Post-revolutionary states are not only in political but also strategic flux. Their regional alignments and perceptions of threats and security change with the coming and going of political regimes. Post-Assad Syria is no different.
Shorn of a government that aligned itself against the United States and Israel in favor of Russia and Iran, Damascus must now reorganize its strategic alignments better to suit its current imperatives of stabilization and consolidation. But which alignments will it choose? Will the new Syria be a Turkish-backed Islamist state, a client in Ankara's growing push to influence and dominate the Middle East? By contrast, will it find a way to build connections beyond Turkey and become a non-aligned power maximizing its own independence? Alternatively, will it fail to break out of post-Assad isolation, and become a hostile, radical jihadist power? Much will depend on both how Syria's rebel factions coordinate the transition, and how they react to the machinations of other countries that see in Syria an opportunity to reframe the region's strategic dynamics in their favor.
What Is the Post-Assad Plan?
As with many states going through a turbulent post-revolutionary period, concrete transition plans take a back seat to the day-to-day imperatives of shoring up control. To this end, a National Dialogue Conference meant to kick-start the process has so far failed to meet its own deadlines; initially planned for the beginning of January, no firm calendar date for the conference has been set. Some of this is reflective of the fractious politics of Syria: though the al Qaeda-derived Hayat Tahir as-Shams (HTS) is the leading rebel faction, whose head Ahmad al-Sharaa is Syria's de facto leader, HTS is but one of several major factions. Sheraa and HTS are Islamist; the other rebels are not necessarily so.
There is the Deraa Military Council, an umbrella of various parties and militias based in southern Syria, which comprises more secular or ethnic groups (like the Druze) that tend to favor democracy due to the grouping's pluralistic nature. There are the Turkish-backed forces in the north, the Syrian National Army (SNA), which exists largely as a Turkish client, and whose ability to exist without Turkey, let alone win elections, is in doubt. There is the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a U.S.-protected and supplied leftist group that is largely inclined toward democracy as well; but the SDF currently exists outside the framework of the provisional government, as the vestigial rebel force was caught off-guard by the December 2024 collapse of Bashar al Assad's government, with whom it had working ties with as the SDF tried to fend off Turkish incursions. And these are just the factions nominally part of the post-Assad era; former Assad elements lurk, as does the Islamic State, with neither showing serious interest in negotiating a place at the table but rather focused on being a spoiler. It is a complex political backdrop that has slowed Syria's political transition.
How these factions align and arrange will help define Syria's future regional orientation.
On the Nature of Revolution — and Recalibration
First, we should note the phenomenon that is revolution. From one perspective, revolutions are political do-overs, wiping away previous political structures and allowing for the emergence of new actors capable of substantially altering a country's domestic and foreign policies. But they are not the same as wiping the slate clean. Basics like geography, demography and economics remain in place both before and after a revolution. The Russian Revolution in 1917 did not mean Russia no longer had long land borders across Eurasia. The Tunisian Revolution of 2011 did not remove the civil society that had collaborated with ousted President Ben Ali's dictatorship and would eventually enable the rise of current President Kais Saied. And the 2011 Egyptian Revolution did not remove the military council that would eventually overthrow the post-revolutionary Islamist regime and bring the country back to its status quo ante, both politically and strategically.
Syria has its own continued constraints to a clean break with history. Post-Assad Syria will still border Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon. It will still have a population that largely lives as close as it can to the Mediterranean coast. It will still be divided into various Sunni, Shiite, Alawite, Druze and Christian religious groups, as well as Arabs, Kurds and smaller ethnicities like Circassians. It will still have a secular and religious divide, a more cosmopolitan urban core in Damascus and Aleppo, and a more conservative hinterland in the Euphrates Valley. And it will still lack significant oil or gas reserves, and have little in the way of mineral resources to export.
Syria will also still face similar external pressures. Its powerful neighbors, particularly Israel and Turkey, will have competing interests in shaping the political outcomes in Syria to ensure that no entity hostile to their interests emerges. Further afield, countries like Iran, Russia and the United States, along with Gulf Arab states like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, also have their own distinctive interests in ensuring that Syria's political evolution moves in a direction that does not strategically threaten them. These immutable realities of Syria's geopolitical structure will ensure that there are hard limits as to how far Ahmad al-Sharaa and his provisional government can act.
The Agency of the Locals
Despite these constraints, significant room remains for Syria's transition to be shaped by the actions and agency of its people. None of the major powers near Syria has a particularly strong interest in which type of government emerges from the post-Assad transition, whether it be a monarchy, a democracy or another authoritarian presidential republic. Rather, their interests lie in the country's ideological orientation and its identity in the Middle East. The specifics of the type of political system are not as important to these outsiders as the outcomes of the said political system. In other words, even the United Arab Emirates, famous for its counter-revolutionary foreign policy that seeks to roll back democratic gains, could be content with a comparatively democratic Syria that is neither Islamist nor particularly meddlesome in the affairs of its neighbors or the region.
To draw forward Syria's political and ideological destiny, we can incorporate regional and global history into post-revolutionary states and overlay them with the existing constraints to Syria's transitional agency. To put it another way, we must learn from the past while remembering that Syria is its own unique entity.
For that matter, we can discount a few scenarios right off the bat given the trajectory of the civil war. For one, it is highly unlikely that there will be some sort of Assad-level counter-coup that would restore the status quo ante like in Egypt, given that the Syrian military was already a shell of its former self during the civil war and that there is no Syrian equivalent of the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Armed Forces capable of organizing the remnants of the Assad regime into such a counter-coup. It is also unlikely Syria will formally lose further territory or break up into new statelets, as Yugoslavia did during its political transition, given that Syria's internal factions are united at the least on preserving the current borders; even Israel and Turkey, which occupy Syrian territory, have no long-term plans to formally annex these regions (beyond Israel's existing annexation of the Golan Heights).
There are other, more realistic, options to consider. First is the emerging baseline, in which an authoritarian republic led by Islamists focuses on internal development and pragmatic ties with Syria's neighbors. This government would recognize the constraints of the country's post-civil war situation and seek to develop a stable enough system, first to weaken foreign influence and then allow Syria to exert influence in the decades to come. Such an Islamist model would see Syria most closely aligned with Turkey, which it would look to as a potential benefactor and protector against the influence of Iran, Russia, the United States, Israel and Gulf Arab states. At times, this Islamist authoritarian republic would appear to serve as a Turkish client, but at other times it would serve itself as an independent state as it steadily creeps toward sovereignty, earning reconstruction and investment through its non-confrontational foreign policies. There is reason to believe that many regional actors would accept this model, particularly as this type of Syrian government would not deliberately host extremists like the Islamic State and may still cooperate with regional countries in counterterrorism missions. An Islamist authoritarian government would also not align with Iran and its anti-Israel strategy, meaning Iran would still be left without a land corridor through Syria to support its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon.
HTS's own governing record in Idlib province was similar to this, which is why an Islamist authoritarian republic is the baseline scenario. HTS focused on the basics of governance and the bread-and-butter legitimacy of delivering public services to the displaced population crammed into the province. The group avoided confrontation with great powers like the United States, Israel and, to an extent, Russia when possible. This strategy informed HTS's decision to allow Russian forces to steadily withdraw from Syria, rather than conducting operations against them, after the fall of the Assad government. It is this strategy that has enabled the Israelis to carry out incursions to deepen their buffer zone around the Golan Heights with little pushback from HTS. But it also assumes that HTS will remain the leading force in post-Assad Syria, and that HTS itself will not splinter or evolve into something new as history unfolds.
An emerging alternative scenario is that of an Islamist republic that seeks to serve not only as a Turkish client but as a Turkish springboard for further influence deeper into the Arab world. This would be a Syria that does not regain its sovereignty but which, through authoritarian Islamism, pulls Damascus closer to Ankara in the modern equivalent of a vilayet, in which Turkey, by and large, calls most of the shots for Syria as it continues to expand its influence throughout the region. This model would see Turkey become a notable political threat to its Arab neighbors in Lebanon and Jordan as Ankara boosts the influence of Islamists, as well as a strategic problem for Israel and a potential booster of Palestinian statehood. As Turkey seeks to achieve not only its near-abroad goals of preventing the emergence of a Kurdish state but also its wider ideological goals of expanding the Turkish political model throughout the region to help restore its status as a leading Muslim power, Syria would serve as a frontline for such a project. This could involve creating cadres of Arab politicians and influencers meant to alter political discourse throughout the region and advocate on behalf of Turkey. In more distant geopolitical scenarios, Syria could become a frontline for Turkish armed forces to conduct operations beyond Syria itself, particularly if regimes wobble or collapse in Iraq, Jordan or Lebanon.
There is another, currently unlikely, third scenario, in which HTS, seeking legitimacy through alternative means other than engagement with the rest of the world, returns to its radical Islamist roots and becomes a functional branch of al Qaeda once more. This scenario becomes more likely should HTS be spurned by Europe and the United States and remain deeply isolated and unable to rebuild itself. We do not see that happening in the near term, in part because the West is fearful that an isolated Syria will turn into this exact jihadist state as a result — or slip back into civil war in which a faction like Islamic State could emerge victorious. However, with the West increasingly divided and many governments focused on problems at home, it cannot be ruled out that populists in Washington or across Europe might argue that the sanctions regime should last until Syria has emerged as a fully-fledged democracy or reliable Western partner. Finally, another way in which Syria could turn into a jihadist state runs not through HTS but through another civil war, sparked perhaps by Turkish machinations in the country, Israeli influence campaigns or an unsuccessful transition process, which would produce a power vacuum large enough to allow the return of Islamic State as the ruler of most, or perhaps all, of the country.
Should Syria go down the path of radical Islamism, it will ensure new rounds of conflict, both among its competing factions and with its neighbors. The wounds of the civil war might not heal but rather be torn open again, with refugees and violence spilling over into the region. Syrians themselves are aware of this possible fate. But while they are the primary drivers of the country's destiny, they are not alone, and mistakes and missteps by other countries seeking to shift Syria in their strategic favor might yet produce this unlikely but highly impactful outcome.
