Syria is on the verge of an “economic revolution”, said Ksenia Svetlova in Haaretz. Its interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qa’eda militant who led the rebel offensive that overthrew dictator Bashar al-Assad in December 2024, has been struggling to rebuild a nation devastated by almost 14 years of civil war.
One of his biggest coups last year was to persuade the Trump administration to lift the strict economic sanctions imposed on Syria in 2019. But the country was still on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation first made in 1979 in response to Damascus’ support for Iran and its harbouring of Palestinian terrorist groups. So, like Iran, it remained cut off from the international banking system, and large-scale reconstruction proved impossible.
But that all changed last week at the stroke of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s pen. Now, at long last, the flow of “dollars, dinars and dirhams” to Syria can begin in earnest. Saudi Arabia has promised to build desalination plants and two airports, and invest in telecommunications projects worth more than $1 billion. Other countries are keen to follow suit. “If everything goes according to plan, Syria will soon become one vast construction site.”
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‘Limited progress’
The rehabilitation of Syria into the world order has happened at “remarkable speed”, said Ilan Berman in The Washington Post. And there’s an obvious logic to it. By removing Damascus from its terrorism list, the US has pulled it towards the West and away from Iran and Russia’s orbit. Yet there are dangers to being so hasty: Washington is “basing its bet more on hope than hard evidence”. For all their promises of liberalisation, Sharaa and his government haven’t fully moved on from the past. Jihadist ideology is prevalent in school curriculums, and there has been no more than “limited progress” in removing 5,000 foreign fighters – extremists loyal to the current regime – from the new Syrian army.
Sharaa also won a significant victory last week in his quest to centralise power, said Smadar Perry on Ynet: he has managed to disband the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the Kurdish-led militia founded in 2015 to fight Islamic State and create a secular, democratic and federalised Syria. At its height, it controlled at least a quarter of the country, including its major oil fields. Its commander, Mazloum Abdi, has now agreed to let his troops be incorporated into the national army, in what he calls “a genuine transition from battlefields to the fields of construction”. But the truth of it is that Sharaa forced his hand by seizing swathes of the SDF’s territory in a lightning offensive in January. Folding the SDF into the army is going to be a hard ask: and though the president has promised to make Kurdish a national language and to protect Kurdish rights, many Kurds still don’t trust him.
Victor’s justice
Sharaa’s government has also been busy bringing members of the Assad regime to justice, said Chris Doyle in Arab News. In August, nine of its most senior figures, including Assad himself, were sentenced to death for war crimes – verdicts that gave rise to an “outpouring of joy”. However, only Atef Najib, Assad’s cousin, a security chief infamous for his brutality, is likely to face execution, the rest having been tried in absentia.
Nor is this exactly a victory for the rule of law: the accused can hardly be said to have received a fair trial; and no corresponding action has been taken against the perpetrators of last year’s massacres of over 1,400 Alawites, the minority sect to which the Assad family belongs. There’s a strong smell of victor’s justice about it all.
Still, progress is undoubtedly being made and “the psychological importance of the removal of sanctions should not be underestimated”, said The National. We have room to hope that the barriers now being torn down in Syria will be replaced “with bridges, roads and tunnels en route to a more stable, secure and prosperous future”.
