The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 and the rise of a new political order under the leadership of Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly known as Abu Muhammad al-Joulani, the leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [HTS]) have fundamentally transformed Syria, shifting the focus from insurgency and regime survival to state-building and post-war consolidation. Having long supported the Syrian opposition and played a pivotal role in enabling the ascent of HTS, Turkey is now one of the main external backers of the emerging regime in Damascus. With this role comes a new kind of responsibility: after helping to bring about the collapse of the old order, Ankara now seeks to ensure that the new one can provide greater stability, functionality, and legitimacy. Yet the al-Sharaa regime’s early trajectory, particularly its failure to prevent violence against Alawi and Druze communities, raises serious questions about its capacity—or even willingness—to depart from the exclusionary and repressive practices of its predecessor.
Turkey’s Stakes and Leverage in Post-Assad Syria
Turkey’s interest in seeing the rapid consolidation of the new regime is driven by both pragmatic and political considerations. After years of investing in Syria’s opposition, Ankara is committed to see the emerging government in Damascus establish a functioning state that can restore basic services, stabilize the economy, and project authority across the country—tasks at which the Assad regime ultimately failed. A similar failure would not just erode the al-Sharaa regime’s legitimacy. It would also risk plunging Syria back into chaos, with immediate consequences for Turkey, including renewed instability along its border with Syria. Yet building a viable state apparatus requires far more than political will or local military dominance. It demands administrative expertise, inclusive institutions, international legitimacy, and above all, substantial financial resources—none of which Turkey can provide on its own. Aware of these limitations, Ankara has sought to bring Gulf actors into the process, hoping to complement its strategic and technical influence with the financial capacity of wealthy Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, while lobbying in Washington for the lifting of sanctions that had crippled the previous regime’s ability to function. Still, the gap between what is needed and what is currently being offered remains wide.
Ankara has sought to bring Gulf actors into the process, hoping to complement its strategic and technical influence with their financial capacity.
Considering its stake in the regime’s success, Turkey has assumed an outsized role in shaping its trajectory. Despite its limitations, Turkey remains an important external actor in post-Assad Syria, and its influence is exercised through a combination of material support, strategic coordination, and diplomatic facilitation. While it was Turkey’s backing that played a crucial role in the survival of HTS during its years as a non-state actor, the group’s transition into a national ruling authority has introduced new complexities. HTS was never a Turkish proxy in the strict sense, and now, as a governing regime, it cannot be expected to operate under Ankara’s direction. Nevertheless, it continues to rely on Turkey for core external functions. Ankara is an important intermediary for the al-Sharaa regime in international diplomacy and a key channel for external validation, particularly in its dealings with the United States. Notably, the current US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, also serves as the administration’s special envoy for Syria, effectively making Ankara a key node in Washington’s Syria policy. This arrangement grants Turkey privileged access to American decision-making and enhances its ability to shape the new regime’s international positioning.
Beyond the diplomatic realm, Turkey maintains significant leverage in Syria through its control of border crossings, its role in enabling cross-border trade, and its potential to provide both technical and material assistance to state-building efforts. While concrete cooperation on military or administrative restructuring remains limited, Ankara has pledged to assist in the formation and training of a future national army and to offer institutional expertise where needed. More recently, Turkish officials have expressed Ankara’s readiness to provide security support to the new Syrian authorities, following what Turkey described as a formal request from Damascus. Moreover, Ankara has said that the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army, which holds territory in northern Syria, should integrate into the national army under al-Sharaa. Yet as the new leadership in Damascus becomes entangled with other regional and international actors, including Gulf states and European powers, Turkey’s once-uncontested primacy is being diluted. Still, Ankara’s accumulated networks, institutional memory, and centrality in Syria-related diplomacy continue to give it outsized influence—though that influence operates through persuasion and access rather than control.
Authoritarian Continuities and the Centralization Trap
Although Syria’s new regime presents itself as a departure from the past, its early conduct suggests significant continuities with the exclusionary and repressive practices of the Assad era. While Ahmed al-Sharaa has abandoned his guerrilla persona and adopted all the trappings of a president, these changes have not translated into a meaningful transformation in how power is exercised. The attacks on Alawi communities in March 2025, which reportedly followed an initial ambush by former regime loyalists, and the recent escalation against the Druze in southern Syria in July 2025, point to a governing logic that remains sectarian and coercive. Even when the regime has not been the initial instigator of violence, its response has consistently favored repression over reconciliation, reinforcing perceptions of exclusion and authoritarianism. Rather than building a state capable of managing diversity, the new regime appears to be reproducing a vision of authority grounded in dominance and ideological conformity.
These actions not only undermine the regime’s claims to legitimacy but also complicate Turkey’s efforts to frame it as a stabilizing alternative. The expectation that the new order would distinguish itself through more inclusive governance is proving increasingly difficult to sustain. Yet Ankara’s conspicuous silence in response to these incidents reflects not just political calculation or neglect, but also a deeper strategic vision for postwar Syria. Central to that vision is the rapid formation of a strong, centralized state—one that can reassert control over the entire national territory and eliminate competing sources of authority. Concepts such as federalism or local autonomy, which Turkish political culture has long viewed with suspicion due to Turkey’s Kurdish issue, have no place in Ankara’s strategic outlook. Although Turkey has recently initiated a cautious domestic dialogue around the Kurdish question, the prospect of Kurdish groups’ disarmament in Turkey has not yet translated into a change in its approach to Syria, where Ankara continues to favor centralization over autonomy or federal arrangements. In this sense, Turkey’s silence is not just a matter of politics, but also an extension of a state-building model that privileges control over inclusion.
Yet this drive for centralization faces a fundamental paradox. The very groups that Ankara proposes should integrate into al-Sharaa’s regime are reluctant to cede arms or to relinquish their claims to local power without credible guarantees from functioning, inclusive institutions. In the current Syrian environment of state fragility, efforts to enforce a monopoly on violence have instead fostered fragmented, localized, and often sectarian conflict. The recent massacres are symptoms of this vacuum: they are not aberrations, but indicators of a structural security dilemma in which violence both facilitates and obstructs state-building. Turkey’s inability to meaningfully address or steer this dynamic reveals the limits of its centralizing approach.
The Limits of Moderation: Between Tactical Adjustment and Structural Continuity
Yet the discourse of “moderation” surrounding HTS does little to address these structural pathologies. The concept of moderating HTS has always been less about internal reform than external reassurance. During the group’s time as the de facto authority in Syria’s northwestern governorate of Idlib, moderation primarily meant transforming the group from a transnational jihadist movement into a localized actor—one that renounced global jihadist ambitions, posed no direct threat to external powers, and could provide some degree of stability in the zones under its control. This was less an ideological transformation than a strategic recalibration. A useful shorthand might be to describe this shift as a move from an al-Qaeda-style jihadism to a Taliban-style approach to governance: inward-looking, pragmatic, and focused on territorial consolidation, albeit without the same degree of ideological rigidity. In Idlib, however, HTS continued to enforce religious orthodoxy, suppress dissent, and restrict pluralism, though it made nominal gestures toward inclusive governance by establishing the Salvation Government—staffed with semi-technocrats and overseen by a Shura Council that it claimed represented broad segments of Idlib’s population. In practice, however, key positions remained in the hands of figures closely aligned with HTS, and minority representation was absent. This continues today in Damascus.
With the fall of the Assad regime and the group’s assumption of national power, the same logic has been extended to the foreign policy realm. Moderation now meant disengagement from the “Axis of Resistance,” rapprochement with the West and the Gulf, and most crucially, a clear break from anti-Israel positions. It is no coincidence that the regime’s outreach to Israel—and discussions of Syria’s eventual inclusion in the Abraham Accords—has been the centerpiece of its international rebranding. But this process has been externally oriented. Internally, the new regime continues to rely on authoritarian methods to impose order, and its moderation lacks any commitment to political inclusion or ideological pluralism. The regime’s repression is not always systematic, and so far has not involved mass detentions for dissent. But it relies on unofficial actors—so-called uncontrolled groups that are loosely affiliated with the authorities—to carry out coercion and intimidation under a veil of deniability.
Turkey’s aims were to stabilize its borderlands and to avoid international isolation by promoting a “manageable” actor in Syria.
Turkey’s role in HTS’s semi-evolution reflects both intent and limitation. Ankara never envisioned the group’s moderation as a path toward democratization or societal reconciliation. Rather, its aims were to stabilize its borderlands and to avoid international isolation by promoting a “manageable” actor in Syria. Working with HTS enabled Ankara to secure cooperation in limiting jihadist spillover and facilitated governance in Turkish-influenced zones, and later ensured that the new regime in Damascus would not threaten Turkish strategic interests. In this framework, moderation became synonymous with centralization, pragmatism, and stability—but not with power-sharing or minority inclusion. It was a strategy of pragmatic containment, not ideological transformation. As such, it has failed to prevent the emergence of a regime that replicates many of the exclusionary and repressive features of its predecessor.
The costs of this approach are now becoming visible. The coercive nature of the new regime’s consolidation strategy has undermined its domestic legitimacy and, in doing so, has opened the door to growing external intervention. By attempting to assert centralized control through violence, particularly against Alawi and Druze communities, HTS has invited outside actors to play a more assertive role in shaping postwar Syria’s political landscape. Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent Israeli response to the clashes in al-Suwayda, which Tel Aviv used as an opportunity to project influence and to press for Druze autonomy, a concession that HTS has long resisted. In this sense, repression has not consolidated sovereignty but diluted it.
Turkey’s ability to encourage a more inclusive political model in Syria is itself constrained by domestic realities. Because its own political system has moved increasingly away from pluralism—a shift marked by the erosion of institutional checks and balances, by the marginalization of dissent, and by the consolidation of executive power—Ankara is poorly positioned to serve as a credible advocate for pluralistic governance abroad. The export of a centralized and security-driven model may align with Turkey’s internal political instincts, but it does little to resolve the underlying fractures of postwar Syria. In this sense, Turkey’s vision for Syria mirrors its own trajectory: prioritizing order over representation, stability over negotiation, and uniformity over diversity.
Conclusion: Beyond Tactical Moderation
If the recent violence in Syria is to remain the exception rather than symptoms of a deeper crisis, moderation must evolve from a foreign policy performance into an internal governing principle. This requires a shift not only within the regime but also on the part of its external interlocutors. Western actors—who have so far viewed HTS’s transformation as a strategic gain, especially in light of its disengagement from the Axis of Resistance and its growing openness to normalization with Israel—must recognize that authoritarian stability is neither sustainable nor benign. To date, there has been little appetite to press the regime on issues of inclusion or minority rights. Incidents like the coastal massacres or the Suwayda assault are treated as unfortunate lapses, rather than as evidence of structural exclusion. US officials, including Special Envoy Barrack, have instead reiterated their aversion to regional federalism in Syria, often echoing Ankara’s centralist discourse.
Such policies, which are motivated in part by Turkey’s hostility to Kurdish autonomy at home, undermine the very stability that they seek to produce. A regime that seeks unity through coercion without accommodating Syria’s deeply fragmented social fabric, is more likely to generate resistance than loyalty. If external actors genuinely wish to see a functional post-conflict order emerge in Syria, they must go beyond rewarding tactical moderation and begin conditioning political recognition and support on tangible steps toward pluralism and inclusion, with tools like power-sharing and local autonomy placed on the table as legitimate options rather than dismissed out of hand. These steps are necessary not just for humanitarian reasons—though those remain urgent—but also for the sake of building a Syrian state that can endure.
The views expressed in this publication are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of Arab Center Washington DC, its staff, or its Board of Directors.
Featured image credit: X/Türkiye Directorate of Communications
