Shownotes Transcript
Nearly five months have passed since Bashar al-Assad's regime crumbled. Syria is no longer at war, but the dust is far from settling. Syrians are now walking a tightrope between chaos and reinvention. In this special episode of the Reuters World News Podcast, we look at life after Assad, the man who replaced him, and how Damascus and the rest of the world are trying to tackle the country's myriad challenges. I'm your host, Gail Issa.
I'm joined by Timur Azari, our Iraq bureau chief. Timur, welcome and thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. Timur, of course, you're normally based in Baghdad. You're between Beirut and Dubai at the moment. But since the fall of Assad, you've been reporting extensively from inside Syria. What about that first drive into Syria? Can you tell us what that was like? Well, yeah, we'd been on very little sleep, of course. We got into the car in Beirut. You drive over a mountain into the Bekaa Valley. We got into the car in Beirut.
Then you get to the border with Syria. We get our passports stamped in Lebanon, and then you drive through this sort of snaking road through a no-man's land until you reach the Syrian border. Usually there's customs there, but here really the only thing that made it out was the torn posters of Assad, the middle of his face missing, at checkpoints that had since been abandoned.
And so we rolled through customs and the border with gunmen at the sides of the road and people looting the duty-free where you previously used to be able to buy foreign products before entering Syria. We drove into Damascus and then on the road you started seeing abandoned military vehicles,
We saw a tank that was on fire. And then as you got into Damascus city itself, I started seeing these piles of things on the street and I didn't really know what they were. But then upon closer inspection, it became clear that they're fatigues. And you just saw dozens and dozens of military fatigues essentially in the street lying there as if the soldiers who had warned them had evaporated. Those initial days when you were in Syria, did it feel like a victory, like a revolution, or did it feel like something else?
It certainly felt like revolution. People were tearing down pictures of Assad everywhere you looked. Just unable to believe really that this person and this family indeed who'd ruled over Syria for more than 50 years were gone.
I remember going to the Souk al-Hamidiya, you know, the central souk in Damascus, and there were just gunmen parading through there under this sort of covering, shouting "God is great". Many of them had been in Idlib for years, this northern enclave under Russian bombardment, and here they were in Damascus celebrating in the city. So definitely the first few days, it was a lot of gunmen, very few civilians on the streets and mostly men coming out, having a peek, going inside.
But very quickly that did change. The rebels who took over, they had a sort of pseudo government up in Idlib. And they brought them down very quickly and they brought traffic police as well. And they tried very quickly to try and normalize the situation.
I remember going to an ice cream parlor on the second day in Damascus just after arriving. It's a famous ice cream parlor called Bekdash. They make a special kind of Arabic gum ice cream. And it was just an incredible scene because you had all of these fighters with their long beards and long hair and dirty clothes lining up with their weapons to buy ice cream from Bekdash because it's so well known and so famous in Syria. And I spoke to a few people there, you know, who basically just said,
If they hadn't been able to have it before, they found it delicious. And if they were going there, even in Damascus during the time of Assad, it now tasted better. Timur, what's life like on the ground in Syria for young, ordinary people?
There was a lot of fear when this group took over, given their extremist past, that they would be cracked down on parties, on bars, on alcohol. But I would just say that from my experience in Damascus, people are still out and about. There are several events that I've attended, one of them in a beautiful old Damascene house in the Christian quarter of Bab Tuma,
where there were dozens of people in attendance, music being played, people dancing. There are also sort of underground raves happening in Damascus. Even though some people are sort of uneasy about where things may be going, I think it's important to note that cultural life does continue.
You mentioned the Christian quarter. How is the Christian minority faring in Syria? Yeah, just a few days after the fall of Damascus, I went to attend mass. And I spoke to a woman in her 60s who said that she was scared because this is an Islamist group with former links to Al-Qaeda. Assad, for a very long time, promoted the narrative that he was the protector of minorities, that he was keeping these radical groups away from Syria's Alawites and Syria's Christians.
And Timur, what about the dire economic situation? What is life like there on a day-to-day basis economically?
Life is difficult. So essentially, when these rebels came in and they turned into rulers, the economy froze. Oil and wheat and money used to come from Russia and Iran to be replaced with not much, to be replaced with rebels who were in this enclave. They've come down. They've taken over a central bank with very little money. At the same time, they have to pay all of these civil servants. So the economy really is frozen today. And if you speak to Syrian industrialists and traders, Syria is historically a country that produced a lot.
They say that they are also now facing the issue of cheap imports. Syria's economy has been opened. The new rulers declared from the first day that this protectionist economy would become free market.
and the borders slammed open and cheap Turkish goods have come in from the north. So all of these domestic industries are also suffering because of that. The economy really is waiting for a signal from abroad and a cash injection, without which many people don't think it can work. I walk out of my hotel in Damascus in the morning and one of the first things is people lined up at ATMs, standing there really for hours just to try to get their money out of the bank.
Let's talk about the man who replaced Assad, Ahmed Al-Sharra. He's emerged as the interim president of Syria. What can you tell us about him? Who is he? So Ahmed Al-Sharra is a Syrian man who was born in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. His family worked there and at the age of six, he moved back to Damascus, had sort of a upper middle class upbringing. And then around his late teenage years...
The Iraq war began, or the lead-up to the Iraq war began. Ahmed al-Shara took sort of a religious turn and around 2003 went to Iraq to fight. He was arrested by the U.S. Army in Iraq, spent five years in a U.S. prison where many other people who ended up becoming, in the U.S.'s eyes, significant terrorists also spent time. He eventually joined a precursor to ISIS, which
and then moved to essentially establish al-Qaeda's wing in Syria before breaking from al-Qaeda and forming his own group, which is HTS, the group that led the offensive that ousted Assad. Timur, you've met him and interviewed him in Damascus. Tell us about that.
Ahmed Chara is a person who gives you a historical perspective on things. He's not a person of quick answers, and some people find that convincing. Many people who sit in the room with Syria's new president say that they leave feeling relieved. He also did strike me as a politician, though, someone who is charming, someone who knows how to speak to people, how to construct a narrative.
Your interview was happening at a key moment of sectarian violence in Syria. Hundreds of Alawites were killed along the coastal region. Can you tell us more about that? The beginning of this was an attack on security forces stationed in the coastal region, which is where the Alawite sect of Syria thought to make up about 10%. They're most prevalent there. It's a hard land. Bashar al-Assad was an Alawite. Many of the people he put into the government and the security forces and senior posts were Alawites.
So there has always been a sectarian undertone to this conflict. Many of the groups that are now in power in Syria, in the wider coalition with Shara'a himself, they look upon Alawites with skepticism. What happened here is that security forces were ambushed, several of them were killed, and at some point, essentially areas were out of the new state's control.
That led alarm bells to go off and also to a sense of panic because it seemed to some people in the administration that there was an attempted coup. There were calls that went up from mosque speakers, WhatsApp groups, people essentially calling for jihad, which, you know, in Arabic is a religious struggle, and tens of thousands of fighters.
amassed and drove towards the coast. And as they drove down this main highway towards the coast, through those Alawite mountains, massacres occurred. Gunmen went into villages, they rounded up the men, they lined them up by the side of the road and they shot them. Reuters has verified various videos of this.
And what did Ahmed al-Sharas say about that violence, including allegations that his supporters were involved? He said, I've established an independent committee that is investigating this and looking into it, and within 30 days they will provide me with the answers.
But what he did say is that even if these people were those closest to him, he would hold them to account. He also said that what happened on the coast was a threat or undermined his vision of building a state. Ahmed Shara and the close group around him have since taken over Damascus and even before on the ride in, they have preached a message of unity. They've preached a message of non-sectarianism. They've said Syria is for all Syrians. And what we saw on the coast here really put that into question. Mm-hmm.
So this is definitely a test. If he is unable to bring these factions under control, if he's unable to hold people accountable for this, that will impact international support for Syria, which it desperately needs because it's essentially destroyed. How can al-Shara thread the needle between getting these factions under control and I guess rebuilding Syria's credibility in the West to get that international support they so desperately need?
It's very difficult because Ahmed Sharaa's group, HTS, is actually a minority in the greater Syrian landscape of armed groups. You have the Kurds in the east, backed by the Americans, who have many tens of thousands of fighters, much more than Sharaa himself. You also have these factions up in the north, backed by Turkey, who again dwarf Sharaa's group.
Since he came in, he's been saying the time of revolution is over, there can be no militias, and everybody needs to get into the military. And while they've made announcements about that, it's not really clear why a militia leader who owns territory would agree to let go of command of his forces. And so it's difficult for Shara'a to convince these factions to come in. On top of that, he does not have the money to, say, pay salaries, to provide whatever the commanders of these groups might need in order to let go of their grip on their factions.
And there is no international support for the building of security forces. You have to remember that Assad's security forces are notorious for their human rights abuses. And Syria's security forces and intelligence branches are highly, heavily sanctioned. And those sanctions have not been suspended by any states. So there's no cooperation with the new Syrian military by Western powers. And yet, at the same time, they...
They need him to construct this military in order to continue to engage with him. It's a catch-22. And so it's very difficult for him to navigate that space. There are also groups within these factions who have different ideas of what Syria should be and of what they fought for. Many of these groups want Syria to be essentially an Islamic state. And that is, of course, not what Shara has said and not what he's trying to do and also is not something that would work with the international community.
What does that new transitional government tell us about the direction that Syria is headed in? It's sort of a mixed bag. On the one hand, yes, they brought in more people. On the other hand, it did fall below some of the expectations and aspirations of both Syrians and those in the international community.
What I think is almost seen as more important in Syria, though, just recently, you've had the first Syrian government officials go to Washington. Obviously, the relationship with the US is super important. Syria is still under this heavy US sanctions regime that really is stifling any kind of economic recovery.
The U.S. has sought several measures from the Syrian government in order to lift sanctions or to have further sanctions relief. We obtained a letter that was a Syrian response, which basically says that they've addressed most of those. You know, they've set up a sort of mechanism to search for a missing U.S. journalist, Austin Tice.
They've worked to get rid of chemical weapons stocks from the previous regime. At the same time, they do have less to say about other issues. One of the key issues being the presence of foreign jihadist fighters in the military. Some of them were promoted to senior ranks. And it's not just the U.S. that's uncomfortable about that. It's also Gulf Arab states and the Europeans. It's a difficult issue for Syria to deal with, and they've called for further consultations on that. Tia Mouaz,
Timur, what does the Trump administration want inside Syria? It's been very hard to read what the Trump administration wants to do in Syria. The effect of this is that states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who have really been at the forefront of wanting to provide direct support, financial support, including for salaries, which we've reported exclusively at Reuters, they've been unable to do that or unwillingly.
willing because they don't know if they will get slapped on the wrist or worse, if they do support this new government. They want the signal from Washington, from Trump. Do we engage with these new guys? Are we giving them a chance or are we not? And that's critical because today, no matter how many sanctions Europeans lift or anybody else lift,
US sanctions in the world we live in today, the dollar dominated world. These are the most important thing. No business is really going to want to do
business with Syria while U.S. sanctions are in place. Additionally, we've reported that Israel is lobbying the Trump administration to keep Syria weak and decentralized to have these different zones of influence. Meanwhile, Turkey, which is the main backer of the new authority, has been absent in its engagement with Washington. Turkey is the power that the new Syrian administration is relying on internationally to lobby for it, in addition to the Gulf countries who do see an opportunity here.
And what about Russia? Has Moscow lost its foothold in Syria? I think so far to the contrary. Russia, of course, was the major power in Syria, in addition to Iran. When Damascus fell, the Russians were very cautious. They started taking military equipment out of their bases. They, of course, also helped Assad flee and other senior members of the regime. But they did maintain their embassy there. And very quickly, they sent a delegation, a senior diplomat, and then Putin and Shara had a phone call. I believe it was in January.
And since then, Russia has sent currency because Syria's currency used to be printed in Russia. And there's a liquidity crisis in the country. Meanwhile, while Europe and the U.S. have eased their sanctions on some sectors, there's very little in the form of direct material support coming through, which is what Syria needs. And so in a way, what Putin is saying to Shara is,
I can give you things now, whereas the Europeans and the Americans are giving you promises and they're giving you signals, but you don't really even have anything in your hand. And analysts will say that this is very important when talking about U.S. policy towards Syria and European policy is that they cannot just leave this hanging. If they do not engage with Syria, it is possible that Shadr, who has always been pragmatic, does build on these relations with Russia.
With Iran, there are essentially no relations today. So there is no love lost and the Iranian embassy is not operating. In fact, it is closed and there is graffiti reading free Iran spray painted on the outside. And Timur, Ahmed Alshara has promised elections. He has promised elections, although it's unclear what exactly or in what format. There is talk about elections. There is talk about freedom, rights, women's rights, all of those things. Democracy, not so much.
And in fact, there are many in Syria who do fear that eventually the country could be heading towards a new strongman rule. And so what many are hoping to see is that HTS will relinquish its grip and bring more people in. There are millions of Syrians around the world as a result of the refugee crisis. This is something that Syria really wants to draw on, but it will need HTS also letting go of power a little bit. And we haven't really seen that yet.
And in the meantime, where does that then leave Ahmed al-Shara and Syria? He's going to struggle to bring it together because each of these different groups, be it the Druze in the south, the Kurds in the east, the Alawites, and even some of his allied factions, they all have different ideas of what Syria should be. And many in Syria do feel that it would be a miracle if it does work out in the end. It's important to say that when Assad fell, it was an incredible moment of hope because
right, this family who ruled over Syria for so long, whose name you couldn't even say, people thought the walls had ears, that this tyrant could fall filled people with a huge amount of hope. And you also have to remember that the Syrian civil war really is at the center of global politics for the last 15 years. The Syrian refugee crisis and the people who went to Europe and further afield, you know, that led to the rise of the far right, it really catalyzed a lot of the dynamics that we see in global politics today.
But hope wears thin and that's what's happening now. The economy is a huge issue. Sanctions remain in place. And so it's getting to crunch time now. Thanks again to Timur for his time and his expertise. Reuters World News is produced by Kim Van El, Sharon Reich-Garson, Jonah Green, David Spencer, Christopher Waljasper and me, Gail Issa. Our senior producers are Tara Oaks and Carmel Crimmins. Our executive producer is Lila de Kretzer.
Music composition and sound design are by Josh Sommer. Engineering on this episode are by Christopher Wall Jasper and Alex Sommer. We'll be back on Monday with our daily headline show. To make sure you never miss an episode, follow along on your favorite podcast player or download the Reuters app.