Lawfare Archive: The New Syrian Government and Its Problems

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As part of the ongoing conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran, the US is

reportedly encouraging the Syrian government to cooperate on counterterrorism efforts and

send troops into eastern Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah.

Although it has previously signaled a willingness to cooperate with western countries, the al-Shara

government seems reluctant to further inflame tensions in the Middle East.

For today's archive, I chose an episode from March 19, 2025, in which Stephen Heidman joined

a Daniel Byman to discuss the Syrian government's transition from the Assad regime to a government

led by Ahmed al-Shara, who is the former leader of an Islamist armed group.

The pair also discussed Israeli interventions in Syria, the US's attitude toward the new

regime in Damascus, and more.

It's the law fair podcast.

I'm Daniel Byman, the foreign policy editor of law fair.

And I'm here today with Steve Heidman.

He is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Smith College and a long time observer of

the Middle East.

And immediately on the heels of the collapse of the Assad regime, Israel intervened militarily

in Syria and now occupies a significant territory in southern Syria and seems to be setting

itself up as permanent or semi-permanent presence in southern Syria.

Today we're talking about the new government in Syria and the many problems that Syria

is facing.

Steve, the situation in Syria has been rapidly changing, not only with the overthrow of

Bashar al-Assad, but in the months that have followed.

Can you catch us up since the fall of the regime?

How has the situation evolved?

Sure.

I'm happy to be here with you, Dan.

And I should say this isn't especially auspicious day to be doing the podcast because this is

the 14th anniversary of the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011.

It began more or less on this day in 2011.

And we're about three months into a political transition that I think very few expected

and which as you indicated has brought an enormous change to Syria and a change that's unfolding

very rapidly and is still quite fluid.

I think on one level, if you look at what has happened in Syria since the fall of the

Assad regime on December 8th, the progress that has been made in putting the pieces of

a political transition in place has been quite extraordinary.

Now there have been acts of violence in the wake of the fall of the Assad regime that's

not unexpected.

Last week, we saw some especially tragic confrontations between remnants of the Assad regime and loyalists

of the interim government, security forces of the interim government in which many civilians

were killed.

But that was not typical for how the transition has unfolded.

In general, what we've seen is pretty steady progress on the part of the acting president,

Ahmed Elshara, the leader of this Islamist armed group, Hayat Tahrir Hashem, that played

a leading role in the overthrow of the Assad regime.

And Elshara has really, I think, made quite steady progress in putting, as I said, the pieces

of a political transition in place.

He has secured the agreement of armed factions to his role as acting president.

He has convened a large gathering of Syrians to talk about what the core principles are

that a transition should be attentive to.

He has selected a group of legal experts, Islamic authorities, to design an interim constitution

that he's now approved.

He has established what he calls a National Security Council to guide him in dealing with

remaining security issues that the country faces, and there are quite a few.

And very importantly, last week, he also signed an agreement with Kurdish fighters under

the Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria's northeast concerning their position in a future

Syria.

Their integration into some new reformed security sector that is still very much information,

but which has at least gotten something of a start.

And these are all really very important benchmarks.

In effect, we have the political framework for a transition in place.

We have the security framework for a transition in place.

On the other hand, if you look a little bit beneath the surface, what seems to be happening

is that Ahmed Asshada is designing a transition that will consolidate his authority as Syria's

president throughout the five-year transition period.

He has not only put himself in the role of president, but Commander-in-Chief of the Armed

Forces.

And in the new constitution, the transitional constitution that was approved just a few

days ago, he has direct or indirect authority over parliament, over the judiciary, and he

has given himself in the new constitution quite extraordinary power.

So while we watch events unfold in a fashion that appears on one level much more orderly,

I think we feared, given how quickly the Assad regime collapsed.

On the other hand, the system that's emerging is one that I think gives us cause for concern.

It's a system in which power will remain heavily centralized in the hands of a president.

It's a system that will unquestionably exhibit the Islamist features the Islamist attributes

that reflect the ideology of Hayat Tafriyat Hashem.

And so even though there's been a lot of discussion of minority rights and tolerance and

freedom and participation and accountability, what we're seeing, I think, leads us to

be a bit wary about where the country is going.

Well, let me follow up on that last point, and then I want to circle back to a few of

your other observations.

You're an expert on authoritarianism, and you've judged it in its various guises throughout

the greater Middle East.

Is there a kind of model you look at and say, you know, I think Syria under Oshara will

look like this country or this leader in a couple years?

The closest model that comes to mind really is the way Turkey has evolved under President

Erdogan over the past decade or so, in which you have a really super empowered executive,

super empowered president, who has direct control over all of the other branches of government,

the military, the judiciary, a government that surveils and controls the media very closely,

a government that is relatively intolerant of dissent, and a government that pursues

a fairly liberal free market style of economic policy.

And we can't really say for sure that Syria will emulate in any way the Turkish model.

But if I had to look for a comparison, that is the one that I would view as perhaps closest.

The one really crucial difference I expect is that even though Erdogan himself is an

Islamist, I think Ahmed Isshara and some of those, he's appointed to very, very senior positions

in his government, have an even deeper ideological commitment to a vision of Islam that maybe

even more restrictive, perhaps socially more regressive than that of Erdogan.

Steve, let me follow up on your point about the recent fighting.

As you noted, some degree of score-settling is inevitable after Brutal Civil War, but

the media reports put the number of deaths at over a thousand people.

Is this the sort of thing that's likely to recur?

And what's your sense of the causes of this particular fighting?

Well, let's recall, I think first of all, that this fighting got underway because of very

large number of troops, of former Assad regime officers and security officials launched

a major attack against the forces of the interim government.

The media reports indicate that there may have been as many as 4,000 Assad regime loyalists

who participated in the initial operation that led to the kind of reprisals that we saw

last week.

And as that confrontation erupted, the interim government responded by dispatching its own

security forces to the coastal region of Syria, which is the heartland of Syria's

aloe community, it's minority aloe community, the community to which Bashar al-Assad himself

and his father belonged.

And in the course of confronting the Assad regime fighters who had launched this attack,

we saw as well an enormous movement into the coastal area of fighters affiliated with

other armed groups, other armed factions, as well as some civilians from villages near

where the confrontation was occurring, including villages that had experienced severe brutality

at the hands of the Assad regime earlier in the Syrian conflict.

And that turned out to be a formula really for massive abuses at the hands of those who

moved into the coast to try to put down this uprising on the part of Assad regime fighters.

And we know that there were, as you mentioned, perhaps as many as 1,000 people killed, we

know that perhaps a quarter of those fatalities were caused by fighters loyal to the Assad

regime, so the violence was not one directional in any sense.

But it was a really important testing moment for the interim government, and in many ways

it failed to test.

Because what we saw in the fighting that occurred was the limits of the interim government's

control over armed factions that had at least nominally pledged their loyalty to this new

government, to Ahmed Isshada.

In fact, as the fighting continued, it became clear that many of these armed groups were

acting quite independently.

They were committing grievous abuses against civilians.

Some of the treatment of allowy civilians that we saw was quite grotesque.

And they conducted themselves in a way that, I think, demonstrated their complete lack

of concern for accountability.

They were clearly outside of any kind of chain of command, and the chief takeaway, I think,

from that episode is how limited the interim government's control continues to be over

the many, many armed factions that are still operating in Syria.

And that's deeply troubling.

There is a long way to go before any kind of centralized command structure will be in

place in Syria.

And so episodes like this could happen again.

We could see a similar kind of really fragmented, almost uncontrolled reaction, if we see

additional provocations from Syrians who remain loyal to the Assad regime.

On the other hand, it seems that the intent of the Assad regime fighters who launched this

wave of violence was to spark a cascade of anti-government violence across a much broader

swath of Syria, perhaps even reigniting a full-scale civil war.

And that failed.

It didn't happen.

And I think we can take a very, very modest degree of comfort in the failure of this operation

to cause that kind of cascade.

But still, the way the forces affiliated with the new government conducted themselves

was grievous and is something that Ahmed Asshada himself is going to need to take very

seriously to prevent future outbreaks like this.

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So as that was happening, and as I was starting to worry about Syria up, really going off

of a conflict cliff, as you also know it, there was this deal between the Shara government

and the curts.

Can you talk a little bit more about that in a particular, what they greedy and what

concessions, if any, did each side make?

Yeah.

The relationship between the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces,

the units that the U.S. has supported for the past seven or eight years because of their

participation in anti-ISIS operations in northeast Syria.

The relationship between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the interim government has been

a difficult one from the beginning.

The SDF has hoped to negotiate a reintegration into Syria that would preserve a fairly significant

degree of autonomy, of self-governance, and would preserve the integrity of the SDF as

an armed group.

And from Ahmed Asshada's perspective, the only option that the new government in Syria

was prepared to consider was the integration of the SDF fighters as individuals and the

reassertion of the authority of the central government over the northeast, an area that

has been outside of the government's control since about 2012.

So the differences were quite significant.

In addition, Turkey bordering Syria to the north views the SDF as an extension of a Kurdish

irredentist group with which it has been at war for almost 40 years, the PKK.

And so Turkey was threatening military intervention to suppress the SDF.

And that created an additional, I think, source of pressure on the SDF to reach agreement

with the Syrian central government, with the interim government.

And an additional factor, I think, that might have pushed the SDF toward this agreement

is the engagement of the US military, actually, because we're aware from media reporting that

senior officials in the US military advised the SDF that this was the time for them to

reach an agreement with the central government, because the fate of US forces that have been

in northeast Syria since about 2017 really could not be guaranteed.

The Trump administration has committed to the withdrawal of US forces.

And so what we saw was a kind of coming together of a number of different factors that I

think created the conditions that led to this agreement.

As to what it contained, it's a very broad, very general understanding, a document, an

eight-point document was signed by Ahmad al-Shara and by Muslim Abdi, the head of the SDF.

And it contained a number of very general principles that reflected the willingness of Ahmad al-Shara

to be responsive to the concerns of Kurds in the northeast.

It acknowledges Kurds as full and equal citizens of Syria.

It acknowledges the right of Kurds to participate as equal citizens in Syrian politics.

Those were things that Kurds had not enjoyed under Bashar al-Assad and his father.

And so it really signaled, I think, a willingness on the part of the new government in Syria to

accommodate some of the principal concerns of serious Kurds.

What we didn't get any clarity about is how the two sides resolved their differences

around the integration of SDF fighters into the Syrian military.

We didn't get any clarity about whether the northeast would be able to be governed with

any measure of autonomy.

And so a lot of the really important details remained to be resolved, or if they were

worked out, we don't know how they were worked out.

But nonetheless, I think the agreement did represent an incredibly important step forward.

At least, I think it removed any incentive that Turkey might have had to intervene militarily

against the SDF.

It brings the SDF into a nominally unified Syrian security sector with a lot of detail still

to be clarified.

And it removed in the process the possibility of a confrontation between forces of the interim

government and the SDF.

So it's a very important step, but with a lot still of ambiguity around important details.

I want to also discuss another major force that you've mentioned a couple times, which

is Turkey.

Could you describe how Turkey views the current government as well as how Turkey might

use its influence to try to change things?

Turkey has been one of the principal sponsors of the current government.

It sees itself as the country that is best positioned to influence serious political transition.

It sees itself as the country best positioned to play a lead role in serious post-conflict

reconstruction, if and when that eventually gets underway.

That has a lot to do with the role that Turkey has had in northern Syria, pretty much since

the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011.

Syria has intervened militarily in northern Syria several times to prevent Kurds from

consolidating control over a contiguous swath of territory on Turkey's southern border.

It has sponsored a number of armed factions as its proxies in northern Syria.

And it was very close in terms of intelligence, sharing, and other kinds of activities with

Hayat Tafriyada Shem in the northwest of Syria, even though the relationships were often

complicated and not entirely collegial or cooperative.

But because Turkey has such a long border with Syria, because it has occupied such an important

position in the north and sees Syria in many respects as its backyard, because it has

been so concerned about the potential threat from the Syrian, the Kurdish, Syrian democratic

forces.

Turkey has really moved very quickly to consolidate its position as really the preeminent

regional actor with an interest in shaping serious political transition.

Let me follow up with a really similar question about Israel, where we've already seen Israel

intervene militarily in post-Assad Syria.

What role do you think Israel is likely to play in the coming months?

And is that something that the US government should be trying to influence one way or another?

Yeah, Israel's strategy in Syria has been interesting and somewhat troubling to watch as

it's unfolded.

As you mentioned, almost immediately on the heels of the collapse of the Assad regime,

Israel intervened militarily in Syria and now occupies a significant territory in southern

Syria and seems to be setting itself up as permanent or semi-permanent presence in southern

Syria.

It has launched hundreds of attacks to degrade the military equipment of the Assad regime.

It has begun a outreach to the Syrian Druze community on the grounds that this is a minority

with which Israel could form some form of alliance.

And all of that is premised on this assumption, on the part of the current Israeli government,

that Israel's security can best be assured by the presence of a weak and fragmented Syria

to its north.

And that's a position that grows out of the decades and decades of antagonism and conflict

between Syria and Israel in part.

And it grows out of the understanding on the part of the Israeli government as well that

Syria's interim government is a solifist, jihadist government that will inevitably pose a threat

to Israeli security.

Now what's troubling about this is that Israeli officials seem to feel that a weakened and

fragmented Syria is in Israel's best interest.

And yet a weakened and fragmented Syria is also one that is likely to invite the return

of Iranian intervention in some form, which Israel, I think, would view as a significant

threat. A weakened and fragmented Syria is a country that Turkey would view with a

great deal of concern and might take steps to try to intervene in, to stabilize this

country on its southern border.

And so it really does seem as if the conclusion that Israeli officials have reached, that

the only path for assuring Israeli security is through the instability of Syria is quite

shortsighted and has implications that may work very much to Israel's disadvantage.

And it's interesting because we're now beginning to hear that concern reflected within the

Israeli political establishment as well, former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, either today

or yesterday came out with a statement in which he called for improved relations with

the new government of Syria for recognizing the government of Ahmad Isshara and for beginning

a process of engagement.

And he expressed the sense that in its current policy, Israel is missing an historic opportunity

to reset its relationship with Syria.

So what the Israeli government is doing is contested among Israelis.

It's an approach that is viewed with a great deal of concern outside of Syria.

I think the one, the one very important actor that seems to be supportive of Israel's policy

is, in fact, the United States.

And I think that is a reflection of perspectives within the Trump administration that are closely

aligned with those of the Israeli government, that once a jihadist, always a jihadist,

that Ahmad Isshara himself has a rather troubling past as a former member of Al Qaeda who fought

against the U.S. in Iraq, and that therefore Israel's interest in a weak and fragmented

Syria is an outcome that plays to American interest as well.

So I do think that the U.S. has quietly, up till now, been supportive of the approach

of the Israeli government.

And that, I think, gives Israel a great deal of license to continue its current policy.

But as I said, it's a policy that I fear has implications that will backfire in quite

serious ways over time.

Let me use our last bit of time here to talk more on the U.S. role.

The United States, of course, has a series of sanctions it's imposed on Syria in the past,

related both to the Civil War and human rights, but also to narcotics and also to support

for terrorism.

And in general, has treated Syria as a hostile country, often with good reason.

How should the Trump administration approach Syria should be lifting economic sanctions,

should in general, it be embracing the new government, or would you recommend kind

of a wait and see sort of approach?

Well, whether the Trump administration moves to deepen engagement with the new Syrian

government, I think addressing the issue of sanctions is really of crucial importance.

Because unless there is a process of economic recovery that feels tangible to Syrians, I

think the prospects for a successful political transition become much, much more remote.

I really do view the economic crisis that Syria is experiencing as perhaps the most

significant threat to the progress of Syria's political transition.

And so the reluctance of the U.S. to address the issue of sanctions in a comprehensive way,

most of which were imposed on the Assad regime and that regime, of course, no longer exists.

In my view, I think will become a significant obstacle to economic recovery and a significant

threat to Syria's near-term, mid-term stability and political progress.

Now the Trump administration, I think, has shown to date significant reluctance to address

the issue of sanctions.

It has not taken any steps, for example, to remove the designation of Syria as a state

sponsor of terror, which was imposed in 1979.

It has welcomed statements from Ahmed Eshara about his willingness to complete the destruction

of Syria's chemical weapons supplies.

It has acknowledged his statements in opposition to terrorism and to ISIS.

So it is acknowledging that the new government is saying the right things.

And yet when it comes to the economy, we really have not seen any movement at all from

the Trump administration to ease conditions that would support Syria's economic recovery.

And I think that's unfortunate because Syrians are very quickly asking themselves, am I better

off today than I was under the Assad regime?

Is this new government able to deliver on the critical economic concerns of me and my family?

And the inability of the interim government to support improvement in Syria's economy

is increasingly going to become a target of popular agreements and popular anger.

And it's an issue that I think the Trump administration could do a great deal more to assist

with.

Steve, that was extremely helpful.

I appreciate your willingness to guide us through the most important issues facing Syria

today.

Thank you very much for joining us at LawFair.

Well, thank you, Dan, and I'm happy to talk with you.

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