Idlib: Flat expanses surrounding the regional capital of this Syrian province grow rockier and mountainous both to the west and the north along the Turkish border: natural barriers to movement but also protection for those in need.
Tunnels used as a refuge from Assad regime and Russian attacks over the past decade “are no longer needed”, one fighter barely out of his teens told Al Majalla in late February.
Scrolling on his phone through photos of numerous of his “martyred” friends and sitting on a dusty, ragged carpet waiting for tea to be served in a small town of the province, he said he had served as one of the Red Headband forces in Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). But now that the war is over, he said, he wants two things: to see his grandmother, who lives in an internally displaced persons (IDP) camp with other widowed women, and to be able to study.
The province—largely severed from much of the rest of the country and world for years—was the incubator from which the HTS-led operation that brought down the Bashar al-Assad government on 8 December sprung. It has since taken on near iconic status despite many still wary of the armed forces originally from the area, many of whom spent years in hardline Islamist factions.
Others who once opposed HTS and its predecessors now say they cannot but recognise that the group played a “heroic” role in the fight against a dictatorial regime that left hundreds of thousands dead and missing and forced millions to flee the country.
A place of refuge
Oft-maligned in past years for allegedly being “infested with terrorists”, Idlib meanwhile was and remains a place of refuge for many. Millions of Syrians displaced from other regions are cramped into the province, with de facto towns built in the place of former encampments housing tens of thousands, while tents exposed to the biting cold and rain continue to shelter those unable to afford more sturdy accommodation. Millions have nowhere else to go nor the means to get there, even if they did.
Those in IDP camps complain of ever less assistance; while all agree there are still few employment possibilities, many blame sanctions and excessive bureaucracy. Curious and courteous officials in the regional capital ushered Al Majalla into the Idlib governor’s underground office on 2 March.
Mohammad Abdulrahman, the governor of Idlib for the past month and a half, was dressed in a button-down shirt and jacket, his office decked out with typical Arab-style government office adornments: plush seating, fake flowers in abundance, shiny nameplates. The walls were newly painted, and shiny marble tiles lined the floors.
A native of the province and a graduate of the Homs military academy, Abdulrahman had previously served as Syrian interior minister “for 40 days in the caretaker government after the liberation of Syria”. Prior to that, he was the interior minister of the Syrian Salvation Government (SSG) for three years.
The SSG was formed in late 2017 by HTS and other opposition groups and controlled much of northwest Syria, with Idlib as its capital and a population of roughly 4 million.
Bussed in
While multiple mass evacuations from other areas of Syria happened prior to the SSG’s formation, tens of thousands of people were bussed to Idlib from the now almost entirely destroyed Ghouta in the Damascus suburbs in early 2018 after it had been besieged and bombed for years. The bombs followed the IDPs even after they arrived in this northwestern region of the country, adding to the immense destruction wrought by former regime attacks starting in 2011.
“The Idlib countryside is completely destroyed,” Abdulrahman stressed, reeling off the names of villages and cities whose surrounding terrain had been bombed incessantly by the former regime and its allies when the areas were held by the former opposition forces now in control in Damascus.
“The countryside of Maarat al-Numan, Saraqib, Jabal al-Zaawiya,” he said, with a “focus on Idlib in particular,” which had a large number of people displaced from other governorates, “in order to exterminate the people here”.
According to a March 2024 report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 3.4 million people were displaced in northwest Syria, rising from 2.9 million the previous year.
Abdulrahman said, “Our priorities are reconstruction, rehabilitation of schools, re-equipping of medical centres and hospitals, reactivation of water stations, reactivation of electricity facilities, and roads.”
“We still have approximately four million people” in Idlib, the governor noted, with “1.8 million living in camps suffering from the cold of winter in dilapidated tents. There is a great amount of suffering in northern Syria, but time will be needed before these people can return to their provinces due to the destruction that has been inflicted on their home provinces by the former Syrian regime. All the provinces have been heavily damaged and need reconstruction.”
Crushing impact of sanctions
“Reconstruction, of course, requires money and time,” he stressed, but “what affects the Syrian people the most today are the sanctions imposed on the Syrian people.”
Schools and medical facilities targeted by the former regime for over a decade will not be able to be rebuilt, he said, unless “help is provided and sanctions lifted”.
Water, electricity, and internet services are more reliable in Idlib than in areas previously held by the regime – or at least outside tent encampments. In most places, only Turkish lira and dollars are accepted, while a few shopkeepers will pull out a calculator for the current exchange rates if customers only have Syrian pounds. The automobile trade is bustling, and there seems to be no shortage of goods in many shops, including imported ones.
The Idlib governor noted to Al Majalla that, in the province, “there was investment and trade even before the liberation, and now more factories are opening”, given the newly won ability to move freely between provinces.
“We have the opening of factories in an industrial city in the Bab al-Hawa area,” he noted, and “the owners of factories are private investors who request licences from the economy ministry.”
