Syria, a year later

A year ago this week, my wife and I were getting in the holiday spirit one evening by watching the overly corny, yet somewhat endearing Nicolas Cage Christmas movie The Family Man. Towards the middle of the film, I suddenly let out an audible gasp. My wife, assuming that I was somehow taken aback by Cage’s acting abilities, said “What is it?” I was not in fact awestruck by another cheap rip-off of A Christmas Carol. Instead, I was scrolling through Twitter (or X or whatever we call it now) looking at images and videos coming out of Damascus. Soldiers of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian Arab Army were shedding their uniforms in the middle of the street. Syrian citizens were defacing and destroying statues of the old regime. Heavily armed members of the Islamist rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) paraded up and down the streets of Damascus in pickup trucks. The rebel offensive that had started just after Thanksgiving had now toppled a dynastic regime that ruled Syria since 1970. 

Virtually no regional experts saw such a dramatic event coming. However, (like every good Monday quarterbacking) it retrospectively seems obvious. The Russians — Assad’s most powerful international backers — were preoccupied by their then two year long war in Ukraine. Russian air and ground assets slated for Syria were diverted to the battlefields of Donetsk, Bakmhut, and Kharkiv. The Iranians (longtime supporters of Assad’s regime due to both political and religious interests) had by November 2024 been battered by a series of Israeli strikes both in Syria and Iran. Tehran’s most powerful proxy, Hezbollah, had helped supplement and support al-Assad’s forces for over a decade. However, by this time last year, Hezbollah had been decimated by Israel including (but certainly not limited to) the infamous beeper operation that killed or maimed thousands of its operatives. In short, the key patrons and allies of Assad’s regime had been battered by their own conflicts thus leaving the door open for a major shift in Syria’s fourteen-year civil war. 

The year that followed the fall of Assad proved that the end of a war doesn’t lead to instantaneous stability. While Bashar al-Assad reportedly plays video games in a Moscow luxury apartment, Syria has struggled to rebuild both physically and governmentally. For starters, Syria is now ruled by a man named Ahmed al-Sharaa who until a year ago often went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Twenty years ago, al-Sharaa was a foot solider in Al-Qaeda who then crossed back into Syria during the outset of the civil war in 2011. The rebel (now governing) faction he leads, HTS, was previously considered an Al-Qaeda affiliate with the U.S. State Department labeling it a foreign terrorist organization until July 2025. 

Al-Sharaa’s rule thus far has produced both pessimism and optimism. Add those two outlooks together and you get one glaring outcome: uncertainty. On the bright side, al-Sharaa has proven to be amenable to dialogue and cooperation with the West. Shortly after the fall of Assad, al-Sharaa received the foreign ministers of France and Germany in Damascus. Over the past year al-Sharaa has met with the U.K.’s national security adviser and was even invited to Paris for a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron. Perhaps the biggest diplomatic accomplishment of Syria’s new leadership came when al-Sharaa was invited to the White House last month to discuss sanctions lifting as well as Syria’s possible joining of the Abraham Accords. Perhaps the newfound celebrity of al-Sharaa is best encapsulated by his appearance at the Concordia Summit this past September. In a video widely circulated on social media, al-Sharaa sits opposite Former CIA Director and Retired U.S. Army General David Petraeus. Two men, one a former jihadist and the other a retired general, who fought on opposites sides of the Iraq War now clad in suits discussing geopolitics in front of an audience of Western policymakers. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. 

While al-Sharaa’s outward performances on the international stage could be fairly called impressive, the same can hardly be said of his domestic governance. In the March of this year, security forces belonging to the new Syrian government launched what they called “counterinsurgency” operations along the northern coast of Syria. After a week’s worth of fighting between government forces and pro-Assad insurgents, over 1,000 Syrians lay dead. Four months later in the southern Syrian province of Sweida, Bedouin tribes engaged in brutal clashes (allegedly alongside government forces) with armed militiamen belonging to the Druze ethnic minority. Israel (which also counts a significant Druze minority among its citizenry) launched air strikes against Syrian targets in response. While the sectarian killings along the coast and in Sweida have abated recently, tensions still simmer beneath the surface. Lastly, Syria’s Kurds have reportedly agreed to a power-sharing and military cooperation agreement with al-Sharaa’s government. However, in the words of Middle East expert David Adesnik, “The devil is still in the details. The Syrian Kurdish commander [Mazloum Abdi] says his forces will join the Syrian army as ‘large military formations’. Does Damascus agree? Does it define those large formations in the same way as the Syrian Kurds?” 

All of this is also happening alongside the near decade-long deployment of US troops in Syria. American military personnel, including special operations forces, continue to patrol the Euphrates River valley and occupy the al-Tanf outpost near the Iraqi border. Their continued presence however is not a guarantee. This is especially true after this past week’s attack on U.S. troops that left two American servicepersons dead. A future U.S. pullout from Syria could potentially lead to even more destabilization in the region. 

While attempting to build a multinational understanding abroad, al-Sharaa has struggled to build interethnic understanding domestically. Looking back over the past year, events in Syria could have undoubtedly gone much worse. There could have been wholesale ethnic cleansing on par with 1990s Bosnia. There could have been a resurgence of ISIS. Armed conflict between al-Sharaa’s forces and the Kurds could have swept through the Euphrates River Valley. All of these did not come to pass… yet. The question for Western leaders is simply stated but incredibly complex when it comes to arriving at an answer: Is a former jihadist, turned suit wearing statesman to be trusted?  

Events in Gaza, Ukraine, and (now more recently) the Caribbean have grabbed headlines internationally. Syria however is not going away. The nations of the world know this which is why all fifteen members of the U.N. security council sent envoys to Damascus last week. Al-Sharaa’s government is here to stay. The question is, do the old habits of Islamism die hard if they die at all? 

Jim Pomeroy, raised in Bucks County and a former congressional aide, works in higher education. He is the author of Alliances & Armor: Communist Diplomacy and Armored Warfare during the War in Vietnam.