Is Al-Sharaa’s Syria A Success?

On Thursday, the 20th of November, the Syrian Ministry of Energy did something that barely two years ago would have been considered a miracle. It supplied the capital city Damascus with uninterrupted electricity for 48 hours in what Middle East outlet the New Arab termed an unprecedented experiment.

Now, for you and me sitting in our homes and offices thousands of kilometers away from Syria, 48 hours of uninterrupted electricity seems like the absolute bare minimum. But for people like Omm Alaa, a housewife who lived in the outskirts of Damascus, 48 hours of uninterrupted electricity was beyond her wildest dreams. In 2016, at the height of the Syrian crisis, she told Enab Baladi, an independent media outlet, “My sister’s family get two hours of electricity by accessing the neighborhood generator but for me, for instance today, the electricity only came for half an hour in 24 hours. (...) In the best cases, we get half an hour of electricity intermittently and there is an energy outage every seven hours. In total, we get no more than an hour and a half of electricity when we are lucky and the government is happy with us.”

As other Syrians would tell various media outlets in the intervening years, including as recently as early November, the situation showed little signs of improving.

So to go from that, to 48 straight hours of power, you can understand why there’s a sense of optimism among some Syrian observers. It’s not just the electricity. On the 18th of November, a Saudi tanker carrying 90,000 tonnes of crude oil arrived in Syria. It’s the first shipment following a grant from the Saudi Fund For Development meant to support Syria’s economic reconstruction.

And then there are the international meetings.

On the 15th of October, Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa met with Russian president Vladimir Putin, a long time ally of ousted leader Bashar Al-Assad, in Moscow. During that meeting, Putin praised Al-Sharaa’s for successfully conducting parliamentary elections while Al-Sharaa committed to restoring and redefining Syria’s ties with Moscow.

While that meeting was obviously significant given that Assad is currently hiding out in Moscow, Al-Sharaa’s most high profile meeting happened on November 10th when he met American President Donald Trump, who vowed that Washington would do everything to make Syria succeed. Symbolically, it was a major coup for Al-Sharaa, because it marks the first time that a Syrian president has entered the oval office since Damascus gained independence from France in 1946. Beyond the symbolism, the meeting had some practical benefits for Syria, as U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced the partial suspension of some sanctions.

When taken together, all of these paint a picture of a Syria that is slowly clawing its way back from the abyss, winning diplomatic recognition and economic support as it approaches the one-year anniversary of Assad's fall. And that is something definitely worth celebrating.

So why does it feel like, despite all of these achievements,  there’s still something missing in Syria?

Sectarian Violence

On the 24th of November, a married couple from the Bani Khalid Bedouin tribe was found murdered in Homs, one of Syria’s largest and most diverse cities. According to the Syrian state news agency, SANA, the woman’s body had been mutilated, and sectarian slogans had been graffitied on the scene. The killings triggered a wave of retaliatory violence from the Bedouin community who attacked Alawite neighbourhoods such as al-Muhajirin and Karam.

In the wake of this violence, security forces were deployed to the city, a night curfew was imposed on Sunday, and more than 100 people were arrested.

Now, if this were an isolated issue, it would be a troubling but manageable security problem that Al-Sharaa's government could address with better policing and community dialogue, but in Syria - where sectarian divisions run not just deep but positively subterranean - this violence represented something far more dangerous.

Syria is a deeply divided nation, with the greatest fault lines being ethnic and religious. The country is home to a complex swirl of communities including Sunni Arabs who make up roughly 70% of the population, Christians 10% of the population, Alawites 10% and a constellation of minor ethnoreligious groups such as the Druze, Isma'ilis, and Mhallami who make up the rest.

The Assad family, which ruled Syria for decades, belonged to the minority Alawite community, and so Alawites dominated the government, military and security services, often to the exclusion and oppression of the Sunni majority.

According to the BBC, some Muslims consider the Alawites heretics because of a perception that they regard Ali, who was a cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. as a deity or God in human form. While Shia Muslims, the other major sect of Islam beside Sunni, also venerate Ali believing he was the true heir to the Prophet, the idea that he is a deity is only found among the Alawaite. And while getting into the finer points of Islamic theology is a little beyond our pay grade, we did want to mention that some Islamic scholars argue that the Alawites believe Ali was an essence or form rather than a human being, through which followers can try to grasp God.

Regardless of this distinction, there was always a deep seated mistrust of the Alwaites because of their religion.

And the Assad regime exploited it.

The regime maintained a network of shadow militias called the shabiha, composed primarily of Alawites, who were accused of using excessive violence to suppress dissent. Additionally, the Assad government deliberately framed Syria's civil war in sectarian terms, portraying the conflict as a Sunni-led insurgency against minorities, and the regime as the protectors of Syria's minorities. This strategy created a vicious cycle. Sunnis who suffered under regime brutality came to associate all Alawites with Assad's crimes, while Alawites feared that any Sunni-led government would seek revenge against them.

And to an extent, this is exactly what happened. In March this year, after large scale attacks by pro-Assad loyalists, government aligned forces and militias targeted the Alawites in retaliatory attacks.  According to Amnesty International, militias killed more than 100 people in the coastal city of Baniyas, home to a significant number of Alawite people, between March 8 and 9. Witnesses told amnesty that armed men asked people if they were Alawite before threatening or killing them and, in some cases, appeared to blame them for violations committed by the former government. By March 17th, the Syrian Network For Human Rights estimated that 1,084 people had been killed during the clashes, and in August, the UN Syria Commission of Inquiry wrote a report concluding that war crimes may have been committed against the Alawites.

In his first interview to the global press after the March killings, President Al-Sharaa told Reuters that the killings posed a threat to his mission to unite the country, and promised to punish those responsible, including his own allies if necessary.

Quoting him here, "Syria is a state of law. The law will take its course on all. We fought to defend the oppressed, and we won't accept that any blood be shed unjustly, or goes without punishment or accountability, even among those closest to us.”

However, critics felt that his promise rang hollow, as home invasions, kidnappings of Alawite women and extrajudicial executions of Alawite men continued well into the rest of the year.

And the violence hasn’t been limited to the Alawaites. The Druze, a minority group that many Sunni Muslims consider heretics, fought the Bedouin community in July this year. When the governments stepped in to intervene, the Druze believed that they were siding with the Bedouins, leading to even greater violence. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that 823 people, including 15 children, were extrajudicially executed by  members of the Syrian ministries of defence and interior. The death toll would eventually surpass 1,000, and Israel, which has a small but influential Druze minority, intervened. Ostensibly to protect the Druze, it attacked government armour near Suweida and defence institutions in Damascus, creating an enforced stalemate between the sides that prevails to this day.

Which brings us back to the present day, where although the government might have managed to stop the flare up in Homs, the fact that it happened in the first place reveals that the country still has a long way to go in addressing these sectarian divisions.

To the government’s credit, they have taken some steps to stop the violence, and provide justice to the victims. In March, immediately following the Alawite massacres, Al-Sharaa established a fact-finding committee to investigate the events on the coast, and formed a higher committee to maintain civil peace which Amnesty International recognized as a positive step towards establishing the truth. In July, the fact-finding committee reported it had preliminarily identified 298 alleged perpetrators from military factions and 265 linked to armed groups associated with the former government, referring their names to the attorney general for additional investigations and prosecutions.

However, the report was criticized by Syrian human rights groups because it failed to acknowledge the structural role of the government as head of security forces responsible for violence.

Razan Rashidi, the Executive Director of The Syria Campaign, a non-profit human-rights advocacy organization supporting Syrian civil society, said, “While the committee rightly acknowledged the catastrophic human losses, it failed to recognize the role of the Syrian security and army that enabled the violations. Failing to do so will only lead to more sectarian violence (...) The interim authorities hold the ultimate responsibility to protect its citizens, end impunity and ensure its security services do not commit violations. Avoiding to acknowledge this responsibility or their failures will only make transitional justice more difficult.”

Despite these criticisms, on the 18th of November, the government took a significant step forward when it opened the first public trial of suspects linked to the March violence. Fourteen people appeared at Aleppo's Palace of Justice, seven of whom were Assad loyalists accused of attacking government forces, while the other seven were members of the new government's security forces.

At the time of writing, it has only been 10 days since the trials began and while we aren’t in the business of guessing the outcomes of court cases before they are decided, we can’t deny that this is a historic moment. As Fadel Abdul Ghany, head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, told local outlet Syria Direct, "This is unprecedented in Syria, and extremely important. For the first time, security and military forces affiliated with the authorities themselves are being held accountable."

Still, even as these trails continue, there is a sense among the Alawite minority that the government is unwilling to protect them. On Monday, after the violence in Homs had subsided, hundreds of Alawites took to the streets to demand improved security, a decentralised political system in Syria, and the release of men they say were unjustly detained by the country's new authorities.

As Leen, one of the protesters, told Reuters, “We demand to live in security, to go to school safely without kidnapping. This was the only place we used to feel security. Now there's no more security and we're exposed to kidnapping and fear.”

If the government cannot deliver security to the minorities in Syria, then we risk seeing a reemergence of the brutal civil war that lasted for more than 13 years. And if we get to that point then 48 hours of uninterrupted electricity, oil deals with Saudi Arabia, and meetings with world leaders won’t mean much.

So, is Al-Sharaa's Syria a success?

The answer depends on what metrics you're using. If you're looking at diplomatic achievements, sanctions relief, and infrastructure improvements, then yes, Syria has made remarkable progress in its first year after Assad. But if you're measuring success by whether ordinary Syrians feel safe in their own neighborhoods, whether minorities trust the government to protect them, and whether the country has moved past the sectarian hatreds that fueled 13 years of civil war, then the picture is far more troubling.

The real test for Al-Sharaa's government won't be whether it can keep the lights on or win diplomatic recognition. It will be whether it can build a Syria where minority and majority communities all feel equally safe, equally represented, and - most-importantly of all - equally Syrian. Until that happens, any talk of success will remain premature.

Morgan Ortagus, U.S. Counselor to the United Nations, said it best, “We urge the Syrian government to fulfill the promise of this moment. Syria only has one chance to get on the right track.”

Only time will tell whether the government is capable of grasping this chance.

Sources

• newarab.com
• reuters.com
• thenationalnews.com
• editorials.voa.gov
• aljazeera.com
• carnegieendowment.org
• politico.com
• jfeed.com
• memri.org
• news.un.org
• nytimes.com
• apnews.com