers are liable to find themselves assassinated by government-aligned forces, neutral armed groups, or civilians acting entirely on their own. High-profile Assad-era commanders and civil leaders occasionally surface, some detained, some killed, others vanishing again. Local skirmishes are common as old grudges are settled the hard way.

Syria’s long-thriving drug trade, primarily the production of captagon, has been subject to near-constant raids by security forces, who have at times been met with violence. Kidnappings remain common across several regions, carried out by armed factions, criminal gangs, and local militias seeking an edge in small, self-contained conflicts. Those taken are frequently summarily executed, their bodies sometimes found bearing signs of torture.

The country is littered with unexploded ordnance that detonates when disturbed, often killing civilians. Weapons caches are identified and confiscated at such a high and continuous rate that it implies an incredible amount of work still to be done. All of it arrives in a constant deluge, with no indication so far that it will stop anytime soon.

Notes of Hope: A New Cabinet

The violence is not the only story. Across the nation there are real and genuine reasons to hope that Syria and its people can find a brighter future. The vast majority of internal and international experts believed continued violence was inevitable after Assad’s fall, but most of those same experts have stressed Syria’s potential to rebuild despite it. Nations everywhere have endured times like these only to build back into something greater after a long, painful, but ultimately successful reconstruction.

Syria can still do the same, though there is no guarantee it will.

Start with the announcement of the full cabinet that will oversee the transition. The personnel transitional president Ahmed al-Sharaa chose have been treated as a measuring stick for how inclusive this government will be, and the cabinet he put forward was encouraging. Of 23 available seats, over half, a total of 14, went to members with no prior links to Sharaa’s former rebel group or the old regional government in Idlib. Just four cabinet members were former members of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, though those four hold the posts that form Sharaa’s inner circle: the ministers of defense, justice, foreign affairs, and the interior.

A Christian, an Alawite, and a Kurd each gained seats, alongside 19 Sunni Arabs. Notably, just one cabinet member is currently under international sanctions, as opposed to Assad-era cabinets in which a majority of ministers were sanctioned. Women were poorly represented, with only one, the new minister of social affairs and labor, but the cabinet was rich with technocrats and figures with only minimal links to Sharaa, if any.

Leaders Coalescing and a Cautious Constitution

The cabinet was one of a recent series of positive signs as the nation’s civil leaders begin to coalesce around the transitional government despite the challenges. The inauguration ceremony was attended by major Christian and Druze figures, as well as the new leader of Syria’s Islamist legal council, a moderate widely accepted by the public. The government is slowly filling with figures who have called for the dismantling and aggressive prosecution of ISIS and al Qaeda, the integration of the Syrian economy into the Western order, and the inclusion of every major group in society. Sharaa even removed his own brother from the post of health minister, a sharp contrast to the Assad regime’s nepotism.

This government is expected to serve for five years, during which a final constitution will be adapted from an interim one passed earlier in the month. The five-year window has raised eyebrows, but recent positive signs suggest the delay reflects a desire to do the process right rather than to extend the government’s hold on power. The interim constitution separates the branches of government and creates an independent judiciary, and it is expected to serve Syria well for a couple of years so long as it remains interim and is not made permanent. Substantial concerns remain about both the powers it hands directly to Sharaa and its identification of Islamic law as “the main source” of new legislation, but the true impact of either provision can only be revealed with time, and the makeup of the cabinet appears to have the potential to counterbalance them.

What Ordinary Syrians Believe

Despite the extreme hardship of the post-Assad era, ordinary people appear optimistic. According to polling collected and published by The Economist, a full 70 percent of Syrians say they feel positive about the country’s future, and an even greater share, 80 percent, say they feel freer now than under the Assad dynasty. Around 80 percent also hold a positive view of Ahmed al-Sharaa personally, despite his past, while two of every three Syrians say their country’s security situation is improving. Crucially, this data was gathered both before and after the March massacres, reflecting an enduring confidence despite that major setback.

As The Economist put it: “Such numbers must be read with care in a traumatized country with little experience of free speech. But they suggest that, despite deep divisions, not least between the Sunni Muslim majority and the once-dominant Alawite minority, Syrians still trust Mr Sharaa to try to rebuild the country.”

Elsewhere, a return to normalcy has begun. Oil tankers have started to dock again, the first allocations of money to rebuild infrastructure are going out, international flights are resuming, salaries are starting to be paid, and humanitarian aid is arriving in growing volumes. Foreigners granted citizenship for fighting for the Assad regime are being weeded out.

The interim government has been praised by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons after leading an inspection team to several chemical weapons production and storage sites, some previously unknown to the Western world. Doctors Without Borders is reaching areas it could not access for years, the Ministry of Justice is working with Interpol to hunt war criminals, and electricity, water, and internet infrastructure are being restored.

Security Is Genuinely Improving

As ridiculous as it might sound to say, the security situation in Syria is improving. The alternative since 2011 has been nationwide civil war, and as bad as things are now, the combination of gradually reducing violence, a gradually strengthening transitional government, and gradual movement toward reconciliation gives Syrians real reasons for hope. Nor has every situation that might have ended catastrophically actually done so.

In one instance, after three Syrian soldiers were killed in Lebanese territory and the transitional army responded with artillery against local smugglers, the Lebanese and Syrian armies ended up poised for a ruinous clash. Instead, both sides worked out a ceasefire within a day. While disputes over the shared border continue, Lebanon and Syria have kept the peace and taken mutual steps to draw down Hezbollah-led smuggling operations in the area. It is a small victory next to the sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing elsewhere, but progress is progress nonetheless.

The Sanctions Stranglehold

One outstanding challenge is the crush of Western sanctions, most of which have yet to be lifted. These are holdovers from the Assad era. International policymakers were within their rights to fear that Sharaa and Syria’s new leaders might use foreign financing to entrench tyrannical rule, but it has now been so long that the sanctions themselves are starting to undermine Syria’s chance at success.

Iced out from the global financial system, barred from foreign investment, and all but unable to trade, the interim government has precious little wealth. Civil servants are mostly unpaid, and so are the new security forces, depriving Damascus of a key point of leverage to make those forces actually listen in the future. Without relief, the transitional government will be sharply limited in what it can accomplish, and every day of stagnation is another day for the nation to sour on a government that has momentum right now.

As The Economist argued: “Relief could be offered in a way that lets sanctions snap back, should Mr Sharaa ever be tempted to turn Syria into a despotic jihadist state. For now, though, Syrians seem to believe his protestations that he is planning no such thing.” Right now, Syrians are waiting for their government to rebuild a nation, but with no money to do it, the transitional government is forced to leave its people to fight for scraps, because a future with more than scraps cannot arrive until things change.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Here lies the central risk: that the perceived impossibility of Syria’s recovery becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The ongoing violence, the pains of reconciliation, the horror of the massacres in Latakia and Tartus, and the risk of further decline are all critical problems. But none of them doom Syria. None place the nation in a position from which it cannot recover, through time, smart leadership, international cooperation, and a great deal of luck.

The only thing that ensures Syria cannot recover is for Syrians and the international community to fail to work toward recovery.

World governments are doing exactly that right now, combining punishing financial measures with a near-complete lack of initiative, making it harder for Syria to escape this post-war purgatory. After the unspeakable tragedy of Syrians killing Syrians, a portion of the nation is understandably uninterested in working with Damascus, and after what they have suffered, they have every right to refuse. But the majority of Syrians are ready to work with the transitional government despite its profound flaws and the fresh scars inflicted on the nation.

There is still a path toward true reconciliation and true reconstruction for a country that has earned a rebirth through blood, tears, and incredible pain. But that path is narrowing by the day. If every party in Syria, and every world nation that touches it, stays the current course, Syria will not get there.

Is the Syrian Civil War over? Maybe, maybe not. But it should be, and it can be. If Syria’s next decade is as tragic as its last, the bitterness will be sharper for the knowledge that things did not have to be that way. And if that is what happens, it will be because this moment, the one in front of us right now, was wasted.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What happened in the March 2025 massacres in Latakia and Tartus, and who was responsible?

An estimated 1,600 or more civilians, the vast majority Alawites, were massacred over roughly a week beginning March 6, 2025. Pro-Assad insurgents deliberately attacked Sunni populations first, provoking a swift, brutal reaction from government-aligned security forces, allied militias, and civilians acting independently. The vast majority of Syria experts concluded the transitional government did not deliberately orchestrate the killings, though its failure to prevent or quickly stop them is widely considered a damning failure.

Who is Major General Suhail al-Hassan, and what role does he play in the ongoing insurgency?

Al-Hassan was one of Assad’s most effective and favored generals and a potential successor. He has not been seen since Assad’s fall but is believed to be in hiding and coordinating the loyalist insurgency, which includes a high proportion of former special-operations personnel. Because these are among the most capable soldiers of the old regime, the insurgency poses a far greater tactical threat than the average conscript army it once was.

What is the SDF-Damascus deal, and why does it matter for Syria’s future?

In mid-March, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces agreed to join Syria’s new state institutions, integrate their civil and military apparatus, concede oil and gas fields, take control of northeastern border crossings, and fold their paramilitaries into the defense ministry. Damascus reunifies a large swathe of the country, while Kurdish fighters gain sovereign protection and are freed to refocus on countering ISIS. Full implementation will take about a year.

Why is Israel’s occupation of southern Syria considered destabilizing rather than stabilizing?

Israel’s destruction of the new Syrian military’s heavy equipment left the government fighting insurgents and groups like ISIS at near-parity, handing those adversaries enormous tactical advantages. The occupation also forced the transitional government to accept Turkish influence it had wanted to resist, while Israeli advances near Daraa have killed local civilian defenders and sparked mosque calls to arms. The occupation has also undermined the goodwill that might have allowed Syria to cooperate willingly against Hezbollah and Iranian-backed groups.

Why are Western sanctions now threatening Syria’s recovery rather than serving their original purpose?

The sanctions are holdovers from the Assad era that have not been lifted. With Syria cut off from the global financial system, barred from foreign investment, and largely unable to trade, the interim government has almost no wealth, civil servants and security forces go mostly unpaid, and Damascus lacks leverage over its own forces. The Economist argued that relief could be structured to snap back if al-Sharaa ever turned Syria into a despotic jihadist state, but without relief, every day of stagnation weakens a government that still has genuine public support.