Syria’s Unclear Settlement Process Risks Fanning Discontent Among Ex-Regime Soldiers 

Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa held a meeting with representatives from coastal communities on Dec. 13 in which he told members of the minority Alawite sect that, “only those with blood on their hands” will be held accountable for crimes committed while serving the Assad regime. The meeting came as part of Damascus’ months-long efforts of rebuilding trust with coastal Alawites following the March 2025 insurgency and massacres that left 1,500 Alawite civilians and over 200 security members dead. Yet even as Sharaa and Damascus attempt to build trust with the Alawite community through the recruitment of Alawites into the police and general security, accountability mechanisms for members of the new military who committed egregious crimes against Alawites, and the formation of civil peace committees, the unresolved status of ex-Assad regime security forces continues to undermine their work.  

In the weeks after Assad’s fall, the new government called on all former security forces to turn in their military IDs and weapons to settlement centers opened in every major city across the country in a process known in Arabic as “taswiya”. This process had long been used by the Assad regime as part of its reconciliation procedure for former insurgents. Taswiya then, as now, involves men submitting their basic information to authorities as a first step toward regularizing their status from armed actors against the state to civilians. Upon handing in their military IDs, these men were given “taswiya cards,” large pieces of paper containing the same information found on civilian IDs, but which were meant only as a temporary measure until new ID cards could be issued. Such IDs are required for many basic bureaucratic tasks, like activating a new phone line or filing civil or financial paperwork at courts. 

Temporary Solution Leads to Confusion 

Many ex-regime soldiers incorrectly viewed this as an official state amnesty, while in reality it was only the first step in a long administrative and justice process. The Assad regime had taken these soldiers’ civilian IDs when they were first conscripted or volunteered in the army, leaving hundreds of thousands of men suddenly in need of new civilian IDs when the regime collapsed. Men from all sects received taswiya cards in what was initially promised to be a temporary solution. Yet one year later, almost no civilian IDs have been handed out, leaving these men in limbo, unsure of their legal status. 

This process has had more impact on the Alawite community given its over-representation within the Assad regime and fears of sectarian reprisal from the new Sunni government. For many Alawites, the regime’s armed forces had formed a “key pillar of Alawite identity and have for nearly a century constituted their main institutional vehicle for attaining upward social mobility and prestige.” In Syria’s coastal provinces of Tartous and Latakia, which form the Alawite heartland, this resulted in towns where most fighting-age males were serving in the military at the time of Assad’s fall. For example, in Latakia’s Beit Yashout, at least 5,000 men out of a total population of 20,000 now have taswiya.  

While most Sunni taswiya holders have returned to their normal lives, Alawi ex-soldiers remain trapped in fear and uncertainty, according to dozens of activists the authors spoke with over the past year. The cards are colloquially referred to as “death cards” by many, according to coastal residents who spoke with the authors who worry that if they show it at a checkpoint they will be arrested or killed on the spot. This fear has rooted these men within their towns, and many are unable to find work and convinced they have no future. 

Destabilizing Fear 

During the Assad regime, many rural Alawite families depended on military salaries and the access to the illicit economy gained through those positions. Now unemployed, most are unable to find work due to the long-neglected local industries. Some men use siblings’ IDs to travel, but most remain in their villages to avoid checkpoints, preventing them from finding work in nearby cities and exacerbating the economic strife.  

Unprofessional conduct and sectarian bias by the nascent security forces of the new government, particularly in the first months after Assad, further entrenched this fear. According to interviews conducted by the authors, some ex-soldiers faced sectarian harassment and beatings at checkpoints in the first months after Assad’s fall simply for holding a taswiya card. Others say they were detained on the basis of the card alone – and although most would later be released, some reported being physically abused by security forces during their detention. These incidents were amplified by widespread disinformation pushed online by propaganda accounts seeking to pull ex-soldiers toward the influence of insurgent groups. 

On one early November day, the authors themselves witnessed the ease with which this fear is cemented at a checkpoint on the Homs-Tartous highway in early November. General Security officers were checking every ID. One passenger in the public minibus in which the authors were traveling handed over a laminated paper – a settlement card. The person who had presented the card was taken off the bus to a small building on the side of the road. Eventually, the bus was instructed to move on without the passenger, triggering mumbled confusion and anger from the rest of the passengers. 

Such incidents are common, though less so than in the first months after the fall of Assad. Each time, it is impossible for witnesses to know if the man is being arrested or merely held for further investigation and later released. Those who are detained disappear into prison matrix where it is often impossible for their families to learn about their location or well-being. This lack of transparency fuels rumors that such detentions are based on sect, not evidence of past crimes, which are reinforced by social media propaganda campaigns pushed by pro-insurgent pages. It also prevents accountability of security forces, limiting the public’s oversight into whether innocent men are being detained. 

Hindered by an Overwhelmed Justice System 

The state has valid reasons to investigate and detain former Assad-era soldiers. The taswiya registration process was a first step toward investigating ex-soldiers for war crimes. Those cleared of such charges would be handed civilian IDs; guilty men became wanted. Though not everyone who did taswiya was a regime fighter; deserters and defectors also received taswiya cards, while those who had retired before the end of the war, or who had been able to recover their civilian IDs from administrative centers as the regime collapsed, did not undergo taswiya. 

“Taswiya was a good will thing at first,” a former military doctor living in Tartous told the authors, “But it became a liability. There are good people and bad people who have done taswiya and they are being treated the same. We just want to feel like proper citizens, but the taswiya cards were a trap.” 

Based on conversations with locals across the coast, ongoing security problems, particularly the growth of a pro-Assad insurgency involving ex-soldiers with taswiya, continues to hinder the return of civilian IDs. These ex-regime insurgent networks grew rapidly in the first months after Assad’s fall, eventually leading a coordinated uprising in the coast on March 6. While significantly weakened since then, they still maintain robust financial and weapons networks to Lebanon and Iraq. In an October interview with Syria Direct, a security official in Tartous claimed that many of the coastal insurgents who had attacked security forces in March were carrying taswiya cards. One coastal security official denied to the authors in December that decisions over handing out civilian IDs were linked to security concerns. Nevertheless, on Oct. 24, Latakia’s governor announced that settled soldiers would be able to register to receive new IDs, but this was delayed amid a series of heightened security fears and Alawite demonstrations in November,  however, and a limited ID return process did not begin until Dec. 10 when the ID return process renewed. Recent efforts to pass out civilian IDs in parts of the country are a step toward assuaging fears of Alawites, but the distribution remains limited and disjointed. In Masyaf, a city in western Hama, the government also began distributing civilian IDs for ex-soldiers on Nov. 3, 2025. However, according to a senior political official in Latakia speaking with the authors in early 2026, these ID handouts have only consisted of old civilian IDs the government had recovered from regime administrative offices. Local Alawite activists echoed this, telling the authors that, in their estimation, no meaningful number of IDs had been handed out by Feb. 2026. 

Adding to the confusion, some local officials told the authors in December that, “the cards are ready but we are waiting on the leadership to give them to us.” Yet no progress has been made in Tartous or Homs in the two months since. Even when IDs are offered, many men are now too afraid to travel to central cities to receive them. As one Alawite media activist in rural Jableh told the authors in November, many men have been convinced by online misinformation that if they go to the station to receive their cards they will be arrested.  

Lack of Transparency Fuels Distrust 

Three months after speaking with the authors, the ex-military doctor in Tartous was arrested in his home, despite having almost never traveled through checkpoints. His arrest appeared to be part of a broader campaign targeting doctors who had worked at the Tishreen Military Hospital. No one the authors spoke with from the doctors’ communities in February had been told why they were arrested. Most friends and families insisted on their innocence and claimed this was part of a sectarian-motivated crackdown on Alawite doctors. Yet multiple security officials the authors spoke with in February stated that the arrests were part of a targeted campaign against doctors for which there was evidence of their role in torturing and killing detainees. 

The doctors’ arrests and the confusion triggered by the lack of government transparency underscore the complexity of concurrent transitional justice and trust-building processes. Competing narratives about accountability will continue to exacerbate sectarian tensions, especially when these arrests are conducted without transparency or explanation to the broader population, the judicial system is opaque, and it remains unclear who the amnesty process applies to. Disagreements about who exactly should be held accountable are inevitable, but the opaque justice system and unclear amnesty processes only fuel the belief that the government is pursuing sectarian-, not accountability-driven detentions. 

Investigating each former soldier takes time, but the longer the government takes to normalize their status the more some of these men are pushed into criminal or insurgent activities and the more anti-government sentiment festers in the coast. The risk of taswiya cardholders moving toward armed or criminal groups has been repeatedly raised by Alawite community leaders and security officials in conversations with the authors since last summer. The unresolved settlement process has also fueled anger and distrust among Alawites without taswiya cards, who sympathize with the others’ circumstances. The combined effect is that the unresolved taswiya process has become the major foundation of Alawite distrust in the new government.  

Policy Recommendations 

If the United States’ Syria policy is rooted in supporting stability, then Washington should support Damascus’ efforts to return civil IDs.   

• To prevent escalating violence on the coast and elsewhere, the U.S. should expand its counter-ISIS cooperation with Damascus to include intelligence sharing on insurgent activity in the coast. This would enhance Damascus’ ability to counter violence committed by ex-regime soldiers while reducing the suspicion placed on other former soldiers not involved in the insurgency. 

• Washington should support Damascus in intercepting weapons shipments and financial support coming from Lebanon and Iraq. 

• Washington should provide technical support and targeted funding to help Damascus expand its ability to efficiently investigate ex-regime criminals. 

• Washington should couple this expanded counter-insurgency support with pressure on Damascus to rapidly finalize handing back civilian IDs. 

To reduce the widespread fear and start building trust with the Alawite community, Damascus should: 

• Provide civilian IDs to ex-soldiers, even if only in batches following the completion of background investigations rather than waiting for everyone to be investigated. The issuance of civil IDs can help reduce fears of harassment and arrest at checkpoints for ex-soldiers and formalize the settlement process which has too long remained ambiguous and secretive. 

• Establish clear procedures regarding the treatment of ex-soldiers at checkpoints, how investigations are conducted, how long ex-soldiers are held for, and the targets and potential suspects of these investigations in order to prevent arbitrary arrests, mistreatment, and harassment. These procedures should then be shared with the Syrian public to increase transparency. Measures should also be taken to hold any security members who violate these procedures accountable, potentially through public reporting systems. The names and locations of detainees should also be provided to family members as well as a list of charges. Clarify the conditions of the amnesty process beyond “blood on their hands” and publicly announce the arrests and charges applied to former soldiers. 

• Encourage NGOs and aid organizations to support economic revitalization in rural Alawite areas to ease the social and security tensions that have grown in response to increased unemployment and the fear ex-soldiers feel over leaving their villages to seek work. 

This analysis was published in collaboration with the Middle East Policy Council.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not an official policy or position of New Lines Institute.

_{Photo: People gather in a courtroom at the Palace of Justice in Aleppo on 18 Nov. 2025, as the first public trial session is held for 14 people accused of committing crimes on the Syrian coast in March 2025. (Photo by Moawia Atrash/picture alliance via Getty Images)}