Kyle Orton reflects on his recent visit to a Syria still adjusting to life after the fall of Assad.
There was something inescapably surreal about visiting Syria at the end of February. This was not supposed to have been possible. The crushing of the rebellion in Aleppo in late 2016 by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, backed by Iran and Russia, might not have ended the war in the sense of terminating the fighting and dying entirely, but the outcome seemed settled. Then in December 2024, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Al-Qaeda derivative in control of Idlib, the last pocket of insurgent-held territory, broke out of its besieged enclave and headed towards Aleppo. Intending to rearrange the frontlines in the north and expecting to meet a counter-attack, the insurgents instead found the regime coalition melting away. Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah had disabled the key emergency-response force Assad could call upon, and within ten days HTS was in Damascus. The capital had surrendered without a fight, Assad had fled into exile, and the historical verdict of the Syrian rebellion apparently rendered eight years earlier was overturned.
The large number of Syrian families on the flight from Istanbul surely reflected the Turkish government’s policy of ‘encouraging’ as many refugees as it can to go home. But this cynical aspect was not all that was going on. It was also a manifestation of the optimism many Syrians have felt about their country since December: nobody would bring this many children and elderly relatives to a place they thought was dangerous. The desire of Syrians to return to homes and families they thought they would never see again was palpable. A middle-aged man in the queue at passport control was brimming with excitement as he explained his plans to visit his mother, who he had not seen in person for twenty-five years and whom his children had never met.
Stepping out from Damascus International Airport, the advertising billboards are all adorned with the colours of the revolutionary flag – green, white, and black. Those revolutionary flags fly over central spaces like Umayyad Square, are displayed on many doors, windows and balconies of private homes, and even decorate the concrete road barriers. The old flag associated with Assad – red rather than green – remains only where it was painted on walls and shop shutters, and doubtless it is only a matter of time before these emblems are scrubbed away. That one US dollar exchanges for about 13,000 Syrian pounds leaves no doubt about Syria’s economic difficulties. Nonetheless, the stalls at the Hamidiya Souq were full and it was quite a struggle to get through the crowds of shoppers.
My first conversation struck a more sombre note. Uncertainty was the man’s main concern, and uncertainty was to become an abiding theme of the trip. Specifically, he wanted to know what Syrians were supposed to make of Ahmad al-Shara, the new interim president. A former Islamic State (ISIS) emir, Al-Shara had come into Syria leading an ISIS front group, Jabhat al-Nusra, and subsequently defected to Al-Qaeda before publicly abandoning them, too. These shifting allegiances made my interlocutor sceptical of Al-Shara’s recent pivot to speaking in moderate and inclusive tones to the Western press, especially when set against the more concrete record of Al-Nusra’s atrocities. ‘You can see the videos of him executing people’, he added. The videos that circulated a month earlier were actually about the HTS justice minister, but point taken. On the other hand, it was perhaps significant that our conversation took place on a public street, in front of Umayyad Mosque, with masked HTS militiamen not 200 yards away, and the man showed no flicker of fear; no attempt to lower his voice and no glance over his shoulder.
One source of hope for Syria is the return of those of her citizens with experience in democratic countries and higher educational qualifications. They can provide a counter-balance to the Islamists in the transitional political process and perhaps most impactfully they provide technical competence in managing the economy. During the time I was in Syria, a National Dialogue Conference was held. Many complained at how hastily it had been arranged, its briefness, and the lack of solid outcomes. It was considered a positive sign, though, when one participant tried to give Al-Shara the kind of over-enthusiastic greeting Assad used to expect at public gatherings, and was swiftly shut down by the withering looks of the other participants. Eliminating cults of personality from Syrian life would be an excellent start.
Among the participants in the dialogue was an industrialist who had left Syria but kept a low enough profile in the regime’s time that he was able to work in the country. Becoming a convinced libertarian while abroad, he now returned to participate in the National Dialogue, trying to advance, among other things, a 10 per cent flat tax and the selling off of Syria’s bloated state companies. He was not much afraid of HTS’s Islamism. At lunch, one of our party asked if they could get a beer, and it was with evident delight he replied: ‘Of course you can, it’s a free country’. The Islamists, indeed, were seen as something of an ally in economic reform, since the classical texts they work from are quite well-disposed to capitalism – he had the Hadith quotes to prove it. There is also the broader fact of Syria’s degradation over decades under various forms of socialism; surely it would be agreed the time had come for a change. Still, he was aware that a full Hayekian reformation might encounter some resistance, so he had prepared fallback positions, but he felt it was best to stake out maximalist demands and negotiate from there.
Farah al-Atassi, a Syrian-American activist and entrepreneur, has emerged as a prominent public figure in post-Assad Syria. Another participant in the National Dialogue, she is well-connected in both her homes and is able to be something of an unofficial channel between the US political scene and the ‘former HTS,’ as she insists they should be called now Al-Shara has formally disbanded all armed groups outside the national army. Al Attasi speaks passionately about the crimes of the fallen regime, and the need for national unity in the new era: ‘We have lots of Alawites and Christians in the opposition.’ She is strikingly optimistic about developments since December.
She is also regularly the face of municipal events. And when she was called away to one such, we were invited to tag along. It was quite something to see Al-Atassi in a ‘Make Syria Great Again’ baseball cap opening an equestrian competition for young people at the old headquarters of the Fourth Division, one of Bashar’s praetorian units led by his younger, particularly brutal, brother, Maher al-Assad, the whereabouts of whom are currently unknown (rumour has it he is in Iran). Adding to the slightly oneiric quality of the occasion, after being introduced to some of the military officials and ministers in attendance, I was tapped on the shoulder by an old friend I have not seen in person since before COVID. Small world.
In Damascus, the standout sense is how normal everything feels. Which is remarkable for a city where fighter jets flying overhead, on their way to strafe insurgent-held districts, had been a fact of life not so long ago; where whole districts still lie in rubble; and a half-century-old governing system collapsed three months ago. The presence of armed young men in masks dotted around landmarks is the most unusual thing, and you soon get used to that. They do not interfere with passers-by and are not intimidating. The concern of Damascenes that HTS was going to use its cadres to impose a harsh version of the shari’a have not come to pass: the pubs are open at night and it was not difficult to find a café serving food on the first morning of Ramadan.
The worries about the slowness in setting out a roadmap at the level of high politics were acknowledged by all, yet tempered for many by a feeling that HTS had shown itself to be quite pragmatic: the original attempt to import the Idlibi coterie around Al-Shara to govern the capital had been abandoned quickly, and some of the lower level technocrats from the Assad era were being brought back to keep the state running. The societal exhaustion with violence was felt to be a bulwark that pushed things toward peaceful compromise. The accommodation reached, whereby ‘secular’ spaces were not encroached upon and Islamic norms like not eating in public during Ramadan were respected, was a microcosm of this. The economic picture was seen as the most pressing crisis, but even there a ready answer seemed to be available in the lifting of Western sanctions on Syria, something urged by every side in Syria.
This general sentiment was shared by the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Ignatius Aphrem II. Studying in Europe and Britain, and becoming a bishop in America before he became Patriarch in Syria in 2014, Aphrem was nearly assassinated by an ISIS suicide bomber in 2016, but refused the offer of security from Assad – he dealt with the old regime as far as necessary for his community and no further, he says. He showed little sign of the stress he has endured. Engaged and good humoured, his reservations that Al-Shara is ‘talking to the world, but not to us,’ and about the deficiency of some of the HTS officials who came from Idlib, are, as he noted, widely shared across all sects. Aphrem was adamant: ‘We refuse to speak about the protection of Christians,’ because this creates the invidious situation of bringing Syrian Christians under the patronage of foreign states and sets them against the rest of the population.
Aphrem advocates for a ‘civil state’ and a constitution that protects all citizens, declaring himself ‘cautiously optimistic’ that the present course will result in a ‘better Syria’ along these lines. That said, there were hints of doubt. The foreign jihadists that came into Damascus at the ‘very beginning’ after HTS took over on 8 December waved the Black Standard in Christian areas and tried to provoke confrontations by calling for conversions to Islam, he said. One of the Syriac Bishops contacted an HTS commander and the foreigners were reined in, then most of them were sent back to Idlib. To that extent, Aphrem was reassured, but foreigners remain in the HTS government, especially its army, and the main anxiety is ‘the unknown’. The possibility that the peaceable present is borne of incapacity alone, and will be transformed once HTS consolidates its rule, hangs over Syria. In this vein, Aphrem highlighted the calls from some in the HTS camp to enforce the law on the books that would sentence people to three years in prison for eating in public during Ramadan. As we discovered for ourselves, the HTS leaders have not acted on this call. The point was that Christians in practice obey this law anyway and everyone knows that, so the Patriarch found this aggressive and unhelpful in such a ‘challenging time for all of us‘.
One of the foreign fighters remaining in the capital is Amin Dakaev, also known as “Harun,” a Belgian of Chechen origins wanted by Interpol. In his uncertainty about what was next, Dakaev echoed the Patriarch, as he did in his ostensible commitment to a Syria for all Syrians, with the glaring caveat that Dakaev believes the shari’a is the best system for safeguarding the minorities. While Dakaev has a non-threatening demeanour – he is gentle in appearance and softly spoken – his very presence is a complicating factor in the new Syria. That one can now easily meet foreign jihadists in the centre of Damascus disturbs many Syrians, as he knows. Twice in our conversation, Dakaev mentioned that people are “scared” of people like him and the Russian-speaking comrade sat beside him.
The darkest view of the situation as it stood in late February came from Bahur Chamntoub, one of seven Jews left in Syria. Chamntoub, a popular local celebrity, has an ebullient manner even in delivering bad news. Chamntoub was pleased that the surveillance and harassment of the Assad regime had been lifted; he could never have met with Westerners in the old days. But he was disappointed HTS had, in his perception, sided with the former intelligence official who holds the key to his synagogue (the Assad state kept the keys to all the synagogues and regularly prevented Jewish worship).
It was other minorities, though, that Chamntoub said were suffering most. At a lower level, Chamntoub said a Christian liquor store in nearby Bab Tuma had been smashed up by HTS militiamen in recent days, and more serious was the killing of Alawis, the esoteric sect from which the Assad family originates and which formed the backbone of the old regime’s military. He said he knew of a steady campaign against Alawi civilians on the pretext of fighting regime remnants, including the killing of a family in Homs the previous night, and he feared that if this carried on the Alawis would not have a place in Syria.
Visiting the Syrian coast in late February, the provinces of Tartus and Latakia, where most of the Alawis live, this could seem alarmist. The area is largely untouched by the war and seemed to be ticking over normally. There was a similar story to Damascus, where abrasive foreign zealots had come in initially and then been quickly withdrawn. The remaining HTS presence was relatively light and unobtrusive, with HTS operatives around the Russian naval base and airbase, and manning some checkpoints through the major towns. The only outward sign of something amiss, paradoxically, was the scale of the display of revolutionary flags in Tartus. It felt more like warding than public decoration.
Indeed, it is clear from those who know the coast best that the Alawis have been expecting mass-killings and expulsions to be visited on them since the day the regime fell. This psychological background is what makes the massacres of hundreds of Alawi civilians by troops under HTS authority over the past week, a horrendous addition to Syria’s bloodshed in themselves, so dangerous to Syria’s transition. The turbulence on the coast began with regime remnants ambushing security forces of the new government, and local reports suggest the murders of Alawis that followed were largely carried out by the Turkish proxy Syrian National Army (SNA) groups, foreign jihadists, and Sunni civilians – forces over which HTS does not have full command and control. However, the SNA and foreigners are formally answerable to the HTS defence ministry and the pogroms took place in the context of an announced HTS military operation. The details about what precipitated the carnage and exactly who was responsible notwithstanding, the Alawis are likely to conclude that their nightmares are coming true. The risk is this perpetuates the violence by inducing Alawis to take actions they perceive as defensive and most other Syrians see as an attempt by the old regime to recover power.
‘The best day after a bad Emperor is the first,’ wrote Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians. In the immediate aftermath of a tyrant, all can share in the feeling of liberation and all hopes for the future are still theoretically possible. Amid the hard work of constructing a new order, choices have to be made and limitations acknowledged, frustrating the ambitions of many – and that is before the inevitable disasters. The enormity of Syria’s trauma after fourteen years of civil war left little chance of a smooth transition, but for three months things went almost miraculously well. The agreements HTS has reached with the Kurds and Druze in early March are positive signs Al-Shara is keeping to his promised political approach, though any hope of sanctions-relief has probably been delayed. More worrying is the reintroduction of violence as a tool of politics, the existential dread driving Alawi decision-making in directions that have the potential to make their worst fears a self-fulfilling prophecy, the opportunities therein for chaos agents like Iran and Russia, and the mutually reinforcing character of sectarianism
Whether these challenges can be contained remains to be seen.
