There was a brief moment after Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed last December when the impossible felt possible in Syria. As Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadists rolled across the country, facing little resistance, leaving civilians unharmed, and proclaiming they would govern for all Syrians, people who had feared their neighbors for a decade or more dared to hope that a different reality could emerge. Soldiers laid down their weapons, taking a chance on the rebels’ promises of amnesty.
The moment, sadly, quickly evaporated. By March, paramilitary groups allied with the new government were massacring Alawite civilians on the coast—spurred on by prejudice and rumors of regime sympathizers. Since then, initiatives that might have opened space for cooperation have repeatedly failed, not because the goals were impossible, but because each party assumed betrayal. More paramilitary violence has shaken different corners of the country. The new government has not directly reneged on its amnesty promises, but for many Syrians, its gestures at inclusion now seem hollow. A cold and familiar suspicion—between communities, and between citizens and the government—has again settled across the country.
Syria’s greatest shortage today is not money, weapons, or even leadership. It is trust. This is Syria’s Catch-22: consensus cannot emerge without trust, yet trust cannot be rebuilt without consensus. The result is a cycle in which every attempt at compromise looks like surrender, and every gesture of cooperation is interpreted as a trap. Until this dynamic is broken, no technical fix—not elections, not justice mechanisms, not aid programs—will produce stability and democracy, and the transition will remain stalled before it begins.
Decades in the Making
The mistrust that paralyzes Syria today did not begin with the collapse of the state in late 2024. It is the accumulation of a century of broken contracts. Under the French Mandate (1923–46), the Levant’s colonial overlords divided the region into six short-lived federated states—Greater Lebanon, Alawites, Jabal Druze, the Sanjak of Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Damascus. About half of these states had an explicit sectarian character, and the mandate years revealed both the promise and fragility of pluralism, since these states were supposed to function together as a federation. But France constantly denied Syrians’ petitions for equal treatment in the army, civil service, education, and health care, and for balanced development between city and countryside. Meanwhile, the Syrian urban bourgeoisie reaped the benefits of commerce while rural areas remained neglected. By the time of independence, Syrians had inherited a system in which every community suspected that any central authority would ultimately serve one group at the expense of the others.
Suspicion deepened in the decades that followed independence in 1946. The Ba’ath Party ruled unilaterally for sixty years under the banner of protecting peasants and workers. But once it sidelined the bourgeoisie through waves of nationalization, its true character emerged: it was a security oligarchy. It then turned on the last organized base of the old ruling class—political Islam, embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez al-Assad’s crushing of the Brotherhood in Hama in 1982, which killed tens of thousands of people, left scars of sectarian fear that never healed. The Assad regime thrived by amplifying these fears: privileging loyalist networks, cultivating the security services, and presenting itself as the only barrier to civil war.
When Bashar al-Assad’s forces met the uprising of 2011 with mass killing, torture, and siege, mistrust spread further. Entire communities were taught—by the Assad regime and rebel groups alike—to see their neighbors as either existential threats or collaborators with the enemy. Stories of solidarity—villages sheltering displaced families from “enemy” groups—were buried beneath propaganda that repeated one message: you are enemies.
By the time of the 2024 transition, Syrians were already burdened with two layers of suspicion: between society and authority, and between communities themselves. Tokenistic gestures at inclusion from the new rulers, even as they dismissed state employees en masse, only confirmed many Syrians’ beliefs that authority could not be trusted, and that every new regime only served its own people.
Stories of solidarity—villages sheltering displaced families from “enemy” groups—were buried beneath propaganda that repeated one message: you are enemies.
Even more destructive than Syrians’ mistrust of authority, however, has been the horizontal mistrust among Syrians themselves. The scale of massacres this year in Alawite areas—and other convulsions of violence like paramilitary attacks against Druze communities in al-Suwayda that started in July—told the citizenry that the state’s security capacity was broken and that communities had to fend for themselves. Groups that had coexisted with unease now view one another through the lens of betrayal and fear. Nearly all of the minorities carry deep suspicion toward the putative Sunni Arab majority. And even that supposed majority is a mirage, because the Sunni urban bourgeoisie fear that their rural counterparts, who are some of the new regime’s core constituents, could exclude them from power and impose an Islamist-technocratic hybrid type of rule, where militias overshadow institutions and power concentrates within a clerical-security elite. In different ways, both minorities and the urban Sunni elite share an anxiety that political change will mean domination by others.
Impossible Governance
The fundamental lack of trust in Syria today is most visible in violent episodes like the massacres in Alawite areas, but its consequences have spread to all aspects of governance.
For example, in the northeast in March, the new government signed a ten-point agreement with the local Kurdish authorities that promised a framework for decentralization. Yet the document remains frozen. Kurds fear absorption without rights, especially after watching what unfolded first on the coast and then in al-Suwayda; Damascus fears that even limited autonomy could set a precedent for disintegration.
The same dynamic pervades everyday governance. In Hama and other governorates, local militias (without objection from the new central government) have confiscated lands belonging to Alawite families in several villages, even though these communities had pledged allegiance, however halfheartedly, to the new government. Elsewhere, the new government has repeatedly denied communities’ petitions to help police their own towns. The state insists on imposing outsiders, fearful that any local role would weaken its monopoly on force. In the civil service, the government has dismissed and selectively reinstated employees based on loyalty, rather than competence. Minorities and opponents are left in limbo, further convinced that the state belongs to someone else.
Then there was the National Dialogue Conference of February 2025. The event was supposed to create a space for reconciliation, but felt stage-managed from start to finish: the new government hand-picked facilitators, pre-wrote outcomes, and carefully excluded dissent. Key political parties and entire regions were excluded. And a mere six-hour dialogue was offered to address a sixty-year national crisis. Even participants who had wanted to give the new authorities a chance left disillusioned. Local dialogue forums organized by pro-government civil society organizations followed the same pattern. Instead of building confidence, they convinced participants that dialogue was theater, and that participation only legitimized decisions that had already been made.
Mistrust as Political Reflex
The new government bears much responsibility for the lack of trust. Aside from failing to stop the violence on the coast or in al-Suwayda (or actually supporting it, as some critics allege), its efforts at inclusion have felt Potemkin to a broad swathe of Syrians. Key portfolios like investments and the interior are tied to security committees and special envoys, while civilian ministries like education and local governance are reduced to implementing commands. Meanwhile, security figures from the Assad regime have returned as advisers. New names appear in the president’s cabinet seemingly as decoration; for example, Kurdish scholar Mohammad Terko was appointed to be the minister of education in March, but seems to have no deciding power. That pattern is echoed in the relationship between the central government and regional and local authorities, who have no meaningful channels to give feedback to the central government, much less pressure it to change policy. At that, most local authorities are self-governed militias, and the central government has minimal control over them, anyway.
Syrians outside the government’s core constituency read between the lines. What looks like balance is tokenism. The structure of government, instead of inviting trust, teaches every community to expect betrayal.
The structure of government, instead of inviting trust, teaches every community to expect betrayal.
However, even if the government were to reform itself tomorrow, Syrians would, at this point, probably have trouble recognizing it—mistrust would guide the reaction. Therein lies the rub for Syria: the justifiable and well-trained political reflex of mistrust also precludes easy remedies. Whenever the government extends a hand in collaboration, the other approaches with fear—or with a knife hidden behind the back. Thus, the government shuts down any opening—a seat on a council, a role in local policing, a space in the civil service—out of fear that it will cause a crack in authority.
The consequences compound. In the security sector, the government’s refusal to integrate local forces fuels the very fragmentation the center fears; in the economy, land seizures and patronage hiring make investment a gamble; in administration, opaque purges signal that professionalism is irrelevant; in dialogue, staged conferences deepen cynicism.
Decentralizing Trust
The situation can feel hopeless, but there is a way out of Syria’s dark wood of suspicion. Mistrust sustains the conflict—a Catch-22 in which every side demands guarantees that only trust itself could actually create. Breaking this spiral requires justice and local trust, not new truces or imposed reforms. Thus, the solution must include the right institutional changes at the national level combined with small-bore, decentralized building of consensus at the local level.
Other postconflict societies have shown that such a process of healing is possible. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1996 after the end of Apartheid, offered acknowledgment without full punishment, and the country’s new constitution enshrined minority rights. In Italy after World War II, reconciliation between fascists and anti-fascists was deferred, but the adoption of a new constitution—in a process supported by the international community—gave all sides a common reference point, even if trust between groups took decades to build.
Other examples offer cautionary tales. In postwar Bosnia, the Dayton Accords of 1995 imposed peace but locked ethnic divisions into the very structure of the state; decades later, Bosnia remains fragile. And in Iraq after 2003, de-Ba’athification left hundreds of thousands excluded, humiliated, and armed, deepening mistrust between Sunni Arabs, Shia, and Kurds, while gutting the state’s capacity to enforce order—showing that purges in the name of justice can destroy intercommunal trust for decades.
For Syria, policies that cultivate trust must include greater decision-making power for the regions and localities, while guarding against the risks of centrifugal fragmentation. Communities need breathing room to negotiate trust at increasing levels of complexity. Trust cannot be decreed from Damascus, but it can be rebuilt in smaller, safer arenas where cooperation is less threatening and betrayal less catastrophic.
While the national government cannot build this trust itself, it does have a responsibility to enable the processes that will nurture it. That means empowering local institutions—municipal councils, business chambers, religious leaders, and civic associations—to govern transparently and inclusively within their communities. It also requires reframing dialogue: not as ceremonial gatherings orchestrated by the center, but as structured, locally grounded negotiations over security, resources, and representation, with the central government serving as facilitator and guarantor rather than gatekeeper.
In short, the country needs more decentralization—not full federalism, but an arrangement that allows local institutions to handle day-to-day governance, while the central state retains core functions. Such decentralization would give each community enough space to feel secure, without forcing premature unity that would collapse under mistrust.
These conversations will not dissolve mistrust overnight. But they will create new bases for cooperation: local accountability, shared economic projects, and gradually widening circles of negotiation. In a society where mistrust has become structural, only visible, incremental successes at the local level can build the framework for a national consensus.
But trust is not a gift that Syria can wait for the future to deliver, nor will it emerge spontaneously. Until Syrians learn to build trust among themselves—before authority, before justice, before security—the country will remain trapped in its loop of suspicion.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image Caption: Bedouin fighters are seen on the streets of al-Mazraa village in Syria’s al-Suwayda governorate on July 18, 2025, during clashes between a Bedouin tribe and members of the Druze sect. Source: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
Tags: middle, democracy, syria, Syrian civil war
A Catch-22 of Suspicion Imperils Syria’s Transition to Democracy
There was a brief moment after Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapsed last December when the impossible felt possible in Syria. As Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadists rolled across the country, facing little resistance, leaving civilians unharmed, and proclaiming they would govern for all Syrians, people who had feared their neighbors for a decade or more dared to hope that a different reality could emerge. Soldiers laid down their weapons, taking a chance on the rebels’ promises of amnesty.
The moment, sadly, quickly evaporated. By March, paramilitary groups allied with the new government were massacring Alawite civilians on the coast—spurred on by prejudice and rumors of regime sympathizers. Since then, initiatives that might have opened space for cooperation have repeatedly failed, not because the goals were impossible, but because each party assumed betrayal. More paramilitary violence has shaken different corners of the country. The new government has not directly reneged on its amnesty promises, but for many Syrians, its gestures at inclusion now seem hollow. A cold and familiar suspicion—between communities, and between citizens and the government—has again settled across the country.
Syria’s greatest shortage today is not money, weapons, or even leadership. It is trust. This is Syria’s Catch-22: consensus cannot emerge without trust, yet trust cannot be rebuilt without consensus. The result is a cycle in which every attempt at compromise looks like surrender, and every gesture of cooperation is interpreted as a trap. Until this dynamic is broken, no technical fix—not elections, not justice mechanisms, not aid programs—will produce stability and democracy, and the transition will remain stalled before it begins.
Decades in the Making
The mistrust that paralyzes Syria today did not begin with the collapse of the state in late 2024. It is the accumulation of a century of broken contracts. Under the French Mandate (1923–46), the Levant’s colonial overlords divided the region into six short-lived federated states—Greater Lebanon, Alawites, Jabal Druze, the Sanjak of Alexandretta, Aleppo, and Damascus. About half of these states had an explicit sectarian character, and the mandate years revealed both the promise and fragility of pluralism, since these states were supposed to function together as a federation. But France constantly denied Syrians’ petitions for equal treatment in the army, civil service, education, and health care, and for balanced development between city and countryside. Meanwhile, the Syrian urban bourgeoisie reaped the benefits of commerce while rural areas remained neglected. By the time of independence, Syrians had inherited a system in which every community suspected that any central authority would ultimately serve one group at the expense of the others.
Suspicion deepened in the decades that followed independence in 1946. The Ba’ath Party ruled unilaterally for sixty years under the banner of protecting peasants and workers. But once it sidelined the bourgeoisie through waves of nationalization, its true character emerged: it was a security oligarchy. It then turned on the last organized base of the old ruling class—political Islam, embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez al-Assad’s crushing of the Brotherhood in Hama in 1982, which killed tens of thousands of people, left scars of sectarian fear that never healed. The Assad regime thrived by amplifying these fears: privileging loyalist networks, cultivating the security services, and presenting itself as the only barrier to civil war.
When Bashar al-Assad’s forces met the uprising of 2011 with mass killing, torture, and siege, mistrust spread further. Entire communities were taught—by the Assad regime and rebel groups alike—to see their neighbors as either existential threats or collaborators with the enemy. Stories of solidarity—villages sheltering displaced families from “enemy” groups—were buried beneath propaganda that repeated one message: you are enemies.
By the time of the 2024 transition, Syrians were already burdened with two layers of suspicion: between society and authority, and between communities themselves. Tokenistic gestures at inclusion from the new rulers, even as they dismissed state employees en masse, only confirmed many Syrians’ beliefs that authority could not be trusted, and that every new regime only served its own people.
Even more destructive than Syrians’ mistrust of authority, however, has been the horizontal mistrust among Syrians themselves. The scale of massacres this year in Alawite areas—and other convulsions of violence like paramilitary attacks against Druze communities in al-Suwayda that started in July—told the citizenry that the state’s security capacity was broken and that communities had to fend for themselves. Groups that had coexisted with unease now view one another through the lens of betrayal and fear. Nearly all of the minorities carry deep suspicion toward the putative Sunni Arab majority. And even that supposed majority is a mirage, because the Sunni urban bourgeoisie fear that their rural counterparts, who are some of the new regime’s core constituents, could exclude them from power and impose an Islamist-technocratic hybrid type of rule, where militias overshadow institutions and power concentrates within a clerical-security elite. In different ways, both minorities and the urban Sunni elite share an anxiety that political change will mean domination by others.
Impossible Governance
The fundamental lack of trust in Syria today is most visible in violent episodes like the massacres in Alawite areas, but its consequences have spread to all aspects of governance.
For example, in the northeast in March, the new government signed a ten-point agreement with the local Kurdish authorities that promised a framework for decentralization. Yet the document remains frozen. Kurds fear absorption without rights, especially after watching what unfolded first on the coast and then in al-Suwayda; Damascus fears that even limited autonomy could set a precedent for disintegration.
The same dynamic pervades everyday governance. In Hama and other governorates, local militias (without objection from the new central government) have confiscated lands belonging to Alawite families in several villages, even though these communities had pledged allegiance, however halfheartedly, to the new government. Elsewhere, the new government has repeatedly denied communities’ petitions to help police their own towns. The state insists on imposing outsiders, fearful that any local role would weaken its monopoly on force. In the civil service, the government has dismissed and selectively reinstated employees based on loyalty, rather than competence. Minorities and opponents are left in limbo, further convinced that the state belongs to someone else.
Then there was the National Dialogue Conference of February 2025. The event was supposed to create a space for reconciliation, but felt stage-managed from start to finish: the new government hand-picked facilitators, pre-wrote outcomes, and carefully excluded dissent. Key political parties and entire regions were excluded. And a mere six-hour dialogue was offered to address a sixty-year national crisis. Even participants who had wanted to give the new authorities a chance left disillusioned. Local dialogue forums organized by pro-government civil society organizations followed the same pattern. Instead of building confidence, they convinced participants that dialogue was theater, and that participation only legitimized decisions that had already been made.
Mistrust as Political Reflex
The new government bears much responsibility for the lack of trust. Aside from failing to stop the violence on the coast or in al-Suwayda (or actually supporting it, as some critics allege), its efforts at inclusion have felt Potemkin to a broad swathe of Syrians. Key portfolios like investments and the interior are tied to security committees and special envoys, while civilian ministries like education and local governance are reduced to implementing commands. Meanwhile, security figures from the Assad regime have returned as advisers. New names appear in the president’s cabinet seemingly as decoration; for example, Kurdish scholar Mohammad Terko was appointed to be the minister of education in March, but seems to have no deciding power. That pattern is echoed in the relationship between the central government and regional and local authorities, who have no meaningful channels to give feedback to the central government, much less pressure it to change policy. At that, most local authorities are self-governed militias, and the central government has minimal control over them, anyway.
Syrians outside the government’s core constituency read between the lines. What looks like balance is tokenism. The structure of government, instead of inviting trust, teaches every community to expect betrayal.
However, even if the government were to reform itself tomorrow, Syrians would, at this point, probably have trouble recognizing it—mistrust would guide the reaction. Therein lies the rub for Syria: the justifiable and well-trained political reflex of mistrust also precludes easy remedies. Whenever the government extends a hand in collaboration, the other approaches with fear—or with a knife hidden behind the back. Thus, the government shuts down any opening—a seat on a council, a role in local policing, a space in the civil service—out of fear that it will cause a crack in authority.
The consequences compound. In the security sector, the government’s refusal to integrate local forces fuels the very fragmentation the center fears; in the economy, land seizures and patronage hiring make investment a gamble; in administration, opaque purges signal that professionalism is irrelevant; in dialogue, staged conferences deepen cynicism.
Decentralizing Trust
The situation can feel hopeless, but there is a way out of Syria’s dark wood of suspicion. Mistrust sustains the conflict—a Catch-22 in which every side demands guarantees that only trust itself could actually create. Breaking this spiral requires justice and local trust, not new truces or imposed reforms. Thus, the solution must include the right institutional changes at the national level combined with small-bore, decentralized building of consensus at the local level.
Other postconflict societies have shown that such a process of healing is possible. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1996 after the end of Apartheid, offered acknowledgment without full punishment, and the country’s new constitution enshrined minority rights. In Italy after World War II, reconciliation between fascists and anti-fascists was deferred, but the adoption of a new constitution—in a process supported by the international community—gave all sides a common reference point, even if trust between groups took decades to build.
Other examples offer cautionary tales. In postwar Bosnia, the Dayton Accords of 1995 imposed peace but locked ethnic divisions into the very structure of the state; decades later, Bosnia remains fragile. And in Iraq after 2003, de-Ba’athification left hundreds of thousands excluded, humiliated, and armed, deepening mistrust between Sunni Arabs, Shia, and Kurds, while gutting the state’s capacity to enforce order—showing that purges in the name of justice can destroy intercommunal trust for decades.
For Syria, policies that cultivate trust must include greater decision-making power for the regions and localities, while guarding against the risks of centrifugal fragmentation. Communities need breathing room to negotiate trust at increasing levels of complexity. Trust cannot be decreed from Damascus, but it can be rebuilt in smaller, safer arenas where cooperation is less threatening and betrayal less catastrophic.
While the national government cannot build this trust itself, it does have a responsibility to enable the processes that will nurture it. That means empowering local institutions—municipal councils, business chambers, religious leaders, and civic associations—to govern transparently and inclusively within their communities. It also requires reframing dialogue: not as ceremonial gatherings orchestrated by the center, but as structured, locally grounded negotiations over security, resources, and representation, with the central government serving as facilitator and guarantor rather than gatekeeper.
In short, the country needs more decentralization—not full federalism, but an arrangement that allows local institutions to handle day-to-day governance, while the central state retains core functions. Such decentralization would give each community enough space to feel secure, without forcing premature unity that would collapse under mistrust.
These conversations will not dissolve mistrust overnight. But they will create new bases for cooperation: local accountability, shared economic projects, and gradually widening circles of negotiation. In a society where mistrust has become structural, only visible, incremental successes at the local level can build the framework for a national consensus.
But trust is not a gift that Syria can wait for the future to deliver, nor will it emerge spontaneously. Until Syrians learn to build trust among themselves—before authority, before justice, before security—the country will remain trapped in its loop of suspicion.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image Caption: Bedouin fighters are seen on the streets of al-Mazraa village in Syria’s al-Suwayda governorate on July 18, 2025, during clashes between a Bedouin tribe and members of the Druze sect. Source: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
Tags: middle, democracy, syria, Syrian civil war