The Case With Syria

Syria is a country located in the Levant region in West Asia, bordering the Eastern Mediterranean Sea to the West and five other neighbouring countries around it. Originally established as a French Mandate (colony), the nation gained independence in 1946 following a wider trend of post-war decolonization. Bashar al-Assad took power as president of the Syrian Arab Republic after the death of his father in 2000. This ushered in a period of brutal and unrelenting dictatorship. Just eleven years after Assad took power came the Syrian Civil War. This was primarily caused by the violent actions of government forces when cracking down on anti-government protests. This, in turn, led to mass insurgencies and uprisings of various anti-government rebel groups across the country (Gritten, 2024).

These major rebel groups include Turkish-aligned factions and Kurdish-led factions, who have been in conflict for nearly a century (Euronews, 2024). Another rebel group is the Islamic State (ISIS), who are one of the world’s largest transnational terrorist groups. Terrorism is defined by United States code (law) as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents” (22 U.S.C. § 2656f). However, the largest group of rebels is called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a Sunni Islamist paramilitary organization that is a relatively new actor in the Syrian Civil War. Founded in 2017, HTS was formed as a merger of minor rebel groups and dissidents from other factions (Clayton & Omar, 2024). Today, HTS ironically fights some of these very organisations it was born out of, namely terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.

On the 26th of November, 2024, HTS and its Turkish-backed allies launched a massive offensive operation against government forces across the country. According to Gritten (2024), the rebels secured control of the city of Aleppo, Syria’s second largest city, only three days after the launch of the offensive. And just nine days after this victory, HTS declared control over Syria’s capital of Damascus, officially toppling Assad’s government. The comprehensive military defeat on the part of Assad’s forces can be attributed to a slow stream of foreign weapons and munitions, as allies like “Russia and Iran [are] preoccupied by other conflicts” (Gritten, 2024). Soon after the fall of Damascus, Assad fled to Moscow, with HTS establishing a provisional government in his place.

After more than five decades of dynastic autocracy, Bashar al-Assad quite possibly achieved the worst record of human(itarian) rights violations in all of West Asia. For example, Assad’s forces tortured and deliberately killed thousands—if not hundreds of thousands—of people, arbitrarily imprisoning the rest in crude underground prisons (Amnesty, 2022). Furthermore, according to Al Jazeera (2021), Assad attacked civilians with chemical weapons on more than 20 separate occasions during the Syrian Civil War. In addition, metrics from the UN Refugee Agency (2024) state the Syrian Civil War has internally displaced over 7 million people, and left more than 16 million in need of humanitarian protection and assistance. This is why no one should lament the fall of Assad’s regime. The damage he caused is immeasurable, and many would agree that he will not be missed.

HTS: A Questionable Successor

Nevertheless, even with the collapse of Assad’s regime, this does not mean that HTS is necessarily a suitable choice to lead Syria. This article argues three reasons why HTS could struggle to secure a sustainable future for Syria, especially one that does not fall prey to the torment experienced beneath Assad.

Designation as a Terrorist Organisation

For starters, HTS is internationally designated as a terrorist organization by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States. However, this is not limited to Europe and North America; Turkey, Argentina, and Japan also label the group as a terrorist organisation. HTS leader Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa (also known by the nom de guerre Mohammad al-Julani) was previously a member of ISIS and al-Qaeda before defecting and founding HTS with other rebels (Clayton & Omar, 2024). The United Nations Security Council Consolidated List justifies their organisation’s designation of HTS as terrorists around these extremist ties, labelling them as a threat to international security. Consequently, HTS has been shunned from much of the world; however, some states have begun to send diplomats to meet with the organization directly. For example, Jordan and Qatar (Baker & Ward, 2024), as well as the US’s Biden administration (Crowley, 2024), have sent state diplomats to Syria, signalling a shift in the norms of how states treat terrorist groups.

But one of the more practical implications of being identified as a terrorist is the freezing of funds and financial assets (Sanctions, 2024). Because of this, there will be a lack of funds to invest in Syria. More importantly, this means a lack of funding—or none at all—for vital institutions, infrastructure, and public goods essential in rebuilding Syria. Therefore, it is clear that, in any case, HTS would benefit from not being labelled as a terrorist group. One possible way to get rid of their terrorist label would be to have the organization alter or scrap any current relationships, policies, actions, or appearances that support any conception of a terrorist. But even if HTS succeeded in doing this and rebranding themselves, there remains skepticism in their shift in strategy. This is because many would continue to acknowledge their controversial past and origins involving terrorist groups. One could even attempt to draw similarities between this past and the atrocities of Assad, rendering HTS as an increasingly undesirable choice for leadership.

Parallels with the Taliban

Another reason why HTS’s leadership of Syria is questionable is that the organisation ideologically parallels that of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (informally the Taliban). Ruling a Sunni Islamist government in Afghanistan, the Taliban succeeded in consolidating power as a government in 2021 by armed conflict against the United States and its allies. After foreign forces departed Afghanistan in August of that year, the Taliban publicly pledged that they would “uphold women's rights in line with Sharia law” (European, 2024) under their new government. Yet, just three years later, the European Parliament Think Tank stated that Afghanistan has become “one of the worst, if not the worst, in the world” for women’s rights. Even former U.S. Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken acknowledged this directly, stating in a council on foreign relations that there “is a lesson” in the Taliban model of “project[ing] a more moderate face—or at least tr[ying] to—in taking over Afghanistan” until “its true colors came out” (Crowley 2024). In Syria, HTS has publicly “lauded [the Taliban] as an inspiration and a model” (Al-Lami, 2024), posing major implications for the future of Syrian civil rights.

The Taliban’s model of political hypocrisy, bluntly put, would allow HTS to briefly rebrand its policies to garner short-term support from the international community. This makes it a strategically efficient tactic as HTS attempts to further consolidate the power and legitimacy of their administration. Following the Taliban model maintains internal support—essential for HTS’s diverse rebel composition—by upholding conservative principles when a policy is reversed later on. We can see the first stage of this when HTS, just like the Taliban, promised to news outlets to protect minority rights and “transition Syria into a state of governance, [and] institutions” (Clayton & Omar, 2024). We can thus expect this statement to manifest itself as false over time, not only because of HTS’s stated inspiration of the Taliban model, but also because it is indeed more strategically efficient for HTS to be politically hypocritical. Therefore, if HTS policymaking is left unchecked, the distinction between civil rights under the Taliban and HTS may become blurred. This would leave their policies barely distinguishable from Assad’s.

Inability to Restore Domestic Sovereignty

A final reason why HTS’s leadership is questionable is their inability to effectively restore domestic sovereignty. As crowds rejoiced on Damascus’s streets following the collapse of Assad’s regime, fighting persisted elsewhere in Syria. This was most principally between rival Turkish and Kurdish aligned rebels, which has intensified ever since Assad’s fall (Euronews, 2024). On one hand, Kurdish-led factions vie for an independent nation that encompasses parts of Syria, while on the other, Turkish-aligned factions support an alternate, interim government in peripheral areas of northern Syria (Middle, 2024). The actions of these two rebel groups violate Syria’s domestic sovereignty, which is defined as the actual control of a state by an authority organized within the state. In practice, if HTS was able to actually control these rebel groups, their interim government would have achieved domestic sovereignty, thus allowing coordinated efforts to restructure Syria's war-torn districts. Although HTS has never attempted to snuff out Turkish or Kurdish-aligned factions, they might soon try to, either through diplomatic or military means.

However, it does not appear that HTS is militarily or diplomatically suited to reclaim the domestic sovereignty that the two rebel groups violate. Diplomatically, HTS could attempt to get the rebels to surrender Syrian territory to them. However, this does not seem plausible, as giving away territory would directly compromise the Turkish-backed rebel’s interim government, and with Kurdistan, it would even violate their own domestic sovereignty. When also considering the existential conflict that the two groups have been locked in since 1924, a diplomatic means of regaining control over Syria seems far-fetched for HTS or any other form of alternative government. This leaves HTS with the option of using its military. However, such an armed conflict would most likely result in a long war of attrition against both Turkish-backed and Kurdish-led groups, the latter who receive supplies from the United States (Euronews, 2024). Unless the current Trump administration cuts foreign aid to Kurdish groups, there remains a steady stream of material support for both sides. HTS has no equivalent source of foreign aid, and are thus not favorites to win a war of attrition. Finally, a military solution to restoring state sovereignty would inevitably perpetuate the suffering of innocent civilians, who civilians cannot tell the difference between the bullets of rebels and of the Assad regime.

Key Takeaways

In conclusion, the future of Syria remains fragile as HTS presents three major challenges to rebuilding the nation in a post-Assad era. The first challenge is the group’s designation as a terrorist organization which, despite a recent increase in state interaction, severely limits HTS’s financial capabilities in rebuilding Syria. Another challenge is HTS’s inspiration from the Taliban’s model of political hypocrisy, which appears both practical and likely to happen. A final challenge is the group’s limited capacity to maintain domestic sovereignty both diplomatically and militarily, in light of the problems posed by Turkish and Kurdish aligned rebel groups. By using these three reasons to emphasize how HTS’s leadership is questionable, the importance of sustainable governance in Syria is underlined.

In any case, both HTS and alternative leaderships should focus on trying to address these problems with governance if they wish to reduce political instability. Otherwise, they will be unable to create a more sustainable future for Syria and will contribute to worsening regional stability. Focusing upon these characteristics also gives policymakers a new way to approach shaping sustainable governance in the broader context of the Levant region. If effectively implemented, maybe civilians will someday see the sun rising, instead of their hopes setting beneath the Western horizon.

Alek S.

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