Later this month, Syria’s Ahmed al-Sharaa will appear before the U.N. General Assembly—the first Syrian leader to do so since 1967. The world will be watching to see how he plans to navigate the religious and ethnic kaleidoscope of a country still traumatized by five decades of brutal authoritarian rule under the Assad family. The challenge that Sharaa faces is herculean, and it is in the interest of the United States and its partners to help him succeed.
Since becoming Syria’s interim president, Sharaa has sought to build a strong central government. However, sectarian violence has challenged these plans, raising fears that different factions could play spoiler to an orderly transition. In June, a Sunni extremist suicide bomber killed 25 people and injured 60 more at the Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in a Damascus suburb. In March, Syrian forces and government-aligned militia groups killed 1,500 Alawites along the western coastline. More recently, communal violence erupted between the Druze and Sunni Bedouin in Syria’s southwestern Suwayda province, with Israel intervening and saying it did so to protect the Druze.
Any heavy-handed attempts by Sharaa to forcibly subdue unrest in the Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish communities is a recipe for disaster. With questions lingering about transitional justice and reconciliation for crimes committed against the Syrian people, Sharaa shouldn’t be surprised by minority groups’ skepticism of the state.
Sharaa’s government has promised to be inclusive, and in September, Syria will hold its first parliamentary election since Assad’s ouster. Sharaa has also put technocrats in key positions, such as economist Mohammed Yisr Barnieh as finance minister as well as electrical engineer and energy sector professional Mohammad al-Bashir as energy minister.
Much more, however, still needs to be done. The United States can’t single-handedly solve Syria’s sectarian tensions. But it can help build a more prosperous economic climate in which these tensions are easier to manage. With this in mind, Washington should take three concrete steps to support Syria’s transition: reopen its embassy in Damascus, use the Global Fragility Act to spur economic development, and back a multidonor trust fund to facilitate financing for critical services and technical assistance.
For almost five decades, Syrians bore the brunt of comprehensive sanctions and coercive economic measures. Even with the lifting of sanctions, many investors are still likely to think twice before doing business in the country. By making and facilitating investments, the United States would not only directly help Syria build its future but also send a strong signal to the country and international investors.
This will help keep Syria’s transition on track and increase the prospects of Sharaa building a stable and secure country. For Syrian citizens, this will finally deliver the future that they deserve. For Washington, it will be vital in weakening Iranian influence and winning the fight against the Islamic State and al Qaeda.
The success of any political process in Syria hinges on Sharaa’s ability to resolve a host of interlocking institutional and economic problems. Like other countries with long-ruling, brutal regimes, such as Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya or Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Syria saw its institutions and civil society thoroughly hollowed out. The mixed experiences of Libya and Iraq in transitioning away from authoritarian rule suggest that rebuilding institutions will be a tall order.
One major ongoing challenge concerns the formerly regime-aligned business community. A committee tasked with reappropriating and restructuring assets linked to regime cronies is exploring granting them immunity—for financial crimes and corruption but not war crimes—in exchange for surrendering their assets. A related question is whether to carry out complex financial crimes investigations against wealthy Assad loyalists—difficult while the courts are still staffed with many Assad-era judges—or to simply seize and nationalize their assets at the risk of scaring off foreign investment.
As if this were not enough to complicate its recovery, Syria is still grappling with the dismantlement of its Captagon industry, which previously generated $5 billion annually. Although production is now down by up to 80 percent, demand for the drug persists, keeping smugglers and militias invested in the trade.
Humanitarian and economic conditions also remain extremely fraught. Since 2011, the Syrian lira has lost 99 percent of its value, and unemployment has recently hovered around 24 percent. Many Syrians are still internally displaced and live under the poverty line. As of June, the country’s electricity grid was limited to two to four hours of daily supply, leaving Syrians in a state of acute energy insecurity and hampering recovery efforts in other indispensable sectors, such as water and health care.
The good news is that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have generously repaid Syria’s outstanding World Bank loans to enable fresh lending and have pledged to pay public sector wages. Riyadh in particular has taken a leading role in reconstruction and has pledged $6 billion of public and private sector investments—a generous amount, certainly, but far less than the $400 billion that some estimate as the total reconstruction cost. Saudi Investment Minister Khalid al-Falih traveled to Damascus in late July to meet with Syrian officials, and Mohammed Abunayyan, one of the kingdom’s most influential businessmen, is set to head a joint Saudi-Syrian business council.
This kind of sustained support will be critical, but economic stabilization will take time and patience. Gulf partners’ debt repayments on Syria’s behalf, while a net positive, do not address the crushing debts that Syria still owes to Iran and Russia, which exceed its GDP and by some accounts are between $30 billion and 50 billion. It is safe to assume that Moscow and Tehran will look to convert this debt into strategic leverage.
And Chinese companies are already vying for reconstruction contracts. This means that Syria and its Mediterranean ports could further become enmeshed in great-power competition, especially if the United States and its regional partners do not fill the void.
Those who have helped secure these investment deals—including Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria—deserve credit. But investment deals alone aren’t enough to help Syria move to the next phase of development, or to avoid the backsliding and nationwide ethnic strife that has bubbled to the surface. More must be done from Damascus to stitch the state and its people back together.
To make things better for all Syrians, Sharaa and his coterie in Damascus should focus on improving the day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens by providing services, utilities, and concrete economic opportunities. This is an area where Washington can and should do more to help.
First, it’s time to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Damascus. What Barrack has accomplished on the ground is valuable. But the best way to advise the new government through this fragile interim period is with an ambassador who can spend the time at the presidential palace and with Syria’s ethnic groups doing the hard diplomatic work of giving all Syrians an economic and political voice. An open embassy also provides a platform that regional stakeholders such as Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar can leverage to make sure constructive steps are being taken inside the government.
The recent elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations has complicated U.S. support for Syria’s transition. However, Washington still has tools at its disposal and a cadre of trained officers who would be eager for this kind of assignment.
The Global Fragility Act (GFA), signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, is designed to improve conflict prevention and stabilization efforts in fragile states. It delineates a set of authorities that the State Department could use to rapidly provide to do so—if the appropriate funding were made available and if Syria were added into the GFA’s priority country list.
Under the GFA, the United States could play an active role in supporting Syrian civil society by providing financing for small, medium, and micro enterprises. It could also support local reconciliation committees recognized as legitimate governing bodies in charge of service delivery, reconstruction, and the voluntary return of displaced persons. The GFA’s pilot efforts in Libya have already taken such steps with positive results.
The United States can and should also help Syria put in place structures to provide essential services for citizens in the short term. The provision of social services is a critical part of building legitimacy with average Syrians. One relatively fast way to accomplish this is through a multidonor trust fund, which has been used in other contexts as well. The World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Multidonor Trust Fund (MDTF), whose last round ended in 2021, is one potential model.
The MDTF can help finance infrastructure in sorely needed areas such as electricity and housing while coordinating with reconstruction efforts funded by Turkey and the Gulf states to avoid duplication. Furthermore, as an international program, the MDTF is not subject to the vicissitudes of U.S. politics, should Syria policy change in this or a future administration.
Washington has already spent significant political capital on the success of Syria’s new government, including the first in-person meeting between Trump and Sharaa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May. It should now be doing everything possible to capitalize on these efforts. To forge a Syria at peace with its neighbors and itself, the United States needs to get serious about increasing its investment there—both figuratively and literally.