When Bashar al-Assad took a trip to Moscow in December 2024, he ended more than fifty years of family rule and left behind a country grappling with uncertainty. The end of Assad’s rule and family dynasty destabilized power structures and the essence of a country amongst the most unsteady in the Arab world. The collapse of Assad’s regime initiated a period of rapid political change and a restructuring of alliances. The far greater challenges than Assad’s regime were left for the new Syria to address. Syria’s new political framework, a new foreign relation model, and unresolved crises illustrate just how critical a juncture this is, how much Syria has changed, and how much Syria continues to change. Syria’s rapidly changing political climate and a major shift in foreign relations are signs of significant change in the country, but the world Syria is set to engage with is marked by a weak economy and a desperately insecure society. The world Syria is set to engage with will fundamentally alter the nation’s course for the foreseeable future.

The Assad regime’s downfall was something most observers did not expect. In November 2024, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) started a military offensive throughout the majority of the urban centers in Syria. It quickly became evident how the regime’s structures had totally decayed from within. Before the end of the month, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs fell, and in less than two more weeks, the capital, Damascus, fell. Assad’s family fled to Moscow, and with them, the Assad dynasty, which had ruled Syria since 1971, came to an end. The pace of events barely slowed. By January of the next year, the “Victory Conference” had scheduled and occurred the official end of the Assad regime, and placed Ahmed al-Sharaa as the First Acting President of Syria. In the months following the conference, Sharaa acted with great firmness and commitment to his declared policies, and as a result, the old order was simply and collectively abolished.

Replacing that order proved considerably harder. The interim cabinet drew heavily from former HTS members and figures tied to the HTS-backed Syrian Salvation Government, which prompted immediate questions about whether power had genuinely shifted or simply changed hands within the same network. Representation across Syria’s communities, Alawite, Druze, Kurdish, Christian, and Sunni, was written into the cabinet’s composition, but analysts remained skeptical; whether these appointments reflected real inclusion or served mainly as window dressing was a point of sustained debate (“BTI 2026 Syria Country Report”). International observers warned that the concentration of authority within HTS-affiliated circles posed a real threat to the transitional process (“The New Syria: Halting a Dangerous Drift”). A Constitutional Declaration signed in March 2025 established a five-year transitional framework, and by October 2025, limited indirect elections had taken place, though not yet across the whole country (“BTI 2026 Syria Country Report”). The government worked to project pluralism. Whether that projection carried substance was a different question entirely.

On the foreign policy front, Syria’s new leadership moved decisively to break from the country’s long isolation. Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia extended support almost immediately following the transition, providing regional backing that helped smooth Syria’s re-entry into international diplomacy (“The New Syria: Foreign Breakthrough, Domestic Impasse”). Relations with the United States shifted with unusual speed: the Trump administration lifted HTS’s terrorist designation in July 2025, and President Trump hosted al-Sharaa at the White House that November. A May 2025 meeting produced a US announcement of intent to lift decades-old economic sanctions (“The New Syria: Foreign Breakthrough, Domestic Impasse”). Regional analysts characterized 2025 as a watershed year for Syria’s international reintegration (“Syria’s Year of Astonishing Developments”). After years of pariah status, these developments amounted to something close to a full diplomatic reversal.

Relations with Russia and Iran were more complicated to navigate. Assad’s departure significantly weakened Moscow’s position in Syria, though Russian influence did not vanish entirely; al-Sharaa’s October 2025 visit to Moscow signaled an intent to redefine the relationship rather than break it, and under new arrangements, Russia retained access to its military installations at Tartus and Hmeimim, preserving a meaningful foothold in the Mediterranean (“External States and Syria’s Challenge”). With Iran, the rupture was considerably sharper. Al-Sharaa publicly denounced Tehran’s sectarian conduct in Syria, and Iran’s leverage over Damascus, once quite extensive, contracted sharply following Assad’s fall (“External States and Syria’s Challenge”). Syria’s new leadership made its position relatively clear: the country would no longer function as an arena for external power projection.

There was some positivity surrounding the economic situation, mostly as a result of the release of sanctions. There was still a long way to go and lots of challenges to face. The progressive removal of financial and energy sector sanctions that the US, UK, and EU placed on Syria during the course of 2025 was the start of a new era. There was no longer any sanctions on Syria’s central bank and Syria’s state-owned energy companies, and it appeared the Caesar Act would be removed in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act. Some sanctions remained in place for military goods, chemical weapons, and for persons associated with the Assad regime. The situation remained poor and the statistics confirmed it: GDP grew by only 1% in 2025, over 90% of Syrians lived in poverty, and the removal of electricity subsidies raised electricity prices to an unattainable level for most of the Syrian population (“A Year After Assad”).

The World Bank placed the cost of reconstruction at approximately $216 billion, a figure that does some justice to the actual scale of the country’s destruction, and the benefits of sanctions removal had not yet reached ordinary people on the ground. The gap between political progress and material reality remained, and remained large.

Political progress cannot be said to have addressed Syria’s significant security challenges, which showed no tendency to improve without assistance. The Islamic State continued to operate in multiple regions and threatened the ongoing transition (“Syria: Transition and U.S. Policy”). In the northeast, the SDF controlled much territory and resources, which culminated in a government-SDF integration agreement in January 2026, the implementation of which remains to be seen. Intra-communal conflict further complicated the situation. The fighting in Alawite-majority coastal regions in March 2025 and conflicts in the Druze-majority southern region in July 2025 killed thousands of people. Israeli military attacks within Syria worsened an already complicated and tense security scenario. Concerning the victims of displacement, 1.4 million refugees returned to Syria after December 2024, but 3.7 million refugees were still outside the country’s borders (“Syria: Transition and U.S. Policy”). This figure may be the most illustrative of the gap between potential political transition and genuine stabilization. These fissures did not go away with the regime.

If you compare it to the situation in Syria in late 2024, in some ways the changes have been dramatic: a government dismantled almost overnight, an entire new set of foreign alliances, and a nascent political order. However, the magnitude of what has been left unfinished is also clearly visible. A faltering economy, security threats in several forms, and the outstanding issue of genuine political participation eclipse the potential of the changes made. As history shows, political transformations are a long process. Removing the old order is, in most instances, the easiest part. Creating an order that is stable is the hard part.

Although the longer-term answers to this decade’s most pressing questions about international support for reconstruction in Syria’s war-torn areas and whether Syria’s economic and social transformations during 2024–2025 events can be leveraged for peace and sustained stability will be known in years and not months, the world changed for Syria in December 2024. Whether that change is ephemeral remains unanswered.

Works Cited

“BTI 2026 Syria Country Report.” BTI Project, 2026, https://bti-project.org/en/reports/country-report/SYR. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“External States and Syria’s Challenge of Reunification under Transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa.” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, 29 Oct. 2025, https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/2026-01/Belfer_External%20States%20and%20Syria%E2%80%99s%20Challenge%20of%20Reunification_5.3.pdf. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“The New Syria: Foreign Breakthrough, Domestic Impasse.” Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, 19 Aug. 2025, https://studies.aljazeera.net/en/policy-briefs/new-syria-foreign-breakthrough-domestic-impasse. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“The New Syria: Halting a Dangerous Drift.” Crisis Group, 28 Mar. 2025, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/east-mediterranean-mena/syria/b95-new-syria-halting-dangerous-drift. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“Syria after Assad: Consequences and Interim Authorities 2025.” House of Commons Library, Apr. 2025, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10161/. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“Syria’s Year of Astonishing Developments.” Arab Gulf States Institute, 9 Dec. 2025, https://agsi.org/analysis/syrias-year-of-astonishing-developments/. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“Syria: Transition and U.S. Policy.” Congress.gov, 26 Feb. 2026, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL33487. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“A Year After Assad: The Search for Syria’s Future.” European Council on Foreign Relations, 4 Mar. 2026, https://ecfr.eu/article/a-year-after-assad-the-search-for-syrias-future/. Accessed 3 May 2026.