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Will Sectarian Massacres Derail Syria’s Transition?
Century International:On Thursday, March 6, Syria’s new rulers began a military crackdown on what they described as a nascent insurgency by supporters of the deposed Assad regime in the coastal region. In the violence that ensued, hundreds of civilians were killed, in addition to large numbers of both pro- and anti-government combatants. Credible evidence implicates regime militias in sectarian massacres of Alawite Syrians. How widespread is sectarian violence? Is it ongoing?
Sectarian Killings
Aron Lund: That sudden spike of sectarian killings we saw during the weekend appears to be mostly over for now, but the situation still seems unstable. A lot of people in Alawite communities have fled their villages or towns. In those cases the violence may just have stopped because they moved out of harm’s way.
I don’t think we know the number of deaths at this point, or at least I don’t. Various monitoring groups have put out numbers, sometimes claiming upwards of 1,000 civilian deaths, but they haven’t been independently verified. But it’s surely at least hundreds. Hopefully, we will soon know more as investigators get to work sifting through the evidence. There’s been a lot of rumors and disinformation.
Sam Heller: Yes, I assume it will take time before we get a reliable count of how many local civilians were killed by pro-government militants marauding from one village to the next, as well as how many combatants on both sides died in clashes.
On Tuesday, the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights said it had documented the killing of 111 civilians, but that’s only an initial tally. The agency emphasized that verification is ongoing, and the actual number of dead is believed to be significantly higher.
I think the death toll will only be part of the story, though. In the dozens of videos that pro-government fighters have posted online, they haven’t just summarily executed Alawite residents of these areas; they’ve also abused and humiliated survivors, beating them and forcing them to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs. In at least one case I saw, bloodied men were made to crawl over the bodies of their neighbors. The violence also seems to have occasioned a real orgy of looting, as fighters robbed local homes and stole hundreds of vehicles. All that is to say that I think the full impact of this weekend will be larger than just the number of dead—it seems likely to leave lasting scars in these communities, whose residents may never feel safe again.
“They haven’t just summarily executed Alawite residents of these areas. They’ve also abused and humiliated survivors, beating them and forcing them to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs.”
And while pro-government forces’ violations over the weekend represented a new extreme for the post-Assad period, they didn’t come out of nowhere. Pro-government forces making Alawite detainees bark like dogs, for example, has been a meme for months now. This weekend’s events just brought those smaller-scale abuses and tensions to a deadly crescendo.
Sincere about Accountability?
Century International:Is the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa able to control its own armed forces? Are there serious efforts to hold accountable government troops who commit atrocities?
Aron: Since the weekend, the government has made promises, launched an official investigation, and arrested a few murder suspects. Most of this came only after the government had been scandalized by the massacres, and as it worried about its relationship with the United States and Europe. To me, it looks more like damage control than like deeply held principles. As an offshoot of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, Syria’s new leaders have a lot of baggage. While they weren’t the most brutal or abusive faction in Syria, they committed serious abuses over the past thirteen years of war, and they made bloodcurdling threats against minorities. If it turns out they’ve now realized that they like the Geneva Convention and dream of personal freedom and equal rights for all, that would be great. It just doesn’t seem very probable.
Then again, their reasons for holding war criminals accountable are not what matters most. What matters most is that they do it, if they do it. To date, Sharaa has at least outperformed his predecessor, Bashar al-Assad. It’s a low bar, but it’s something.
Command and Control
Sam: I think it’s worth interrogating what it means for the Sharaa government to control “its own armed forces,” and to ask whose armed forces, exactly, participated in the weekend’s violence.
What seems to have happened last week, in the broadest terms: local anti-government militants carried out deadly attacks on Syria’s new security forces; Sharaa’s government responded with a major mobilization of military and security forces, which were joined by various irregular groups from across the country—maybe tens of thousands of people altogether, subject to little apparent command and control.
I think we got a preview of this type of mobilization in December, when groups of ex-rebels across Syria responded to unrest and violence on the coast by publishing videos online announcing their readiness to support the country’s new military command against “regime remnants.” The nationwide reaction this time was similar—except this time, all those ex-rebels actually drove to Syria’s coast and joined in the violence.
Some reporting has suggested that the new government’s “General Security” forces led the initial response to the anti-government militants. These General Security forces grew out of the security apparatus in Idlib—the governorate that was a rebel stronghold before the fall of Assad, and which Sharaa and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) governed for the last several years. These forces seem to be controlled more directly by Sharaa, and were reportedly more ordered and disciplined. But after General Security’s initial involvement, forces claiming to represent the Syrian government’sMinistry of Defense arrived and ran amok. That “Ministry of Defense” label now covers the whole array of ex-rebel factions that seized the country in December, and which seem to be as fractious and ill-disciplined as ever.
It clearly wasn’t just unflagged, irregular “popular forces” that carried out violations. Men filmed themselves pushing naval charges out of helicopters over Lattakia. In numerous videos, militants identify themselves as part of the Ministry of Defense as they threaten to kill Alawites. Some have suggested that specific, notorious factions of the Syrian National Army—a major Turkish-backed anti-Assad rebel outfit—were primarily responsible for the abuse of civilians. But those factions now, ostensibly, answer to the Ministry of Defense and have been folded into the new Syrian army.
Since December, one of my main concerns has been that it wasn’t just Sharaa and his armed faction that toppled Assad and seized power. Rather, Sharaa heads a much broader coalition of armed groups, one that includes all kinds of out of control, dangerous elements. This weekend has made clear that he hasn’t yet combined those groups into anything resembling a national military.
Sharaa’s Ambiguities on Sectarianism
Century International:Many Syrians from minority communities, or who supported the Assad regime, have accused the new rulers of being Sunni sectarians and predicted sectarian violence. Is it possible to return to the precarious entente of December and January, or is Syria already experiencing a continuation of a long civil war that always had a strong sectarian dimension?
Aron: In some ways it was predictable, and almost everyone did predict it. There were widespread fears both inside Syria and outside Syria that Assad’s toppling could unleash sectarian violence. Then to everyone’s relief, it didn’t happen immediately after his fall. HTS swept to power very quickly and behaved impressively well. And it took a few months of building tensions before the dam broke.
There’s some hope in that reprieve, of course. There’s hope in the fact that there was a degree of domestic backlash to the massacres. And there’s hope in the fact that Sharaa is now saying the right things, more or less. But structurally, things are bleak. Syria is a place of extreme economic despair, doomed to get worse by Donald Trump’s decision to kill off the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The country has been deformed by dictatorship and ripped apart by war, it is extremely militarized, with guns and armed factions everywhere, and it suffers from vicious sectarian and political tensions. It is an environment that is inherently unstable, and where instability will produce atrocities.
“There’s hope in the fact that Sharaa is now saying the right things. But structurally, things are bleak.”
As Sam noted, what happened on the coast looks less like an organized government attack, and more like a horrific breakdown of order. The government played a part in it, as did Alawite ex-regime groups, and there were abuses and armed provocations. But then they were both overwhelmed by what followed.
Sharaa’s regime has an ambiguous position in all of this. On the one hand, it’s the one thing that keeps the chaos bottled up, and appears like Syria’s best hope for stability—because it’s now the only game in town. Were it not for Sharaa having the clear upper hand, Syria would have no order at all, no center of gravity. It would just be a boiling mess of rival armed factions, and it would not be pretty, and it would not be kind to either minorities or the majority. On the other hand, Sharaa’s government and HTS are intimately linked to, even a product of, Syria’s most deadly strands of sectarianism. Sharaa may be saying the right things now, but he presides over a movement that has been teaching its soldiers for years that Alawites are heathen filth. The ideological indoctrination is not unrelated to what just happened.
A stable yet sectarian order would not necessarily be pleasant, but it could still be less lethal than one engulfed in chaos, where militias run amok. That’s what we saw happen with Assad’s rule. His dictatorship was oppressive and cruel and sectarian under a secular surface, but not particularly lethal in the years preceding 2011. Once the conflict started, however, the Assad regime engaged in massive brutality and it became a hothouse for militias. And many of those militias were deeply bigoted and committed to pursuing their own local vendettas. They went after rival communities, Sunnis in their case, with a murderous frenzy of their own, which the state sometimes exploited and sometimes tried to rein in. The coast and the Homs region saw some vicious massacres early on in the conflict—village versus village, neighbor killing neighbor. In retrospect, some of those massacres look similar to what happened on the coast now, only with the sectarian relationships reversed. Militias took the lead with the state in tow, instead of the other way around.
Majoritarian Rule
Sam: I think we ought to be clear here: it looks like Sharaa is consolidating a new system of sectarian-majoritarian rule, in which Syria’s Sunnis are the country’s inheritors and true owners, and minorities are tolerated but consigned to a subordinate position. Sharaa is smart enough to keep that vision for Syria’s social order mostly implicit, and to avoid vocalizing more naked sectarianism (with some exceptions) now that he’s assumed the Syrian presidency. But that’s the political project he seems to be pursuing. It’s not just a figment of minority Syrians’ collective imagination.
I don’t know the precise motivations of the anti-government militants who attacked the security forces last week. But for Alawite Syrians broadly, I can understand why they would be unhappy about being made a permanent underclass. And I can understand why people would be agitated over recent government decisions that have severed large numbers of Alawites from public sector employment and from Syria’s military and security services, and that have denied many thousands of people the salaries, pensions, and benefits on which they depend for survival.
What’s more, this past weekend has apparently communicated that majority tolerance for Alawites and other disfavored out-groups—including some religious or ethnic minorities, but also Sunni Syrians who do not conform to the dominant faction’s conception of Syrian and Islamic identity—is highly conditional. This mob violence seems to signal that if minority communities do not remain quiet and out of view, and if they are seen to challenge Syria’s new sociopolitical order, then the majority is prepared to respond with extreme repression.
Slim Possibilities for Stability
Century International:Is there any hope, then, to escape this new sectarian dynamic? Is an alternative political order possible?
Aron: While a nonsectarian and pluralistic order would of course be preferable, that doesn’t exactly seem to be on offer now. A more realistic, immediate option may simply be to try to move Syria out of its acute instability. It will require economic conditions that let Syrians live and rebuild, and that allow for a normally functioning government to emerge. Syria—including its minorities—would almost certainly be better served by an Islamist government that can enforce its writ using civil police and service provision, instead of an Islamist government that barely functions outside Damascus and that tries to solve every problem by sending in truckloads of gun-toting ex-rebels.
Fighters with the new Syrian government mobilize on March 7, 2025 in the Tartus region of coastal Syria. Source: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
Unfortunately, things do not look very promising. That’s in part because of the political and structural problems of Sharaa’s government and the former rebel movement, and the immense political challenges they face. But most of all it’s because there’s no light in the tunnel for Syria’s economic recovery. The sanctions have only been suspended in part and for a limited time, and the level of humanitarian support isn’t going up, it’s going down. In retrospect, I think everyone will agree that the decision to let Syria economically collapse was much more important than any ideological or political factors. If Syria is allowed to slip into that dark pit, then it will be guaranteed to continue to generate desperation, extremism, and sectarian bloodletting.
International Political Repercussions
Century International:On the subject of sanctions relief: what type of political repercussions can we expect from the weekend’s violence? Is this likely to scuttle further sanctions relief?
Sam: Well, the Trump administration very directly condemned “the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria” over the weekend, and expressed solidarity with “Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities.” That reaction seems to bode poorly for any further easing of U.S. sanctions—something that already seemed uncertain, even before this latest eruption of violence.
I don’t really trust Washington’s pro-Damascus advocacy groups and partisans to sway the Trump administration on this. Many of them lost a lot of credibility this week because of the way they’ve downplayed the killing of civilians and tried to make the story about “Assad loyalists” and “Iran.”
Without additional sanctions relief and—also important—assurances to U.S. friends like Qatar that the Trump administration will look favorably on allowed transactions in support of Syria’s new authorities, it’s hard to see how Sharaa’s government can stabilize Syria, and how the country can pull out of its present socioeconomic death spiral.
However ill-behaved and unruly Syria’s ex-rebel factions are now, if Damascus lacks the money to centralize the payment of army salaries, they could grow even more unaccountable. For Syria’s new government, consolidating the country’s armed groups and restoring some minimum order is already a very daunting challenge. Continued economic collapse is only likely to make things worse, by every measure.
Header Image: Fighters with the new Syrian government stand around a fire on March 7, 2025 in the Tartus region of coastal Syria. Source: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
Aron Lund is a Swedish writer on Middle Eastern affairs and a fellow at Century International who has published several books and reports on Syrian politics.
Sam Heller is a Beirut-based researcher, analyst, and fellow at Century International. Sam’s work focuses on politics and security in Lebanon, Syria, and their regional neighborhood. He has published extensively with International Crisis Group and The Century Foundation and for outlets including Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks and The Daily Beast.
Will Sectarian Massacres Derail Syria’s Transition?
Century International: On Thursday, March 6, Syria’s new rulers began a military crackdown on what they described as a nascent insurgency by supporters of the deposed Assad regime in the coastal region. In the violence that ensued, hundreds of civilians were killed, in addition to large numbers of both pro- and anti-government combatants. Credible evidence implicates regime militias in sectarian massacres of Alawite Syrians. How widespread is sectarian violence? Is it ongoing?
Sectarian Killings
Aron Lund: That sudden spike of sectarian killings we saw during the weekend appears to be mostly over for now, but the situation still seems unstable. A lot of people in Alawite communities have fled their villages or towns. In those cases the violence may just have stopped because they moved out of harm’s way.
I don’t think we know the number of deaths at this point, or at least I don’t. Various monitoring groups have put out numbers, sometimes claiming upwards of 1,000 civilian deaths, but they haven’t been independently verified. But it’s surely at least hundreds. Hopefully, we will soon know more as investigators get to work sifting through the evidence. There’s been a lot of rumors and disinformation.
Sam Heller: Yes, I assume it will take time before we get a reliable count of how many local civilians were killed by pro-government militants marauding from one village to the next, as well as how many combatants on both sides died in clashes.
On Tuesday, the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights said it had documented the killing of 111 civilians, but that’s only an initial tally. The agency emphasized that verification is ongoing, and the actual number of dead is believed to be significantly higher.
I think the death toll will only be part of the story, though. In the dozens of videos that pro-government fighters have posted online, they haven’t just summarily executed Alawite residents of these areas; they’ve also abused and humiliated survivors, beating them and forcing them to crawl on all fours and bark like dogs. In at least one case I saw, bloodied men were made to crawl over the bodies of their neighbors. The violence also seems to have occasioned a real orgy of looting, as fighters robbed local homes and stole hundreds of vehicles. All that is to say that I think the full impact of this weekend will be larger than just the number of dead—it seems likely to leave lasting scars in these communities, whose residents may never feel safe again.
And while pro-government forces’ violations over the weekend represented a new extreme for the post-Assad period, they didn’t come out of nowhere. Pro-government forces making Alawite detainees bark like dogs, for example, has been a meme for months now. This weekend’s events just brought those smaller-scale abuses and tensions to a deadly crescendo.
Sincere about Accountability?
Century International: Is the government of Ahmed al-Sharaa able to control its own armed forces? Are there serious efforts to hold accountable government troops who commit atrocities?
Aron: Since the weekend, the government has made promises, launched an official investigation, and arrested a few murder suspects. Most of this came only after the government had been scandalized by the massacres, and as it worried about its relationship with the United States and Europe. To me, it looks more like damage control than like deeply held principles. As an offshoot of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, Syria’s new leaders have a lot of baggage. While they weren’t the most brutal or abusive faction in Syria, they committed serious abuses over the past thirteen years of war, and they made bloodcurdling threats against minorities. If it turns out they’ve now realized that they like the Geneva Convention and dream of personal freedom and equal rights for all, that would be great. It just doesn’t seem very probable.
Then again, their reasons for holding war criminals accountable are not what matters most. What matters most is that they do it, if they do it. To date, Sharaa has at least outperformed his predecessor, Bashar al-Assad. It’s a low bar, but it’s something.
Command and Control
Sam: I think it’s worth interrogating what it means for the Sharaa government to control “its own armed forces,” and to ask whose armed forces, exactly, participated in the weekend’s violence.
What seems to have happened last week, in the broadest terms: local anti-government militants carried out deadly attacks on Syria’s new security forces; Sharaa’s government responded with a major mobilization of military and security forces, which were joined by various irregular groups from across the country—maybe tens of thousands of people altogether, subject to little apparent command and control.
I think we got a preview of this type of mobilization in December, when groups of ex-rebels across Syria responded to unrest and violence on the coast by publishing videos online announcing their readiness to support the country’s new military command against “regime remnants.” The nationwide reaction this time was similar—except this time, all those ex-rebels actually drove to Syria’s coast and joined in the violence.
Some reporting has suggested that the new government’s “General Security” forces led the initial response to the anti-government militants. These General Security forces grew out of the security apparatus in Idlib—the governorate that was a rebel stronghold before the fall of Assad, and which Sharaa and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) governed for the last several years. These forces seem to be controlled more directly by Sharaa, and were reportedly more ordered and disciplined. But after General Security’s initial involvement, forces claiming to represent the Syrian government’s Ministry of Defense arrived and ran amok. That “Ministry of Defense” label now covers the whole array of ex-rebel factions that seized the country in December, and which seem to be as fractious and ill-disciplined as ever.
It clearly wasn’t just unflagged, irregular “popular forces” that carried out violations. Men filmed themselves pushing naval charges out of helicopters over Lattakia. In numerous videos, militants identify themselves as part of the Ministry of Defense as they threaten to kill Alawites. Some have suggested that specific, notorious factions of the Syrian National Army—a major Turkish-backed anti-Assad rebel outfit—were primarily responsible for the abuse of civilians. But those factions now, ostensibly, answer to the Ministry of Defense and have been folded into the new Syrian army.
Since December, one of my main concerns has been that it wasn’t just Sharaa and his armed faction that toppled Assad and seized power. Rather, Sharaa heads a much broader coalition of armed groups, one that includes all kinds of out of control, dangerous elements. This weekend has made clear that he hasn’t yet combined those groups into anything resembling a national military.
Sharaa’s Ambiguities on Sectarianism
Century International: Many Syrians from minority communities, or who supported the Assad regime, have accused the new rulers of being Sunni sectarians and predicted sectarian violence. Is it possible to return to the precarious entente of December and January, or is Syria already experiencing a continuation of a long civil war that always had a strong sectarian dimension?
Aron: In some ways it was predictable, and almost everyone did predict it. There were widespread fears both inside Syria and outside Syria that Assad’s toppling could unleash sectarian violence. Then to everyone’s relief, it didn’t happen immediately after his fall. HTS swept to power very quickly and behaved impressively well. And it took a few months of building tensions before the dam broke.
There’s some hope in that reprieve, of course. There’s hope in the fact that there was a degree of domestic backlash to the massacres. And there’s hope in the fact that Sharaa is now saying the right things, more or less. But structurally, things are bleak. Syria is a place of extreme economic despair, doomed to get worse by Donald Trump’s decision to kill off the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The country has been deformed by dictatorship and ripped apart by war, it is extremely militarized, with guns and armed factions everywhere, and it suffers from vicious sectarian and political tensions. It is an environment that is inherently unstable, and where instability will produce atrocities.
As Sam noted, what happened on the coast looks less like an organized government attack, and more like a horrific breakdown of order. The government played a part in it, as did Alawite ex-regime groups, and there were abuses and armed provocations. But then they were both overwhelmed by what followed.
Sharaa’s regime has an ambiguous position in all of this. On the one hand, it’s the one thing that keeps the chaos bottled up, and appears like Syria’s best hope for stability—because it’s now the only game in town. Were it not for Sharaa having the clear upper hand, Syria would have no order at all, no center of gravity. It would just be a boiling mess of rival armed factions, and it would not be pretty, and it would not be kind to either minorities or the majority. On the other hand, Sharaa’s government and HTS are intimately linked to, even a product of, Syria’s most deadly strands of sectarianism. Sharaa may be saying the right things now, but he presides over a movement that has been teaching its soldiers for years that Alawites are heathen filth. The ideological indoctrination is not unrelated to what just happened.
A stable yet sectarian order would not necessarily be pleasant, but it could still be less lethal than one engulfed in chaos, where militias run amok. That’s what we saw happen with Assad’s rule. His dictatorship was oppressive and cruel and sectarian under a secular surface, but not particularly lethal in the years preceding 2011. Once the conflict started, however, the Assad regime engaged in massive brutality and it became a hothouse for militias. And many of those militias were deeply bigoted and committed to pursuing their own local vendettas. They went after rival communities, Sunnis in their case, with a murderous frenzy of their own, which the state sometimes exploited and sometimes tried to rein in. The coast and the Homs region saw some vicious massacres early on in the conflict—village versus village, neighbor killing neighbor. In retrospect, some of those massacres look similar to what happened on the coast now, only with the sectarian relationships reversed. Militias took the lead with the state in tow, instead of the other way around.
Majoritarian Rule
Sam: I think we ought to be clear here: it looks like Sharaa is consolidating a new system of sectarian-majoritarian rule, in which Syria’s Sunnis are the country’s inheritors and true owners, and minorities are tolerated but consigned to a subordinate position. Sharaa is smart enough to keep that vision for Syria’s social order mostly implicit, and to avoid vocalizing more naked sectarianism (with some exceptions) now that he’s assumed the Syrian presidency. But that’s the political project he seems to be pursuing. It’s not just a figment of minority Syrians’ collective imagination.
I don’t know the precise motivations of the anti-government militants who attacked the security forces last week. But for Alawite Syrians broadly, I can understand why they would be unhappy about being made a permanent underclass. And I can understand why people would be agitated over recent government decisions that have severed large numbers of Alawites from public sector employment and from Syria’s military and security services, and that have denied many thousands of people the salaries, pensions, and benefits on which they depend for survival.
What’s more, this past weekend has apparently communicated that majority tolerance for Alawites and other disfavored out-groups—including some religious or ethnic minorities, but also Sunni Syrians who do not conform to the dominant faction’s conception of Syrian and Islamic identity—is highly conditional. This mob violence seems to signal that if minority communities do not remain quiet and out of view, and if they are seen to challenge Syria’s new sociopolitical order, then the majority is prepared to respond with extreme repression.
Slim Possibilities for Stability
Century International: Is there any hope, then, to escape this new sectarian dynamic? Is an alternative political order possible?
Aron: While a nonsectarian and pluralistic order would of course be preferable, that doesn’t exactly seem to be on offer now. A more realistic, immediate option may simply be to try to move Syria out of its acute instability. It will require economic conditions that let Syrians live and rebuild, and that allow for a normally functioning government to emerge. Syria—including its minorities—would almost certainly be better served by an Islamist government that can enforce its writ using civil police and service provision, instead of an Islamist government that barely functions outside Damascus and that tries to solve every problem by sending in truckloads of gun-toting ex-rebels.
Unfortunately, things do not look very promising. That’s in part because of the political and structural problems of Sharaa’s government and the former rebel movement, and the immense political challenges they face. But most of all it’s because there’s no light in the tunnel for Syria’s economic recovery. The sanctions have only been suspended in part and for a limited time, and the level of humanitarian support isn’t going up, it’s going down. In retrospect, I think everyone will agree that the decision to let Syria economically collapse was much more important than any ideological or political factors. If Syria is allowed to slip into that dark pit, then it will be guaranteed to continue to generate desperation, extremism, and sectarian bloodletting.
International Political Repercussions
Century International: On the subject of sanctions relief: what type of political repercussions can we expect from the weekend’s violence? Is this likely to scuttle further sanctions relief?
Sam: Well, the Trump administration very directly condemned “the radical Islamist terrorists, including foreign jihadis, that murdered people in western Syria” over the weekend, and expressed solidarity with “Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities.” That reaction seems to bode poorly for any further easing of U.S. sanctions—something that already seemed uncertain, even before this latest eruption of violence.
I don’t really trust Washington’s pro-Damascus advocacy groups and partisans to sway the Trump administration on this. Many of them lost a lot of credibility this week because of the way they’ve downplayed the killing of civilians and tried to make the story about “Assad loyalists” and “Iran.”
Without additional sanctions relief and—also important—assurances to U.S. friends like Qatar that the Trump administration will look favorably on allowed transactions in support of Syria’s new authorities, it’s hard to see how Sharaa’s government can stabilize Syria, and how the country can pull out of its present socioeconomic death spiral.
However ill-behaved and unruly Syria’s ex-rebel factions are now, if Damascus lacks the money to centralize the payment of army salaries, they could grow even more unaccountable. For Syria’s new government, consolidating the country’s armed groups and restoring some minimum order is already a very daunting challenge. Continued economic collapse is only likely to make things worse, by every measure.
Header Image: Fighters with the new Syrian government stand around a fire on March 7, 2025 in the Tartus region of coastal Syria. Source: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
Tags: sectarianism, civilian deaths, syria