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I met some of those technocrats during a recent visit to Damascus and heard them talk about the capital city’s many problems. They include backed-up sewers, a water shortage, and errant garbage collection—infrastructure issues exacerbated by sanctions that cut off foreign financing during Bashar al-Assad’s decades of dictatorship. The newcomers had plans to change all that.

“We came here to work,” said Ismael Abu Al Khayer, who’s in charge of community relations. He portrayed Damascus as backward compared to Idlib. “We have electricity, food and water, and high-speed internet. We have modern cars. You can pay bills by phone. It is an electronic government,” he said, referring to his former city.

By comparison, city employees in Damascus “don’t have laptops. They don’t know how to use MS Word. And they don’t know how to use mobile apps,” like the one now used to manage Idlib’s payroll. Khayer said Syrians viewed Idlib as the local version of modern Dubai, but until December, when the Assad regime fell, it was “Dubai under siege.”

Seven months after toppling the Assad dictatorship, Sharaa has fostered a spirited sense of hope in Syria. It was palpable everywhere I went. The country is mired in poverty, and much of its housing remains in ruin from the 13-year war. The state is far from united, and its political system is still being debated. But the mood is buoyant, and many people are expecting an economic revival.

Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa delivers a speech in Damascus on July 3. Bakr Alkasem/AFP via Getty Images

“I have to pinch myself. Did this really happen?” were the words I heard in nearly every conversation I had during my two-week visit.

It’s not just the end of the war and the passing of a reviled dictatorship that Syrians are giddy about. They’ve watched Sharaa, in his short time in power, log some surprising achievements, including: the lifting of U.S. and European economic sanctions, a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, and a $7 billion deal to revamp and restore the power network. The American flag was raised over the U.S. ambassadorial residence in late May for the first time in 11 years, and Iran, which had helped keep Assad in power, has lost all influence.

Many Syrians certainly have doubts about Sharaa, whose rebel militia flew the al Qaeda banner in its first years of fighting the Assad regime. But his roots in middle-class Damascus and the fact that he’s from an educated family have given him breathing room even among his critics. And the way he vanquished the Assad regime so swiftly and soundly continues to amaze people.

Sharaa, under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, led the Islamist militias in the capture of Idlib from the regime in 2015. He quickly found himself in a power struggle with other rebel forces and jihadis in his own ranks that lasted several years. He formally broke with al Qaeda in 2016 and later set up a government in Idlib, calling it the Syrian Salvation Government.

He soon began planning for the offensive against the regime. Sharaa established a military academy, organized the manufacture of drones and other arms, trained forces, and worked on strategy with other armed factions.

Last November, the stars aligned. Israel had decapitated and decimated Lebanese Hezbollah and bombed Iran and Iranian proxies in Syria. Turkey gave up its attempt to patch up relations with Assad and dropped its objections to a rebel offensive. Meanwhile, the Assad regime was corrupted from within. Its troops were demoralized by poor leadership and low pay, and were caught unprepared, short even of ammunition.

Together with other opposition militias, Sharaa’s force captured Aleppo, Syria’s economic capital, in three days. In 12 days, the core rebel force of about 3,000—a number I learned from a rebel commander—routed the Syrian army and its irregulars, which had well over 100,000 troops, and marched into Damascus.

Damascus today is a magnet for people from other parts who want to rebuild their country. For me, it offered the first postwar glimpse of a country I’d visited several times during more than a decade of fighting and had come to know as a locus of horrific violence and destruction.

In the lobby of my hotel, I came upon a journalist from Hasakah in northeastern Syria who was a source for my reporting of the war 10 years ago. It was Old Home Week. Mudur Hamad al As’ad had driven to Damascus with plans to establish a new newspaper in Syria. He was surrounded by media activists and journalists from Hasakah.

I visited the sprawling Damascus souk—a shadow of its former self because of poverty, sanctions, trade restriction, and the absence of tourists.

But the vast fairgrounds, way out of town, were bustling with people and exhibits on construction materials. Judging by the number of displays, everyone is fixated on electricity. I was offered the chance to equip my entire house with solar panels for $2,000—though the system would power only one appliance at a time.

I met a computer engineer named Osama Said, who said his next big project is to ease Damascus traffic using AI. There are 168 traffic intersections, and each needs to be controlled in relation to the next one. The engineer thinks he has a good chance of getting the contract. He didn’t know of any city that’s using AI as he intends to.

And where would a Syrian acquire the skills to apply the very latest technology? He had a degree from Aleppo University, which was under regime control, and another one from Azaz, which was under rebel control.

On the airport road and just beyond the fairgrounds, I spotted an electronic signboard with the message: “Thank you, President Trump. With your support we can Make Syria Great Again.” It was sponsored by the Syrian Emergency Task Force, the Washington nonprofit that had helped make much of this happen—from the sanctions that crippled the Assad regime to Trump’s reversal, which has pumped new energy and a sense of economic liberation into the country.

I visited Idlib, the scene of Sharaa’s learn-by-doing education in governance. Anyone driving past the newly built indoor shopping malls, cafes, quality restaurants, and even a theme park must wonder: How did this happen? No one I met had a satisfying answer, but a big factor was the improved security situation that the Salvation government had fostered. Under Assad, regime goons would set up checkpoints in the area and shake down drivers and passengers. This kind of corruption, which had come to define the Assad regime, was largely gone under Sharaa.

Left: The recently opened Hamra mall in Sarmada, seen on May 23, is one of more than a dozen in Idlib. Right: A merchant stocks Syrian brassware and inlaid handicrafts at al-Hamidiyah in Damascus on May 21, but the great souk is a shadow of its former self.

Still, the Syrian leader faces many challenges. Kurds from northeast Syria aren’t ready to give up self-rule, which they achieved with the help of U.S. arms (the Kurds helped the United States fight the Islamic State in Syria). More than 1,000 Alawites from the Assad family’s home region were killed in a clash with Sharaa loyalists in March. Remnants of the Islamic State remain active—the group recently blew up a Greek Orthodox church in Damascus. Druze factions, with encouragement by Israel, have resisted joining the state and committing military forces. And then there’s Israel itself. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing military depots just after Damascus fell and has seized hundreds of square kilometers of territory, despite Sharaa’s insistence that the new Syria wants peaceful relations with its neighbor to the south. And this week, Israel attacked Syrian government forces that had been deployed to the southern province of Sweida to quell sectarian clashes between Druze and Bedouin Arabs.

And yet, hope abounds.

Douma, northeast of Damascus, was attacked by Assad with chemical weapons in 2018, driving tens of thousands to flee north. But today, some 60 percent of the displaced have returned, according to Abu Subhi Taha, the head of the Council of Elders, and a lot more are expected when the new school year begins. Most people are out of work and living very poorly, but there is no starvation. He was confident the city can solve its problems, starting with repairs to three damaged schools, which they expect to have open on time.

Trump’s lifting of economic sanctions made a huge difference. “The markets started functioning. People started selling and buying,” Taha said. The value of the Syrian lira rose 60 percent to 7,000 to the dollar—from 12,000. “This will affect the local market. Lots of goods were prohibited previously. Now countries can do investment without fear of being punished.” He said hundreds of foreign companies are considering investing in Syria, at least two of them in Douma.

People drink and chat in a bar in the old town in Damascus on June 19.Ed Ram/Getty Images

“We are not waiting for the government to take action,” Taha said. “Civil society is taking the initiative. And the reason is that civil society now considers that it owns the state.” In other words, ordinary people now feel they have an actual stake in the country. He predicted that Douma would look completely different in two years.

Taha was dressed in combat khakis; he had been a rebel commander in Douma starting in 2012, was expelled to the north in 2018, and took part in the liberation of Aleppo with Sharaa’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham. I asked him why he was still in military gear. “Make no mistake, I support the government,” he said, adding that Sharaa is doing a good job. “But the government has to change for the better.”

Riad Seif is the grand old man of Syrian reform. An industrialist and member of parliament, he was also an outspoken leader of the internal reform movement when I first met him in 2001. At the time, his demands to move toward democracy and an open economy at first got a friendly hearing from the newly installed Assad. But when Seif brought up corruption in the awarding of the cellphone franchise to Assad’s family member, the regime responded harshly. Seif spent seven years in Assad’s prisons, then became a leader of the Syrian opposition-in-exile. Seif is now back in Damascus, where I paid him a visit.

He spoke cautiously about Sharaa.

Seif said he viewed Syria’s rebirth as the culmination of the Syrian spring that he and others had led in the year 2000. Sharaa, he noted, had not supported the secular opposition’s calls for democracy and secularism during the long internal war. But he credited him for leading the effort to build a state well before the overthrow of Assad. “He’s educated. He’s patient. He has huge energy. He is from a good social background. People know his father and his family. This is a family that does not produce criminals or terrorists. One aspect of his pragmatism is continually adapting.”

Seif’s immediate issue is the need for transitional justice and an accounting for the 600,000 people killed and more than 100,000 tortured or disappeared during the war. But Sharaa seems sympathetic to his concern. When Seif helped organize a public discussion on this, 300 people attended, including Hind Kabawat, the minister of social affairs.

For many Syrians, that kind of accounting is just the beginning. After all the deaths, the disappearances, and the suffering in the war, I doubt they’ll be silent if Sharaa fails to deliver a modern country.