One year ago this week, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham stormed into Damascus, overturned the 50-year reign of the Assad family, and set its sights on controlling a multiethnic country scarred by nearly 15 years of civil war. Throughout 2025, Middle East Policy has featured vital analyses of the struggle to build a durable order, including a new article on the violent Turkey-Israel rivalry playing out within Syria’s borders.
While this newsletter looks back on the year, the Early View of our winter journal examines the new US approach to rebuilding failed Arab states, the making of a new hybrid order in the Red Sea, the struggling peace movement inside Israel, and the domestic crises roiling Turkey. Readers can still access our special issue, The October 7 Emergencies, and our Fall 2025 issue. If you find this newsletter useful, please forward to others you believe will benefit, and please follow us on the social media sites X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Just as Bashar al-Assad was fleeing for Russia, Rob Geist Pinfold was warning in Middle East Policy against simplistic takes and overreactions. “Contemporary Syria is a bewildering surfeit of acronyms,” he observed of militias from the Kurdish-led SDF to the Turkey-backed SNA to the SOR of Islamists and Druze, which enjoys American support.
And of course there is HTS—Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—whose leader, Ahmed al-Shara, enjoys the support of the White House. However, Pinfold noted, “a post-Assad Syria may nominally look united under a single central government and unified army, but the realities on the ground will be very different.” He cautioned readers not to accept any myths about the new Syria at face value.
As for what kind of state the Islamist HTS is seeking to build, Middle East Policy featured reporting from the front lines. In interviews with 123 members and supporters of the group, Rasim Koç found that “post-Assad Syria is emerging as both more Islamic and more nationalistic, blending religious identity with a strong sense of sovereignty.”
Koç discovered that HTS is not united about how to balance its sectarian preferences and how to create cohesion across the country. “Syria is a multiethnic and multireligious society, composed of various groups with distinct identities,” one activist told the author. “Yet, our shared identity is rooted in Islam and our belonging to the Arab nation.” Others noted that the population was likely too concerned about health, education, and basic services to fall back into war. Still, HTS remains an Islamist organization: “Islam is not just an ideology of resistance,” one imam said. “It is also the source of our rebirth.”
Of course, those are the voices of the putative victors; the story grows more complex due to the interests of outside actors. One of the most important is Turkey. Just after Assad’s fall, Şaban Kardaş showed that during the civil war, Ankara focused on border security and restricting Kurdish autonomy, and it engaged with Russia and Iran—despite their support for Assad—to freeze the conflict. This reflected “strategic patience, flexibility, and pragmatism,” Kardaş wrote. The result was an “unstable equilibrium” that fostered the conditions for HTS to take Damascus.
The author identified Turkey’s three key roles in the new Syria: enabler, state builder, and protector. However, he ended with a note of caution: “Ankara should avoid a patron-client relationship with the new administration in Damascus and forge the appropriate regional and international alignments.”
Nearly a year later, it is not clear that Turkey has done this. A new article in the forthcoming winter issue of Middle East Policy shows how Ankara is now engaged in a high-stakes, indirectly violent rivalry with Israel to shape Syria. As Buğra Sari and Avnihan Kirişik contend, “Syria—far from stabilizing after Assad’s fall—may become the locus of a new axis of regional rivalry, one that demands diplomatic management to prevent escalation into direct military confrontation.”
The external interventions came immediately after Assad left Damascus. Israel has attacked from the air and ground to enforce “a sterile zone from the Golan Heights to the outskirts of Damascus,” Sari and Kirişik write. “By eroding the regime’s capacity to develop a coherent national defense apparatus, Israel effectively forestalls a unified post-Assad order that could challenge its security dominance.” This puts the Israelis on a collision course with HTS and therefore with Ankara, they warn.
For its part, Turkey took advantage of the chaos and used proxies to assault areas held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. In addition, it has sought to expand its footprint within Syria and jointly operate bases “under a defense cooperation framework between Ankara and Damascus [that] would legitimize and institutionalize Turkey’s military presence.”
Most important, Sari and Kirişik argue, is that the two external powers are coming close to direct conflict inside Syria’s borders. Israel struck two bases “just days after Turkey had completed engineering reconnaissance missions,” they write. And Ankara’s “expanding military presence and institutional infrastructure on Syrian territory suggest an ambition to create a zone of influence. This conflicts with the designs of Israel and other regional actors.”
This brings us back to Pinfold’s clear-eyed analysis at the dawn of the new Syria, published in Middle East Policy just after HTS seized Damascus. “Only the United States can de-escalate tensions between its key regional allies, Turkey and Israel, and stop each from using Syria to provoke the other,” he wrote. The provocations could accidentally spark an unintended hot conflict.
The Best of Middle East Policy 2025: Building the New Syria
The Struggle for Syria: Strategic Rivalry and the Risks of Escalation
Buğra Sari | Avnihan Kirişik—in the Winter 2025 issue!
Myth Busting in a Post-Assad Syria
Rob Geist Pinfold—open access!
Turkey’s Long Game in Syria: Moving beyond Ascendance
Şaban Kardaş—open access!
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham: Voices of Syria’s New Leaders
Rasim Koç
Regime Change in Syria And the Emerging Israel-Turkey Conflict
Mehmet Doğan Üçok
From Rebuilding to Restoring Political Order: A New Agenda for Failed Arab States
Guilain Denoeux | Robert Springborg—open access!
Iran’s Annus Horribilis in 2024: Beaten, but Not Defeated
Thomas Juneau—open access!
After Assad: How Russia Is Losing the Middle East
Namig Abbasov | Emil A. Souleimanov—open access!
Forgotten Fighters in Their Own Words: Pan-Arab Volunteers in Syria-Iraq
Djallil Lounnas | Israa Mezzyane
Biden’s Gaza Failure, the Syrian Revolution, and the Folly of US Middle East Policy
A.R. Joyce
Arab-Israeli Gas Diplomacy: Interdependence and a Path Toward Peace?
Gawdat Bahgat
Lessons from the Syria-Hezbollah Criminal Syndicate, 1985–2005
Iftah Burman | Yehuda Blanga—open access!
Middle Powers and Limited Balancing: Syria and the Post‐October 7 Wars
Chen Kertcher | Gadi Hitman—open access!