Transcription
The United States has completed its withdrawal from Syria. If your reaction to that was something along the lines of, "What? US troops were in Syria at all?" Well, we wouldn't blame you. It wasn't that big to begin with, nor was it the deployment particularly front and center in the daily news.
But the way it happened is worth looking at a bit more closely because there's a version of this story you'll hear in Washington where Uncle Sam pulled out because the war is over. The new government is on its feet and Syria has finally turned a corner under Hmed al-Shar.
But then there's the version that you'll hear from some actually in Syria. The one where places like Seda have already broken away and where entire provinces have started quietly asking how much of Syria still answers to Damascus. Those two stories look almost nothing alike. And which one turns out to be closer to the truth is going to shape what happens to the country for years to come.
A few months ago, Akhmed al- Shar walked into the White House, a man who as recently as last year had been on the State Department's terrorist designation list, until the rebellion he helped lead brought down the Assad regime in late 2024. The world knew him as Abu Muhammad al- Jalani, the head of an organization that started life as Alqaeda's official Syrian affiliate. Although we should note that his organization publicly split from Bin Lad's old outfit back in 2016. Shar himself later traded his jihadist military attire for a suit and tie. And when CNN asked him about the transformation, he offered something closer to a shrug than anything else. "People change as they get older. This is human nature," he said.
While in Washington, he was able to secure a suspension of sanctions on his country and committed Syria publicly to joining the global anti-ISIS coalition. Beyond all of this, the region has been pouring in money for Syria's recovery. Saudi Arabia and Qatar paid off the entirety of Syria's outstanding debt to the World Bank back in May of last year. And by fall, Riad had announced nearly $7 billion in reconstruction projects already underway, while the UAE had pitched in $800 million for redeveloping the port at Tartis.
While all of that was coming together, on the morning of April the 16th, 2026, the final American military convoy quietly drove out of a base in northern Syria and crossed into Jordan, ending a decade of US presence in the country. With it went the last vestige of what had been the most institutionalized self-governing zone, Kurdish Syria. Publicly, this was framed as a massive win for the Sharah government. They were consolidating state power. They were able to bring the Kurds on board, and the country's largest ethnic minority seemed willing to play ball with the new government.
Behind this framing, though, the reality was a bit less collaborative. Three months earlier, Shira's army attacked the Kurdish Northeast. Something we covered on this very channel. The Kurdish-backed forces collapsed in just 5 days when their tribal recruits defected to Damascus. Amidst the panic, Trump's envoy flew to Urbil and told the Kurdish commander flat out that Washington wouldn't back them. So, the Kurds signed on to this new Syria, not out of any love for Damascus, but because Shar's forces had bested them.
And while Western capitals have been very willing to meet and work with Shar, they appear to recognize how unstable this situation actually is, at least behind closed doors. A Wall Street Journal piece earlier this year revealed what may have been the true motive behind the US withdrawal in April, that the Pentagon wanted to get American forces away from Shiraas. The Journal later reported his army to be riddled with jihadist sympathizers, including soldiers with ties to al-Qaeda and Islamic State and others who have been involved in alleged war crimes against the Kurdish and Drews minorities.
"End quote." This isn't just an abstract concern either. Last December, two US soldiers and an American civil interpreter were killed by a member of Syria's security apparatus who had connections with Islamist extremist groups in the country. SenCom's own actions in the weeks leading up to the withdrawal indicate how deep the mistrust goes. More than 5,700 former ISIS fighters were moved out of prisons in Syria's northeast and into Iraqi custody. If you've been following our Middle East coverage here on Warfronts, you'll know that Baghdad isn't exactly a shining example of stability right now. The fact that it's seen as a more reliable place to house dangerous fighters than Shar's Syria should tell you something about Washington's thinking here.
The major question for us being whether the Pentagon has got this right or not. Now, before we get on to whether Washington has this right or not, a quick pause to let me tell you about our new subscriber site. Front Sto.co is for people who want even more depth on these topics. And every week, we publish two exclusive videos and at least two expert-written articles diving in deep into lesser-known conflicts as well as the major stories that are shaping our world. This week, as an example, we published a deep dive into the ongoing state collapse in Mali in the face of jihadist advances. A piece that will doubtless resonate with anyone interested in the somewhat similar forces destabilizing Syria. We've also started a strand of exclusive podcasts, including a new 90-minute briefing on the Middle East, which, you know, we're just going to go ahead and call required listening for anyone watching this video. A subscription costs just $5 a month or $50 a year. That's fronts.co. Check it out if you want more of these sorts of stories. And now, let's get right back to Syria's growing problems.
Same men, new uniforms. Now, there are legitimate reasons why the Pentagon might be wary of the current administration in Syria. The organization that Sharab built started life as the al-Nusra Front, Alqaaida's official Syrian affiliate and for years was renowned as one of the more effective and brutal jihadist factions in the civil war. To be fair, this changed over time. Al-Qaeda links were officially severed in 2016 and Shar later worked to position the group as something more pragmatic, more nationally focused, and more amenable to Western engagement than you'd expect from a jihadist group. Still, when his rebranded organization HDS rolled into Damascus in late 2024, the men holding the guns were pretty much the same guys they had been all along.
The resulting new Syrian army was less a truly national institution and more a coalition of factions that had fought in the civil war alongside him, plus everyone else who showed up after Assad took his PS5 and fled to Moscow. None of these soldiers got processed through anything resembling a disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program. The standard framework by which post-conflict states convert their armed factions into a coherent national military. Shar simply put everyone in the same uniform and said, "Hey, presto, look, Syrian army."
Shar's government was basically 3 months old when it got its first real test. Not from ISIS, not from a foreign power, but from his own territory. In March 2025, on the Alawite-dominated coast that had long been made up of Assad's strongest base of support, the new army had to respond to an insurgent attack on its own terms. Things kicked off with an ambush by Assad regime loyalists who hit a Syrian security forces patrol along the country's coastal stretch, killing multiple soldiers. The new government was already sensitive to criticism that it was lacking in follow-through ability, particularly in areas outside of the Sunni community that had largely made up the revolution's strongest supporters.
The response that came, though, went beyond merely asserting control. HDS-aligned forces swept through Alawi villages across Latakia, Tartis, and parts of Homs and Hmer, killing roughly 1,400 civilians. The Shira government did convene a trial in Aleppo last November, but the majority of the actual killers were never identified and many remained inside the army. Akled, the conflict tracking project, was pretty blunt in its 2025 country review. The administration's own investigations had downplayed the sectarian dimension of the killings and made little effort to discipline the perpetrators.
For Syria's religious minorities, incidents like this seemingly confirmed that the new government was exactly what they feared. Alawites and Christian communities, mostly in the coastal provinces, began to demand a federalized Syria that would give them significant autonomy from Damascus. But that ran into a basic problem. Allowing formalized dividing lines between ethnicities in the Middle East tends to lead to extremely bloody outcomes. That's a major reason why Shira's provisional constitution is aimed at outlawing separatism.
If all this does have you wondering why other nations would be so willing to support Shar's government, well, it's less out of love for him and more out of fear of what could replace him. The alternative to Shar, realistically, is not a better version of Syria. It's a Yugoslavia-style breakup with all that implies. And in a country awash with weapons and ISIS fighters that only just exited a massively destabilizing civil war, it doesn't take a genius to see why the international community might be all like, "no" to that one. The trouble is, it's not clear that Shar can hold the country together. Instead of a sudden shattering, we may now be witnessing Syria collapse in slow motion.
Open season. Now, you'd expect that after a civil war ends, the killing would at least slow down. In Syria, though, it actually sped up. Ackled tracked just over 6,000 conflict-related fatalities in the country during the final 12 months of the Assad era, which surged to over 9,000 in the 12 months that followed his departure. This was not, however, evenly spread across the country. Over half of the deaths came from just five provinces: Leakia, Tartis, Seda, Hamar, and Homs. Those five are not geographically close to each other. Some are along the west coast, others in the south, and Homs is directly in the center of the country.
What they do have in common, though, is that they are dominated by religious and ethnic minorities. And in several of them, Damascus' authority has largely ceased to exist. Sueda is perhaps the best example of this. A small province in the country's southwest, it's home to roughly half a million Jews, about a quarter million Bedawins, and a small Christian population. And at this point, it's largely functioning as something close to an autonomous state. Alhedri, the Drew's spiritual leader who has emerged as the face of the autonomy push, has been running the province through local councils and armed units that answer to him directly, not to Damascus. Just this month, Alhari dissolved his own governing body entirely and replaced it with something called the administrative council of Jabal Bashan, named after the Hebrew biblical term for the region, dropping Syria's preferred name of Sue entirely. For anyone wondering how seriously the Drews are taking the whole independence thing, the answer is literally in the letterhead.
Now, this one's a bit of an outlier because of how it got to be quite so independent. In July of last year, ethnic-based clashes between Drews and Bedawin tribes inside Sueda broke out and began to escalate with Syrian forces eventually deploying to restore order. By the time the dust settled, an estimated 1,100 people were dead, 130,000 had been displaced, and the situation was ultimately contained by, of all things, Israeli air strikes on Damascus itself. The Drews had never been enthusiastic about Shira's project to begin with. But July turned that skepticism into something far more concrete, and nothing since has softened it.
Last month, that dynamic was on display again. On the night of March the 19th, mortars fell on residential neighborhoods in Seda City after a day of clashes between Al-Hedri's National Guard and Syrian internal security forces. By the next morning, Israeli jets were once again bombing Syrian army positions. The message from Jerusalem has been consistent since last July. Any attempt by Damascus to stand in the way of Drew's autonomy in the south will be met with air strikes. Under a US-brokered deal, Damascus agreed to hand security in the province over to Al-Hidri's people. For all intents and purposes, the state is no longer present there.
Adding to the general sense of chaos has been the resurgence of ISIS. The group, operating under various names, including Sarah Ansar al-Sanar, was reportedly behind no fewer than five separate assassination attempts against senior Syrian officials in 2025, including multiple attempts on Shar personally. Beyond senior leadership, though, the attacks have largely focused on minority communities throughout the country. In June of last year, an ISIS bombing tore through the Greek Orthodox Ma Allias Church in Damascus, killing at least 20 worshippers and injuring dozens more. A few months later, another bombing struck the Alawied mosque in Homs. All of this continues a long-standing policy of not just targeting groups ISIS views as heretical, but exploiting sectarian divides, reducing minorities' confidence in the state's ability to provide security, and benefiting from the resulting collapse in legitimacy.
So, it probably won't come as too much of a surprise that many of these communities are openly advocating for the more decentralized approach that we described earlier. The Drews seem happy to basically run things themselves and are completely disinterested in whatever help is on offer from Damascus. Alawi communities around the country, by all indications, would love to get themselves a similar deal. The problem is what such a world would actually lead to. Given Syria's diverse makeup, any form of even semi-autonomy for its ethnic and religious minorities would carve the country up into a map that looks more like the Balkans than the modern Middle East. Even a system that offers more formal representation for groups risks turning the country into another Lebanon, where the confessional system was aimed at balancing sectarian communities against each other and succeeded so completely at blocking division into the foundation of the state that the country has been barely governable for decades now.
But put aside for a moment the question of whether decentralization is or is not the answer, because the people asking for it aren't the ones who actually get to decide. Increasingly, the trajectory of the country is being shaped by external powers running competing projects on top of it. One of the most committed of these is Turkey, which was an early backer of Shira's HDS. They very much view the situation along the lines of ethnic staplets in the place of a unified Syria. No. Anara's intelligence chief said in his 2025 annual report that they had been involved in the Syrian crisis, "from its beginning through subsequent phases." A remarkable thing for a foreign intelligence service to say out loud.
And Sharah has been returning the favor. Turkish troops remain in the country with no indication that they're going anywhere anytime soon. Two former Turkish-backed Syrian National Army commanders also hold senior positions in his restructured army. Both of whom have been sanctioned by Washington for human rights abuses and both from units that reportedly took part in the March coastal massacres. And then there's the growing spat between Turkey and Israel which is beginning to unfold literally on Syrian soil. Erdogan, for his part, has publicly called Netanyahu worse than Hitler multiple times, including last June, when he said the Israeli PM had "long ago surpassed Hitler in perpetrating genocide." For its part, the IDF repeatedly struck Syrian military infrastructure over 2025 that Turkey had supplied, a pattern widely interpreted as a bit of a warning to Ankara.
So far, though, with the exception of the Drews, the Turkish vision of a unified Syria controlled by Damascus mostly still stands. The question, of course, is can it last? And the answer does seem to depend on who you ask. The international community's answer is, for now, yes, and the evidence they point to is real enough, even if their behind-the-scenes actions show that they're not willing to bet ISIS detainees on it. For the Drews in Sueda or the Alawites on the coast, though, you'll get a pretty different answer. The problem for Sharon is that once these regions start to break away, it usually only flows in one direction. And stopping that from happening may require yet more bloodshed in a country already soaked in the stuff. Thank you for watching.