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This week, thousands of diplomats and dozens of prime ministers, presidents, and kings were holed up in Manhattan for the annual UN General Assembly meetings. Typically, UN week is a relatively monotonous, predictable affair: high-powered politicians make grandiose speeches at the UN lectern, organize a few side meetings with their fellow heads-of-state, and zoom around New York for various conferences, where they relitigate what they said just a few hours or days before. 

But this year’s event was different because there was a newcomer to the party: Ahmed al-Sharaa. The former Al Qaeda fighter and U.S. military prisoner, whose militia outfit Hayat Tahrir al-Sham shocked the world last December by deposing the half-century-old Assad regime in a matter of weeks, is now an ordinary politician in a suit crowing about his nation’s historical achievements. Sharaa, who up until last year was still designated by the United States as a terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head, is now a free man giving speeches, meeting with Western officials in the hope of earning their support, and doing everything in his power to present himself as a moderate, responsible statesman who wants nothing more than to rebuild his country after a 14-year civil war. And he's saying all the right things: Extremism won’t be tolerated, Syria has no gripes with any other nation and the country’s post-Assad leadership would like nothing more than to have good relations with everybody. 

Sharaa was the talk of the town. His 10-minute speech to the UN assembly—the first time a Syrian president was at the annual confab since the late 1960s—was designed to earn the international community’s confidence and underscore that Syria has returned to the community of nations after five decades of harsh dictatorial rule. But the speech was just an appetizer to the main-event; Sharaa did a full-court press, sharing some laughs with Gen. David Petraeus (Ret.), who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq during the 2007–2008 troop surge, doing a talk hosted by the Middle East Institute (where Trump administration officials Tom Barrack and Morgan Ortagus were in attendance), and sitting for a 60 Minutes interview before he left town. The man was everywhere.

Sharaa was a celebrity in New York. Back in Syria, however, he’s the interim head of a state with a litany of problems. The long civil war ruined Syria's economy, bringing its gross domestic product back to what it was in the early 1990s. The cost of Syria’s reconstruction is as high as $400 billion, and even that figure might be an underestimate. Entire cities are in shambles, to the point where you could easily mistake some of the suburbs surrounding Damascus with cities in Gaza. Although Sharaa has managed to work some magic and earn the economic support of the Gulf States, any reconstruction initiatives will take a long time to play out. We could be looking at 20 or 25 years before Syria gets back to the pre-civil war normal. 

Syria’s political situation isn’t exactly ideal either. Yes, Assad is gone and his band of criminals are in hiding. But Syria can’t be considered a united country. Once Assad boarded a plane for exile, the common enemy left and the internal balance of power was scrambled. Syria’s minority communities, from the Alawites in the mountains of Tartous and the Kurds in the east to the Druze in the southwest, have legitimate reasons to wonder whether a former head of a jihadist outfit that only a short few years ago was trying to kill them is now genuinely committed to turning Syria’s political scene into a diverse mosaic. You can’t blame these communities for feeling skittish; the first 10 months of Sharaa’s administration has seen a number of sectarian massacres perpetrated by unruly hordes who may or may not be associated with the Syrian security forces. In March, more than 1,000 Alawites, mostly civilians, were killed as pro-government militiamen stamped out a rebellion from Assad-era officers. Approximately 2000 people have lost their lives after fighting between Druze fighters, Bedouin tribes and Syrian forces broke out in July, which prompted Israel to intervene with airstrikes on behalf of the Druze. 

None of these wounds have healed. To his credit, Sharaa has announced a series of investigative committees to determine who committed abuses and has repeatedly declared, including during his UN speech, that those who violated the rights of their fellow Syrians will be held accountable. The socio-political situation in Al-Suwaidaa, where the vast majority of the Druze population lives, is slowly being addressed after the Syrian government, with help from Jordan and the United States, agreed on a plan this month to increase humanitarian aid into the province, restore services to the area and station Syrian government troops on the main thoroughfares.

But even if this plan is implemented smoothly, the damage is already done. The violent incidents in March and July have sent a visceral message to minorities throughout the country that you need to look after your own communal interests, because the Syrian state isn’t going to do it for you—or perhaps is too weak to do so. That’s certainly the message the Kurds are taking. The March accord between Damascus and the Syrian Kurds, which was supposed to incorporate the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into the Syrian army and result in the Kurdish administration handing over the land it controls east of the Euphrates, is bogged down in implementation problems. Sharaa is so frustrated by the impasse that he raised the idea of using military force to reconquer those territories if the negotiations didn’t proceed accordingly. It’s difficult to envision the deal being enacted by the end of the year, which means Sharaa will have a decision to make: use military means, knowing full well that hundreds of U.S. troops are still on the ground in Kurdish-administered areas, or give the talks more time.

Syria’s national security is in flux as well. While Israeli airstrikes in Syria are nothing new and happened frequently when Bashar al-Assad was sitting in the presidential palace, Israel is no longer going through the pretense of hiding those strikes from the public. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looks at Ahmed al-Sharaa and sees a wolf in sheep’s clothing, whose jihadist past is buried underneath the slick-cut blue suits he’s wearing on the diplomatic circuit. The Israeli government, whose regional threat perceptions changed after the October 7, 2023 attacks and have since reached the level of the absurd, is unapologetic about its Syria policy, despite killing the 1974 deescalation agreement. Israeli troops now occupy Syrian territory east of the UN-patrolled buffer zone along the Israeli–Syrian border, and Israeli troops occasionally raid Syrian positions, as they did near Damascus in August. Sharaa, who leads a weak state still getting its legs, can’t afford a war with the region’s most powerful state and is relegated to swallowing these intrusions. 

Negotiations between Israel and Syria on a new deescalation mechanism, which in principle would trade an Israeli withdrawal from Syrian land for a demilitarization zone south of Damascus, is Sharaa’s north star at the moment. But given Israel’s military superiority and the intricacies of negotiating an agreement Israel and Syria can both live with, even this diplomatic endeavor isn’t a sure thing. 

After capturing the spotlight in New York, Ahmed al-Sharaa may rue going back to Damascus.