Syria in post-Assad transition

Syria is the most consequential governance question of the 2020s Middle East. The country endured nearly fourteen years of civil war that began in 2011 as anti-government protests and metastasised into a multi-front conflict involving Bashar al-Assad's regime, a fractured opposition, Kurdish-led forces in the northeast, jihadist groups including the Islamic State, and a Russian-Iranian intervention from 2015 that kept Assad in power. The regime collapsed in late 2024 when a Hayat Tahrir al-Sham-led offensive seized Aleppo, Hama, Homs and Damascus in eleven days. Assad fled to Moscow, ending the Ba'ath era. Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the HTS leader) now governs a transitional administration from Damascus, while Kurdish-led forces continue to hold the northeast, Israel strikes Syrian targets to prevent residual Iranian and Hezbollah re-establishment, US-led coalition forces continue counter-ISIS operations, and Arab and Western capitals weigh recognition of the new government. Russia's Tartus naval and Khmeimim air bases remain in fraught negotiation; Iran has lost its primary Levant land bridge. The theater holds four contested surfaces — the Kurdish question, Israeli strikes, residual counter-terrorism, and the international recognition trajectory — plus three umbrella narratives that span them: legitimacy of the HTS-led transition, the substantive warning that HTS is rebranded al-Qaeda, and the Russia-Iran-axis lament at the regional setback.