Syria is a Middle Eastern country where Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former jihadist, is attempting to rebuild the state after the fall of the Assad regime. A country that was once a despotic client of Iran and Russia is now trying to join the region's pro-Western camp. Despite fears of an Islamist theocracy, women are not obliged to cover up or stay at home, and entertainment and alcohol are allowed. Damascus fell to his forces, prompting a transition. Asaad al-Shaibani serves as foreign minister. The interim government wants to privatise state-run firms and woo foreign investors. The new government has pledged to disarm Palestinian militias in the country. There is serious talk of peace with Israel: not full normalisation, but at least an end to decades of conflict.
In February 2026 the Damascus International Book Fair, held at the International Convention Centre, suggested Syria's new rulers are keen—or at least willing—to create intellectual space that did not exist under Bashar al-Assad. Copies of Darwin, Hawking and Sally Rooney shared shelf-space with treatises on the failures of Islamist governance and tomes by Sayyid Qutb. Jordanian and Saudi publishers attended, though big Western publishers were largely absent. Under Assad, publishing houses were regularly forced to pull books from their shelves and intelligence agencies rifled through new collections; unflattering biographies of Bashar were banned. Sanctions remain an impediment to sourcing books at scale.
Palmyra is an ancient oasis city built on a trading route, once one of Syria's most popular tourist sites, attracting an estimated 150,000 visitors annually. After the outbreak of civil war in 2011 the site was closed to international visitors. Jihadists blew up monuments they deemed idolatrous, including the Temple of Bel, which had been consecrated nearly 2,000 years ago.
Sednaya, north of Damascus, was the most infamous prison in the Assad regime's network of torture and interrogation centres. Both Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar used it to lock up dissidents of all kinds, from communists to jihadists. As Syria's peaceful uprising morphed into civil war, Sednaya became as much a place of execution as of incarceration. Most inmates had been sentenced to death or indefinite detention. Execution was often by hanging, carried out in the early hours of the morning; prisoners were sometimes starved in the days before, because it meant they died more easily. When overcrowding made hangings impractical, guards beat inmates to death or strangled them.
On December 8th 2024, as the regime crumbled, gunmen stormed the prison and freed its inmates. Nine months later, hundreds of thousands of Syrians were still searching for missing relatives. The Syria Prisons Museum, an interactive digital archive created by Syrian journalists and activists, presents a comprehensive account of Sednaya, including documents, 360° video tours and testimonies from surviving inmates. The same team earlier mapped the detention system of Islamic State; that archive was later used as evidence in trials of IS members in Europe.
Syria has some of the world's largest phosphate deposits, said to total roughly 2bn tonnes. Ukraine hopes to use them for agriculture, offering wheat in return.
Syria's economy has shrunk by more than 70% since the civil war began in 2011. In the latter days of the Assad regime, the country's main export was illicit drugs. Unemployment is over 24%. More than 80% of the population lives below the poverty line, and over half of Syria's 24m people face food insecurity, according to the UN's World Food Programme. An estimated half of Syria's infrastructure has been destroyed. The Central Bank of Syria, led by governor Abdulkader Husrieh, is preparing to introduce inflation-targeting over the next three years. Exchange-rate unification—convergence of the official and black-market rates—remains a priority; recently the black-market rate has fallen below the official rate, reversing the historical pattern. Regional banks from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates have expressed interest in investing once sanctions are lifted. Regional partners have cleared Syria's arrears to the World Bank. DP World, an Emirati port operator, has unveiled an $800m deal to run the port of Tartus. Spinneys, a regional supermarket chain, is scouting sites; Zain, a Kuwaiti telecoms giant, has entered the market; and Saudi private capital is eyeing Syria's derelict cement plants. Executives from Chevron, an oil giant, visited Damascus in December 2025. Congress is expected to repeal the Caesar Act by early 2026.
The first trial of Assad-era officials began in late April 2026. Atef Najib, a first cousin of Bashar al-Assad and former security chief of Deraa, faces charges of murder, torture and orchestrating massacres; he was captured in January 2025 and is the most prominent old-regime figure in government custody. He famously told parents of children arrested in 2011 protests to "go home and make new ones". Syria's pre-existing statute book has no provision for crimes against humanity or command responsibility; the trial draws on the Geneva Conventions and the Convention against Torture. The transitional-justice commission established in 2025 has foundered, with the Ministry of Justice prosecuting Najib via the ordinary courts instead. Critics worry the haste undermines due process.
More than 6m Syrians were living abroad when Bashar al-Assad was toppled in December 2024. By end of 2025 some 3m had returned home. Four-fifths of the rest say they want to return one day, but many know it will not be easy. According to a UN poll, 81% of homeowners who fled say their houses are no longer habitable. A shortage of jobs deters others: at least a quarter of Syrians back home lack work. Reports of theft and intimidation by armed groups, especially in Aleppo, are scaring off the diaspora. Non-Sunni minorities, especially the Alawites, fear retribution if they return. Wealthier individuals with foreign passports have been going to and fro to rebuild homes or set up businesses. But for some Syrians abroad returning is an all-or-nothing decision: by going to Syria they may risk losing their right to stay as refugees in countries such as Britain.
Syria and Iraq have had a poisonous relationship for decades. By the 1970s rival Baathist regimes ruled in Damascus and Baghdad: Hafez al-Assad dismissed Saddam Hussein as a "gang"; Saddam accused Syria of treachery. After America invaded Iraq in 2003, Bashar al-Assad sent busloads of jihadists from his prisons into Iraq. Ahmed al-Sharaa once waged jihad in Iraq and spent five years in Iraqi prisons, making him deeply distrusted in Shia-majority Iraq. Muhammad al-Sudani, Iraq's prime minister, is one of the few Arab leaders yet to welcome him. A 350km concrete wall now runs along their once-porous border.
China vetoed several UN Security Council resolutions to impose sanctions on Bashar al-Assad's regime for the alleged use of chemical weapons. China's biggest interest in the civil war was the presence of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Uyghur militants from China's far-western region of Xinjiang fighting alongside Islamist rebels. Chinese officials praised Assad for combating terrorism and called on outside powers to "abandon the fantasy of regime change".
American sanctions long crippled life in Damascus, forcing men in suits to rummage through bins for food and leaving the capital with just a few hours of electricity each day. The sanctions also made potential donors, including the Syrian diaspora and Gulf states, nervous about paying for reconstruction. On May 13th 2025 Donald Trump announced he would lift American sanctions on Syria, to a standing ovation at an investment forum in Riyadh. The decision came at the urging of Muhammad bin Salman and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Lifting sanctions will allow money from the diaspora and Gulf states to flow in; rejoining SWIFT would let Syrian banks do business with foreign institutions and help fix a chronic cash shortage. But repealing the most restrictive sanctions will require an act of Congress.
The Caesar Act is a key part of the sanctions edifice. Trump has pledged 180-day suspensions for its provisions, but a dysfunctional Congress will struggle to repeal them before 2026. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has urged Congress to act, warning that waivers alone "are not going to be enough to attract foreign investment".
At a donors' conference in Brussels in March 2025, America listed eight demands for al-Sharaa's administration, including helping to find Americans missing in Syria—notably Austin Tice, an imprisoned journalist—preventing foreign fighters from joining the new government, and designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps a terrorist organisation.
Hawks in the White House, among them Sebastian Gorka and Tulsi Gabbard, are unconvinced by al-Sharaa's transformation and insist Syria remains a counter-terrorism issue. But evangelical Christians and Jewish leaders in America see Syria as a key battleground for minority rights in the Middle East and have been pushing for engagement. Al-Sharaa hinted to visiting Republican congressmen that under the right conditions Syria might one day join the Abraham accords.
Al-Sharaa signed an interim constitution in March 2025 that leant heavily on Islamic law. Efforts to weld Syria's myriad militias into a national army have foundered; negotiations with the Kurds in the north-east are going nowhere. The issuance of identity documents has stalled; civil registries outside Idlib have not recorded births, deaths or marriages since Assad's fall. Power is concentrated among perhaps half a dozen people in Damascus, from al-Sharaa's former rebel group, who often bypass the very state institutions they need to rebuild. Al-Sharaa has appointed three brothers and a brother-in-law to key positions; foreign investors report having to chase his brother Hazem rather than the appropriate ministers. The government has been reluctant to recruit minorities, particularly Alawites, into its new security institutions. Nine in ten Syrians still live in poverty.
Elections planned for a People's Assembly would use electoral colleges selected by the government to choose candidates from pre-screened lists. There would be no universal suffrage. Political parties remain banned.
In July 2025 the Syrian Centenary Initiative, named after a Druze-led uprising against the French mandate a century ago, became the first organised political opposition to al-Sharaa's government. Its founders include George Sabra, a Christian politician who once led a coalition of exiled opposition groups, and Ayman Asfari, a Syrian-British billionaire. The government has reacted badly: civil-society activists say criticism is treated as treason.
Vigilante justice persists in Homs and in Alawite-majority coastal areas, driven in part by Sunnis frustrated by the government's reluctance to prosecute figures from the Assad era. A suicide-bomb attack at a church near Damascus in June 2025 was the work of an extremist group. Religious zealots have harassed Christian-run bars in Damascus; gunmen stormed a nightclub, killing a woman. In March 2025 pro-government militias massacred more than 1,000 Alawites in Syria's coastal region. A committee established to investigate the massacre reported to al-Sharaa on July 20th, concluding that commanders had not ordered the killings—in effect pinning blame on lower-ranking soldiers. Many Syrians regard the finding as a whitewash. Calls from Alawites for international protection have grown. In Homs, a mixed city seen as a faultline, 14 people were kidnapped in a single night. Many Alawites now avoid going out after dark.
Turkey probably has more leverage than any other regional power over the new Syria. Its intelligence agency has numerous allies inside Syria's security forces and its army has begun to train Syrian troops and police officers. Natural gas from Azerbaijan has started to flow into Syria via Turkey through a newly repaired pipeline. Turkish exports to Syria reached $2.1bn in the first eight months of 2025, a new record. Sympathy for Erdogan, who championed Syria's opposition for over a decade and took in nearly 4m of its refugees, is widespread. In August 2025 Syria signed a defence pact with Turkey after Israel bombed Syria's ministry of defence.
But the limits of Turkey's influence are showing. At America's urging, Israel and Turkey have found an uneasy balance, each hoping the other will avoid its red lines. "America, not Turkey, is becoming Mr Sharaa's main patron," according to a European ambassador. The armed groups known as the Syrian National Army (SNA), which Turkey used to police northern Syria, now answer to the government in Damascus. Some SNA fighters, once subsidised by Turkey, are paid out of the central budget with cash from Qatar.
In November 2025 Syria joined the American-led coalition against Islamic State, the first time the Syrian state has formally participated. Since 2014 the multi-country coalition had obliterated IS targets across the region from the air, helping Iraqi and Kurdish forces reclaim territory, but without the consent of the Syrian state. Bashar al-Assad waged war on his own people rather than fight the jihadists. The new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, spent years fighting IS, though some in his ranks still sympathise with them. Despite the coalition being well-established, IS retains a presence in Syria and has mounted several attempts on al-Sharaa's life. In June 2025 a suicide-bomber killed 25 worshippers in a Damascus church.
Around 35,000 people have been detained in camps in north-east Syria run by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Al-Hol, a vast camp near the Iraqi border, is the largest. One section houses Syrians and Iraqis caught up in the civil war; the other—the "annexe"—holds foreign jihadists, many still loyal to Islamic State. For nearly a decade they existed in legal limbo: the Kurds could not try them, nor would they free them, and most Western governments refused to take their citizens back.
The status quo collapsed in January 2026 when a government offensive retook territory from the SDF. Kurdish guards fled; fighters loyal to Ahmed al-Sharaa moved in—they seem more sympathetic to the inmates. Women were seen climbing out of the foreigners' annexe; others were collected by masked men, apparently bound for Idlib. America is moving as many as 7,000 of the most dangerous detainees, mostly foreign men, to Iraq. Iraq's intelligence chief said around 10,000 IS militants are active in Syria, up from 2,000 a year ago. Some of those held in al-Hol have committed no crimes; some were born there, others arrived as small children.
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an American-backed group that includes a PKK proxy, said it would integrate its fighters into Syria's new army, though Turkey has accused it of not being serious. The fall of the Assad regime left the SDF vulnerable to attacks by the so-called Syrian National Army, a coalition of Turkish-backed militias. America has already withdrawn several hundred of its 2,000 troops from north-east Syria, and Donald Trump is keen to pull out the rest.
Since the SDF's accord with al-Sharaa, normalisation had progressed. On June 2nd 2025 the SDF and the government swapped 470 prisoners. Kurds worked with the Syrian government to facilitate the return of Kurds who fled Afrin, a Kurdish city in north-west Syria which the Turkish army and its proxies captured in 2018. Some 400 Kurdish delegates from Turkey, Iraq and Syria gathered at a unity conference on the Syria-Turkey border.
The SDF collapsed in January 2026 after year-long negotiations with Damascus floundered. Fighting broke out on January 6th between government and SDF troops in a Kurdish part of Aleppo, prompting the government to send reinforcements. The SDF withdrew barely a week later. Syria's tribes mobilised, and thousands of Arab recruits in the SDF defected. The group's military campaign against IS was lauded, but its political project had become unsustainable in Arab-majority areas. In recent years the SDF had grown more autocratic: celebrating al-Sharaa or waving the Syrian revolutionary flag was grounds for arrest.
Al-Sharaa issued a presidential decree recognising Kurdish cultural rights, eroding the SDF's bargaining position. The SDF's units are to be dismantled and its fighters integrated into the Syrian army; there will be no Kurdish-majority units. Its leader, Mazloum Abdi, was offered three army divisions and a senior defence post, but the deal fell through. America no longer regarded the SDF as useful; its envoy said the group's original mission had "largely expired". For years the SDF had guarded tens of thousands of IS detainees in north-eastern Syria; amid the chaos, more than 100 escaped.
Syria is home to the Druze, a religious minority concentrated along the borders with Israel and Jordan. The Druze heartland is the southern city of Suwayda. Druze officers were once part of the security state under Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar. In the early years of the civil war Druze militias supported the regime, but as its grip weakened protests broke out in Suwayda.
At least 30 people have been killed in and around Damascus in clashes with the Druze. The Druze are wary of al-Sharaa's government. Their religious leaders—three sheikhs in Suwayda—have rejected his proposed constitutional framework as too Islamic and unrepresentative. In March 2025 one of the trio, Sheikh Hijmat Al Hijri, called the administration "an extremist government in every sense of the word". In February 2025 fighting erupted between Druze militias and government forces in Jaramana, a largely Druze suburb of Damascus.
A newly formed Suwayda Military Council, led by Tariq al-Shoufi, is pragmatic about outside support. Some Druze fighters are re-equipping and reorganising in case of a showdown with the government, though a few militias have said they are willing to join the Syrian army.
In July 2025 an attack on a Druze merchant sparked clashes between Bedouin groups and Druze militias in Suwayda. Al-Sharaa sent government troops to intervene, ostensibly to enforce a ceasefire, but appeared keen to use the incident to establish control over the province. Rather than quell the violence, his troops—many of them jihadists—worsened it. Government forces carried out summary executions of Druze men and other atrocities. Scores of Druze were killed in attacks that recalled the massacre of hundreds of Alawites in March. A fragile truce ended the bloodshed on July 20th. Gunmen shaved off the moustaches of some Druze, with videos of the humiliation circulating on social media. Druze communities across northern Israel demanded their government intervene. They blocked northern roads, broke through the border fence with Syria and secured a meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu. On July 16th Israeli warplanes struck Damascus, targeting the presidential palace, the defence ministry and the army command, killing at least one person.
The Alawites, the sect from which the Assads drew most of their senior officials, have borne the brunt of the new government's lay-offs and subsidy cuts. At least 25,000 Alawites have fled to Lebanon, including thousands of former officers and soldiers. In late November 2025 Ghazal Ghazal, a hardline Alawite cleric, rallied thousands in mostly peaceful protests after a sectarian killing, calling for a self-governing Alawite region—an idea dismissed in Damascus. Former regime officers have circulated calls to arms. Mohammed Jaber, a militia commander under the Assad regime, and his brother Ahmed are part of a network seeking to foment rebellion against Ahmed al-Sharaa. Another faction is linked to Suheil al-Hassan and Kamal al-Hassan, two former generals who decamped to Moscow with Assad. A cluster of NGOs allegedly linked to these groups has been distributing stipends to Syrian refugees in Akkar, northern Lebanon, and earlier attempted to establish training camps on Lebanese soil.
Ukraine severed diplomatic relations with Syria in 2022 after Bashar al-Assad recognised Russia's annexation of the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Relations were restored in September 2025. On April 5th 2026 Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, conducted a surprise visit to Damascus—arranged by Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom he had met the day before in Istanbul. Zelensky flew to Damascus on a Turkish government plane alongside Turkey's foreign minister. Syria said it would reopen its embassy in Kyiv; Ukraine said it would appoint an ambassador to Syria. The two countries are exploring trade: Syrian phosphates for Ukrainian wheat. Ukraine also hopes for a security partnership, offering help modernising Syria's ageing Soviet-era weapons systems and rebuilding its port and energy infrastructure.
Israel occupied territory in southern Syria within hours of Assad's fall in December 2024 and has built ten fortified outposts there. The Trump administration is trying to broker a deal under which Israel would withdraw to the 1974 "disengagement" line on the Golan, but Netanyahu has been unwilling to relinquish the buffer zone. Al-Sharaa called for Israel to withdraw during his meeting with Trump.
Al-Sharaa is said to have met Israeli officials during visits to the UAE and Azerbaijan. For months his commanders in the south co-ordinated military manoeuvres directly with Israeli army officers. A draft non-belligerence pact would have parked Syria's claims to the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered in 1967 and later annexed, and paved the way to normalisation. Donald Trump is keen for Syria to join the Abraham Accords. But the July 2025 strikes made reconciliation harder. Netanyahu appears to have calculated that the use of military force improves Israeli security and his political standing at home.
If you think before you speak the other guy gets his joke in first.