Trump Needs a Real Syria Policy

For the first time in 53 years, Syrians gathered this week to talk about the future of their country without fear of imprisonment or death. The country’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is a former Al-Qaeda militant who in his past life organized suicide bombings in Damascus and was jailed by the U.S. military in Iraq for killing American soldiers. Sharaa has ditched his nom de guerre (Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) and his fatigues, exchanging the latter for a well-pressed suit. His transformation from jihadist to pseudo-renaissance man has been about as dramatic as Syria’s abrupt departure from the Assad family dictatorship. 

After weeks of preparations in which the post-Assad transitional government’s hand-picked officials traveled the country to speak to ordinary Syrians about the state’s most pressing domestic issues, about 600 delegates went to Damascus for a two day-long national dialogue conference. The session was hastily organized, with invitees given short notice, and some attendees questioned whether Sharaa and his loyalist administration would seriously consider their list of 18 non-binding recommendations. As outlined in the press, the recommendations seem quite basic: Syria should have sovereignty over all its territories; the country shouldn’t be fragmented; militias within Syria’s borders should reintegrate into the ranks of the new Syrian army; and the legislative council, which the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) government has vowed to set up, should be established at the earliest possible opportunity. 

For the purposes of creating a whole new political system from the ground-up, the national dialogue was a major step in the right direction. Thus far, Sharaa and his transitional authority have been more talented at destroying the old order—dissolving the Assad-controlled legislature, demolishing the Baath Party, and snuffing out the Syrian intelligence services—than creating new structures or outlining a political program that goes beyond the most superficial generalities. 

In the two and a half months since Bashar al-Assad and his family flew to Moscow for a life in exile, Sharaa has devoted most of his energy to courting the international community, sidling up to Arab leaders, and greeting European diplomats who want to explore whether a new relationship with the new Syria is possible. The former hardliner has twisted himself into a pretzel to be all things to all people—a closeted democrat to the French and Germans, a bold leader who wants to throw the yoke of Iran off Syria to the Saudis and Emiratis. In fact, the new Syrian government is the epitome of a pragmatic actor, willing to meet anybody who wants to meet. Even Russia, which caused such destruction, misery, and death to the Syrian people in its quest to keep Assad in power, is pushing on an open door. 

Yet chucking the hated Assad out of the country was never a panacea for Syria. The country has an opportunity to move in a different direction, but the problems standing in its way are formidable and won’t be easily addressed. Nearly fourteen years of civil war have ruptured Syrian society, leveled its economy into the ground and neutered the country as a player in the Arab world. Syria’s reconstruction costs could be as high as $400 billion, a sum that traditional donors will be hard pressed to meet. The Gulf Arab states who would normally be called upon to pick up the tab are already expected to fund Gaza’s reconstruction costs, which are in the tens of billions of dollars. In 2021, World Vision and Frontier Economics assessed that Syria’s war had wiped out $1.2 trillion from its economy, a figure that has only grown since then. 

Getting the Syrian economy back to pre-war levels will be a long-term project. The same can be said about establishing a new governing regime that all of the country’s major sects, communities, and stakeholders can agree on and work with. But the short-term obstacles Syria’s new rulers must deal with are no less challenging. 

First, while Syria may no longer be in a state of civil war, it isn’t exactly in a state of peace either. There is another smaller-scale war taking place in the northeast between Turkish-backed militias like the Syrian National Army and the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Turkey, which doesn’t distinguish between Kurdish militant groups and views all of them as terrorists, isn’t shy about bombing their positions in Syria. This continues to cause a mixture of anger and resignation in Washington, which regards the Kurds as their most important partners in the country—and more reliable than the assortment of Arab militias who were more interested in fighting amongst themselves than they were in combatting ISIS. 

Next up are the ongoing political disputes inside Syria. Just because Assad is gone doesn’t mean the divisions are going to heal smoothly. Syria’s two strongest forces— HTS and the SDF—are now engaging in a metaphorical staring contest that could very well get bloody if their differences aren’t rectified. It escaped nobody’s attention that the SDF was a no-show at the national dialogue in Damascus. In fact, the SDF weren’t even issued an invitation to attend the conference, which suggests that Sharaa and the HTS-led government are not going to tolerate separate spheres of influence inside the country. 

Right now, HTS and the SDF are on the opposite ends of the table; the former wants political unification and a strong central authority, while the latter have no intention of giving up the power and U.S.-protected mini-state in the northeast it formed a decade ago. The Kurds, with approximately 70 percent of Syria’s oil resources under their thumb, have enormous leverage in negotiations with the new government in Damascus.

Through it all, the Trump administration’s Syria policy remains undeveloped and unexplained beyond the regular airstrikes it conducts against selected ISIS and Al-Qaeda positions (the latest occurred on February 21). Sharaa no longer has a $10 million bounty on his head, but his group is still labeled a foreign terrorist organization by Washington. The Biden administration, on its way out the door, granted a six-month humanitarian waiver on existing U.S. sanctions, but Trump has halted any further moves to relax those authorities. The European Union is taking the opposite approach, agreeing on February 24 to suspend sanctions on Syria’s energy and transportation sectors while permitting European financial institutions to establish contact with certain Syrian banks. 

Eventually, President Trump is going to have to address two basic questions: Does it make sense to keep 2,000 U.S. troops in Eastern Syria on a seemingly permanent mission to destroy ISIS, whose caliphate was already destroyed back in 2019? And is it worth exploring more engagement with the new sheriff in Damascus? Stay tuned for the answers.