By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Don’t Let Geopolitics Ruin Syria’s Transition

In December 2024, the regime of Bashar al-Assad crumbled like a house of cards. Rebel forces led by fighters from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham overtook Aleppo, in Syria’s north, before turning south in a lightning offensive. Upon the rebels’ arrival in Damascus a little over a week later, it had become clear that the government’s security forces were not prepared to fight for the regime, and Assad, after almost 25 years in power, fled to Moscow. HTS’s leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, became Syria’s de facto head of state, appointed an interim government, and announced a timetable for the country’s political transition.

The rebel offensive benefited from careful preparation and the support of Turkey, which occupies territory in Syria’s north and provided the only safe access route to Idlib, where HTS was based. Even so, most observers didn’t expect the regime to collapse so quickly. They underestimated Assad’s continued dependence on the external supporters that had helped him prevail in Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011 after the state violently suppressed peaceful demonstrations. Conflicts elsewhere had made Assad’s key allies unable or unwilling to defend him: Russia was preoccupied with its war in Ukraine; Iran was debilitated and powerless to protect its proxies; and Hezbollah, in Lebanon, was weakened by its fight with Israel.

After the regime’s fall, representatives from the United States, Europe, and the United Nations scrambled to get to know Syria’s new leaders. Humanitarian agencies working in Idlib regarded HTS and its de facto provincial government as pragmatic actors. But HTS had originally emerged, in the mid-2010s, from the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda. The group has since renounced al Qaeda and tried to cast off its extremist roots, but the United States, the United Nations, and others still designate it as a terrorist organization. As such, policymakers and officials became concerned about the intentions and ideology of its members, wary of potentially assisting the emergence of a jihadi state.

Syria is jumping into the unknown. The vast majority of Syrians—including the country’s businesspeople and religious authorities, as well as those in its overstaffed but experienced bureaucracy—appear to support a clean break with the corruption and mismanagement of the Assad regime. If it is to yield positive change, Syria’s transition cannot become the object of a geopolitical struggle. For decades, many regional or world powers ostracized the Assad regime, tried unsuccessfully to change it, or worked with it—or around it—to pursue their own ends. Those approaches are no longer tenable, and Syria deserves a chance to move on from the misery of the Assad years, even if it’s not yet clear what kind of leaders Sharaa or other HTS figures will become. If foreign governments and international bodies focus on their own narrow interests and impose onerous conditions on aid, Syria’s transition is sure to falter. They must instead support Syria in its efforts to rebuild its economy, open up to the world, and be at peace with itself.

 

Helping Hands

After years of war, repression, destruction, and displacement that resulted in deteriorated socioeconomic and humanitarian conditions, Syria will need international support for its political transition. Only from a place of stability can it begin to rebuild, convince refugees and exiled businesses to return, and attract investment. The UN, in particular, will have a major role to play, and Syria’s new rulers should actively seek its support.

The UN already has a special envoy for Syria, as well as an existing Security Council resolution, from 2015, that entrusts the body with facilitating a political process to establish “credible, inclusive and non-sectarian governance” in Syria. This goal is still aligned with the Syrian people’s aspirations. But the mechanisms put in place to achieve it are no longer sound. The resolution was passed to engage a regime that no longer exists. For years, the special envoy facilitated talks about a new or revised Syrian constitution between small delegations from the government and from opposition factions based mostly in Turkey. The talks yielded no results and became a kind of stand-in for substantial negotiations about peace and actual political change. Furthermore, HTS, the entity now in power, was excluded from any UN-facilitated processes, owing to its terrorist designation.

The new leaders want a clean break not only with the Assad regime but also with the international community’s approach to Syria over the past decade. Sharaa and his interim government have begun to make preparations for a national conference to debate the future of the country and agree on a new constitution, but the opposition factions with which the UN and many world capitals have engaged won’t be represented as groups. The new leaders have indicated, however, that they will be open to integrating individual members from these opposition factions into both the conference and the larger transition. Sharaa and his associates appear conscious of the pluralistic nature of Syria’s ethnically and religiously diverse society and know that they have to respect it if they want to build a sustainable form of government. The armed groups that overthrew the regime are themselves a coalition with different ideological and regional backgrounds. For the time being, they appear to enjoy the support of a broad spectrum of Syrian society. But with a unifying fight against a now deposed regime behind them, disputes over power and resources will inevitably emerge.

The UN must respond to this changed landscape. Given the divisions in the Security Council, agreement on a new resolution will be difficult, but it can be achieved, particularly if Syria’s new government avoids being dragged into geopolitical conflicts. The Security Council should establish a new mission on the ground or transform the special envoy’s office in Geneva into a Syrian-based mission with a clear mandate to aid the transition. This would include technical support for any Syrian-led political or constitutional processes, drawing on the experiences of various UN bodies with political transitions and peace-building operations in other countries. A mission in Syria should also help establish the rule of law—by building up a credible police force and reforming the security sector—as well as legal reform, human rights protections, and means for reconciliation. According to World Bank estimates, more than half of Syria’s population has been internally or externally displaced since the start of the civil war, and anyone returning would need to be reintegrated. The UN can draw on the expertise of member states such as Colombia or South Africa to support a transitional justice process to deal with the Assad regime’s heinous human rights violations while helping prevent retribution attacks between or within Syrian communities. Moreover, the UN should continue its efforts to coordinate humanitarian assistance and promote development and sustainability.

Material support for the country’s reconstruction, however, will fall mostly to entities with a particular interest in a stable Syria: the Arab Gulf states, the European Union, and perhaps the United States. Syria’s needs are enormous, estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Syria’s per capita GDP has more than halved since the start of its civil war. The health system has been severely degraded. Residential areas and social infrastructure in opposition-heavy cities have been destroyed. To spur employment and economic recovery, reconstruction efforts must first focus on energy infrastructure, health care, and housing. And such support will have to come hard and fast: the lack of a speedy and visible economic recovery will fuel discontent and thus risk Syria’s transition toward an inclusive, pluralistic political system, similar to the failed transitions in Tunisia and Sudan after those countries’ longtime leaders were ousted in 2011 and 2019, respectively.

The United States and the EU both imposed wide-ranging sanctions against the Assad regime, including an arms embargo, restrictions on financial transactions, and strict export controls, as well as bans on Syrian energy-sector investments and imports of Syrian oil. Now that Assad has departed, these measures are major obstacles to restarting the country’s economy and need to be either lifted or immediately suspended. They are separate from the hundreds of sanctions against individuals or entities that helped enrich the Assad family or implement the regime’s repressive policies: these must remain in place to help Syria’s new authorities prosecute perpetrators and find stolen money. The foreign ministers of France and Germany, Jean-Noel Barrot and Annalena Baerbock, also broached the issue of foreign fighters drafted into the army during their meeting with Sharaa on Jan. 3, an official aware of the talks said.

 

Leave Geopolitics at the Door

World powers may be tempted to leverage Syria’s new beginnings to their advantage, but pulling the interim government into regional or international disputes may doom the transition. Geopolitics is not a current priority for Syria’s new leaders. Consider, for instance, that members of the interim government, despite their Islamist backgrounds, have refrained from any bellicose anti-Israeli rhetoric. Syria’s new foreign minister, Asaad Hassan al-Shibani, told Al Jazeera on New Year’s Day that Syria wants “peace and prosperity” and that any “pending issues between Syria and Israel”—including Israeli incursions beyond the disengagement lines that separate the two countries—would be dealt with “in peaceful negotiations.” The use of such language is notable, as was the minister’s calling Israel by its name rather than the “Zionist entity,” as was standard under the Assad regime.

The transitional government has also decided to tread cautiously with Russia, the old regime’s main external backer. After Assad’s fall, Russian soldiers, scattered around the country, quickly withdrew to Russia’s air base and naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. According to Syrian customs authorities, the government has since canceled a 49-year investment agreement with the Russian company Stroytransgaz about the management and expansion of the port in Tartus that contains the Russian naval base. What this actually means for docking rights for Russian vessels remains unclear, as does the future of Russia’s air base in Khmeimim. Syrian authorities may want to negotiate the details or even allow some limited Russian presence in exchange for Moscow’s support in other areas. Russia, however, may decide for itself that it is safer to withdraw all its forces, given the decisive role of its air force in the destruction of major Syrian cities and the hatred this has engendered.

Syria’s new rulers have reestablished diplomatic relations with Ukraine and have even spoken of a “strategic partnership” between the two countries. But Syria does not want to get caught in the middle of a geopolitical rivalry, and its leaders certainly do not need a confrontation with Russia or for Russia to offer support to what remains of the old regime. The new government aims to keep Russia out of Syria’s domestic affairs without closing any doors. It recognizes that Russia is a “significant state in the world,” as Shibani put it, and considers Moscow a potential future partner. It may even seek Russia’s favor now, as Syria will not, at least in the short run, be able to replace its existing arms, almost all of which are Russian, or forgo expertise related to its Russian-built civilian infrastructure, including power stations and dams.

The United States and other Western countries would benefit if Syria closed the Russian bases and thus limited Moscow’s access to the Mediterranean Sea and Africa. But they should not pressure Damascus to do so and must not condition support or sanctions relief on any foreign policy positions. Such demands would strain Syria’s political transition, distract from more urgent development concerns, and signal to the Syrian people that sanctions on the Assad regime were ultimately not about ending brutal repression but furthering a Western geopolitical agenda—a narrative the old regime fed to its citizens for years. Furthermore, if striving to meet Western conditions pushed the interim government into open conflict with Russia or another of Assad’s backers, no Western country would be prepared to intervene to prevent the instability that would follow.

The international actors most directly involved in Syria and with the Syrian diaspora must exercise particular restraint. Turkey, for instance, is a main beneficiary of change in Syria, but some of its actions pose risks to the political transition. Ankara is pursuing two contradictory concerns in Syria: it wants a stable neighbor, not least so that a majority of the more than three million Syrian refugees living in Turkey can return home, but it is also expanding its multidecade war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) onto Syrian territory by fighting, partly by proxy, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led coalition of U.S.-backed militias. The United States and Europe should have a frank conversation with Ankara, a NATO ally, about Turkey’s interests and apprehensions related to Syria and make clear that for a stable transition to occur, Syrian Kurds—including groups that have administered much of the northeast over the past decade—will need to have a role in the Syrian government.

European countries must also act responsibly to avoid destabilizing Syria’s transition. After Turkey and Lebanon, Europe is home to the largest population of Syrian refugees. Rather than give in to populist sentiments and demand the refugees’ quick return, European leaders need to devise policies by which displaced Syrians can support their homeland’s reconstruction whether they return or not and, in so doing, help build solid, people-based relations between Syria and Europe.

Supporting the transition also means respecting Syria’s sovereignty. In the fight against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), for instance, the United States and the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, a U.S.-led group with more than 80 member states, have relied on the SDF as their main partner on the ground in Syria. The coalition should invite Syria to become a member of the group, which would acknowledge both Syrian dominion and the government’s responsibility in helping counter the remaining ISIS threat. The United States has a limited troop presence in Syria to fight active ISIS cells; these troops should remain, working not only with the SDF but also with the new government in Damascus. In turn, the Syrian government, once it’s ready, should take over the management of the al-Hawl and Roj detention camps in the northeast, which are run by the SDF and hold some 9,000 ISIS fighters and about 40,000 displaced people.

It will ultimately fall to Syria’s new leaders to keep the country on a path that ensures continued international assistance. But first, the world must clear the way, resisting the urge to let narrow geopolitical interests obstruct the cooperation that will be necessary to allow Syria to rebuild. To achieve peace and stability, Syria needs the help of current and future partners that will not bend the country toward their own visions but instead help support Syria’s own.

 

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