In this edition of The New Lines Institute Middle East Center’s Post-Assad Podcast series, Middle East Center co-director Nicholas A. Heras sits down with Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff to analyze how humanitarian and economic rehabilitation efforts can support peacebuilding in Syria. Sasha is a Nonresident Fellow with the Middle East Center at The New Lines Institute who has a granular and nuanced perspective on Syria that comes from his oversight over targeted civil society capacity building and humanitarian assistance programs throughout Syria. He is also currently the Middle East and North Africa Program Director for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and a Security Fellow at the Truman National Security Project. Heras and Ghosh-Siminoff also assess what should be the priorities for international organizations looking to support the rehabilitation of Syria.
Nicholas Heras:
Hello, my name is Nick Heras, and I’m the co-director of the Middle East Center at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. I will be hosting this episode in the institute’s Post-Assad Podcast series. This episode we will be discussing the enormous humanitarian challenges in Syria and assessing in depth the ways in which humanitarian assistance delivery could ease conflict within the country and facilitate the rehabilitation of Syria. Joining me for this conversation is an expert who has almost a decade and a half experience managing projects on the ground in Syria and across the country, Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff. Sasha is a non-resident fellow with the Middle East Center here at the New Lines Institute. He’s also currently the Middle East and North Africa program director for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He’s a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project, and he’s a senior advisor at People Demand Change, which performs monitoring and evaluation work throughout Syria for a range of stakeholders.
Sasha has a granular and nuanced perspective on Syria that comes from his oversight over targeted civil society capacity building and humanitarian assistance programs throughout Syria for a range of international donors, including the U.S. government and the European Union. Welcome Sasha, and thank you for joining me for this discussion. Sasha, you have a decade and a half of experience implementing mountain and evaluation projects throughout Syria. Over the next year, what should be the most important priorities for organizations looking to support the rehabilitation of Syria?
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff:
Right. This is a really important question, and I think, first and foremost, it’s important that everyone understand that just because there’s been this seismic political shift in Syria, that doesn’t mean that Syria as a country is safe. Number one, we need to, I think, governments and the international community at large need to first recalibrate expectations about what’s going on in Syria. Yes, the Assad regime fell. Yes, there have been some movement for people to return home, and there’s been some push for internally displaced people inside Syria also to return to their villages and towns and to the cities. But what’s happening is people are showing up and finding that the infrastructure of Syria is just completely decimated and that there actually is nothing to return to. Now, some internally displaced persons who have the financial means are returning and attempting to rebuild, but frankly, many don’t have the financial resources yet to do that, and they’re still dependent on aid.
Even now the vast majority of the Syrian people require some sort of humanitarian assistance. And that is not going to change anytime soon until Syria’s shattered economy is rebuilt, until its infrastructure is rehabilitated, until the damage that has been done to Syria’s environment has been reversed in some order, and until its linkages to the outside world, both economically, politically and diplomatically are somewhat restored. I think it is important that all the assistance and provision of support that the international community has been providing up until now continues for the foreseeable future. And how much impact that assistance will have and under what conditions will to a degree be dependent on the new type of governance structure that comes out from the events that happened on December 8, 2024, when the Assad regime fell and rebel factions basically took control of Damascus and took control of the country.
I think part of the difficulty is that this conflict has been going on for almost 14 years, and there’s a degree of fatigue with regards to Syria, that fatigue has been years in the making, and in addition, the world’s problems have only increased. We have more conflicts rather than less since the outbreak of the Syrian Revolution and the Arab Spring in 2011. And in addition, obviously, the Middle East specifically has a number of conflicts that in the minds of some governments may take precedent over whatever commitments they might have made in the past towards supporting the rehabilitation of Syria moving forward.
But I think it is important to remember that Syria is an integral part of the chess game that is the Middle East. And leaving Syria without the capacity to rehabilitate itself, without the capacity to rebuild first and foremost, means that the number of Syrian refugees that are mostly sitting in the Middle East region will not be able to return home. And that would be unfortunate, because, for example, UNHCR has done a perception intention survey in the past in which they asked Syrian refugees basically in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, about whether they would potentially be willing to return home to Syria, and 57% indicated that they hoped to return to Syria one day, and more than one-third hoped to return in the next five years.
So, there is, I think, a deep interest of the refugee population in the region to return home to Syria, but the conditions in Syria have to be such that they can, A, absorb population, and, B, that there is the stability, both from a security standpoint and from an economic standpoint, that people would be able to go home and thrive if they do choose to do that. I think the continued support from the international community towards Syria at its current levels and more is going to be needed. And we shouldn’t think that just because the Assad regime fell that this crisis is over; this crisis is still very much continuing. It’s just entered a different phase, so I think we need to just recalibrate expectations, number one, about this moving forward.
Nicholas Heras:
Sasha, thank you for that detailed breakdown on the current dynamics as it relates to the humanitarian situation in Syria. I want to pull on this thread a little bit more. As you know, a big debate right now is whether the international community should accept the caretaker government in Damascus led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, HTS, and its allies. What is your assessment on that debate, and are there any key dynamics related to the rehabilitation of Syria that this debate misses?
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff:
Sure. I think number one, we should look at how the Assad regime felt. For years I, along with many of my colleagues who’ve worked in this space for this entire period, of which many of them are Syrians themselves who are from Syria or are of Syrian heritage, have explained repeatedly that the Assad regime was hollow, that the only thing propping up the Assad regime were the Russians and whatever the Iranians were providing. And past that there wasn’t a ton keeping the regime afloat. And it’s been this way for almost a decade, which was why the Russian intervention in 2015 was so critical to the regime’s survival.
And so, although HTS and its opposition allies prepared for years, as we now know, this campaign, it seems to me that once HTS was able to show how weak the regime really was and that it wasn’t prepared to fight for its survival, that provided then the catalyst through which many other opposition factions in numerous communities. Not just Sunni Arabs, but also Druze also within the Kurdish-led SDF, also within places like Salamiyah, which is a mixture of Ismailis, Sunnis, and Alawites, in many places once HTS did its first lightning offensive to enter Aleppo city. That was the green light to everyone who wanted the regime gone to say, “All right, this is our chance.”
And I don’t think that HTS could have done what it had done if that groundswell and that interest in finally getting rid of the regime once and for all wasn’t there, broadly speaking within Syrian society. And so what that tells me is that although HTS may have been at the forefront of this military campaign, they cannot control the entirety of Syria without robust and integral cooperation and power-sharing with all the different ethnic and religious communities that make up Syria. Yes, it’s true that 70% of Syria is Sunni Arab, but even within that community there’s not necessarily full consensus. There’s different factions. In fact, some of the first military factions from the opposition that entered Damascus wasn’t led by HTS; it was led by people from Daraa and Quneitra and the Damascus suburbs in the south. So, we have a lot of different competing political and military groups who all will have to be accommodated in some fashion to build a new security paradigm for Syria, number one.
And number two, to agree on what is going to be the governance structure for Syria moving forward. Of course, that will entail a new Constitution, it will entail elections. And while I think the international community needs to find some means of allowing perhaps a sanctions waiver as has been discussed, and it looks like is happening, to a degree, or other things that would allow more economic inputs into the country. No one should be letting HTS or anyone who is in power now off the hook, they are now there and they’re responsible for what happens next. And that means that they will have to create the necessary accountability mechanisms, the necessary changes to the way government was run in Syria; government in Syria was extremely corrupt on all levels under the Assad regime.
And the layers and layers of corruption that existed on all levels helped fuel the original revolution in 2011. So, ending endemic corruption in Syria will be a major issue that will help determine whether any future governance, cohesive governance, of Syria fails or pushes forward and sets a new chart for … A new path for Syria moving forward. I think there has to be a degree of flexibility from the international community with regards to how they deal with HTS. I mean, God knows, they were extremely flexible and willing to make all sorts of accommodations for the Assad regime, despite its known war crimes and its known brutality. And we’ve seen just how viscerally those war crimes and that brutality truly was after the regime fell. And every day more documentation and more evidence of the regime’s crimes are coming out. So, if there was a degree of pragmatism regarding how to engage with at a certain level with the Assad regime, I would expect there to be that same level of pragmatism and basic engagement with the new transitional government.
But that is not the same thing as saying there will be no accountability and there’ll be no oversight and there’ll be no pressure on this new transitional government to get things right. And there should be. And I think it’s really important to emphasize this point that yes, nothing was going to change so long as the Assad regime was in power. And anyone who worked seriously on Syria for all this time knew that the root of the problem in terms of resolving the crisis and the conflict in Syria started with getting rid of the Assad regime. But that doesn’t mean moving forward that we say, “Okay, our job is done, and good luck.” No, this is the hard part now, rebuilding the country, making sure there’s a governance structure with a social contract with the entire population of Syria, taking into consideration its diversity and its various nuances and various issues and problems that are sometimes highly local, all of this will need to be addressed.
On the other hand, whatever transitional government is currently in place cannot address everything overnight. They cannot fix the security situation in one month or two months. It will take a lot of time, and they will need resources. So, there has to be a balancing act between providing enough resources and capacity so that the transitional government can succeed in its potential mission to move Syria forward. But not writing simply just a blank check and saying, “Okay, whatever you guys want to do, no problem.” There should be a real critical look at how there will be accountability mechanisms built into whatever types of support and provision of aid and assistance that is provided to the new transitional government.
Nicholas Heras:
Sasha, I want to build on some of the points you made here about HTS and about the fact that now that we’ve entered the post-Assad period, as far as we know, never say never, in the region, but now that we’ve entered this sort of post-Assad period, I often reflect as we watch the dismantlement of the previous regime on something, a Syrian friend of mine once told me in describing Syria in that you had the big thief, aka the Assad family at the top, and underneath it you had the thousands of thieves as this friend had sent it to me. And it was the thousands of thieves everywhere in Syria that were allowed to operate by the big thief, the Assad family, that made life so unbearable. And one of the dynamics that you point out very well here is that in order for there to be a true post-Assad transition in Syria, that environment, that psychology of thievery, of the sort of type of autocratic regime that’s parasitic upon its own population, has to be removed.
And that isn’t something that changes overnight, as you pointed out. I want to ask you, one of the dynamics that we see in the commentary, among Syrians, by the way, among Syrians themselves, I had Nitav Vittare here to talk to us about the role that Syrian civil society can play and change in Syria after Assad. But when we talk about the power dynamics and the power of brokers, especially in Damascus, but as you’ve always pointed out in our conversations together over the last decade and a half, it’s not just about Damascus, it’s about all the other regions of Syria. Syria ultimately is a country of many diverse regions and local communities.
And so I want to ask you, two dynamics. One, how does HTS actually become a true future authority in Syria? I mean, at the moment it seems as if it’s trying to use a phrase to fake it until it makes it, trying to spread itself as best as it can, even though it has itself limited resources. How does HTS achieve that? And then related to this, there’s a concern I’ve seen among Syrian commentators who are worried that you change one form of Ba’ath, the Assad Ba’ath for another form of Ba’ath, aka the green Ba’ath, referring of course to HTS’ Islamist background as an organization. How do you prevent a so-called green Ba’ath from securing power after Assad and perpetuating a different type of authoritarian regime in Syria?
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff:
Yeah, this is a very tricky balance, and I’m not convinced that any nation governance structure will get this completely right in the initial years, just because of all the elements in the equation that one would need to assess and determine as one goes forward. But as a good example, although the regime fell quickly, there’s whole segments of the Syrian state that are still somewhat intact. There’s still a whole base of civil and government, civil servants, government workers, and there needs to be a true reckoning with how the Syrian state itself is built and how it’s going to be changed so that the mistakes of the past are not replicated. First and foremost, I think if we see that there’s an HTS-led governance structure in which other political parties are not being allowed to form and actively participate in governance, I mean, this is the first red flag.
The second red flag will be if we see the proliferation of various security and intelligence apparatuses like the number of security and intelligence apparatuses that were created under the Assad regime. If we start seeing that the new Ministry of Interior has outsized powers that are then being used to maintain HTS’ current grip on power and prevent Syrian society from expressing its will and what it would like to see out of its new government, that’s another red flag. And then so I think part of this is thinking about and determining in coordination frankly with all the Syrian civil society and human rights groups and all the people that worked very hard from day one of the peaceful revolutionary movement against the Assad regime to determine what are the indicators that they think are important in assessing whether Syria is moving in the right direction or not in terms of all of these issues. But especially in terms of governance and security and in terms of how HTS is addressing its own fundamental shortcomings in terms of its ideological positioning vis-ã-vis the rest of the country.
But for example, I could see again, if HTS is serious that it plans to dissolve all military factions and move them into a unified armed force, a national army, well, that also means that HTS’ own units will dissolve and be part of a new national army. That remains also that all militias and factions across the country would have to do the same, including down the road the SDF, including the SNA and including any local militia that existed over the last almost 14 years of civil conflict. That is a very large and difficult task to accomplish, but it’s a very important one, both for serious cohesion from a geographic and societal standpoint, but also to provide the comfort to any minority community that this isn’t going to be a security and military apparatus that is completely dominated by one ideological or sectarian group.
And then on top of it there has to be, and we’ll probably discuss this later, but there has to be an acknowledgment that whatever transitional justice mechanism is put in place to provide justice for everyone who suffered under the Assad regime has to be well thought through so it doesn’t become a vehicle simply for taking revenge. And taking revenge in a way that creates other or reopens sectarian fault lines or religious fault lines. There should be some real thinking done about how to move forward with a transitional justice mechanism that does provide justice for the victims, but is also a fair, clearly thought out mechanism that is anchored in the rule of law and requires evidence and is not simply just someone accusing someone that they did something during the conflict and then they’re brought before a kangaroo trial and sentenced. Because that’s what the Assad regime did. If you got on the wrong side of the wrong person and they happen to have influence inside the Assad regime and they decide to report you to the intelligence and write a report, and suddenly you ended up in jail with no due process.
And I think ensuring that not replicating that system, it sounds very obvious that no one in Syria would want to replicate that system. But I do think then it requires lots of discussion and thought about how not to accidentally replicate that system as everyone attempts to try and provide justice, to try and rehabilitate the country. And everyone is saying, “You need to do these, a million things,” and there’s a lot of pressure. And then this new governance structure starts taking shortcuts in their attempts to try and fulfill all these needs and promises that they have a lot of pressure on them to do.
There needs to be a degree of conversation with the wider Syrian community and setting expectations and saying, “We need to do this together. We need to do this as a group, as a community. We need to do this methodically, and we can’t take any shortcuts this time, even if that means things might take longer than we’d like long-term for the health of the country and for the health of our society we need to be very careful how we proceed so that we learn from the mistakes of the past and we don’t accidentally replicate the authoritarian structures that we just got rid of.”
Nicholas Heras:
Sasha, this is a very important point when we talk about conflict-affected societies, when we talk about building sustainable futures for countries that have gone through conflict and trying to manage, especially in diverse conflict affected societies like Syria. And I want to pick up on that point you raised about transitional justice and tie it into this question of minority community rights in Syria. And there is already, but there’s also starting to be serious investigation at the level of policymakers as you know very well from your work in United States and Europe, and I would even say in the Middle East as well. And there are certain states in the Middle East that are really taken up on the subject of minority community rights in Syria. Some may be cynical and say that all these actors, whether it’s the United States, Europe, the so-called West, but also in the region, are looking at minority community rights from cynical point of view.
But if we want to hold that cynicism to the side for the moment, just to say from a very pragmatic perspective, and from the perspective of you’re trying to help Syrians help themselves to develop a sustainable future that acknowledges the country’s rich tapestry of communities that have been there for a long time. But also balance that against, as you put so well, the need for there to be truth and reconciliation process of some type.
And in that context of transitional justice, how do you balance that? How do you balance developing true rights for minority communities but also tie in that against the horrific history of the conflict in Syria whereby unfortunately the Assad regime, although it did have a number of what we call Sunni Arab supporters that were part the security forces were even part of RINs of the inner core of the regime. It also liked to play minority community affairs against the majority population of country, Sunni Arab majority population of the country. How do you manage that dynamic? How do you manage that? And from your point of view, as someone who’s delved in both the practical implementation world as well as the policy world, is there a mechanism that can be developed by policymakers to achieve that?
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff:
Yes, it is. This is, I think in some ways the key question for Syria’s future. I think number one, over the last almost 14 years the international community has tried with different levels of support, sometimes quite robust, sometimes not as robust, to build out different segments of the Syrian civil society and human rights community that have thought about these questions and have tackled these questions and have tried to think about what a future without Assad would look like. So, first and foremost thing, I think everyone needs to agree on is that the way the international community dealt with Syria was that Syria itself was secondary to whatever adjacent conflict that was occurring that may have been next to Syria’s borders. It may have dealt with a proxy battle with wider regional or geopolitical implications, but Syria as a policy issue itself was always secondary to another policy goal for most countries.
And so, what that meant was that when you look at all these policies of various governments vis-ã-vis Syria, the actual voices of Syrians themselves and what they wanted and how they wanted to proceed with rebuilding their country and moving their country forward was often ignored. So, I really hope, and I implore the international community to put Syrian voices first moving forward for figuring out some of these more complex processes and questions. I think there’s more than enough knowledge and expertise now within the Syrian civil society and human rights community that they have the capacity to speak for themselves about what is required moving forward. That being said, my personal opinion is that having a constitution and a rule of law that is built through consensus across the board as much as possible within Syrian society, and spending the time necessary to get everyone to a place where they feel comfortable and feel that their rights will be protected under the rule of law writ large is going to be the first test.
I do think that there should be perhaps, again, my personal opinion, a recognition that centralized control of the country from Damascus may or may not be what Syrians want moving forward. I’m not talking about the fundamental division of Syria, but what I am saying is there’s a lot of cultural differences that span Syria’s geography, and there may need to be a degree of enhanced provincial authority or autonomy that addresses the concerns and fears that all communities have about a governance structure in Damascus attempting to reassert centralized control over the entire country. Because the last half century has shown that that kind of centralized control resulted in immense trauma, in immense suffering for the Syrian people.
On the other hand, when you look at the dispersion of resources across Syria, no one community in Syria can go it alone. Someone needs something from another part of the country to succeed. I think on a societal level of recognition that Syria is stronger when everyone works together as a whole, and thinking about it from that perspective would be helpful. And working to create and enhance the linkages that communities across Syria have with one another will be really key to whether Syria society down the line is cohesive and at peace with itself. I remember when I was living in Syria in 2011 how many times people told me that they often did not have friends outside of their region within Syria. So, people from Idlib did not have friends from Deir ez-Zor, people from Damascus didn’t necessarily have relationships with people in Idlib. I heard this repeatedly about how the regime spent so much time trying to silo Syrian society, city versus rural, province versus province, ethnic and religious group versus one another, to create all of these rivalries and domestic competition to keep the country divided so it would be easier to rule.
And I think that will take time to mend those relationships and change the way in which Syrians themselves deal with one another. And only Syrians, I think can decide and explain to the world moving forward what that’s going to look like, how they want to work with one another moving forward, and what are the things that are going to provide people the level of comfort and safety needed to then engage with one another moving forward. And how that gets balanced with the transitional mechanism, I think will highly depend on what kind of transitional justice mechanism is implemented. I think we have oodles of case law from other conflict spaces that can provide a sense of what has or has not worked. Nothing is going to be copy and paste for Syria, Syria has its own unique complex environment. But I think there are plenty of places where lessons learned can be taken and thought of as a new mechanism is built.
And I think there will have to be at a certain point a discussion of what is the threshold for a prosecution or bringing someone to court. Because if you make the threshold too high, then very few people are brought before such a mechanism and it feels like justice is not served. If you make the threshold too low whole communities may feel like they’re arbitrarily being brought before this mechanism for trial and that they are being scapegoated for the crimes that were committed by the Assad regime. So, where to put that threshold is going to be, I think, really important. I don’t think anyone has a clear answer quite yet as to where that threshold should be, what it would look like. And more importantly, I think what is the evidentiary bar required for a conviction? And more importantly, if you have a known war criminal who goes before the court but they don’t meet the evidentiary bar and they’re subsequently not convicted, will there be extra legal justice then?
Will there be this feeling, “Okay, the courts didn’t do it, we’re going to go, we know he’s a known war criminal, we’re going to go and kill this person ourselves, or we’re going to go and imprison this person ourselves.” Because that will also lead to this feeling that there is no set justice mechanism. And most of these transitional justice mechanisms are very imperfect, and they don’t always necessarily have the evidence to convict all the people who should be convicted of the crimes they committed. That’s going to be hard. That’s going to be hard for the people who were victims of the Assad regime.
And for the families who frankly are still waiting to hear what happened to the 130,000 or 150,000 disappeared Syrians who we know at this point probably are dead and are probably in a mass grave somewhere. So, there’s a lot of places in which there’s going to be very hard questions and there will need to be real thoughts and real discussions of how everyone is going to agree and compromise together to build a system that is not going to be perfect, but is going to be sufficient for the vast majority of Syrians to feel like they can move forward and engage in that new structure and that new justice system and that it’s equitable.
Nicholas Heras:
Sasha, that was a very in-depth analysis for a very sober subject, and I appreciate you taking that topic head on. And you’re right to point out there that we really need to keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of people in Syria, if not millions, who may never know what happened to their family members who were most likely killed by the former regime. And it’s just this anonymity of horror that is now becoming more widely understood as the glacier of the Assad regime recedes, and we’re now seeing what’s left in its wake. I mean, this is very sobering subject, and something as you point out rightly, the international community and Syrians as well will need to keep in mind as they move forward and contemplate how to develop transitional justice mechanisms against all the other challenges and hopefully opportunities though as well that the country can seize.
And I just want to end where we began this discussion. There’s a debate among academics about the extent to which accelerated rehabilitation, the economy and infrastructure of conflict-affected societies can facilitate peace-building efforts between formerly warring communities. Now, Sasha, in your analysis, what connection can be made between humanitarian and economic rehabilitation efforts and therefore upon peace-building in a post-Assad Syria? And related to that, and in this context, what should be the U.S. approach to supporting Syria moving forward?
Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff:
I think in terms of humanitarian aid and economic rehabilitation, in the past we’ve had this difficulty in which the way policies are designed, whether it’s by the U.S. government or other governments, is that they have highly focused lanes, you could say, of work. In other words, for example, if you’re working on the provision of shelter and the rehabilitation of shelter, you’re not necessarily being provided funding to address resource scarcity in a community that causes conflict. Whenever a humanitarian aid group or a development group goes into a conflict space and into a community and they provide resources, they’re never going to be able to provide every single person in that community resources. It’s very rare. And so, automatically anytime a humanitarian aid group or anyone enters these spaces, they are creating conflict, not on purpose, but just by the very nature that there’s resource scarcity.
And so, I think part of what needs to be recognized is if you’re going to have a comprehensive humanitarian aid and rehabilitation program for Syria, it has to be paired with robust conflict mediation and mitigation mechanisms. So, in my previous organization, PDC, we worked extensively on rehabilitation of infrastructure in Deir ez-Zor, but it was always paired with a conflict mediation and mitigation mechanism. And we supported the local conflict mediation councils and groups that were working to mediate conflict between various community members. And we did that because we knew anytime, again, you show up and you rehabilitate water infrastructure, or you rehabilitate electrical infrastructure, anything that’s providing resources to people, some people get access and some people do not. And we had to recognize and be realistic that wherever we went we were there to try and help and we didn’t want to make the situation worse by creating resource scarcity issues.
And across Syria there is a lot of resource scarcity issues that will have to be addressed, especially when it comes to mixed communities. But frankly, in any community these days in Syria there should be holistic programs that allow whoever is working on supporting the Syrian people through humanitarian and development programs that conflict mediation, mitigation be part and parcel of that process. As example, even if you have a community that’s homogenous, let’s say it’s a community that’s solely Sunni Arab, I mean, a lot of people have been displaced and are living in houses and homes that are not necessarily theirs. What happens when refugees and internally displaced persons show up and ask for their property back, and the people who are currently displaced living in those houses don’t have anywhere to go back to because their towns and their villages were destroyed and they don’t have anywhere to go back to?
It won’t matter that they’re from the same community, there’ll still be conflict, because it’s an issue of literally having a place to live. So, this really needs to be thought through well, and having stand-alone aid programs that don’t take this into consideration, I think will have less of an impact on the ground and may create in some instances additional conflict or pressure points that didn’t necessarily exist before. So, this would be my one recommendation to policymakers and governments as they embark on providing support.
I think whether it’s the U.S. or other governments, I think there should be some initial sanctions waivers that will allow additional economic inputs. But I do think that we need to be cautious and there needs to be benchmarks for ensuring that this new transitional governance structure is accountable to some degree. And if they’re, again, if we have a set of indicators laid out from Syrian civil society and human rights groups about what they expect to see from this new governance structure, and those are some of the guiding points that we use to determine whether the new transitional government is going in the right direction, then maybe some of those sanctions can be lifted and more economic inputs will follow.
But let’s bear in mind, of course, we still have multiple areas of Syria that are under different factional control. Syria as a country is still not united. Its territorial integrity is not complete. And we still have U.S. troops in Northeast Syria. We still have Turkish presence either directly or through their proxies on the ground that is very much part of this equation. And now we have the Israelis occupying not just the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, but they’re occupying now pieces of Quneitra province and even Daraa province, so they’re pretty far into Syria. For Syria to succeed, to a certain extent it will eventually need full territorial control and have its sovereignty not infringed upon by its neighbors. That’s an area where the international community, in theory, should have more leverage and more capacity to do something, is by helping to ensure that Syria is made whole again.
And that could reduce the pressure and that could reduce some of the potential domestic conflicts that could arise in Syria. So, anything the international community can do to relieve pressure on Syria from the outside world would be super helpful. And in addition, I think, again, having serious conversations and diplomatic engagement with the current transitional government, I think is important. But in doing so, the support that the international committee has lent to Syrian civil society, human rights groups, local governance structures, nation political factions, that all needs to continue, because that will be the counterweight against any sort of government overreach or authoritarian tendencies that may or may not come out of this HTS-led transition moving forward. We need to work from multiple angles and have a holistic strategy, one that’s not just solely focused on counterterrorism or other secondary regional concerns. There has to be a Syria-first policy for Syria. That’s how the United States will have a successful policy is when Syria itself is the primary purpose of its Syrian policy, not just a secondary concern to another policy issue in the region.
Nicholas Heras:
Well, Sasha, I think that’s the best way for us to end this discussion on that hopeful note that if the United States follows a Syria-first Syria policy, that it can help Syrians create a tremendous change for their future. And on that note, I’d like to thank you for joining us for this discussion, Sasha, and thank you all for listening today. If you liked this episode, remember to subscribe to New Lines on SoundCloud, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Visit www.newlinesinstitute.org if you’d like to hear more from our team of experts on all sorts of important topics in global affairs. And we will see you in the next episode. Goodbye, and all the best.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not an official policy or position of the New Lines Institute.
