Standing on the streets of Damascus, surrounded by dozens of angry workers who had just been laid off from the Ministry of Health, Mahmoud Issa felt both furious, and freer than he had in decades.
“This is injustice!” the 61-year-old lawyer and human-rights activist shouted above the din of protesters. “The new government has an agenda! They want to build a regime, not to build a free country!”
There was indeed lots to be angry about that chilly Sunday morning. Hundreds of health workers had just found out they had lost their jobs, along with their meagre civil service pay of roughly $30 a month, via a Facebook post.
Many of them were members of the Alawite religious minority, leading to suspicions that Syria’s new government – which is dominated by the veterans of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Sunni extremist militia that swept to power after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime three months ago – was looking to punish Mr. al-Assad’s co-religionists.
But, for the first time in decades, Syrians were standing on the street and venting their anger at the government without facing immediate reprisals from those in power.
To Mr. Issa, who spent 14 years in jail for his opposition to the Assad regime, that was progress.
The question hanging over Syria’s future is whether the forward momentum can continue under Ahmed al-Sharaa, the country’s interim president – or whether such moments will be remembered as a brief flicker of hope before a new darkness fell over the country.
“We want to be a complete democracy, but wishes are wishes. We have walked half of the way, and the next half is not easy. There are many obstacles,” Mr. Issa said after the protest at the Health Ministry.
“But this is better than before. We can walk on the streets and speak freely.”
Mr. Issa’s optimism, with all its caveats, would not last the week. Nor would the relative peace.
It was surreal for me to enter Syria on Feb. 28, less than three months after the fall of Mr. al-Assad’s Baathist regime, which had blacklisted me back in 2007 for my reporting. It was supposed to be a lifetime ban. “They say you are so anti-regime,” reads one e-mail I received from my fixer in 2016, when I applied to visit wartime Damascus.
This time, I entered Syria with approval from the new government’s Ministry of Information. Openness to foreign media is yet another way Mr. al-Sharaa’s government is trying to show that it’s as different as possible from what came before.
Some things will take longer to change. The electricity cut out in the passport office at the Syria-Lebanon border as the guard pondered my e-mailed permission to enter the country. Relieved chuckles filled the room a few moments later as diesel-burning generators kicked in, and the lights and computers came back on. Four hours a day of electricity is now the norm, even in Damascus.
The first thing I saw after my taxi resumed its journey was a large billboard with the message “Welcome to Syria!” written against the background of the country’s new green-white-and-black flag. Then came an arch over the road still bearing a giant and partly torn photograph of Mr. al-Assad.
To travel the road to Damascus in early 2025 is to move between a country that no longer exists and one still being violently born. We passed more vandalized billboards and stone reliefs of Mr. al-Assad and his equally loathed father and predecessor Hafez. Then came an abandoned military checkpoint painted half in the colours of the new flag, while the other half still bore the black-red-white banner of the old regime. We drove by several roadside tables selling plastic jugs of gasoline, the most important good in a country desperate for fuel to keep its cars moving and generators running.
A family of four whizzed past on a single motorcycle, the father driving, one child in the middle, and the mother at the back, cradling an infant in one of her hands while clutching onto the bike with the other. It felt like a metaphor for a whole country that’s just hanging on, hoping something better – and safer – is somewhere ahead.
Gasoline vendors have a precious resource in a war-scarred, impoverished country where international sanctions still hamper much of the economy.
My first stop in Damascus was SyriaTel, one of the country’s main mobile phone providers, and a place where the old autocracy still lingers. A thumbprint, and another copy of my passport, were required just to buy a SIM card, and access to the country’s feeble 3G mobile internet. The bill, 280,000 Syrian pounds – about $30 – was paid with a brick of 5,000-pound notes, each note bearing an image of a soldier saluting the old flag.
No credit cards are accepted, as all transactions with Syrian banks are barred by the international sanctions that have been in place since Mr. al-Assad ordered a crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2011. That violence spiralled into a 13-year civil war that killed more than 600,000 people before the HTS takeover of Damascus on Dec. 8. More than 100,000 others are still officially considered missing.
Unwinding the layers of sanctions is the most pressing task facing Syria’s new rulers. Canada, the United States and the European Union placed sanctions on the Assad regime and almost anything connected with it shortly after the outbreak of the civil war. Those measures were later escalated as part of the West’s limp response to the former regime’s repeated use of chemical weapons against rebel-held areas of the country.
In addition, Syria has been designated by the U.S. as a state sponsor of terrorism since 1979, because of the former regime’s links with both Iran and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Complicating things even further is the United Nations designation of HTS as a “terrorist” group. Mr. al-Sharaa is personally sanctioned as the group’s former leader.
While Canada and the EU have temporarily suspended some sanctions since the fall of Mr. al-Assad, the U.S. measures remain in place – making it difficult for even humanitarian aid to arrive as international organizations are wary of falling afoul of U.S. law. Two months after his return to the White House, nobody yet knows what Donald Trump’s Syria policy will be – other than his stated desire to bring home the estimated 2,000 U.S. soldiers, most of whom are stationed in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in the east of the country.
Meanwhile, the economy remains in free fall. A February report by the United Nations Development Program estimated that 90 per cent of the country was living below the poverty line. An injection of nearly US$1-trillion is needed just to rebuild Syria’s shattered cities and restore its economy to its barely functional prewar state.
Canada's embassy in Damascus is deserted. For Syrians who need consular help, Beirut is the next closest place to get it.
Canada’s policy toward the new Syria is also in flux. While Ottawa announced on March 12 that it was pausing some sanctions on transactions for democracy, stability and humanitarian assistance, it has yet to fully embrace the new government.
A farewell tour of the Middle East by former prime minister Justin Trudeau – which Syrian and Canadian sources say was supposed to culminate with a visit to Damascus – was cancelled at the last minute without explanation.
The Globe is not naming the sources because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
And while Stefanie McCollum, Canada’s ambassador to Lebanon, has been nominated to concurrently serve as the country’s first ambassador to Syria since 2012, the empty Canadian embassy in Damascus stands as a silent monument to a frozen relationship.
A sign bolted to the main gate tells visitors that the embassy is closed “until further notice” and directs visitors to contact the Canadian mission in Beirut for assistance. The sign is punctured with half a dozen bullets.
Tamara Abo Alwan wasn’t sure how to feel as Mr. al-Assad fled and HTS fighters entered Damascus on Dec. 8. Ms. Abo Alwan, a 26-year-old dancer, DJ and graffiti artist, had long strained against the constraints that the Assad regime had placed on the creative community.
“Before the fall of the government, every time I wanted to paint a mural, they would tell me: ‘No, you can’t do this. It’s not related to Bashar. Only things related to the Ba’ath Party were allowed,’ ” she said.
But she was hardly relieved when the HTS fighters took over the city. “I was scared,” she says matter-of-factly. “We thought, ‘who are these jihadi people taking over?’ ” (The Assad regime was avowedly secular, and violently suppressed Islamist groups in the decades before the civil war started.)
She wasn’t alone. Ms. Abo Alwan met with The Globe on March 1 – the first full day of Ramadan – at Ahweh Mazbuta, a famously liberal café that has long been one of the few safe spaces for discussing politics in Syria. Despite the month-long religious fast, the café was serving coffee and water, and the air was thick with cigarette smoke. But, as rumours flew about the city that HTS would shut down any establishments violating the fast, the outside sitting area was closed, and the café’s shutters were drawn so passersby could not see what was happening inside.
Ramadan passed without the worst fears of Syria’s liberals – as well as its substantial Christian, Alawite and Druze minorities – being realized, but the trend line remains worrying. In January, Ms. Abo Alwan was having a night out with friends at the Join Social Club in Damascus when masked gunmen entered and demanded its closing, saying neighbours had complained that men and women – some with tattoos and piercings – had been seen dancing together inside.
The club, which hosted everything from alternative music shows to trivia nights, was forced to shut down, and its owners fled to Lebanon after receiving death threats. When Ms. Abo Alwan tried to complain to the new authorities about what had happened to Join Social Club, she was told that she should be careful. “They told me we’re in an unstable state right now, so today a person has to be very careful with whom they hang out and what they do.”
The café where Ms. Abo Alwan met The Globe is a relatively safe place to talk politics, but that's not the case everywhere in Syria now.
There are some positives. Ms. Abo Alwan can now paint what she wants on the streets of Damascus. Her latest project is a giant mural just around the corner from Ahweh Mazbuta that features three people she sees as heroes of the revolution: May Skaf, a feminist activist who was one of the early leaders of uprising against Mr. al-Assad, Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a goalkeeper on Syria’s national soccer team who joined an Islamist rebel faction and was killed in 2019, and Hamza al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old boy who was tortured to death by the regime in 2011.
She said that when the new authorities saw what she was doing, they said they were pleased that she was honouring Mr. al-Sarout, and let her carry on.
But such moments of understanding have been overshadowed by darker encounters. After our interview, Ms. Abo Alwan invited me to meet her sister, who had written for the official SANA newswire under the Assad regime. Since Dec. 8, her sister had been receiving rape and death threats because of her previous job, and wanted to tell her side of the story.
As my translator and I drove toward the sisters’ home in Damascus on the evening of March 6, gunfire crackled somewhere nearby. Soon, trucks of government fighters were screeching through the streets of the capital.
“They’re saying it’s halal to kill us all, anyone who talks against Jolani,” Ms. Abo Alwan said, using Mr. al-Sharaa’s nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. It was impossible to meet, so we were discussing the events via a series of voice messages.
She was quoting from things she was reading on social media pages affiliated with HTS. “They’re saying especially that they’re going to assassinate the activists and the journalists.”
While Tamara and her sister remained safe, the gunfire that night heralded four days of the worst bloodshed Syria had seen since Mr. al-Assad’s ouster.
After days of smaller clashes, the fighting began in earnest earlier on March 6 with an ambush in the coastal Latakia region. Sixteen of the new government’s soldiers were killed in the attack, which was carried out by fighters from the former regime. Many Syrians immediately saw the incident through a sectarian lens.
Latakia is one of two governorates (along with neighbouring Tartus) where Alawites – followers of an offshoot of Shia Islam – are the majority. Latakia is also the ancestral homeland of the Assad dynasty. Syria’s estimated three million Alawites, who made up about 10 per cent of the country’s prewar population, were seen as having been the main beneficiaries of five decades of Assad family rule.
Decades of pent-up rage spilled over as gunmen from the Sunni majority, some of them from the official government army, others from armed groups loosely affiliated with HTS, began pouring into Latakia and Tartus. Gruesome videos soon emerged showing Alawite men being dragged from their homes and executed. In at least one case, a large group of perhaps two dozen men was forced to crawl on the road and bark like dogs. Some of the same men, identifiable by the clothes they were wearing, could later be seen in a pile of corpses photographed in an unfinished home.
By the time the fighting calmed four days later, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, was estimating that 1,500 people had been killed, a number the group has since revised up to 2,000 as smaller scale incidents have continued. More than three-quarters of the dead, SOHR says, were civilians who had been executed based on their sectarian affiliation.
“The children of Idlib were raised in tents and raised to hate the regime as an Alawite regime, rather than just an evil regime,” said Abu Suleiman, a 48-year-old Alawite man I met amidst the violence, referring to HTS’s rapid growth among internally displaced persons. Youths in particular were forced to seek protection in the northwestern region of Idlib while it was under the control of HTS and Mr. al-Sharaa during the civil war. “They’ve been raised on ideas of sectarian revenge.”
The Alawite coastline isn’t Syria’s only sectarian faultline either. A few days before the killing started in Latakia, I visited Jaramana – a largely Druze suburb of Damascus – to find the main road to the capital blocked off by a cement barricade guarded by perhaps two dozen masked fighters. At least one man, wearing a black ski mask, had a rocket-propelled grenade on his shoulder. The gunmen were vowing to keep HTS and the new government out of the country’s Druze areas.
As the violence surged on the coast after March 6, men with automatic rifles began patrolling the streets outside my hotel in the Christian Quarter of the historic Old City of Damascus. The gunmen rode on motorbikes in slow, protective loops around cobblestoned streets that were lined with both ancient churches and some of the few bars still serving alcohol in Mr. al-Sharaa’s Syria.
Sealed off from the violence outside, the new Syria is being hastily glued together in the lobby of the capital’s “Four Seasons” hotel – a limestone tower in the New City of Damascus that still bears the name and look of the Toronto-based brand, despite having been evicted from the chain six years ago as its local owner fell afoul of sanctions.
One afternoon, as I sat on a cream-coloured couch in the hotel’s elegant tearoom waiting for an interviewee, I spotted a former trade minister from Mr. al-Assad’s regime, introducing himself to – and reinventing himself for – the new powers-that-be.
At another table sat Bahia al-Mardini, an anti-Assad journalist whom I had met in London while she was living there in exile during the war. She was now back in Syria, and serving as one of two women on a seven-person committee drafting the country’s interim constitution, which is supposed to remain in place for the next five years.
“I hope that it will contain both men’s and women’s voices. I’m working for this,” she said on March 11. Two days later, a draft of the interim constitution was released to widespread criticism that it grounds the country’s legal system in Islamic sharia law, while also concentrating too much power in the hands of Mr. al-Sharaa.
Still, Ms. Mardini told me that moderates like her didn’t need to fear Mr. al-Sharaa, recounting how she had met the interim president twice during the drafting process and had felt no pressure to change her behaviour or wear a hijab. “He’s a clever man. Pragmatic,” she said, sounding as though she were trying to assure herself too. “The biggest problem in Syria is that there are a lot of rumours right now.”
This Damascus hotel, a ‘Four Seasons’ in name only, is sometimes a hangout for influential people in Syria’s new order.Yamam al Shaar/Reuters
Finally, my interviewee – and the star of the Four Seasons scene – arrived, shaking hands at every table as he crossed the tearoom. Moussa al-Omar is a 43-year former presenter for al-Hiwar, a London-based Islamic television station that has courted controversy in Britain by giving a platform to figures from Hamas and other extremist groups.
Today, he is seen as a key member of Mr. al-Sharaa’s inner circle, though he holds no official capacity. When asked how he came to be consigliere to the interim president of Syria, Mr. al-Omar recounted how during the civil war, he had travelled twice to interview Mr. al-Sharaa in Idlib, the region of northwestern Syria that was governed by HTS for seven years – with Turkish protection and assistance – before the group’s sudden takeover of Damascus.
The interviews were intended for a video obituary of Mr. al-Sharaa that was never needed. Instead, the TV presenter and the jihadi became friends. They went for a drive around Idlib the first time they met, stopping for ice cream, then dinner. By the end of the day, Mr. al-Omar found himself impressed with the “moderate, smart and honest” Mr. al-Sharaa.
After his second visit, Mr. al-Omar became the chief image-maker for HTS. “I was able to alter the way they spoke, the way they were seen,” he said, smiling at his accomplishment. “I was sure that this was the only force that could bring down Bashar al-Assad, in spite of their radicalism.”
But, I asked him, could a re-branded HTS really govern all of Syria? How could Mr. al-Sharaa convince the country’s nervous minorities that he would guard their interests, as well as those of his conservative Sunni Muslim base?
“The current administration is spending 10 times more effort on the minorities than on the majority,” Mr. al-Moussa replied, his wide smile receding with seeming irritation at the question. “Because we know that any shortcomings regarding minorities means international punishment and sanctions.”
The clashes that ignited this car near Jableh, Latakia Governate, have left friends and foes of the new government questioning what will come next.Omar Haj Kadour/AFP via Getty Images
The bloodshed on the coast, he acknowledged, had dealt a setback to the effort to get the sanctions lifted. A March 9 statement by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio referred to pro-government forces as “radical Islamist terrorists” and said the “United States stands with Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities, including its Christian, Druze, Alawite, and Kurdish communities.” Precisely the opposite of how the new government frames the events.
Mr. al-Omar alleges the violence was instigated by remnants of Mr. al-Assad’s regime, working at the direction of their old patron, Iran. And while he acknowledged that “mistakes” were made by pro-government forces during the crackdown that followed, he said that most of those had occurred during the first hours when the official army was still mustering its forces to go into Latakia. Angry locals, beyond the government’s control, got there first.
“Everyone was taking their gun and going to coast. And everyone who went to the coast had an issue with Bashar al-Assad. He either killed their brother, their father, their son. They all went to the coast to avenge their families.”
The violence, he contended, could perversely end up having a positive effect by helping to unite Syria. He pointed to a March 10 deal that Mr. al-Sharaa signed with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that control eastern Syria. Under the terms of the deal, the SDF agreed to integrate all of its institutions with those of the state by the end of 2025, concluding more than a decade of division. A day later, Mr. al-Sharaa signed a similar pact with a major Druze faction.
Before the violence, Mr. al-Omar said, the Kurds and the Druze had believed that Mr. al-Sharaa’s grip on power was weak. “Once they saw what happened on the coast, they understood that the Syrian army and government is strong.”
The “major part” of the fighting was now over, Mr. al-Omar told me, though some ex-regime fighters were still at large. He vowed that they would be found.
“Using helicopters and drones, we are going to kill them until the last man standing,” he said, leaning closer to me on the cream couch. “The last armed man,” he added after a pause.
Among those killed in the violence was Nizar Essa, a cousin of Mahmoud Issa, the veteran human-rights activist I had met at the Health Ministry protest. Nizar’s two sons, Zeen and Ahmed, were also dragged from their homes and executed by Sunni militiamen.
For Mr. Issa, it was incomprehensible. He and his family had suffered for decades under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad – his own brother Yousef, a communist activist, was beaten to death by regime thugs in 1988, and Mr. Issa himself had been repeatedly jailed for his pro-democracy writings – and now the family was being targeted again.
“I spent all my life fighting to live freely, and for the Syrian people to be free,” Mr. Issa said. But rather than seeing them as heroes of the revolution, the supporters of the new government perceived Mr. Issa and his family only as Alawites.
Before the violence, Mr. Issa had told me that he sympathized with the position Mr. al-Sharaa and his government found themselves in. The gap between the Syrian people’s expectations of better postwar lives and the country’s economic reality was so vast that any government would struggle, he said.
Mr. Issa also worried – even before the violence on the coast – that if Syrians didn’t see Bashar al-Assad and other key regime figures brought to justice, they would seek vengeance themselves. Mr. al-Assad remains in Russia, under the protection of President Vladimir Putin, and Mr. Issa’s worst fears now seem to be coming to pass.
“I want to be optimistic, I have to be optimistic,” Mr. Issa said, recalling the hope he had expressed when we first met. But so much had happened since then. Syria, he now worried, was now sliding into a new phase of civil war – one he feared would permanently split the country.
“Everything now is out of hand. Everything is in danger,” he told me as I prepared to leave Damascus, two weeks after our first conversation. “Because no one cares for peace.”
Mr. Issa, the lawyer and human-rights activist, worries that the free Syria he fought for will not be as peaceful and accepting as he hoped for. But 'I want to be optimistic, I have to be optimistic.'