They won the war. Can Syria's new leaders rebuild the country?

Last Update: 2025-01-30 17:00:03 - Source: Middle East Eye
They won the war. Can Syria's new leaders rebuild the country?

They won the war. Can Syria's new leaders rebuild the country?

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Dania Akkad
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)

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