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Syria’s emerging transitional government faces a daunting path as it seeks to unite a vast coalition of rebel groups and appeal to Western nations worried that the country will wipe out minority communities or become a haven for violent extremists.
The opposition force that toppled Bashar Assad’s regime this month was led by an al Qaeda offshoot, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which has tried to rebrand itself as a more moderate Islamist movement, but will to prove himself to power.
HTS has already created a transitional government that will lead Syria until March 2025. Its acting prime minister is a former administrator of the northwestern provinces ruled by HTS, Mohammed al-Bashir.
Whether HTS can successfully unite the country peacefully will also be a key determinant of how the US, which has substantial interests in Syria, engages with the new government in Damascus. Further complicating matters is that President-elect Trump has called for the United States to stay out of Syrian affairs and to pull the roughly 900 US troops out of the country when he takes office on January 20.
For now, HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani presents himself as a moderate to Western leaders and promises a new era.
“People are exhausted by the war,” he told Sky News. “So the country is not ready for another and will not enter another.”
There are also lingering questions about how much influence Turkey has over HTS, given its support for the rebellion, and the coming months will begin to show whether the US-designated terror group is functionally independent of Ankara.
Osamah Khalil, a Syracuse University professor and historian of the modern Middle East, said the measures taken by HTS must be “compatible with the reality on the ground,” especially for elections.
“Is it a free and fair election in which you have multipartyism? Is there equal access to the polls? Does the whole of Syrian society appear? he said “Because you could also see this on the other side, where Syria becomes this arena for proxy conflicts.”
Sunni Islamist HTS, which swept into Damascus to topple the 50-year rule of the Assad family in just two weeks, had the help of multiple factions to claim victory in a civil war that had consumed Syria since 2011.
Many of these factions are at odds with each other.
One of the biggest backers was the Syrian National Army, which is also backed by Turkey but has at times been an enemy of HTS.
The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which control territory in the northeast with US support, also contributed to Assad’s fall. Turkish-backed groups have frequently clashed with the SDF, including this week after the fall of Damascus, raising concerns of an escalation in the conflict.
Minority groups, including Druze, Christians and Alawite populations, also formed a southern rebel alliance that helped topple Assad, and a big question remains how the new opposition forces in power will deal with the remnants of Assad’s Ba’ath party.
Jon Hoffman, a defense and foreign policy fellow at the Cato Institute, said “the ability of HTS or any group to unite all these factions in Syria is a very, very long shot.”
“This is the classic story of revolutions,” he said. “Uprisings, or any revolution, you can bring people together to overthrow a dictator, which is a shared interest, but as soon as he falls, there is the infighting that follows the revolution, which we could see. We could also see the remnants of the Assad regime trying to fight back. It’s so hard to chart those early days.”
There are some clues as to how HTS and its government may rule Syria. HTS ruled parts of northwestern Syria, mainly Idlib province, for years under what it called the Salvation Government of Syria. Al-Bashir, the new acting Syrian Prime Minister, had led this government group.
But if the Idlib government is a sign of things to come, many Western observers are worried, as it was besieged by corruption and suppression of opposition voices.
Hoffman said HTS rule in Idlib was “very autocratic.”
“Many Syrians are also worried about this, those who were under the HTS government in Idlib, but also minority groups across Syria,” he said. “That doesn’t mean a lot of tears should be shed for Bashar al-Assad, but it’s just realistic.”
Khalil said the government in Idlib raises the question of whether al-Golani has simply been smiling for the cameras “for now”.
“What you don’t want to do is replace the brutal secular regime of Bashar al-Assad,” he said, “for a brutal religious theocracy.”
HTS has its roots in 2011 from its predecessor, Jabhat al-Nusra, which aimed to create an Islamic state in Syria.
Although HTS morphed into its own entity and shed its ties to Al Qaeda in 2016, a report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies shows that HTS works with several Al Qaeda-affiliated groups, including the Turkistan Islamic Party, a Uyghur jihadist group, several Uzbek jihadist groups and others made up of Chechens, North Caucasians and fighters from the Balkan states.
HTS is just one of the potentially problematic factions within the rebel alliance. Geir Pedersen, UN special envoy to Syria, explained that HTS “is not the only armed group in Damascus”.
“Syria is now at a crossroads with great opportunities for us, but also with serious risks. And we really have to look at both,” he said this week.
The United States, for now, is playing a cautious hand as it watches Syria’s new government grapple with the complexities of the situation. After decades of brutal rule by the Assad family, Washington is wary of the potential for the suppression of minorities, especially Christians, in the country.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Turkey and met its president on Thursday, and will later head to Jordan. he he said in a statement This week the US supports “a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political transition”.
“This transition process should lead to a credible, inclusive and non-sectarian government that meets international standards of transparency and accountability,” he said, calling for the uninterrupted flow of humanitarian aid, the protection of minorities and the elimination of chemical and biological weapons. The Assad regime had succeeded.
White House national security spokesman John Kirby said there is uncertainty about how the situation in Syria will “play out politically” but that the rebels have been “saying the right things” so far.
“But we’ll have to look and see what they actually do,” Kirby told reporters this week.
But Turkey remains a point of contention for Washington in Syria, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seeks to eliminate the possibility of a Kurdish state in Syria and may oppose the participation of Kurdish factions in a coalition ruler
Kirby acknowledged that Turkey has a counter-terrorism threat to address, but also said the US counter-ISIS mission, which has relied on cooperation with Kurdish fighters, will continue.
“And when those two goals overlap or may come into conflict,” he said, “we will have the appropriate conversations with the Turks about how those two outcomes can be achieved.”
Gönül Tol, founding director of the Turkey program at the Middle East Institute (MEI), said in a webinar on Thursday that Turkey will be more involved in Syria in the future and will likely try to address the Kurdish issue.
“Ankara will ask the new government to target the autonomous Kurdish region. I don’t know what will happen there, but this is significant,” he said, adding that it was possible Erdogan and Trump could get off to a good start if US troops withdraw from Syria.
MEI senior member Wa’el Alzayat said at the event that Syrians are excited about the potential of a new government.
“The hope of Syrians on the ground is that there will be a balanced approach” from the US, Alzayat said, noting the need for aid with humanitarian aid and the exhumation of mass graves. He said a framework for such initial cooperation would begin to legitimize HTS, but also give the US a chance to keep them honest.
The US has sanctions on Syria that they imposed during the Assad years. It has also designated HTS as a terrorist organization with a $10 million bounty on al-Golani’s head.
Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the U.S. should take a “wait and see” approach to HTS before lifting sanctions or designations .
“There has to be more evidence than a handful of days to show that, and that evidence we may not even have in a year,” he said. “It is up to (al-Golani) and HTS to prove themselves with deeds and words over time.”
