Five months after its liberation from the police state of Bashar al-Assad, Syria sometimes looks like a country in civil war. Sectarian clashes have turned into street battles with rockets and mortars. In the southern province of Suweida, local leaders have denounced the new Syrian government as a band of terrorists, and they fly the flag of a Druze statelet that flourished a century ago.
The country’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has tried repeatedly to reassure Syria’s religious minorities, saying he wants peace and pluralism. He won some unexpected relief on the economic front yesterday, when President Donald Trump, who is visiting the Gulf states, agreed to drop all American sanctions on Syria. But he seems unable to remedy the structural flaws that have fed the violence of recent months. His fledgling state is too centralized, and too dependent on former jihadists he cannot control.
In March, Sunni Islamist gangs massacred Alawites on the Syrian coast, in attacks that left well over 1,000 people dead. Alawite friends tell me they live in constant fear, as these gangs roam the streets and sometimes confiscate their houses at gunpoint under the dubious authority of a “war-spoils committee.” Several have asked for my help in escaping a country that now seems alien to them.
The latest crisis erupted late last month, when a Druze cleric was alleged to have insulted the Prophet Muhammad. Crowds of armed men thronged the streets in several Syrian cities, chanting for the blood of infidels. The audiotape of the cleric’s offense turned out to be fake. But an old religious hatred had been rekindled. One video showed a small boy held aloft in a cheering crowd as he sang “Alawites, we will slaughter you all” and slashed the air with a knife. Soon afterward, gunmen attacked members of the Druze religious minority in towns south of Damascus, setting off fierce battles that left more than 100 people dead.
Attitudes are hardening among the Druze, who have mostly refused to hand over their heavy weapons to Damascus. Many believe that the new government was behind the attacks, despite its denials. “We are defending ourselves against Salafi ISIS extremism and terrorism, disguised as a state,” a Druze contact texted me earlier this month.
The attack on the Druze has drawn in Israel and shown just how vulnerable Syria’s new state is. On May 2, Israeli warplanes fired missiles into a hillside next to Syria’s presidential palace, in what that country’s defense minister called a “clear warning” to leave the Druze alone. Israel appears to be exploiting the conflict to carve out a de facto zone of control in southern Syria, where the Druze are concentrated. It has also clashed with Turkey, the patron of the new Syrian government, which aspires to exert a similar dominance over the country’s north.
Israel’s incursions are fueling a vicious cycle inside Syria. They feed the perception that the Druze are a fifth column, supported by an outside power; hard-line Sunni Muslims see this as justification for more attacks. Most Druze resent Israel’s behavior, but the more threatened they feel by their Sunni neighbors, the more inclined they are to demand greater autonomy for their sect and region. A similar pattern is visible with the Kurds in Syria’s northeast, who distrust Sharaa and are trying to maintain some independence.
Israel and Turkey have been holding “deconfliction” talks in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, ostensibly aimed at avoiding military mishaps. To some Syrians, the talks resemble a vaguely colonial project to divide up their country, as the European powers did a century ago after the collapse of the Ottoman empire.
Sharaa, a former jihadist who led the fight to expel Assad in November and December, cannot do much about these internal and external challenges to his authority. He has spoken out repeatedly against sectarianism and says he wants to restore a pluralist and sovereign Syria. But without a real army, he is still dependent on the undisciplined jihadist legions who helped him defeat the Assad regime.
“Sharaa has a dilemma: How do you unify the country without having real control?” Joshua Landis, the director of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma, told me. “His forces are Sunni supremacists, there’s no getting around that.”
Landis and others say that Sharaa has given up any hope he might have had to tame his unruly militias and has now adopted a tacit strategy of crushing the minorities into submitting to Sunni rule. If that is true, Sharaa could risk souring his improved relations with the United States and Europe, which have lifted the sanctions that were suffocating Syria’s economy. Christians may be a minority in Syria, but their voices are loud in Washington, and perhaps especially with Trump loyalists like Sebastian Gorka, who more or less runs Syria policy in the new administration.
Paul Salem, the Beirut-based vice president for international engagement at the Middle East Institute, takes a more optimistic view of Sharaa. “The president is seemingly trying to inch in the right direction, with great difficulty,” he told me, adding that the U.S. and others can still help Sharaa build a more open government that would help stabilize the region.
President Trump’s meeting with Sharaa in Riyadh on Wednesday could help to advance that effort, Salem told me. Sharaa is urgently hoping to lure American investments in Syria. He has already tried to fulfill some conditions the Trump administration has laid out, including by arresting some Palestinian militants in Syria and reaching out indirectly to Israel to signal a desire for peace.
Syria is a shattered country whose reconstruction will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Any kind of funding would make a big difference. Just being able to pay regular salaries to soldiers, police, and teachers would provide a bulwark against chaos.
But the recent sectarian bloodletting has exposed another problem, and it’s one Trump can do nothing about. Sharaa’s new government is far too centralized and desperately short on competent administrators. The Syrian leader has placed his family members and cronies in essential posts. He appointed 23 new cabinet members late March—most of them figureheads without power. Almost nothing can be done without the direct involvement of Sharaa or Asaad Shaibani, his foreign minister and right-hand man. The machinery of state moves at a crawl; public employees are still being paid via Sham Cash, a dubious app launched by Sharaa’s Islamist cronies before the fall of the Assad regime and plagued by technical failures.
Sharaa promulgated a new constitution in March that enshrines this concentration of power. There is no real check on the authority of the president, who directly appoints a third of the Parliament and indirectly controls the remaining two-thirds. The constitution also says the Syrian state “respects all divine religions.” Many Islamists—including those in the new government—see that wording as a tacit exclusion of the Alawite, Druze, and Ismaili faiths. Members of those communities see the clause as an insult at best, and at worst, an invitation to violence.
Sharaa has great charisma, and many Syrians tell me, with conviction, that he is not to blame for the fanaticism in his camp. But if sectarian pogroms continue on his watch, those assurances will start to look hollow. Some people are already recalling the honeymoon granted to an earlier Syrian ruler, who seemed so mild-mannered in his first days that few could believe he was the one sending people to be tortured and killed.
“People used to say, It isn’t his fault; Bashar’s heart is good,” Mohammad al-Abdallah, the executive director of the Syria Justice and Accountability Project, told me. “It was always the people around him who were to blame.”
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