Officials in Syria's caretaker government were left with a state in ruins. Some fear they aren't moving fast enough to fix it
In Syria, the clock is ticking.
Just seven weeks ago, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) fighters and allied rebel groups took Damascus after a lightning-speed campaign.
The group had not expected to go much past Aleppo, let alone end the 53-year autocratic rule of the Assad dynasty 12 days later.
Suddenly, members of the group found themselves in charge of a state.
HTS, of course, has some experience in governance: for the past seven years, the group has managed the civil administration of Idlib, the northwest province that became its stronghold during Syria’s 13-year civil war.
Still, the swift transformation of the group from combat fatigues to business suits, from the trenches to Davos, has been breathtaking.
“Curiously,” said Tom Fletcher, the British diplomat turned top UN humanitarian official who has been among a cast of senior international figures to visit Damascus since the fall of Bashar al-Assad, “the person I had the best conversation with about post-conflict reconstruction was Ahmed al-Sharaa.”
Sharaa, Syria’s newly appointed interim president formerly known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed Jolani, has come to symbolise the rebranding and reorientation of HTS.
In its original iteration as the Nusra Front, the group founded by Jolani in 2012 was once affiliated to al-Qaeda and remains a proscribed terrorist group in many western countries.
Fletcher said the two men had “talked long into the night”. Sharaa, he said, talked of having learned lessons from failed state-building experiments in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and “had a kind of governing model in his mind of how you try to rebuild a central administration”.
Many delegations that have recently travelled to Damascus have had similar assessments after meetings with the group: HTS, they say, are saying the right things.
Behind the scenes, HTS officials have told visitors that the group is incredibly overwhelmed by the state-building task it has before it and its ability to deliver on Sharaa’s apparent vision.
One high-ranking HTS official told Middle East Eye that American and Saudi officials have separately warned the group that, without training and capacity building, they will fail.
Some believe this issue is a matter of time and one that HTS is already starting to at least try to tackle, while prioritising more immediate issues such as security.
But others say the signs they see worry them that Sharaa and other leaders within the group are reluctant to delegate power to people outside their inner circle and are creating unnecessary and unhelpful bottlenecks.
All agree that there is a limited amount of time before Syrians grow impatient.
Haid Haid, a Syrian expert and senior consulting fellow at Chatham House, said: “Syria is at a crossroads and things could go either way.
“For now, people are more sort of willing to give this authority a chance, but for how long will that last?”
Officials 'overwhelmed'
Long before 13 years of war ravaged the country, the Syrian state was a mess.
Ministries were weighed down by employees hired on the basis of their personal connections, many whom knew little about the jobs they were supposedly doing, if they showed up for work at all.
Simple administrative tasks, such as getting copies of documents, could take preposterous amounts of time, even if one had greased the wheels with a bribe or made a call to someone with influence.
Many civil servants were trained in places such as Iran and Russia.
And there was little hope that anything would change, said Steven Heydemann, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy and chair of Middle East Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts who has spent decades focused on Syria.
“This was an inept, corrupt, clientelistic bureaucracy in which officials were intensely reluctant to make decisions that might end up backfiring on them, which led to decision-making funnelling all the way up to the top where it encountered enormous bottlenecks,” Heydemann said.
A Syrian rebel stands inside a ransacked office at the Defence Ministry's military security headquarters in Damascus, the day after Assad's overthrow (Louai Beshara/AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">It is this state, the one that already needed fundamental transformation before it was hollowed out by conflict, that HTS has inherited.
“You don’t understand,” said someone in close contact with HTS’s leadership who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to comment. “Everything is paper-based. There is no digitisation.”
Mohammed Alaa Ghanem, the principal strategist and senior political adviser for the Citizens for a Secure and Safe America, a US-based NGO which advocates for democracy in Syria, recently visited Damascus for a month and attended meetings with officials across numerous ministries.
Ghanem said he was told by multiple officials - the prime minister, the health minister, the governors of Damascus and Reif Damascus, and the director of civil registry at the interior ministry - in separate meetings and without solicitation or prompting that they are overwhelmed by the extensive damage the regime inflicted on state institutions.
“They all expressed a similar sentiment, feeling overwhelmed at present,” he said. "They said the regime left them a very, very, very heavy burden.”
He said Sharaa, too, highlighted the severity of the burden when they spoke, but that the de facto leader, nonetheless, appeared cool, calm and collected.
Ghanem said that before he met the officials this reality had already become clear to him during a visit to a civil registry office, where birth, death and marriage certificates are stored.
“The building wasn’t looted, but it looked like a joke to me. All these important records were scattered on the floor,” he said. “They didn’t have enough computers. They didn’t have enough of those machines that print IDs.”
Drinking from fire hoses
Securing birth certificates and printing IDs are certainly not at the top of the list of urgent tasks for Syria’s leadership at the moment.
The situation in the country is extremely fragile. Earlier this month, the new Syrian government, with intelligence passed from the US, reportedly thwarted an attack on a Shia shrine near the capital by the Islamic State (IS) group, which still has a presence in the desert in southeastern Syria.
An Emirati commentator, writing in an Israeli media outlet, recently speculated about whether Sharaa would be assassinated and wondered why the Syrian leader feels so confident about his security.
Even seemingly innocuous situations can quickly get out of control.
Last week, a photo circulated online of Syrian actor Ghatfan Ghanoum who once played Maher al-Assad, the ousted president’s younger brother in a film. Ghanoum, who moved to Finland in 2014, had returned to visit Syria.
Photo of Syrian actor Ghadhfan Ghanoum, who played Maher al-Assad in a TV series, shared by Syrian film-maker Abd Alhade Alani (X/@abdalhadealani)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">Abd Alhade Alani, a Syrian film-maker, said a fan posted Ghanoum’s picture with a joke caption saying, “Maher-al Assad has returned to Syria”.
Within hours, Alani said the joke - which many believed to be real news - had stoked Assad supporters to mobilise armed forces across the country.
Security forces were reportedly deployed to the Assad stronghold of Latakia while protesters apparently took to the streets in support of the new government, chanting “Maher, go to sleep, long live Syrian General Security”.
Along with security, the caretaker government faces the immediate challenges of disbanding armed factions and integrating rebels into a cohesive, unified Syrian army.
There are also questions over northeast Syria, where roughly 90 percent of the country’s national resources sit, and which is currently controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Earlier this month, US forces patrol in Qamishli, a city in northeastern Syria in the Hasakeh province which is mostly controlled by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (Delil Souleiman/AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">American troops, which quietly increased in number from 900 to 2,000 after Assad was overthrown, are present in this area as part of a decade-old, anti-IS mission with the SDF.
And critically, despite a six-month general licence relieving some of the restrictions imposed by US sanctions, those sanctions and others, including from many EU countries, largely remain in place, significantly hampering the new government’s ability to rebuild Syria’s economy.
Less than two months into the job, it’s clear to visitors that Syria’s top officials are feeling the weight of their responsibilities.
Ghanem was pretty sure that one, if not two, of the officials he met were sleeping in their offices, and were obviously fatigued.
Heydemann said a friend of his described the officials as “drinking out of 7,000 fire hoses”.
“And they are,” he said. “But alongside that is this very worrisome pattern that Sharaa seems to have fallen into, of relying on this very narrow group of insiders in whom he has confidence and trust without seeming to acknowledge the constraint that it imposes on his ability to manage those 7,000 fire hoses.”
The interim government, by all accounts, is replete with offers of assistance from Syrian civil society and expats, other countries and private companies.
'It’s no secret, at least to those who have followed the organisation for a long time, that most decisions are controlled by a small circle of individuals led by Sharaa'
- Haid Haid, senior consulting fellow, Chatham House
But several sources said those at the top of the government appeared to be sitting on these offers. The HTS official said the group's leaders had welcomed such offers but they "remained in the realm of polite discussions".
The question is why.
Haid Haid, who has studied the group for years, said: "It’s no secret, at least to those who have followed the organisation for a long time, that most decisions are controlled by a small circle of individuals led by Sharaa."
During a visit this month to Damascus, Haid said he heard concern from Syrians outside the government and also from officials about the leadership creating bottlenecks.
“They have not been delegating the majority of responsibilities to others despite how busy they are,” he said.
“They have to change the mentality of trying to run Syria the same way they used to run Idlib. That’s not going to work. The key figures can’t be the only ones making decisions.”
Haid said the new government needed to be more transparent and public about the fact that it doesn’t have the human resources or bandwidth to deal with all of its challenges.
“I think pride usually might come in the way of asking for this or that. But that’s not always a good thing. In this case, it’s definitely not a good thing,” he said.
He and others say they find the lack of transparency about how the interim government is being run particularly disconcerting because there is little information about the upcoming national dialogue conference that is supposed to bring Syrians together to chart a new path for the country. It is scheduled for March.
A speech by Ahmed al-Sharaa is televised in a cafe in Damascus on 29 January 2025 (Louai Beshara/AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">These concerns will likely have been stoked this week as the leadership announced the dissolution of the country's 2012 constitution, the Assad-era parliament, all security agencies and the Ba'ath Party.
On Wednesday, Sharaa was appointed as Syria's interim president and was authorised to form a temporary legislative assembly, but little further detail was shed about the conference or how long the transitional period will last.
During his visit, Ghanem said the topic of assistance came up during a discussion he had with the new prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir.
Previously, Bashir served as the minister of local development in Idlib. Ghanem said he explained that, in his earlier role, he had used a database that could tell him with “one click of a button” how many male or female employees they had or what his department’s greatest needs were.
The new government has started completely in the dark on these kinds of details, he told Ghanem.
“They said, ‘We’re in the process of doing that so that hopefully, a couple of months down the road, we can take advantage of these very gracious and very generous offers of help,'” Ghanem said.
“The governor of Damascus and the prime minister both said that they’re being inundated with offers of help by people with excellent resumes, but they said they are currnetly unable to take advantage of that because they don’t even have a database.”
Mutasem Syoufi, executive director of The Day After (TDA), a Syrian non-profit organisation, said he has struggled to establish a fruitful connection with the new government.
As its name would suggest, Syrian scholars and civil society activists who are part of TDA’s network have worked for the past 13 years to prepare for this very moment.
They’ve focused on topics such as transitional justice, housing and property rights, arbitrary detention and missing persons and constitutional and electoral reform, and now have a library of policy papers ready to go.
But Syoufi said that how to get them in front of the right people has proved challenging.
“I don’t know who to talk to, what are the methods, what are the venues,” Syoufi said.
“We see people from America, from Europe and from other civil society groups visiting Sharaa and having meetings with him. When you ask them how these meetings were organised, they say, well, through personal relationships.”
Syoufi said he recently attended a meeting with more than 20 other organisations with the Minister of Social Affairs, and suggested that the government establish a national commission for identifying missing people alongside civil society groups and victims' associations.
People pray as they gather outside Sednaya Prison in Damascus looking for their relatives on 9 December 2024 (Omar Haj Kadour/AFP)
“He listened and he said, ‘Yes. There will be something in the future’. I said, ‘We are ready’,” Syoufi recounted.
The minister said he was receptive to the organisations’ proposals, but didn’t tell them how to share these.
“After the meeting, I went to one of his aides and I said, 'The minister said you are ready to receive our proposals. How can we give them to you?’
“He said, ‘Inshallah, inshallah, we will find out,'” Syoufi said, adding that he has yet to find out.
Bread-and-butter issues
The challenges facing Syria’s caretaker government are very familiar to Zied Ladhari.
Ladhari was a prominent member of the Ennahda party which led Tunisia after the fall of longtime dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and he served as Tunisia’s minister of development, investment and international cooperation.
He resigned from the party in 2019 over concerns that Ennahda had failed to address Tunisia’s economic and social challenges.
He’s now working as a lawyer in Paris where he reflected on the struggles that he and others faced to rebuild the Tunisian state after Ben Ali’s overthrow.
“I remember talking to some ministers after the 2011 elections. They told me they felt completely lost,” he said.
“It was a very challenging moment for them even to decide how to organise their time, what people they should meet or even what agenda to follow.”
Ladhari is careful to clarify that the situations in Tunisia and Syria are not comparable in many regards. Tunisia hadn’t been through a war and state and public services still functioned, he said.
But he said he believes Syria’s new leaders will face many of the same human resource challenges that befell Tunisia’s post-Ben Ali government to build a better state.
A street vendor fries food in Syria's northern city of Aleppo on 11 December 2024 (Ozan Kose/AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">Ladhari’s first piece of advice? Focus on government delivery on bread-and-butter issues, rather than on creating the perfect political transition. He says it was a mistake to spend three years in Tunisia finalising the new constitution.
“We had a revolution to have a fantastic constitution, but this was not really the first reason to overthrow the Ben Ali regime. The problem was also dignity and people's jobs and economic issues,” he said.
That delivery, he said, will depend on capacity building within state institutions. “I am personally convinced that this is key to transformation,” he said.
The onus will be on the government to hire the right people with the right skills, not simply those “with the same convictions or same backgrounds”.
In Tunisia, he said he and other colleagues sometimes faced resistance from entrenched politicians from the “old guard” when they tried to bring in these kinds of hires.
“There is a temptation to hire people of confidence, people they trust, people from the same background. The problem is that these people will not necessarily be able to deliver on the work and this creates even more problems,” Ladhari said.
He sympathised that it would be easy to dismiss state-building as a priority at the moment, given all of the pressures in Syria. But in his mind, it is critical to start that work now.
“I think it’s completely understandable in the first days and weeks. They cannot realise how important this capacity-building is,” he said.
“There is a time for excitement after the removal of Assad, but I think that this time will not actually be here for years.”
HTS in Davos
No one seems clearer on the urgency of the project than the caretaker government itself.
In a conversation with former British prime minister Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Syria’s Foreign Minister Assad Hassan al-Shibani said: “We have political challenges, economic and humanitarian [challenges], and also how to rebuild Syria’s relations with the region.
“But what we need in this period, we need to convince the Syrian people inside and outside that they are finding the right government that serves their interests and also that represents them in an honourable way and that they feel safe in their country.”
Syria's Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shaibani speaks to former British prime minister Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos on 22 January 2025 (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP)
") rgba(220, 220, 220, 0.5); top: -15px; left: 0px;">Shibani said the government had made a “committee of expertise” that is now “studying and making experiments” in the field, which appeared, like the database, to be an assessment project to figure out what its priorities should be.
He also said he was drawing inspiration for Syria’s new economy from Singapore and Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030.
Middle East Eye has heard from a source with knowledge of the current operations inside HTS, that the transitional government invited and has received at least 50 people from European countries in recent weeks to help run the government.
The same source said that Syrians educated in Europe, including engineers, political scientists, economists, sociologists and agricultural experts, had been invited and hired to various levels of the government to lead the country to a national conference and elections.
MEE asked HTS’s media office to confirm these accounts, explain how individuals were selected and how the group would ensure that the hiring process was both swift and transparent, but did not receive a comment by the time of publication.
Ghanem said he believes the government’s priorities are roughly in the right order right now, although he thinks additional efforts are necessary in the areas of transitional justice and in preserving the regime’s archives for future trials.
But the government’s focus on the economy, in particular, would seem very much in line with the priorities of Syrians, 90 percent of whom are currently living in poverty according to the UN.
During his recent month-long visit in Syria, Ghanem stayed in his family’s home and learned what it was like to live with very limited electricity in the depths of winter, conditions all too familiar for Syrians throughout the country.
“We live in an upscale part of Damascus and we’re not poor. Nonetheless, I was very cold. You only get electricity an hour in the morning, and an hour in the evening,” he said.
Warm showers required diesel fuel. A chicken he bought went bad the next day because there wasn’t enough electricity to run the refrigerator. He heard similar complaints time and again from cab drivers and fellow Syrians using microbuses.
“The majority of people don’t care who is in charge right now. They care about putting food on the table and not going to sleep on an empty stomach,” Ghanem said.
A man rides his bicycle past people lining up to buy bread in Damascus in December 2024 (Aris Messinis/AFP)
He said he isn’t alarmed that the government hasn’t jumped on the resumes and offers of assistance it has received - yet.
“I’m not losing sleep over the fact that they’re not taking advantage of all these offers because I saw with my own eyes how overwhelmed they seem to be and how grim the regime’s legacy was,” Ghanem said.
“If three or four months down the road, they still claim that they don’t have a database, then we will need to breathe down their necks in order to do that. However, I’m not too concerned. They seemed very genuine.”
Syoufi remains in the door-knocking phase. He heard from a friend with connections to HTS that one of The Day After’s reports is among several currently being assessed by the government.
Next month, he plans to open an office in Damascus.
“We have factors of optimism and we have factors that make us concerned. What is clear for now, at least, is that there is no public clear road map for an inclusive transition announced by Ahmed al-Sharaa. We have to wait. I think we have to give the guy a chance,” he said.
"What can we do? As a civil society, all we can do is advocate and use our voices and try to be active.”