Assessing Syria’s Progress Since Assad

[Fadel Abdulghany is executive director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights and author of The Use of Chemical Weapons in Syria and the Failure of the International Community and Undermining the Independence of the Judiciary in Syria and Pathways to Its Reform.

Kenneth Roth is a former executive director of Human Rights Watch, a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, and author of Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments.]

Fourteen months since the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad, Syria is at an historic crossroads. Tangible achievements stand side-by-side with formidable challenges and considerable uncertainty. The new Syrian authorities have pursued two overriding goals, state building and state legitimization – aims that have been often complementary but at times at odds. The resolution of these tensions will determine the nature of the Syria that emerges from this transitional period. 

The state-building goal centered on the consolidation of executive power. This was an understandable priority because the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel group that overthrew Assad in December 2024 had previously governed only Syria’s northwestern Idlib province and surrounding areas. It assumed control of a central government that had served mainly to uphold the Assad dictatorship and had no control over broad swathes of the country. 

The new authorities took significant stabilizing steps by establishing transitional constitutional frameworks, forming interim governing structures, and creating justice mechanisms, as well as securing the lifting of international sanctions and achieving positive diplomatic engagement.

 They also deserve credit for providing a higher level of security and allowing a greater margin of freedom than under Assad, low bar as that is. 

Yet the country’s new constitutional declaration concentrates considerable power in the hands of the presidency with few checks on his authority. 

Periodic outbreaks of intense sectarian violence have revealed deep security vulnerabilities and the limited capacity of the new authorities to rein in all militia that are nominally affiliated with them or to protect all groups of society equally. Women’s participation in political life is weak. Transitional justice mechanisms remain limited in scope, impeding the ability of a shattered and traumatized population to learn the truth, grieve, and rebuild their lives. 

With respect to the new government’s legitimacy, the major challenge has been demonstrating a commitment to inclusive, rights-respecting governance. Would Syria’s minorities be safe under a government that was dominated by Sunni Arabs? How would women be treated by a government that had an Islamist background? Would basic freedoms of speech, media, association, and assembly be respected after their utter absence under the Assad dictatorship? How would the rule of law be established, and transitional justice be pursued, in the absence of a functioning, let alone independent, justice system? 

The new authorities are navigating between these two sets of imperatives. Much of what they have done is admirable, attracting broad international support, but important questions remain unanswered. Many global leaders are still looking for reassurance that the new Syria is worth supporting.

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The new authorities’ initial challenge was establishing a lawful governing structure. It sponsored a National Dialogue Conference on February 24 and 25, 2025, at the presidential palace in Damascus, which, the government said, included some 800 participants. 

The conference was organized into six working groups to address transitional justice, constitutional reform, state institutions, personal freedoms, economic principles, and the role of civil society. 

From the start, the conference was criticized for being insufficiently inclusive. 

The date was announced only two days in advance, allowing little time for critical voices to coordinate, and some prominent opposition figures, particularly those who had criticized the HTS governing record in Idlib, were either not invited or received belated invitations. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which at the time controlled northeastern Syria, were excluded in part because of ongoing disputes about their integration into national forces.

On March 13, 2025, President Ahmed al-Sharaa signed the constitutional declaration marking the official start of a transitional period of at least five years. The declaration, prepared over two weeks by a committee of seven Syrian academics and legal experts with little external input, comprised 52 articles described as a temporary framework for regulating relations among the authorities, guaranteeing public rights and freedoms, and outlining a roadmap for stability.

The declaration stipulated that Islam should be the president’s religion, and Islamic jurisprudence should be the main source of legislation. It also emphasized the independence of the judiciary and freedom of expression and the media, while including guarantees for women’s political, educational, and professional rights.

The declaration was widely criticized for concentrating power in the hands of the presidency without sufficient oversight. It establishes a highly centralized presidential system that grants the president extensive executive powers and abolishes the post of prime minister. It gives full legislative authority to the People’s Assembly but empowers the president to effectively appoint one-third of the Assembly members.

So far, al-Sharaa still has not made these appointments, effectively removing the assembly for now as a check on his authority. 

A transitional government was announced on March 29, 2025, with 23 ministers. 

The majority were Sunni Arabs, but they also included representatives from the Christian, Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish communities. The first parliamentary election was held on October 5 and 6, 2025. 

Women won only six seats in the 119-member People’s Assembly despite constituting 14 percent of the candidates. 

 That avoidable result reflected a voting process that consistently under-represented women from the outset. Women were only 2 of the 11 members of the Supreme Committee for Elections, 10 percent of the 180 election administrators, 13 percent of the 1,400 candidates, and 18 percent of the 6,000 electors. 

On May 17, 2025, Presidential Decrees No. 19 and No. 20 established the National Committee for Missing Persons and the National Committee for Transitional Justice – the first official mechanisms to address the pervasive and systematic atrocities and enforced disappearances of the Syrian conflict. 

The Syrian Network for Human Rights estimates that as many as 177,057 people are missing, and more than 230,000 civilians killed. The combined total amounts to nearly 3 percent of the Syrian population. In addition, nearly half the population has been forcibly displaced.

The mandate of the National Commission for Transitional Justice has been widely criticized for limiting its scope to crimes committed by the Assad government and excluding violations by non-state actors. 

That allows former HTS rebels and allied forces, the core of the new government, to avoid scrutiny of their past misconduct in Idlib. This selectivity, evidently a compromise to retain the support of the government’s military backers, suggests a partisan approach to justice that could dangerously entrench impunity for the current power holders.

Very quickly, the new authorities faced serious security challenges as they tried to establish control over a range of independent and sometimes hostile militia using pro-government troops that have often lacked the discipline needed to avoid inflaming tensions with new atrocities. On March 6, 2025, violence erupted when armed groups affiliated with the Assad regime launched coordinated attacks on security and military sites in Latakia and Tartus in the northwest. 

The Defense Ministry and Interior Ministry, supported by loyalist forces, launched a counter-offensive that rapidly descended into widespread sectarian violence. The UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that between March 6 and 9, around 1,400 people from both sides were killed, mostly civilians and largely Alawite, many in massacres. 

Murder, torture, looting, and the widespread burning of homes led to the displacement of tens of thousands of civilians. 

Between July 12 and 16, 2025, intense violence erupted in Suwayda province in the south, as clashes broke out between armed Druze groups and Bedouin tribal fighters, When pro-government troops entered the fray, they committed their own sectarian abuses in this largely Druze area.

Those two incidents of violence deepened existing divisions between communities and contributed to a climate of fear and insecurity across Syria’s ethnic mosaic. 

Meanwhile, ISIS remained a threat despite its loss of control over most of the territory it once had held. ISIS sought to exploit the political vacuum and security shifts left by the fall of the Assad regime, but the number of attacks in 2025 still decreased compared to 2024. In November 2025, Syria joined the US-led international coalition to fight the ISIS – the Global Coalition against Daesh – representing a significant shift for a country that Western powers had classified as a state sponsor of terrorism. 

The integration of the SDF into national structures has presented a particular challenge. A March 2025 agreement stipulated the integration of the SDF into the armed forces by the end of 2025, along with provisions relating to state control over infrastructure and key resources in the parts of northeastern Syria that it controlled. The agreement also recognizes the constitutional rights of the Kurds, including making the Kurdish language a second official language.

However, disagreements arose over whether integration should preserve the collective leadership of the SDF or dismantle it and incorporate SDF soldiers individually. The issue was resolved militarily in January 2026 when government forces overwhelmed the SDF. A January 2026 agreement would create a military division within the Syrian army composed of three formerly SDF brigades. 

The government did move forward in recognizing Kurdish language rights as well as the Syrian citizenship of certain Kurds who had previously been excluded – the first official recognition of Kurdish rights in Syrian history. However, the government acted by decree rather than incorporating these rights into the constitutional declaration, a source of concern within the Kurdish community. 

The U.S. government urged the SDF to accept these terms. The Turkish government had long opposed the SDF, seeing it as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Despite the security threats, the first year was marked by a significant expansion of civic space compared to the Assad regime, with a wider margin for freedoms of expression, protest, and movement. Independent media outlets and newspapers opened in Damascus and other cities. For the first time in decades, civil society organizations were able to register and operate publicly, with more than 650 NGOs registering in the first six months of 2025 alone. However, this progress was tempered by the government’s decision to retain Assad-era Law 93, which imposes restrictions on civil society activities and foreign funding. 

Public demonstrations occurred without the violent suppression characteristic of the Assad era. Human rights organizations gained access to detention facilities to monitor conditions, as well as to gather evidence of Assad-era atrocities. However, concerns remained about restrictions on certain types of expression, particularly criticism of religious authorities or the transitional government itself. Article 49(3) of the constitutional declaration criminalizes “glorifying the obsolete al-Assad regime or its symbols” and “denying his crimes or praising, justifying, or trivializing them.” Following the March 2025 coastal massacres, both international and Syrian reporters were barred from entering the affected area.  

Today, Israel’s intensified military operations and territorial expansion in southern Syria represent the biggest threat to Syrian sovereignty. Through December 2024, Israel launched more than 600 attacks, averaging nearly two per day, and occupied more than 460 square kilometers of Syrian territory. Israeli forces currently occupy a declared buffer zone extending up to 25 kilometers beyond the occupied Golan Heights into Quneitra and Daraa Governorates, including strategic positions on Mount Hermon. Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz has stated that the forces are prepared to remain in Syria indefinitely. 

Russia’s relationship with Syria has shown remarkable resilience despite the initial tensions following Assad’s fall. In October 2025 and January 2026, President al-Sharaa visited Moscow for talks with President Vladimir Putin. 

Al-Sharra declared his willingness to allow Russia continued access to its two military bases in northwestern Syria while seeking to renegotiate the terms to ensure greater Syrian control. A source of bilateral tension is Putin’s decision to give refuge to Assad, effectively protecting him from prosecutorial efforts for his mass atrocities. 

According to a 2025 World Bank report, Syria’s economy has been severely damaged by 14 years of conflict and international sanctions, with GDP shrinking by more than 50 percent since 2010.

Around 16.5 million Syrians need humanitarian assistance, and nearly 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, while about 60 percent suffers from food insecurity. Reconstruction costs are estimated at approximately $216 billion, nearly ten times Syria’s current annual GDP. 

The most notable positive impact on economic prospects was the gradual lifting of U.S. sanctions. In May 2025, Donald Trump’s administration issued a 180-day waiver of the Caesar Act, easing some restrictions. 

On June 30, President Trump issued an executive order lifting most U.S. sanctions on Syria. 

The Caesar Act was permanently repealed in December 2025 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2026. The announcement was met with widespread celebrations in Syrian cities, as it was seen as a pivotal step on the road to economic recovery. 

In March 2025, donors at the ninth Brussels Conference pledged €5.8 billion to support the transition in Syria. 

Syria re-established contact with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and worked to reconnect with the European banking system. The World Bank also approved a $146 million loan to rehabilitate electrical infrastructure.

The transitional government pledged to adopt liberal market reforms and open the country to foreign investment, but the pace of progress remained constrained by entrenched cronyism, weak institutions, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis. 

The banking sector remains severely underdeveloped, with limited capacity to process international transactions. Corruption networks established under Assad continue to operate, complicating reform efforts. The voluntary return of some refugees, while a welcome sign of confidence in the new government, creates additional economic pressures on housing, employment, and services. Regional economic integration remains limited due to ongoing instability and the cautious approach of neighboring states. The Syrian government faces difficult choices between the rapid liberalization demanded by international partners and a desire to protect vulnerable populations from economic shocks.

The future of Syria hinges on the transitional authority’s ability to move beyond prioritizing centralized control towards genuine inclusivity, comprehensive transitional justice without regard to the perpetrator to show that no one is above the law, integration of the various armed groups into unified national forces, protection of all communities from violence, and revival of the shattered economy. Meanwhile, the international community must choose between providing the intensive support needed for a successful transition and a more stand-off approach that leaves the transition process vulnerable to renewed conflict. 

Syria’s trajectory over the coming years will test whether a society shattered by systematic state violence can build institutions worthy of its people’s sacrifices. The transitional authorities have demonstrated pragmatic flexibility and achieved notable early successes, but the concentration of power, selective justice, and unresolved tensions with minority communities pose serious risks. The international community, having done far too little to curb Syria’s catastrophic collapse into violence under Assad, should engage deeply with the new authorities with the aim of helping them to achieve inclusive governance rather than merely stable authoritarianism. 

For the millions of Syrians who risked everything for dignity and freedom, and for the hundreds of thousands who perished in that struggle, the promise of this moment must not be squandered. The choices made in the months ahead will determine whether Syria emerges as a model of post-conflict reconstruction or another cautionary tale of revolution betrayed.

Photo attribution: “More Cheeky Kids” by Sean Long is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0