10 March 2025 - 2:00pm
With his planned limited offensive in northwestern Syria unexpectedly escalating to the seizure of Damascus, former al-Qaeda insurgent and aspiring technocrat Ahmed al-Sharaa may find that conquering Syria is an easier task than ruling it. At the time of the lightning HTS offensive last December, former president Bashar al-Assad’s security forces simply melted away without a fight, even in his ethnic Alawite heartlands of Latakia and Tartus. But when armed Alawite elements ambushed HTS security forces in Latakia late last week, it unlocked a cycle of ethnosectarian violence already casting a pall on the new regime’s international legitimacy.
The new government’s counterinsurgency efforts swiftly degenerated into sectarian reprisals, with more than 700 Alawite civilians reported dead and brutal footage of summary executions posted online by the perpetrators. Sunni Arab advocates for the revolution now find themselves watching footage of the government they support throwing unguided barrel bombs out of helicopters, just like the old regime they spent more than a decade railing against.
Yet despite the flood of journalists flocking into postwar Damascus to celebrate the new Syria, basic facts about the weekend’s events remain strikingly opaque. Firstly, how much control does the new government in Damascus actually wield over the security forces acting under its name in the northwest? And secondly, are the armed Alawite opposition really Assad loyalists, as claimed by government supporters, or do they represent Alawite ethnic mobilisation independent of the fallen regime? The answers to these questions will lead Western and regional powers to pursue very different attitudes to engagement with the new government.
If the perpetrators of these war crimes are acting under Sharaa’s sanction, then all the recent talk of humane and technocratic governance by the new regime rings hollow. Yet if the perpetrators are outside the Damascus government’s control, then Sharaa’s grip on power is surely weaker than many external observers assumed. Neither option bodes well for the new leader’s prospects of stable domestic rule or widespread international legitimacy.
Early indications are that, rather than HTS’s core security forces, the worst violence was carried out by foreign jihadist factions long taken under the group’s wing. Also involved were the predominantly ethnically Turkmen “Syrian National Army” militias armed and funded by Turkey, which control much of northern Syria and have a long and bloody record of human rights abuses. Either way, the massacre of Syrian minorities in the northwest will do little to persuade the autonomous Druze militias in the South and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeast to disarm and fold themselves into Sharaa’s new regime.
For the European Union, whose overriding interest in Syria is in preventing a new flow of refugees towards the continent, and the return of those already here, humanitarian concerns appear best swept under the rug for now in the interests of stabilising the new government. But for the Trump administration, long sceptical of the Syrian rebels, the horror on the coast will do little to win the new regime recognition or sanctions relief. Israel, slowly occupying new areas of southern Syria and declaring a sphere of interest up to the suburbs of Damascus in the proclaimed interests of the Druze minority, will now likely be given an even freer hand by the US. Having condemned the atrocities on Sunday, asserting that “the United States stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities”, Washington will join with Moscow to bring the matter to the UN Security Council later today.
Attempting to assert control over the lawless Turkish-backed SNA forces in the north, which significantly outnumber his own core HTS troops, Sharaa must also juggle the Israeli incursion in the south and the powerful and still-autonomous Kurdish-led forces in the northeast, which continues to host both American and Russian military missions.
Syria’s confessional and ethnic patchwork of peoples has always been a source of both national pride and political instability: the existence of the collapsed Baathist regime represented one brutal attempt to manage such a divided country. In consolidating power at the centre, Sharaa now finds himself, like many a Syrian ruler before him, struggling to manage the country’s diverse and heavily-armed periphery.
