Can One Man Hold Syria Together?

Photographs by Moises Saman

At the end of January, Ahmed al-Sharaa stepped up to a podium in the presidential palace in Damascus, dressed in the olive-drab uniform of a military commander. Seven weeks had passed since he stunned the world by conquering most of Syria in an 11-day blitzkrieg that put an end to the 55-year dynastic rule of Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, Hafez al-Assad. In the interim, Sharaa had presented what seemed like another kind of miracle to Syrians: forbearance. Sharaa is a former jihadist and the founder of the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, a figure who once inspired terror. But in speeches and interviews, he has modeled an extraordinary restraint, promising to forgo revenge and rebuild Syria in a moderate and inclusive way. 

Before him sat an audience of rebel commanders who had appointed him Syria’s transitional president earlier in the day. Speaking in a soft, somber voice, Sharaa compared Damascus to a grieving mother, tacitly casting himself as the loyal son who would nurse her back to health. 

“Syria’s priorities are, first, to fill the power vacuum legally,” he said, and to “maintain civil peace” by “preventing manifestations of revenge.”

Even as Sharaa spoke, members of Syria’s Alawite minority, the sect to which the Assad family belongs, were being abducted from their home or from the street, sometimes by gunmen who claimed to represent the new authorities. Days later, their bodies would turn up, many of them bearing signs of torture. Sharaa’s government condemned these murders and referred to them as “individual incidents” that had not been carried out by any militias under its control. In Jableh, a city in the Alawite heartland on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, a retired military officer warned me ominously in January that the violence could escalate if the killings continued. “There are lots of weapons,” he said. “It could be hellfire.” 

That fire broke out in early March. Assad loyalists ambushed government security patrols in the coastal province of Latakia, killing dozens in what appears to have been a coordinated assault. Sharaa called for reinforcements, and soon thousands of gunmen were pouring into the region, including foreign jihadists who had helped capture the capital in December. The hunt for remnants of the Assad regime’s armed forces—they’d quickly melted back into the hills—devolved into a savage ethnic-cleansing operation, with gunmen going from house to house and murdering entire Alawite families. More than 1,000 civilians were killed. 

Sharaa responded by reasserting his promise to be a leader for all Syrians regardless of sect. He decried the assault on the country’s unity and promised to punish the perpetrators, including “those closest to us.” He appointed a committee with Alawite members to investigate the killings within 30 days and provide recommendations. Still, the tenuous calm that had followed Syria’s liberation in December was decidedly over. 

Syrians are faced with a peculiar predicament: They have little choice but to trust a former terrorist with one of the most daunting state-building jobs in history. The risks of violence and religious hatred that he and his allies embody are now more vivid than ever. But the fact remains that Sharaa is Syria’s most powerful figure and its best shot at unity. He proved the point just after the massacres on the coast in March by reaching a deal to extend his government’s sovereignty to the Kurdish northeast, the last major region to resist his authority.

The task before Sharaa is staggering in its scale. It starts with the reconstruction of a pulverized country that is destitute and still cut off from the world by the sanctions levied against the Assad regime. Sharaa must convince the West that he is a reliable partner, despite the jihadist noises that some of his subordinates still make. He must also complete the job of taming and disarming the country’s disparate rebel factions, some of them jihadists with fresh Syrian blood on their hands. If he fails, Syria could collapse into anarchy and become an open field for all kinds of terrorist groups, including the ISIS militants now lurking in its far corners. That would pose a threat well beyond the Middle East. 

Perhaps the greatest obstacle of all is overcoming the past. For almost six decades, Syrians have been taught to hate and fear one another. The Assad regime recruited Syrians to spy on one another and built an archipelago of prisons where torture and extrajudicial murder were the norm. This was the cauldron that spilled over during Syria’s civil war, which began in 2011,  led to the rise of the Islamic State, and left more than half a million dead and millions more living abroad as refugees. 

The one thing holding Syria together now is Ahmed al-Sharaa, who has taken on the near-impossible job of teaching his people to trust one another again. It is an unlikely role for a former jihadist. But he has projected himself as a model of renewal and reconciliation, a violent man who has transformed into a figure of peace and forgiveness. 

Just how many people accept this premise is impossible to say, but almost everyone I spoke with in Syria seemed fascinated by Sharaa’s demeanor, his language, his deftly ambiguous braiding of Islamist rhetoric with talk of civil rights and freedoms. One Christian priest amazed me by comparing Sharaa to Saint Paul—who, he reminded me, set out for Damascus as a zealot intending to punish the Christians, but had a change of heart on the way. Even some of those who hate Sharaa concede that no one else has the power and charisma to contain Syria’s furies. If Sharaa can’t save them, perhaps no one can.   

When Sharaa swept into Damascus on December 8, he embodied a fear that has existed in the bones of Syria’s minority Alawite population for hundreds of years. This kind of thing follows a script, a relic from the Middle Ages: The conqueror sacks the cities; the rivers run red with blood. But that is not what happened.

Sharaa’s forces captured Aleppo—the first major city in their campaign—in November, and I immediately began texting Christian friends there, worried about the sectarian reprisals everyone had long feared in the event of a rebel victory. Instead, they told me that the fighters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main rebel militia that Sharaa commanded, had treated them respectfully. “They have been instructed not to interfere or hassle the Christian communities,” one contact texted me. “Things are calm here, food is available.” And so it went, with Sharaa’s forces showing remarkable self-control as they continued southward and took the capital. 

This narrative may help explain why Syrians sometimes talk about Sharaa as if he were a figure out of myth rather than a flesh-and-blood man. Most of the people I spoke with didn’t much register that he was born in Riyadh in 1982, the son of an oil engineer and a geography teacher, or that he grew up in an affluent neighborhood of Damascus, where he was known as a shy, studious boy. 

What does matter to them is that at 19, after coming under the influence of some radical Islamists, Sharaa went off to Iraq just before the American invasion of 2003 to take part in the fight against the occupiers. There he joined what would become the local al-Qaeda branch. Lurid rumors still circulate about his time there: He was a master bomb maker; he had a knack for persuading young men to become suicide bombers. A Syrian journalist who knows Sharaa told me these rumors are false. But there is no doubt that he was a natural leader with a gift for adapting to changing circumstances. After a long stint in American prisons in Iraq, he rose quickly in the jihadist movement, adopting the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (in deference to his family’s origins in Syria’s Jolan region, now occupied by Israel). He allied himself with the notorious leader of ISIS and then broke away just before that group’s fatal decision to declare a caliphate. A few years later, he disavowed any relationship with al-Qaeda, reorienting his goal to the liberation of Syria. 

After riding triumphantly into Damascus, he transformed again. The Ahmed al-Sharaa who has emerged in news conferences and interviews is an entirely different figure from the stone-faced jihadist commander of a decade ago. Instead of his old combat gear, he now often wears tailored suits, English leather shoes, a Patek Philippe watch. His expression is empathetic and mild. He has talked about the importance of moving beyond a revolutionary mindset, which “can topple a regime, but cannot build a state.”  

In retrospect, Sharaa’s historic conquest of Syria—the main source of his current authority—was clearly a walkover. When his offensive began in late November, the military backers of the Assad regime—Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah—caught the world off guard by abandoning it. But Assad’s own soldiers had abandoned him first. The retired military officer I met in Jableh told me that after the fall of Aleppo, he called an active-duty general to ask why the army hadn’t fought harder. The answer he got was, “You expect me to defend this son of a bitch?” 

Sharaa knew what many others did not: The Assad regime had been quietly disintegrating for years. The regime had reclaimed Aleppo and other major opposition-held areas with the help of Russian air strikes in late 2016. But in the years that followed, the country sank ever deeper into poverty, and the victory over the rebels came to seem hollow. “From 2018 on, people were no longer with Bashar,” a former regime official told me in January. Assad’s wife, Asma, had become a particularly hated figure. Rumors that she had started forest fires on the Syrian coast and confiscated houses there gave baseless but eloquent expression to the public’s anger. 

Osama Shahoud, who started working in the presidential palace for Assad and his wife in 2018, told me that the Assads seemed oblivious to the crisis. In the final weeks, Asma put Shahoud in charge of organizing the presidential archive. “I used to think sometimes, In what world is she living?” he said.

[Graeme Wood: The end of a 13-year nightmare]

On December 7—the day before the rebels took the capital—Assad called his staff at the palace and asked them to make plans for him to give a speech, Shahoud told me. At midnight he called again, asking for a photographer to be ready. By that time, Shahoud and his supervisor were the only two people left in the building. They would later learn that Assad was lying to them: He was already on his way to a Russian plane that would fly him out of the country. But Shahoud and his colleague didn’t leave the palace until an officer called and told them to, at 2:30 in the morning.

They emerged into a palace compound that was usually a hive of armed guards and security men but was now entirely empty. As they drove into the city, they found a scene of chaos: soldiers tearing off their uniforms, gunfire, honking, people fleeing on foot. “A car stopped near us, with bearded rebel guys in camouflage,” Shahoud told me. “They asked us for directions to the airport,” where Assad was rumored to be catching a military flight. 

On that first morning, many feared the worst. Firas Lutfi, a Franciscan priest in the old city of Damascus, told me that a group of 20-odd Shiite men came to his church and said, “You have to protect us.” Father Lutfi told me he could not resist telling his visitors that a few hours earlier, these men might have disdained him as an infidel agent of the West. But he reassured them and even accompanied them to a Shiite mosque, risking his life. “There was shooting everywhere,” Lutfi said. Later that day, he found the entire foreign diplomatic community sheltering in the marble lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel. 

But over the following days, a message spread: The rebels were not taking revenge. Jolani, as Sharaa was still known, had told them to treat the entire population with respect and forbearance. Shahoud, who had fled to his parents’ home on the coast, returned to Damascus a week later. He was surprised to find that his apartment had not been looted. His favorite café (the one where I spoke with him) was open. He even went to the palace and asked about getting his old job back. The HTS men who interviewed him said they would consider his application.

The Alawites did not take long to start changing their minds about Sharaa. When I drove to the Syrian coast in mid-January, dozens of people had already been abducted and murdered. In Jableh, an Assad loyalist took six HTS fighters hostage and made a video calling for an Alawite rebellion to stop the killings. Hours later he was dead, his small band of former regime fighters overpowered by an HTS force. Few guessed at the time that much worse was still in store.

The violence had started in Homs, a city about 50 miles east of the coast with a long history of sectarian animosity. I attended a condolence ceremony there in January for Abdullah al-Naem, a 24-year-old man who had been abducted and murdered days earlier. His uncle, an elderly poet and author named Abdelkarim al-Naem, was sitting in a small salon surrounded by friends and relatives, a cloth draped over his head as a sign of mourning. He signaled for me to sit next to him and recited the facts: Abdullah had been standing by his family’s house in the early evening when someone drove up and called him by name. He got in the car and never came home. His body was found two days later near a mosque, his hands cuffed behind him, his face butchered so badly that he was almost unrecognizable. “There were five bodies in total,” the uncle said. “All Alawites.” 

Abdullah’s father looked broken. He wept and trembled so violently that his daughters came forward to hold him up, their faces bathed in tears. “Yesterday four more were abducted,” one of the sisters told me. “I’m afraid if we complain, we will all be killed.”

Sharaa had disbanded the entire Syrian police force in December. Bearded militia fighters now control the streets, another sister told me, but they are impossible to tell apart from lawless gunmen. No one knows anymore who represents the state. Written warrants and due process were meaningless even under Assad; now the killers are free to abduct people with impunity.

The people gathered at the al-Naem family home said they could not understand why Sharaa had not done anything to help them. Some described him as a baffling figure whose reassuring speeches have no connection to their daily reality. Others saw him as a jihadist hiding behind a civil mask, a man who wants to see them all wiped out. 

“Our fear is that Jolani will emerge from Sharaa,” an Alawite activist in Homs told me, too frightened to be quoted by name. “We want Sharaa to control Jolani.” 

The identity of the killers in Homs has remained a mystery, but the motive was visible to anyone with a cellphone: Demands for the murder of Alawites were appearing online all the time. Many Sunni Muslims hold the Alawite community responsible for their suffering under Assad, when hundreds of thousands died. In Latakia, posters have appeared with quotes from the medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyya, in which he labels Alawites the enemies of Islam. That is a coded call for revenge, and one that conjures up a bitter history for Alawites. Their sect has long been denounced as a heresy by hard-line Sunni Muslims, and despite their association with the Assad dynasty, most Alawites remain poor even today. 

Syrian Christians and other minorities have not been targeted for murder as the Alawites have, but they are suspicious of Sharaa’s Islamist bent. Sharaa has been strategically vague about the role Islam will play in the new Syria, saying it will be left “up to the experts” who write the new constitution. His own role, he said in an interview with The Economist in January, is merely that of an executive: “If they approve it, my role is to enforce it; and if they do not approve it, my role is to enforce that as well.” 

Sharaa surely seeks to avoid alienating either the many Islamists in his camp or the Western countries that hold the keys to Syria’s financial future. For this reason, perhaps, he has promised to respect Syria’s diversity but has carefully avoided using the word democracy, which some Islamists see as irreligious. When pressed on this, he offered a calibrated response, saying the word had various definitions. “If democracy means that the people decide who will rule them and who represents them in parliament,” he told The Economist, “then yes, Syria is going in this direction.” 

Sharaa’s graceful dodges have left many Syrians anxiously guessing how they will fit into the new nation. “I have met Jolani; he speaks very well,” Father Lutfi told me. “He gives the impression of a quiet man, a smart man. But what is the complete program?”

When Sharaa rode southward in December to take the capital, he was followed by a loose cavalcade of fellow travelers from Idlib, the opposition holdout province in the northwest, many in their own vehicles. Other Syrians trickled in from neighboring countries over the following days and weeks. Many had been living double lives for years, hiding from the regime or the jihadists or God knows who else. Coming home forced them to confront again the scale of their losses: families, houses, entire communities. 

One of those returnees was a 41-year-old man known as Rami al-Sayed. Like Sharaa, he had taken on a new identity when he joined the rebels and fled his Damascus home. For nine years, he lived in a rural camp in Idlib. No one there knew his real name, Dia al-Sayed. His parents were still in Damascus, and his brother was in Sednaya, the most notorious of the regime’s prisons; if Sayed had spoken out about his opposition to Assad, he might have endangered their lives. So he kept a low profile, working as a photographer under his new name and using the money he earned to pay bribes that helped get his brother released from prison (the family paid a total of $55,000, an extraordinary sum in Syria). He posted often on a new social-media account, but never showed his face or dropped any hints about his real identity. “I was living with two personalities, one dormant, one active,” he told me. “I had psychological problems.” 

Sayed witnessed the rebel offensive at close range in December and nearly died in a regime air strike near Aleppo. Once back in Damascus, he began documenting the Assad regime’s crimes—mass graves, prison torture rooms—and one day, he found something revelatory. 

In one of the regime’s security headquarters, he stumbled onto a section of the building dedicated to disguises for paid informers. The first room looked like a barbershop or beauty salon, he told me, with six chairs and multiple mirrors, each of them surrounded by cosmetic tools: beards, mustaches, wigs of various colors and lengths. He saw nail polish, makeup, adhesives. In an adjoining room, he found a large collection of costumes: tattered clothes for beggars, work uniforms for mechanics and electricians, Western-style clothes like those worn by tourists, and traditional Arab garments such as abayas and hijabs. Another room was full of equipment for duplicating keys; an entire suite was dedicated to surveillance and wiretapping. 

Those chambers, Sayed told me, represented everything he wanted to escape—the culture of secrets and betrayals that the regime had forced on the Syrian public. No one knows how many civilians the regime recruited as informers, but the number is believed to be in the tens of thousands.

Those who believe Sharaa’s promises—and many do—will tell you that his transformation was neither sudden nor magical. It took place in Idlib, where he forged a proto-state and learned valuable lessons about power, loyalty, and the dangers of extremism. 

When Sharaa first arrived a decade ago, Idlib was a dangerous backwater patrolled by dozens of rebel groups, including jihadists. Some of these militias hated one another as much as they hated the Assad regime. A friend from Idlib told me he lived in fear of the Islamist groups, which tried to kill him twice for his outspoken secularism—but that he admired Sharaa, who took charge of the province and “slowly and wisely cleaned it out,” killing or banishing the most extreme elements. Sharaa also created a military academy to discipline his jihadist fighters into soldiers. 

Sharaa built a police force and a semblance of law and order with an Islamist cast. The economy picked up, with help from the Turkish government, which acted as a patron of sorts for HTS, and some humanitarian groups from abroad. Several people who returned to Damascus with Sharaa’s forces in December told me they missed the creature comforts of Idlib: 24/7 electricity, running water, high-speed internet. 

Sharaa also created a semblance of pluralism. In March 2024, protesters began holding rallies against HTS in Idlib. Some were jihadists who found HTS too liberal; others were secularists who wanted more freedom. 

“I think they dealt with these movements with rationality and morals,” Khaldoun al-Mallah, a doctor who lived there at the time, told me. HTS created something called the Diwan al-Mazalim, or bureau of grievances, based on an old Islamic tradition. “I visited it; I saw how it worked,” Mallah said. The HTS officials would listen to complaints and in some cases respond with reforms. 

Mallah, who is a novelist as well as a surgeon, has unusual credentials for assessing Islamist behavior. He memorized the Quran as a youth, and when he dared to talk back to ISIS zealots in 2016, they knocked out all his remaining teeth. (He’d already lost half of them to starvation when the Assad regime blockaded his Damascus neighborhood and his weight dropped to 88 pounds.)

Dareen Khalifa, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, first met Sharaa in 2019 and has conferred with him repeatedly since. She told me that the changes in his thinking during the Idlib years were gradual and incremental. “He’s a utilitarian, conservative Islamist who has spent the past decade reading the politics of the region,” she said. “He’s a pragmatist.” 

Even if Sharaa’s moderation is entirely genuine, it is not yet clear that he has the capacity to govern a nation as large and diverse as Syria. Sharaa is now running the country with a skeleton crew of people he has known and trusted for years, including his brother Maher al-Sharaa, the acting minister of health. Some of these men never got much formal education. It’s a bit like putting the Boston Police Department in charge of the entire eastern half of the United States. 

Among other things, this means the government sends out wildly mixed messages about its intentions. In January, Fady Kardous, a Syrian Canadian lawyer who returned to Damascus after the liberation, told me he went to HTS seeking a permit to hold workshops on writing a constitution. Within a single hour, he received two different responses: One official welcomed his secular ideas enthusiastically, and a second told him firmly that the Quran would be Syria’s only constitution. 

In much of the country, the only signs of authority, apart from bands of bearded gunmen at checkpoints, are members of the HTS da’wah office, in charge of spreading Islam with songs and recitations. I came across them in the main square of Homs, where a very young man was reciting the Quran through a sound system so loud, you could hear it hundreds of yards away. When he was done, they began broadcasting nasheeds, or Islamic anthems, which are grimly familiar to Westerners as the soundtrack to jihadist execution videos. One of the ones I heard in Homs included the line “We will liberate Tartous; we will slaughter the majous.” (Islamists use the word majous to denigrate those they see as heretics.) I approached the da’wah contingent after they had packed up their loudspeakers, and they described their mission to Islamize the country, smiling sweetly. “There is no need for fear,” one of them said. “We will not be strict or loose, but in the middle.” 

Sharaa’s administrators are stretched so thin that in many places, they can barely maintain the trappings of a state. In Homs, I met the jurist Sharaa had recently appointed to run the city’s courts. Hassan al-Aqraa was a stout man with a bushy black beard and a lumpy nose that looked as if it had been mangled by shrapnel. He seemed alert and organized, but his only qualification was a degree in Islamic law and some time running a Sharia court in Idlib for Jaish al-Fatah, a rebel militia. 

When I asked about the murders of Alawites, he acknowledged the problem, but said he had to balance it against a flood of complaints from people seeking justice for relatives killed during the war years, and those clamoring for the return of property illegally taken by the Assad regime. He said he was at pains to distinguish genuine political prisoners from common criminals released just after the liberation. 

Sharaa faces an equally difficult task with Syria’s educational system. In January, he appointed a man named Walid Kaboula as superintendent of schools in the Latakia governorate, where Alawites have long been a majority. A video soon emerged of Kaboula delivering a sermon in Idlib in 2023 in which he said, “I ask almighty God to cleanse our eyes by purifying our country of the filth of the Alawites, the Shiites, and the Jews.” An uproar ensued. 

But when I went to see Kaboula in Latakia, before the video had emerged, he seemed consumed by more concrete demands. The schools lacked paper and ink. There was no fuel for heating, and the teachers were being paid the equivalent of $20 a month, a wage that led them to demand bribes from parents. 

I visited a school whose classrooms were crowded, cold, and dim; its hallways dirty; its doors and walls cracked and faded. My spirits lifted a little when I heard children’s voices in a rear courtyard chanting “Syria!” in unison. This was new: Until the liberation, they had to chant their loyalty to Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, “our eternal leader.”  

Even more dismaying than the schools is the condition of Syria’s hospitals. Many were destroyed during the war, and in the decade since, many more have been forced to close for lack of money. At the Ibn Sina psychiatric hospital, just outside Damascus, I found patients clustered behind a barred door, like prisoners, shaking against the cold. The hospital’s pharmacy is out of medications, even though many of its patients suffer from schizophrenia and other serious conditions. A nurse handed cigarette packs to patients who reached eagerly through the metal bars to take them. The hallway reeked of urine and disinfectant. “Our food is all donations,” another nurse told me. She said that most of the employees had left because they had not been paid since the liberation: “Who will stay with crazy people with no salary?” 

For a brief moment early this March, Sharaa’s authority appeared to founder. The massacres on the coast cast doubt on his promise to forswear revenge. Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a strongly worded statement saying that the United States “stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities” and calling for the interim government to take action. I heard from Syrian friends that the country’s other powerful minority groups, the Kurds and Druze, would be less likely than ever to cooperate with the new government.

Within days, Sharaa proved them wrong. He signed a landmark deal to absorb the Kurdish-led autonomous region in Syria’s northeast. The Kurds, whose substantial militia was armed and trained by the U.S. military to do battle with ISIS, had posed a real threat to Sharaa’s power. Now they’d agreed to rejoin the nation. Celebratory gunfire hailed Sharaa as a unifying figure. 

Sharaa appears to have won over the Kurds by granting them considerable regional autonomy, and the agreement is vague, with further negotiations to take place later this year. The Kurds control most of Syria’s oil fields and may yet prove unwilling to give Sharaa what he wants. 

Sharaa has tried unsuccessfully to make a similar deal with the Druze, who have also remained largely independent of Damascus. When I met the paramount Druze leader, Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajri, in his stronghold in southern Syria, he seemed profoundly distrustful of Sharaa. The Druze, he told me, would not hand over their weapons until there is a “state of law” in Syria and a true national army.

Still, the Kurdish agreement may give Sharaa the political clout he needs to instill discipline in his own ranks. The military force that captured Syria in December, with Sharaa at its head, is a fairly loose coalition of rebel groups. At its core are HTS and two closely allied groups from which most of his appointees are drawn. They are in turn allied with a larger but much less organized collection of Turkish-funded militias that operate under the name Syrian National Army. Some of these appear to have been the main perpetrators of the massacres in March.

Transforming these men into reliable soldiers will not be easy. One morning in Damascus, I was passing through Umayyad Square when I came across two dozen armed men in pickup trucks, gearing up for a raid. They were an almost ludicrously motley crew. Some of them were dressed head-to-toe in black, their faces masked by balaclavas. Others wore varying shades of camouflage. Some had brand-new Interior Ministry patches on their upper arms, and a few bore the logo of the Syrian Salvation Government, the authority that Sharaa ran in Idlib. They said they were on their way to seize and destroy one of the Assad regime’s caches of illegal drugs, and when my driver asked if we could ride along, they cheerfully agreed. 

They drove fast out of the city, and soon we turned off into a gated compound that had been the domain of Maher al-Assad, the former dictator’s brother and a notoriously brutal military commander. The soldiers led us to a warehouse full of Captagon, an addictive stimulant that became the Assad regime’s main source of revenue in its final years. As we watched, the soldiers loaded up the drugs, piled them high in a nearby ravine, and, after dousing them with gasoline, lit a huge bonfire, the black smoke pouring into a clear blue sky. One officer, a man named Badr Youssef, seemed a little defensive as he told me about his unit’s activities, which seemed to consist of following tips about new Captagon sites and racing off to burn the drugs.

“After two months, there will be a new army,” he said. That will require a lot more training and money. Many of the militias within the rebel coalition earned money from smuggling, or manning checkpoints, or levying unofficial border taxes. It will not be easy to persuade men who have lived as freewheeling rebels to accept a soldier’s wages. 

Money may be the biggest challenge of all for Sharaa. His country has been economically isolated from the rest of the world for more than 60 years, thanks to its own xenophobic policies and a wall of sanctions levied against the Assad regime. The European Union removed some restrictions on Syrian banks in February, but the Trump administration seems unlikely to follow suit, especially after the March massacres. The Americans and Europeans remain wary of Sharaa’s Islamist bent, and are busy with other priorities anyway, including Ukraine and Gaza. Sharaa has lobbied in vain for the U.S. to remove HTS’s designation as a terrorist group, another obstacle to investment. Even his pleas for emergency aid have not yielded much. His primary political backer, Turkey, doesn’t have a lot of cash to spare. The Saudis and Qataris have promised to help but have delivered little so far. 

At least no one in Syria has the money to foment another war. But if Sharaa can’t find a way to make the country economically viable, his coalition of former warriors could begin to fragment. People who have studied Syria for years suggested this scenario to me again and again: not another civil war but a slow collapse into anarchy, not so different from what happened in Libya, with the country dissolving into a patchwork of enclaves run by local militias. 

Before I left Damascus, I went one last time to see Dia al-Sayed, the restless photographer who had returned from Idlib. We met in a refugee camp in his old neighborhood of Yarmouk, which had been a dense cluster of high-rises that had housed more than 1 million people before the civil war. Now it’s a forest of blasted concrete that reeks of cinders and urine. 

Sayed wanted to show me the building where he’d lived through the first years of the war, but when we got there, we found that only a pile of rubble remained. I glanced down and happened to see what appeared to be a shattered human femur in the dust. We walked onward, and Sayed kept up a compulsive patter, describing an entire world that had vanished: a car market, a hospital, and, finally, his childhood home. “There was the living room, there the bedroom, there the kitchen,” he said. 

When the future came up, he grew morose. His life had been on hold during the years he’d spent in Idlib, and he didn’t know where he could find a new community. Starting over at the age of 41 in a shattered country felt impossible, even to someone who had survived years of war and near starvation. “For me, this is the hardest period,” he said.

The one thing that seemed to comfort Sayed was talking about Sharaa, whom he had met together with a delegation of Syrian photographers and reporters. He’d had mixed feelings going in. Sayed is not an Islamist, and has been critical of HTS. But he spoke about the meeting with a kind of rapture. Sharaa, he said, had answered questions thoughtfully, without the kind of prompting from advisers that some politicians rely on. He did not seem like a man from an Islamic background. “He said, I will build a new Syria; we want to turn the page. This is the time for Syrians to live.”

Sayed beamed as he described his encounter with the president. For a moment, he seemed to glimpse a new life and a new country. Then the moment passed, and he was the same divided, troubled man he had been before.