The Post-Assad Honeymoon Is Over, and Syrians Are Still Waiting for a Reckoning

Six months have passed since rebels led by Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS) toppled the Assad family’s 53-year dictatorship in Syria in December 2024. After an initial period of widespread celebration, a new period has set in — one of realization that the end of Assad’s rule has not meant solving the deep problems compounded in Syria from 14 years of counterrevolution and war.

In the initial weeks — and even first few months — after the Assad regime’s fall, the mood in Syria was one of widespread relief and optimism for the future. Syrians expressed relief that the police state had fallen, and that people within the country could finally speak openly about politics without fear of arrest or disappearance. Syrians also hoped that Assad’s fall would lead to a better economic situation in the war-destroyed country, and that millions of Syrians in exile would be able to return home. The rebels’ conscious decision to free thousands of prisoners from Assad’s notorious prisons during the overthrow of the regime also led to widespread expectations that some level of justice and accountability would be served.

Sara Ajlyakin, Deputy Director of Al-Jumhuriya Collective, who returned to Damascus for the first time since 2012, described to Truthout the relief that people throughout Syria were experiencing:

In the immediate aftermath of the regime’s fall, you could almost physically … feel the country exhale. It was a collective sigh of relief, palpable in the streets. After years of normalized violence and repression, I don’t think the world fully grasps the significance of that moment. You would see it in people’s faces — even the young looked aged by exhaustion: the exhaustion of fear, of being on edge at all times, of surveillance, poverty, violence, and unrelenting loss. The entire country had been brutalized on every conceivable level.”

Ajlyakin said the relief continues to this day, though it is “now tempered, for many, by the uncertainties of transition,” because “people understand that Syria’s most grotesque chapter may be behind us, but much remains unresolved.”

Though the fall of the Assad regime raised Syrians’ expectations for the future, the vast majority of Syrians’ expectations for the aftermath of its fall remain unfulfilled. The country remains economically and physically devastated after 14 years of war. Israel has invaded and continuously bombed Syria and attempted to take advantage of its political fragmentation and fragility. And while Syrians hoped for a more democratic transition process, former HTS leader Ahmad al-Shar’aa appointed himself and other HTS leaders internally and undemocratically from its local Islamist government in Idlib to lead the new transitional government. Worse still, this government has failed to prioritize transitional justice — which has led to continued instability and violence, making the return of millions of Syrians unlikely for the time being.

Sanctions, Israel’s Incursions, and US Pressure

Syria’s economy and infrastructure have been decimated by 14 years of counterrevolution and war. Since the war’s start in 2011, Syria’s economy has contracted by 85 percent. Nearly one-third of the country’s buildings are estimated to be badly damaged or destroyed, largely due to aerial bombardment. And more than half of Syrians are living in abject poverty.

Even before 2011, the economic situation in Syria was already marked by stagnation, high unemployment, and growing inequality. The Assad regime had ushered in neoliberal austerity policies beginning in the 2000s — one of the factors that undoubtedly helped trigger the 2011 uprising against its rule.

But since taking power, al-Shar’aa’s government has continued on this path rather than working to create economic support for millions of impoverished Syrians. He has ramped up privatization, and enacted plans to cut subsidies and fire public sector workers — measures that actually triggered the initial Arab Spring, including the Syrian revolution in 2011, and have also caused significant though limited protests against HTS today.

But Syria’s decimated economic situation is also caused by years of sanctions that largely punished the population rather than the former regime. The U.S., U.K., and EU implemented sanctions that froze assets, prevented the export of materials for a range of industries — from oil to technology — to Syria, made it extremely difficult to send remittances to Syria from the diaspora, and even isolated Syria’s education system.

Syrians expected that these sanctions would be dropped after Assad’s overthrow, but movement remained stalled until mid-May. On May 13, U.S. President Trump announced on his Gulf tour that he would be dropping sanctions on Syria — causing renewed relief and celebration in Syria — and a week later, the U.S. lifted the main sanctions imposed on Syria. The EU and U.K. have followed suit with partial suspensions of sanctions, mainly easing restrictions on energy, transport, and finance.

Similar to his pressure on Sudan to normalize with Israel in exchange for being dropped from the U.S. State Sponsors of Terror list, Trump had been pushing for al-Shar’aa to normalize with Israel in exchange for the dropping of sanctions. In April, while attempting to secure sanctions relief, al-Shar’aa told U.S. Republican lawmaker and Trump ally Cory Mills that he would normalize with Israel “under the right conditions.” During his Gulf tour, Trump met with al-Shar’aa, and seemed satisfied that the new Syrian government would cause no problems for him.

These dynamics highlight the pressure faced by the new Syrian government, and the Syrian population more broadly, since Assad’s overthrow. Immediately after the Assad regime’s overthrow in December, Israel bombed and destroyed Syria’s weapons depots to prevent the new government — which it considered a potential threat, unlike the Assad regime — from obtaining any military capabilities. Israel also expanded its incursions on Syrian land over a dozen miles beyond its occupation of the Golan Heights. Since then, it has bombed numerous sites in Syria, and weaponized sectarian divides in order to further its influence in the country.

While Israel has carried out these incursions on Syrian land, al-Shar’aa has insisted that his new government is not a threat either to Israel, the international order, or the reactionary status quo in the region led by regimes like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. While the weakened and largely devastated Syria is unlikely to be able to face off against Israel, and in a clear position of weakness against major military powers, it is also evident that al-Shar’aa’s reasoning is that of an unscrupulous pragmatist who is aiming to join a reactionary status quo.

And yet although the regimes of the region, from Saudi Arabia’s MBS to al-Shar’aa, have cheered on Trump’s Gulf tour even during the continued genocide in Gaza, it is difficult to imagine al-Shar’aa agreeing to outright normalization. This is due to the fact that Syrians across the country have protested in solidarity with Gaza and against Israeli incursions on their land, even burning Israeli aid and rejecting Israeli attempts to divide the Syrian population. Normalization with Israel would be disastrous for al-Shar’aa’s reputation and stability in Syria, and could even lead to an end to his political leadership.

However, Israel has managed to take advantage of the new government’s failure to protect minority communities, weaponizing sectarianism in order to make further inroads in Syria. In late April, attacks on and clashes between the Druze and Islamist loyalists of the new government killed dozens. Israel began to insist that it was “protecting” the Druze minority, launching airstrikes and putting in motion a plan to welcome Druze leaders into Israel for religious pilgrimages and temporary labor. In fact, Israel reportedly instructed Trump not to drop sanctions on Syria, declaring that it was still suspicious of al-Shar’aa and that it was protecting the Druze minority from Syria’s new government. Fundamentally, Israel’s policies attempt to further division and build off the lack of adequate transitional and political justice in Syria to propel its colonial agenda.

Transitional Justice and Accountability

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented over 618,000 people killed in Syria since March 2011, throughout the course of the country’s revolution and civil war. For its part, in 2021 and 2022 the UN human rights office said that at least 580,000 had been killed, including over 306,000 civilians, while stating that this was “certainly an undercount.” The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) has reported that 91 percent of civilian deaths were caused by the Assad regime and its allies (primarily Russia and Iran); the remaining 9 percent by ISIS, the U.S.-led coalition, Syrian opposition factions (including HTS) and Kurdish militias.

After the release of thousands of detainees from Assad regime prisons in December, the SNHR said that over 112,000 people forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime remain missing. And since the fall of the regime, several mass graves have been discovered, one of them containing human remains of at least 100,000 people. Individuals forced for years to dig these graves in silence have begun to speak out. Syrian medics spoke out for the first time after Assad’s overthrow claiming they were coerced by the regime to give false testimony after its chemical weapons attacks. Each of these cases requires investigation, sharing of testimony, and community justice processes.

Transitional justice is undoubtedly necessary for Syria’s recovery and emergence from the 14-year quagmire of counterrevolution and civil war. It is needed to provide information to the families of the disappeared, and guarantee that atrocities will not be committed again, that those responsible will be held accountable rather than given free rein to continue to perpetrate violence, and that Syria is stable and safe enough for refugees to return. Beyond this, political society must be remade on new grounds of equality rather than the privileging of one minority over another.

But since its takeover, HTS has prioritized its relationships with other regional and international states and largely neglected transitional justice. From the initial days in December, it failed to secure mass graves and detention sites, allowing for the destruction of crucial evidence.

HTS’s lack of effort on this front has prompted frustration, anger, and even protest. Families of the disappeared have protested repeatedly to demand the new government pay attention to their cause, preserve evidence from prisons, and investigate what happened to their loved ones. They expressed outrage that for months, al-Shar’aa prioritized meeting with foreign states and individuals rather than with the families of the disappeared. And while over 100,000 people are estimated to have been disappeared by the regime, others were disappeared by Islamist groups — and protesters have demanded answers to these disappearances as well. The protests and activity on behalf of the disappeared in Syria has created a wedge of pressure on the new government, and shown that the HTS-led government can be affected, to an extent, by popular pressure — certainly to a greater degree than the Assad regime. After months of pressure by the families of the disappeared and other activists, on May 18, Ahmad al Shar’aa at last announced the formation of transitional justice and missing persons commissions. Additional popular pressure will be needed to ensure that transitional justice is in fact carried out.

But the transitional government has already acted in ways that explicitly violate transitional justice. Beyond failing to preserve mass graves and prisons, it has allowed perpetrators from the Assad regime to roam freely at the sites of regime massacres. In February, hundreds protested in the Tadamon neighborhood of Damascus as one of the Assad regime perpetrators of the 2013 massacre in the area was released by the new leadership.

While the Assad regime was responsible for the majority of the deaths and disappearances over the past 14 years, accountability is also needed for perpetrators of crimes from militias connected to the opposition, which became increasingly reactionary throughout the war. This includes militias from HTS and the Syrian National Army (SNA). The SNA in particular, formed in 2017 as a Turkish subsidiary, had repeatedly perpetrated crimes in the Kurdish-majority region of Afrin as the militia was used in service of Turkey’s goal of waging war on the Kurds. But after its takeover, the HTS-led transitional government incorporated militias like the SNA into its new national army, essentially allowing perpetrators of war crimes to retain their positions and receive governmental backing.

The initial absence of transitional justice or accountability for perpetrators, whether those within the Assad regime or the reactionary militias within the opposition, directly enabled sectarian massacres. One of the worst killings took place in March 2025 on the Syrian coast and was largely perpetrated by militias from the former SNA. The new leadership under al-Shar’aa claimed that its government was not responsible, but had it recognized the previous crimes of known perpetrators, these massacres could have been prevented.

But accountability for individual perpetrators is only a first step. As with other civil wars and long-term intranational conflicts, there needs to be a readjustment in political priorities and power-sharing. Scholar and writer Mahmood Mamdani, for example, has cautioned against a focus on individual responsibility, especially without larger political justice and a change in political arrangements, as it would allow the cycle of sectarian violence to continue. In Syria under the Assad regime, the regime’s political system weaponized sectarianism, oppressing the Sunni majority and empowering the Alawite minority, gifting Alawites the majority of senior positions within the army among other benefits, and focusing the majority of barrel-bombs and mass killings on Sunni-majority areas throughout the counterrevolutionary war. But now, the script has flipped: Though Alawites themselves were largely dissatisfied with the regime, reactionary factions from the former opposition are now targeting them in revenge killings. What is needed now is a model that looks beyond the privileging of a single minority, sect, or ethnic group, and a creation of systems that enable structural equality — and certainly one not based on a sectarian model as exists in Lebanon or Iraq.

There are two options for Syria’s near future: an increasing descent into cycles of violence, with states like Israel and Turkey taking advantage of the fragmentation, or serious attempts at a post-Assad, transitional justice that focus not solely on individual accountability but on political justice and inclusive democratization.