DAMASCUS — The U.S. is plunging deeper into a geopolitical and sectarian maelstrom in Syria under the leadership of a president who six years ago tried to pull America out of the country, as part of Washington’s effort to reshape the Middle East.
President Donald Trump met with Syria’s interim president, Ahmad ash-Sharaa, behind closed doors in the White House on Monday. The historic meeting between a former Al Qaeda militant and America’s chief executive was aimed at resetting relations between the United States and a long-time adversary.
“We want to see Syria become a country that’s very successful, and I think this leader can do it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office after the meeting. “I really do. I think this leader can do it. And people said he’s had a rough past. We have all had rough pasts.”
Trump has his own rough past with Syria. In 2019, he ordered the U.S. to end its military operations there, amid a flurry of resignations and a public outcry that Washington was abandoning its allies, Kurdish-led rebels who were instrumental in fighting the Islamic State.
“The United States was supposed to be in Syria for 30 days, that was many years ago. We stayed and got deeper and deeper into battle with no aim in sight,” Trump said at the time. He later reversed course, saying the U.S. was staying “just for the oil.”
American forces are still in Syria.
In his second term, Trump has made reshaping the Middle East a central theme of his foreign policy. The meeting with ash-Sharaa on Monday was the result of energetic diplomacy by the U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack, who also serves as the president’s special envoy to Syria.
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Barrack, a former private equity real estate investor, is the grandson of Lebanese Christians who emigrated to America when their homeland was still part of the Ottoman Empire. He has spoken admiringly about the multiculturalism that he views as the Ottoman heritage, and believes the key to stability in the Middle East is getting Turkey, Israel, and the Gulf States on the same page to assist with reintegrating Syria into the global economy.
Ash-Sharaa is overseeing a revolutionary political and social transformation of Syria, after a 13-year civil war that toppled Bashar al-Assad, ending nearly 50 years of authoritarian rule. Under a temporary constitution adopted in March, he will lead a transitional government until 2030.
He desperately needs international support to secure an estimated $216 billion needed to rebuild — and his visit to Washington was partly to convince Trump to lift residual sanctions aimed at the Assad regime, which devastated Syria’s economy. The U.S., in turn, hopes to stabilize the country, denying the Islamic State a safe-haven there and minimizing Iran’s influence — thereby weakening its proxies, especially Hezbollah.
In the wake of the meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the U.S. was lifting “sanctions in order to support Syria’s efforts to rebuild its economy, restore ties with foreign partners, and foster prosperity and peace.”
The scope of devastation from the country’s civil war is difficult to overstate. In almost every city on the road from Damascus to Aleppo, the scars of war are everywhere. Entire neighborhoods have been reduced to rubble, with survivors eking out a living and often rebuilding by hand.
In a recent tour of the war-torn country, Rolling Stone met with an array of Syrians from across the country’s sectarian and social divides.
On the surface, much of the country seems relaxed, with relatively few checkpoints and security forces primarily posted around government buildings. But the recurring theme is mistrust and doubt. The new government is dominated by Sunnis — a demographic that includes about three out of every four Syrians. Many members of minority religious and ethnic groups remain skeptical about the interim government, viewing it as a front for Islamic extremists hoping to institute sharia law.
Sectarian massacres after the Assad regime’s collapse are casting a long shadow, with some convinced the incidents reveal the true face of ash-Sharaa’s government.
“They are terrorists, and they want to exterminate any sect other than Sunni,” a schoolteacher in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana tells Rolling Stone. He is Druze, a minority group in Syria, and asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. “When they meet with you [America], they agree to all your demands and pretend they are innocent lambs. But in reality, they do the exact opposite of what they claim.”
Such views are echoed by others across the country.
“Frankly, when we heard the regime was toppled, we were so happy. We suffered a lot in the final years of the Assad regime. Too much,” says George, a Syrian Christian who lives in a small village of mixed religious sects in the mountains of Latakia province. His last name and village are being withheld, for his own security. “But those who rule now, the radicals — we are scared of them. We don’t want radical Muslims to rule.”
“We welcome moderate Muslims. We wish moderate and open people to rule the country. We saw what those radicals did in many areas, whether in churches, or…” George says, trailing off with a shrug. “If we get rid of them, we can live a happy life.”
Rolling Stone met with a group of representatives from the interim government’s media department under condition that they not be named. They dispute the characterization that they are radicals, saying that intentional disinformation was exacerbating post-regime violence, and that domestic and foreign actors Syria are capitalizing on divisions — and are especially focused on inflaming tensions with the Druze.
“We welcome everyone, even if they are Druze. … Our goal is for Syria to be for all the components of society, and to be supporters of all sects,” one representative said. “The Syrian government does not want to kill anyone, whether they are from Sweida or not. We want to ensure the safety of the people.”
Trump’s engagement with ash-Sharaa is, in part, meant to assuage fears about the rebel leader’s well-documented past as an Islamic extremist. Ash-Sharaa, a Syrian who fought with Al Qaeda against the U.S. in Iraq, was at one point detained and imprisoned by occupation forces. When the civil war in Syria erupted in 2011, ash-Sharaa — under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — was sent to establish an Al Qaeda presence. He later had a falling out with the man who sent him: Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of the Islamic State.
It is fitting, if not ironic, that counterterrorism is now Washington’s primary lever for engaging with ash-Sharaa and unifying the many competing factions and foreign powers involved in Syria. One of the goals of the meeting on Monday was to get Syria to agree to join the multinational coalition to defeat the Islamic State.
Last week, Reuters reported that the U.S. plans to deploy its military to an airbase south of Damascus. The U.S. already maintains a key outpost at At-Tanf, which sits at a tri-border crossing between Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, commanding the highway from Baghdad to Damascus. It also provides a lifeline to oil fields in southern Syria. U.S. forces are also active in northeastern Syria, where they work with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF.
For more than a decade, the justification for American boots on the ground in Syria has been the Islamic State. Combatting the group now provides a vehicle for cooperation with Syria’s interim government. On July 25, U.S. and Syrian forces conducted a raid targeting an Islamic State leader, Dhiya Zawba Muslih al-Hardan, in Al-Bab, near Aleppo. The raid killed al-Hardan and his two sons. Separate raids carried out in August and September killed other Islamic State leaders, but it was unclear whether the Syrian interim government assisted in those operations.
Whether or not the Islamic State can reconstitute as a global threat, it remains deadly inside Syria. The group has claimed dozens of attacks in SDF-controlled territory this year. In May, it also said it carried out a suicide attack in southeastern Syria that killed five interim government soldiers.
In June, a suicide attack on a Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus killed 25 and injured 63. Although an Islamist rebel splinter group established in February claimed responsibility, interim authorities allege the Islamic State was responsible.
The interim government is keen to show it takes the issue seriously, and to crack the whip on former rebels who may be turning to extremism. On Saturday, ahead of ash-Sharaa’s visit with Trump, it carried out a sweeping series of counterterror raids that resulted in 71 arrests. SDF officials, too, are eager to highlight their role fighting what they say is a resurgent Islamic State.
If the U.S. does expand its military presence in Syria — especially near Damascus — it will insert itself into a hornet’s nest of mistrust and animosity. While terror attacks and assassinations of former regime officials continue — often with impunity — they are not the primary engine of instability.
The violence that could derail ash-Sharaa’s efforts to unify the country — and unravel America’s strategy — is sectarian.
In the wake of the Assad regime’s collapse, clashes in Alawite enclaves along the Mediterranean coast resulted in the massacre of thousands. An attack on interim government forces in March by regime holdouts in Latakia Governorate — the traditional enclave of the Alawite minority group to which the Assad family belonged — turned into a bloodletting that claimed the lives of as many as 1,500 people.
“Most of the people left when this attack started. People left the villages, they left their houses, and went to the mountains, to the forests, and ran away — to escape the killing that was happening,” says Mayada, a lawyer from Tartus who considers herself a secular moderate. She is Alawite, and her surname is being withheld for her safety. “You say that the war is over? In my opinion, no, it is not. It has become worse.”
Multiple people interviewed by Rolling Stone in and around the coastal cities of Latakia and Tartus described the killing of family members and neighbors in March, often showing pictures and pointing out bullet holes or other signs of violence.
“Those who were in the streets were killed,” one Alawite man in Latakia, who asked not to be identified for his own safety, told Rolling Stone. “I found my uncle shot near the university. I put him in a car and rushed him to the hospital.”
The belief among many in the neighborhoods where massacres took place is that educated professionals and politically active Alawites were systematically hunted down and slaughtered.
“We don’t care who runs the country,” the Alawite man says. “We don’t stand against anyone. We only want to live. Let whoever rules the country rule. Just let us live. We only ask for security, to be able to go out for work and come home again.”
The events in Latakia eroded the little trust many of Syria’s minority groups had for the interim government.
Ash-Sharaa, the former commander of the Idlib-based Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, or HTS, must now lead the entire country. To consolidate power, he must bring a mosaic of armed groups under the control of his government, as part of the “General Security Service.”
This paramilitary provides security across much of western Syria, including all of its major cities and highways. The plan is to craft a national military out of the remnants of HTS, regime defectors, the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army, Turkish-backed Arab militias, and the Kurdish-led SDF. Tensions between these groups remain high — and sometimes devolve into isolated clashes.
A litmus test for Syrian minorities is whether ash-Sharaa reins in the foreign jihadists and diehards who provided much of the muscle for HTS, the group he once led. They now form the backbone of his security forces — and are regularly accused of carrying out sectarian violence.
The Druze — an esoteric sect derived from Islam, spread across Lebanon, Israel, and Syria — largely coordinated with HTS when it began its offensive to bring down the former regime. With more than a million Druze spread across Syria, local power-brokers maintain militias in their ethnic enclaves.
In July, the interim government and Druze militias clashed in As-Sweida, south of Damascus.
The events allegedly began with the robbery of a Druze man by Bedouin on the road to Damascus. Fighting escalated between the Druze and the predominantly Sunni Bedouin, and the interim government deployed security forces.
The Druze allege that extremists among government forces used the chaos to carry out sectarian massacres. A flood of inflammatory videos and speeches — some real, some intentionally misleading — quickly overwhelmed Syrian social media, further fanning the flames.
The Druze schoolteacher interviewed by Rolling Stone said he traveled to Sweida and volunteered to join a militia. He said they had captured fighters from “Turkistan” — using the historical name for a vast swath of Central Asia stretching from the Caspian Sea to central China — including Uighur jihadis.
“We started interviewing them, but they don’t speak Arabic,” says the schoolteacher. “We had to bring them a Russian translator.” Russian is the lingua franca of many post-Soviet Central Asian nations, and is spoken by an array of foreign jihadis who fought in Syria during the civil war.
To date, there has been no definitive investigation into the massacres, and little accountability. There is no question that the violence in Sweida killed hundreds, if not thousands. Documented atrocities included extrajudicial killings at a hospital, and the murder of entire families.
In response to the violence, Israel conducted strikes against the interim government, with the stated intention of protecting the Druze. “If it was not for the Israeli intervention, there would have been a genocide,” the schoolteacher says.
Ash-Sharaa may have the backing of the U.S., Turkey, various Gulf States, and the EU, but Israel remains at best tepid — and at worst openly hostile — to his ambitions of a Syria unified under his rule.
After the fall of Assad, Israel carried out strikes eliminating what remained of the former regime’s aircraft and heavy weapons stockpiles. It also used the chaos to expand into the U.N.-brokered buffer zone that previously separated Israeli and Syrian forces in the occupied Golan Heights, securing what it calls strategic defensive positions. Although ash-Sharaa protested these actions, he admitted Syria didn’t want to go to war over it.
Iran, too, has reason to hope for ash-Sharaa’s failure. It dispatched tens of thousands of fighters affiliated with Shia militias, including Hezbollah, to prop up the Assad regime before its collapse. Israeli military operations against Hezbollah and Iran, coupled with the HTS offensive last year, succeeded in neutralizing these militias. As a result, they no longer play a significant role in Syria, and Tehran’s influence has been fading.
Still, the country remains a patchwork of control, with the interim government controlling the west, the Kurds controlling much of the northeast and Euphrates River corridor, and Turkish-backed militias dominating border areas in the northwest. Rolling Stone also observed Turkish soldiers deployed in regularly spaced outposts along the highway stretching from Aleppo to Latakia, as far as 20 miles from the Turkish border. Russian forces, too, remain ensconced at an airbase in Latakia, as observed by this reporter. Israel occupies territory in the southwest.
And as many as 1,000 Americans are already there, too.
Swieda remains a potential flashpoint. The interim government says it quelled the violence after negotiating ceasefires. The Druze view themselves as besieged. Now, many want independence, which they hope the U.S. and Israel will support.
The possibility of establishing a Syrian federation, whereby minority groups maintain autonomy and provide for their own security, was a constant refrain among non-Sunni Syrians interviewed by Rolling Stone. But it isn’t clear who would have the power to back such a framework, even if the interim government decided to accept it.
In September, at a cafe in the shadow of Damascus’ Umayyad Mosque — one of the world’s oldest and largest, with some walls that belonged to a Roman temple to Jupiter built nearly 2,000 years ago — a pair of elderly men hold court in a corner, eager to speak to a foreign journalist. They talk candidly about a range of topics, including a son one lost to the Assad regime, the torture they endured at the hands of its security services — and the fears they have about the man now in charge.
Saying that at first they welcomed ash-Sharaa and the fall of the regime, they now see Syria on the brink of disintegration. While they revile Assad, they fear what will happen now that the secular authority that held their society’s multiethnic, multisectarian components together has disappeared.
“Do you see this?” says a man who asks to be called Abu Fayyad, holding up a set of misbaha — Islamic prayer beads. “There are 99 beads, linked with a string. I’ll say it simply. If you cut the string, the 99 beads will scatter across the floor. Gather them together again if you can. Neither Trump, nor Putin, nor ash-Sharaa, nor all the world’s leaders, can gather them together again — only God Himself.”
With additional reporting from Mirna Al-Rasheed.
From Rolling Stone US
