Syria’s Post-Assad Pulse Check

In December 2024, forces led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham defeated Assad regime forces, leading to the regime’s collapse and raising hopes for an end to Syria’s brutal civil war. Since then, President Ahmed al Sharaa has impressed many Syrians and foreign observers with his pragmatism and ability to stabilize the country. However, the path to peace has not been smooth. Many minority groups in the country feared a Sunni leader with a jihadist background, and the Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces were reluctant to surrender their hard-won autonomy. In addition to managing domestic challenges, al Sharaa has had to manage relations with neighboring states and gain support from global leaders. The government also inherited a devastated economy, though the lifting of some foreign sanctions might help with recovery.Now that the government in Damascus has had more than one year to stabilize the country and demonstrate its approach toward governance, we asked five experts to assess how the government is coping with key challenges.Read more below.Alexander McKeever Author of the Substack newsletter “This Week in Northern Syria”One of the biggest challenges facing the Damascus government is establishing sovereignty over all of Syria. Most vital has been the issue of the Syrian Democratic Forces, which at the beginning of 2026 still controlled a quarter of the country and many of its gas and oil fields. During 2025, the two sides engaged in U.S.-facilitated integration negotiations, but neither side proved willing to compromise on a core dispute over centralization versus federalization. Last month, Damascus turned to force to break the deadlock, launching limited offensives and stoking mass defections of disaffected Arabs from the Syrian Democratic Forces’ ranks, while successfully leveraging its burgeoning relationship with the United States to end the Syrian Democratic Forces’ control of Islamic State prisoner file. The Syrian Democratic