Is Al-Sharaa’s Syria A Success?

Electricity isn’t something most of us think about. We flip a switch, the lights come on, and that’s that. But in Syria—where infrastructure has spent more than a decade in ruins—48 hours of uninterrupted electricity can feel like a revelation.

That moment arrived on Thursday, November 20th, when the Ministry of Energy announced something that would’ve sounded impossible just two years ago: two full days of continuous power in Damascus. Middle East outlet The New Arab described it as “unprecedented,” and for people like Omm Alaa, a housewife living on the outskirts of the capital, it might as well have been a miracle. Back in 2016, she told the independent outlet Enab Baladi that in a full day she sometimes received just thirty minutes of electricity. On a lucky day, maybe an hour and a half, scattered in fragments.

The years marched on, but for many Syrians, the electricity never truly improved. So when the lights stayed on for 48 straight hours, optimism surged. And it wasn’t the only promising sign.

On November 18th, a Saudi tanker arrived carrying 90,000 tons of crude oil—the first delivery under a Saudi Fund for Development grant intended to help rebuild Syria’s shattered economy. On top of that came a flurry of diplomatic breakthroughs: a Moscow visit on October 15th, where Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa met with Vladimir Putin, and a far more symbolic moment on November 10th, when Al-Sharaa entered the White House to meet President Donald Trump. No Syrian leader had stepped into the Oval Office since 1946. The meeting not only marked a historical shift, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a partial suspension of sanctions—something Syrians had been desperate to hear.

Taken together, these milestones paint a picture of a country pulling itself back from collapse, one year after the downfall of Bashar al-Assad. Diplomatic recognition is returning. Fuel is flowing again. Power grids are humming. But despite all these achievements, something fundamental still feels missing.

And that missing piece reveals just how fragile Syria’s recovery truly is.

A Country Still Divided: Sectarian Wounds Reopen

On November 24th, the fragile calm cracked.

A married couple from the Bani Khalid Bedouin tribe was found murdered in Homs, one of Syria’s most diverse cities. The woman’s mutilation and sectarian slogans graffitied on the scene ignited immediate fury. Bedouin youth retaliated, launching attacks on nearby Alawite neighborhoods. Security forces rushed in, imposed a Sunday night curfew, and arrested more than 100 people.

If this had been an isolated incident, it would have been a serious but containable crisis. But Syria’s sectarian fractures aren’t surface-level. They’re deep—subterranean, even—and this violence served as a reminder of how easily those old fault lines can rupture.

Syria is a mosaic of groups: roughly 70 percent Sunni Arab, 10 percent Christian, 10 percent Alawite, and smaller minorities like the Druze, Isma’ilis, and Mhallami. The Assad family’s power had long rested on the Alawite community, whose dominance in government and security institutions bred resentment and suspicion among much of the Sunni population.

Religious tension made things worse. Some Sunni Muslims consider Alawite beliefs heretical due to the community’s unique theological interpretation of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. While Shia Muslims venerate Ali too, the Alawite belief that Ali represents a divine essence has fueled decades of mistrust.

Assad weaponized these tensions, using Alawite-led militias—the shabiha—to crush dissent and framing the civil war as a sectarian battle for minority survival. The result was a cycle of brutality: Sunnis increasingly associated Alawites with the regime’s crimes, and Alawites feared that any Sunni-led future government would hunt them down in revenge.

And after Assad fell, those fears were not unfounded.

The Retaliation Years: Violence Against Minorities

In March, following attacks by pro-Assad loyalists, militias aligned with the new government struck back with devastating force. According to Amnesty International, more than 100 people were killed in Baniyas on March 8th and 9th alone. Witnesses reported that gunmen explicitly asked residents whether they were Alawite before killing them, blaming them collectively for the former regime’s brutality.

By March 17th, the Syrian Network for Human Rights estimated more than 1,000 people had died in those clashes. In August, a UN Commission of Inquiry concluded war crimes may have been committed against the Alawite population.

President Al-Sharaa vowed justice, telling Reuters, “We fought to defend the oppressed, and we won’t accept that any blood be shed unjustly… even among those closest to us.” Yet home invasions, kidnappings of Alawite women, and extrajudicial executions of Alawite men continued in the months that followed.

And the Alawites weren’t the only targets.

In July, the Druze community clashed violently with the Bedouin after accusing the government of siding with their rivals. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that 823 people were executed by members of the ministries of defense and interior. The toll eventually exceeded 1,000. Israel—keen to present itself as protector of Druze minority interests—struck Syrian government forces near Suweida and Damascus, imposing an uneasy stalemate that still holds.

These were not isolated flare-ups. They were symptoms of a deeper national fracture, one far more threatening than the absence of power or fuel.

A Government Trying to Heal, Yet Struggling to Lead

To its credit, the Syrian government has attempted to address the violence.

In March, Al-Sharaa formed a fact-finding committee to investigate the massacres. Amnesty International praised the move as an important step toward truth and accountability. By July, the committee had identified hundreds of alleged perpetrators across both loyalist militias and former government-aligned forces, referring them to the attorney general.

But Syrian human rights advocates argued the report was incomplete. It failed to acknowledge the structural role of the security institutions themselves. As Razan Rashidi of The Syria Campaign explained:

“The interim authorities hold the ultimate responsibility to protect its citizens… Avoiding this responsibility will only make transitional justice more difficult.”

Still, something shifted on November 18th, when the government opened the first public trial of suspects connected to the March violence. Fourteen men—seven Assad loyalists and seven members of the new government’s security forces—appeared before Aleppo’s Palace of Justice. For the first time in modern Syrian history, security officials affiliated with the ruling authorities themselves were being held accountable.

Fadel Abdul Ghany of the Syrian Network for Human Rights called it “unprecedented” and “extremely important.”

Yet accountability alone cannot guarantee safety. And the Alawite community knows it.

The Fear on the Streets

When the clashes in Homs ended, hundreds of Alawites poured into the streets to demand security, political decentralization, and the release of men they say were wrongly detained. They are afraid—not abstractly, not hypothetically, but in their daily lives.

One protester, Leen, told Reuters:

“We demand to live in security… Now there’s no more security and we’re exposed to kidnapping and fear.”

If Syria’s minorities do not feel safe, then Syria is not stable—no matter how many oil tankers arrive, how many sanctions are lifted, or how many hours the electricity stays on.

The stakes are clear: failure to protect vulnerable groups could drag the country back into a nightmare it barely survived the first time.

Is Al-Sharaa’s Syria Truly a Success?

That depends on what you value.

If the measurement is diplomacy, infrastructure, and economic cooperation, then yes—Syria has made real, measurable strides. Energy grids are stabilizing. Foreign governments are extending their hands. Sanctions are softening.

But if you measure progress by whether Syrians feel safe, whether minorities trust the government, and whether the nation has begun to heal the sectarian wounds that fueled more than 13 years of civil war, then the answer is far more complicated.

The real test of this new Syria won’t come from world leaders or foreign investments. It will come from whether Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Druze, and others can live side by side without fear—whether they can feel equally protected, equally represented, and equally Syrian.

Until then, celebrations will remain cautious. Optimism will be fragile. And every spark of progress will carry the risk of being extinguished by the next eruption of violence.

Morgan Ortagus, U.S. Counselor to the United Nations, summed it up clearly:

“Syria only has one chance to get on the right track.”

Whether it can seize that chance is a question only time can answer.