Lawfare Archive: The New Syrian Government and Its Problems

>> At the end of the last episode, the second band of the kangaro comics,

“"Do you kangaro? I have said it in 220 with the words of the person who is in the world, if you need me, would I have to return?"”

>> Three years later, is it already so far? >> Yeah, it's already so far. Now I'm not so sure. I've also found out that before. You mentioned that there is no way to get a book from the two countries. Now it's from Mark Ovekling, the kangaro Rebellion. Yet, by bookbeads and overalvos Bücher and Hörbücher, I'm Marisa Wong, internet law fair. With an episode from the law fair archive for March 28th, 2026. As part of the ongoing conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran,

the U.S. is reportedly encouraging the Syrian government to cooperate on counterterrorism efforts

and send troops into Eastern Lebanon to disarm Hezboa. Although it has previously signalled a willingness to cooperate with Western countries, the Al-Sharag government seems reluctant to further inflate tensions in the Middle East. For today's archive, I chose an episode from March 19th, 2025, in which Stephen Heiderming joined a Daniel Bymane to discuss the Syrian government's transition from the Assad regime to a government led by Ahmed Al-Sharag, who is the

former leader of an Islamist armed group. The pair also discussed Israeli interventions in Syria,

the U.S. is attitude toward the new regime in Damascus and more.

The law fair podcast, I'm Daniel Bymane, the foreign policy editor of law fair, and I'm here today with Steve Heiderming. He is a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Smith College and a longtime observer of the Middle East. Almost immediately on the heels of the collapse of the Assad regime, Israel intervened militarily in Syria, now occupies a significant territory in southern Syria and seems to be setting itself up as a permanent or semi-permanent presence in

southern Syria. Today we're talking about the new government in Syria and the many problems that Syria is facing. Steve, the situation in Syria has been rapidly changing and not only with the overthrow of Bashar Assad, but in the months that have followed. Can you catch us up since the fall of the regime? How has the situation evolved? Sure, I'm happy to be here with you, Dan, and I should say this isn't especially auspicious day to be doing the podcast because this is the 14th anniversary

of the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011. It began more or less on this day in 2011. And we're

“about three months into a political transition that I think very few expected and which as you indicated”

has brought an enormous change to Syria and a change that's unfolding very rapidly and is still quite fluid. I think on one level, if you look at what has happened in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime on December 8th, the progress that has been made in putting the pieces of a political transition in place has been quite extraordinary. Now, there have been acts of violence in the wake of the fall of the Assad regime. That's not unexpected. Last week, we saw some especially tragic

confrontations between remnants of the Assad regime and loyalists of the interim government, security forces of the interim government in which many civilians were killed. But that was not typical for how the transition has unfolded in general. What we've seen is pretty steady progress on the part of the acting president Ahmad Alshara, the leader of this Islamist armed group, Hayat Takreeyat Hashem, that played a leading role in the overthrow of the Assad

“regime. And Alshara has really, I think, made quite steady progress in putting, as I said,”

the pieces of a political transition in place. He has secured the agreement of armed factions to his role as acting president. He has convened a large gathering of Syrians to talk about what the core principles are that a transition should be attentive to. He has selected a group

He has established what he calls a national security council to guide him in dealing with

remaining security issues that the country faces and there are quite quite a few. And very importantly, last week he also signed an agreement with Kurdish fighters under the Syrian Democratic Forces in Syria's Northeast concerning their position in a future Syria. Their integration into some new reformed security sector that is still very much information, but which has at least gotten something of a start. And these are all really very important benchmarks. In effect,

we have the political framework for a transition in place. We have the security framework for a transition

in place. On the other hand, if you look a little bit beneath the surface, what seems to be happening is that Ahmad Ashara is designing a transition that will consolidate his authority as Syria's president throughout the five-year transition period. He has not only put himself in the role of president, but commander and chief of the armed forces. And in the new constitution, the transitional constitution that was approved just a few days ago, he has direct or indirect authority over parliament

over the judiciary, and he has given himself in the new constitution quite extraordinary power. So while we watch events unfold in a fashion that appears on one level much more orderly,

“then I think we feared given how quickly the Assad regime collapsed. On the other hand, the”

system that's emerging is one that I think gives us cause for concern. It's a system in which power will remain heavily centralized in the hands of a president. It's a system that will unquestionably exhibit the Islamist features, the Islamist attributes that reflect the ideology of Hayat Tafriyat Hashem. And so even though there's been a lot of discussion of minority rights and tolerance and freedom and participation and accountability, what we're seeing, I think,

leads us to be a bit wary about where the country is going. Let me follow up on that last point and then I want to circle back to a few of your other observations. You're an expert on authoritarianism and you've judged it in its various guys' throughout the greater Middle East. Is there a kind of model you look at, say, you know,

“I think Syria under Ashara will look like this country or this leader in a couple years.”

The closest model that comes to mind really is the way Turkey has evolved under President Erdogan over the past decade or so in which you have a really super empowered executive, super empowered president who has direct control over all of the other branches of government, the military, the judiciary, a government that surveils and controls the media very closely. A government that is relatively intolerant of descent and a government that pursues a fairly liberal free market

style of economic policy. And we can't really say for sure that Syria will emulate in any way the Turkish model. But if I had to look for a comparison, that is the one that I would view as perhaps

closest. The one really crucial difference I expect is that even though Erdogan himself is an Islamist,

“I think Ahmad Isshara and some of those he's appointed to very, very senior positions in his”

government have an even deeper ideological commitment to a vision of Islam that may be even more restrictive, perhaps socially more regressive than that of Erdogan. Steve, let me follow up on the your point about the recent fighting. As you noted, some degree of score settling is inevitable after brutal civil war, but the media reports put the number of deaths at over 1,000 people. Is this the sort of thing that's likely to recur? And what's your sense of the causes of this

because of very large number of troops of former Assad regime officers and security officials launched

“a major attack against the forces of the interim government. The media reports indicate that there”

may have been as many as 4,000 Assad regime loyalists who participated in the initial operation that led to the kind of reprisals that we saw last week. And as that confrontation erupted, the interim government responded by dispatching its own security forces to the coastal region of Syria, which is the heartland of Syria's alloy, community its minority, alloy, community, the community

to which Bashar al-Assad himself and his father belonged. And in the course of confronting the

Assad regime fighters who had launched this attack, we saw as well an enormous movement into the coastal area of fighters affiliated with other armed groups, other armed factions, as well as some me civilians from villages near where the confrontation was occurring, including villages that had experienced severe brutality at the hands of the Assad regime earlier in the Syrian conflict. And that turned out to be a formula really for massive abuses at the hands of those who moved

into the coast to try to put down this uprising on the part of Assad regime fighters. And we know that there were, as you mentioned, perhaps as many as 1,000 people killed, we know that perhaps a quarter of those fatalities were caused by fighters loyal to the Assad regime, so the violence was not one directional in any sense. But it was a really important testing moment for the interim government. And in many ways it failed to test because what we saw in the fighting that occurred

was the limits of the interim government's control over armed factions that had at least nominally pledged their loyalty to this new government to Ahmad Ishada. In fact, as the fighting continue to became clear, that many of these armed groups were acting quite independently. They were committing grievous abuses against civilians. Some of the treatment of Alawi civilians

“that we saw was quite grotesque. And they conducted themselves in a way that I think demonstrated”

their complete lack of concern for accountability. They were clearly outside of any kind of chain of command. And the chief takeaway, I think, from that episode, is how limited the interim government's control continues to be over the many, many armed factions that are still operating in Syria. And that's deeply troubling. There is a long way to go before any kind of centralized command structure will be in place in Syria. And so episodes like this could happen again. We could

see a similar kind of really fragmented, almost uncontrolled reaction. If we see additional provocations from Syrians who remain loyal to the Assad regime. On the other hand, it seems that the intent of the Assad regime fighters who launched this wave of violence was to spark a cascade of anti-government violence across a much broader swath of Syria, perhaps even reigniting a full-scale

“civil war. And that failed. It didn't happen. And I think we can take a very, very modest degree of”

comfort in the failure of this operation to cause that kind of cascade. But still, the way the forces affiliated with the new government conducted themselves was, was grievous and is something that that Ahmad Ishara himself is going to need to take very seriously to prevent future outbreaks like this.

At the end of the last episode, the second band, the Kangorokomics, that you Kangorod,

I said 222 with the Worten for Abshidets, when the world needs me, would I need you? Three years later,

the same answer. Your people have said that there is no way out of the two countries, from the two countries.

New is from Mark Ovekling, the Kangorokomics region, now on the bookbite and above all, where the highest and highest number of people there. Hello, how can I help you? Yes, the Kangorokomics region, as well as Shibrit, Placinibrit or full-enactry. It's up to 450 km/h, and with the integrator, the city-GbT assistant. Hello, how can I help you? Yes, the Kangorokomics region, and the new Peugeot 388. I have 329,000,000 and 139,000 in total. Now, by then, Peugeot has a lot of families.

So, as though it's happening, and as I was starting to worry about Syria,

really going off of a conflict cliff, as you also know it, there was this deal between the Shara government and the Kurds. Can you talk a little bit more about that in a particular what they agreed to and what concessions if any did each side make? Yeah, the relationship between the Syrian Democratic Forces, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the units that the US has supported for the past seven or eight years because of their participation in anti-ISIS operations

in Northeastern Syria. The relationship between the Syrian Democratic Forces and the interim government

has been a difficult one from the beginning. The SDF has hoped to negotiate a reintegration into Syria that would preserve a fairly significant degree of autonomy of self-governance and would preserve the integrity of the SDF as an armed group. And from Ahmad Asshada's perspective, the only option that the new government in Syria was prepared to consider was the integration of the SDF fighters as individuals and the reassertion of the authority of the central government

over the Northeast. An area that has been outside of the government's control since about 20, 2012. So the differences were quite significant. In addition, Turkey, bordering Syria to the north, views the SDF as an extension of a Kurdish-era dentist group with which it has been at war for almost 40 years, the PKK. And so Turkey was threatening military intervention to suppress

“the SDF. And that created an additional, I think, source of pressure on the SDF to reach agreement”

with the Syrian central government with the interim government. And an additional factor, I think, that might have pushed the SDF toward this agreement is the engagement of the US military, actually, because we're aware from media reporting that senior officials in the US military advised the SDF that this was the time for them to reach an agreement with the central government because the fate of US forces that have been in Northeast Syria since about 2017 really could not

be guaranteed. The Trump administration has committed to the withdrawal of US forces. And so what

“we saw was a kind of coming together of a number of different factors that I think created the”

conditions that led to this agreement. As to what it contained, it's a very broad, very general understanding, a document and eight-point document was signed by Ahmed Asshara and by Maslim Abdi, the head of the SDF. And it contained a number of very general principles that reflected the willingness of Ahmed Asshara to be responsive to the concerns of Kurds in the Northeast. It acknowledges Kurds as full and equal citizens of Syria. It acknowledges the right of Kurds to participate as equal

citizens in Syrian politics. Those were things that Kurds had not enjoyed under Bashar al-Assad

“and his father. And so it really signaled, I think, a willingness on the part of the new government”

in Syria to accommodate some of the principal concerns of Syria's Kurds. What we didn't get any

into the Syrian military. We didn't get any clarity about whether the Northeast would be able to be

governed with any measure of autonomy. And so a lot of the really important details remain to be resolved or if they were worked out, we don't know how they were worked out. But nonetheless, I think the agreement

“did represent an incredibly important step forward. Not least, I think it removed any incentive”

that Turkey might have had to intervene militarily against the SDF. It brings the SDF into a nominally unified Syrian security sector with a lot of detail still to be clarifying.

And it removed in the process the possibility of a confrontation between forces of the interim

government and the SDF. So it's a very important step, but with a lot still of ambiguity around important details. I want to also discuss another major force that you've mentioned a couple times, which is Turkey. Could you describe how Turkey views the current government as well as how Turkey might use its influence to try to change things?

“Turkey has been one of the principal sponsors of the current government. It sees itself”

as the country that is best positioned to influence Syria's political transition.

It sees itself as the country best positioned to play a lead role in Syria's post-conflict reconstruction, if and when that eventually gets underway. And that has a lot to do with the role that Turkey has had in northern Syria pretty much since the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011. Syria has intervened militarily in northern Syria several times to prevent Kurds from consolidating control over a contiguous swath of territory on Turkey's southern

border. It has sponsored a number of armed factions as its proxies in northern Syria. And it was very close in terms of intelligence sharing and other kinds of activities with high-tech area to share in the northwest of Syria. Even though the relationships often were often complicated and not entirely collegial or cooperative. But because Turkey has such a long border with Syria because it has occupied such an important

position in the north and sees Syria as in many respects as its back yard. Because it has been so concerned about the potential threat from the Syrian democratic forces. Turkey has really moved very quickly to consolidate its position as really the preeminent regional actor with an interest in shaping Syria's political transition. Let me follow up with really similar question about Israel where we've already seen Israel intervene militarily in post-Assad Syria.

“What role do you think Israel is likely to play in the coming months?”

And is that something that the US government should be trying to influence one way or another? Yeah, Israel's strategy in Syria has been interesting and somewhat troubling to watch as it's unfolded. As you mentioned, almost immediately on the heels of the collapse of the Assad regime, Israel intervened militarily in Syria. Now occupies significant territory in southern Syria and seems to be setting itself up as a sort of permanent or semi-permanent presence in

southern Syria. It has launched hundreds of attacks to degrade the equipment, the military equipment of the Assad regime. It has begun to outreach to the Syrian Druse community on the grounds that this is a minority with which Israel could form some form of alliance. And all of that is premised on this assumption, on the part of the current Israeli government, that Israel's security can best be assured by the presence of a weak and fragmented

and conflict between Syria and Israel, in part. And it grows out of the understanding on the part

of the Israeli government as well, that Syria's interim government is a solidifist, jihadist government that will inevitably pose a threat to Israeli security. Now, what's troubling about this is that Israeli officials seem to feel that a weakened and fragmented Syria is in Israel's best interest. And yet a weakened and fragmented Syria is also one that is likely to invite the return of Iranian intervention in some form,

“which Israel, I think, would view as a significant threat. A weakened and fragmented Syria”

is a country that Turkey would view with a great deal of concern and might take steps to try to

intervene and to stabilize this country on its southern border. And so it really does seem as if the conclusion that Israeli officials have reached that the only path for assuring Israeli security is through the instability of Syria is quite short-sighted and has implications that may work very much to Israel's disadvantage. And it's interesting because we're now beginning to hear that concern reflected within the Israeli political establishment as well, former Prime Minister

who'd all merit, either today or yesterday came out with a statement in which he called for "improved relations with the new government of Syria for recognizing the government of Ahmed Ashara and for beginning a process of engagement." And he expressed the sense that in its current policy, Israel is missing an historic opportunity to reset its relationship with Syria. So, what the Israeli government is doing is contested among Israelis, it's an approach that is viewed

“with a great deal of concern outside of Syria. I think the one very important actor that seems”

to be supportive of Israel's policy is in fact the United States. And I think that is a reflection of perspectives within the Trump administration that are closely aligned with those of the Israeli

government that once a jihadist always a jihadist, that Ahmed Ashara himself has a rather troubling

past as a former member of Al-Qaeda who fought against the U.S. in Iraq and that therefore Israel's interest in a weakened fragmented Syria is an outcome that plays to American interest as well. So, I do think that the U.S. has quietly, up till now, been supportive of the approach of the Israeli government and that I think gives Israel a great deal of license to continue its current policy. But as I said, it's a policy that I fear has implications that will backfire in quite

serious ways over time. Let me use our last bit of time here to talk more on the U.S. role. The United States of course has a series of sanctions that's imposed on Syria in the past related both to civil war and human rights but also to narcotics and also to support for terrorism. And in general, has treated Syria as as a hostile country often wow with good reason. How should the Trump administration approach Syria should be lifting economic sanctions,

should in general be embracing the new government or would you recommend kind of a wait and see sort of approach? Well, whether the Trump administration moves to deepen engagement with the

“the new Syrian government, I think addressing the issue of sanctions is really of crucial importance”

because unless there is a process of economic recovery that feels tangible to Syrians, I think the prospects for a successful political transition become much more remote. I really do view the economic crisis that Syria is experiencing as perhaps the most significant threat to the progress of Syria's political transition and so the reluctance of the U.S. to address the issue of sanctions in a comprehensive way. Most of which were imposed on the Assad regime and that

regime of course no longer exists. In my view, I think will become a significant obstacle to

Now, the Trump administration, I think, has shown today significant reluctance to address the

“issue of sanctions. It has not taken any steps, for example, to remove the designation of Syria as a”

state sponsor of terror, which was imposed in 1979. It has welcomed statements from Ahmed Ashara about his willingness to complete the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons supplies. It has acknowledged his statements in opposition to terrorism and to ISIS. So it is acknowledging that the new government is saying the right things. And yet when it comes to the economy, we really have not seen any movement at all from the Trump administration to ease

“conditions that would support Syria's economic recovery. And I think that's unfortunate because”

Syrians are very quickly asking themselves, "Am I better off today than I was under the Assad regime?

Is this new government able to deliver on the critical economic concerns of me and my family?"

And the inability of the interim government to support improvement in Syria's economy is increasingly going to become a target of popular agreements in popular anger. And it's an issue that I think the Trump administration could do a great deal more to assist with. As Steve, that was extremely

“helpful. I appreciate your willingness to guide us through the most important issues facing Syria today.”

So thank you very much for joining us at Lafair. Well, thank you, Dan. I'm happy to talk with you. The Lafair podcast is produced in cooperation with the Brookings Institution. You can get ad-free versions of this and other Lafair podcasts by becoming Lafair materials supported to our website, Lafairmedia.org/support. You'll also get access to special events and other content available to only to our supporters. Please rate and review us wherever you get your

podcasts. Look out for our other podcasts including Rational Security, chatter, allies, and the aftermath. Our latest Lafair presents podcasts series on the government's response to January 6. Check out our written work at Lafairmedia.org. This podcast is edited by Jen Pacha and her audio engineer the episode was Cara Schillen of Goat Roadie, our theme song is from Alabama music.

As always, thank you for listening.

At the end of the previous episode, the Kengaro comics, "Do You Kengaro Road", I said 222 with the voice notifications. If the world needs me, I'll be back. Three years later, is it already worth it? Yes, it's already worth it. Now I'm not so sure about it, I'm sure I've found it. Your people already have the offerbook, not me, from the future, you get to the point.

Newbies of Mark Ovekling, the Kengaro Rebellion, now on BookBit and over Alvus Bücher and Hörbücher,