Politics

How Syria's al-Sharaa learned from the failures of Libya and Iraq

To the surprise of many, Syria’s interim president has neither removed Assad-era staff nor sought revenge on his key lieutenants. It has helped stop Syria from fragmenting.

AFP

Ahmed al-Sharaa has proven his doubters wrong and learned from Iraq and Libya to keep Syria from splintering and dividing.

How Syria's al-Sharaa learned from the failures of Libya and Iraq

Kamal Alam

last update on 14 Dec 2025

It has been a year since the fall of the former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the Levantine doomsayers who predicted that it was “Assad or nothing” have been proved wrong. Contrary to their prophecies, Syria has not fractured along ethnic and religious lines. If that was the script, then Syrians have so far refused to follow it.

A year may feel like a long time in politics, but when it comes to Syria and its rebirth, the country is not out of the woods yet. However, while it is still too early to judge, the achievements of the government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa has surpassed all expectations. Still, there have clearly been some big problems along the way, not least the mass killings of Alawites on the coast in March, and fierce fighting between Bedouin and Druze fighters in Sweida this summer.

Whilst the jury is still out on those massacres, al-Sharaa has evidently learnt some valuable lessons from the story of Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, and of Libya after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi. Against the odds, al-Sharaa has ensured a smooth transition, as he formed a government to rebuild a hollowed-out state broken after a bloody 14-year civil war. He has also been open and flexible in foreign affairs, in contrast to the stubborn intransigence of the regime he replaced, and of the regimes that followed Gaddafi and Saddam.

Lessons from Iraq

Much has been made of how the de-Baathification of Iraq led to millions of unemployed men ready to fight not just the American and British forces but also the Iranian influence on government in Baghdad that dominated a post-Saddam Iraq. Aside from disarming Iraq’s military and police, the US-led administration of Paul Bremer also got rid of hundreds of thousands of educated Iraqi doctors, lawyers, and civil servants who had no role in Baathist authoritarianism or repression.

Thaier Al-Sudani / Reuters — Syrians support their country in a FIFA Arab Cup quarter-final against Morocco in Qatar on 11 December 2025. Syria has a bright future if it can avoid sectarianism and violence.

Al-Sharaa’s administration has not followed the same path. He has already reinstated the most capable diplomats of the Syrian foreign ministry and interior ministry, and kept Assad’s political appointees in-post as ambassadors (including those in Riyadh and at the United Nations), as he negotiated the early stages of the transition. When he did finally change envoys, the transition went according to plan. This matters because in the Middle East optics matter, especially after a devastating civil war.

Al-Sharaa been open and flexible in foreign affairs, in stark contrast to the stubborn intransigence of the regime he replaced, and of the regimes that followed Gaddafi and Saddam

Assad's last Prime Minister, Mohammed al Jalali, was neither manhandled nor arrested, but instead just asked to vacate his office and guide the incoming transitional body to the relevant documents. Syria's traffic police and civil bodies who ensure the smooth function of major cities were told they could keep their jobs provided they had not taken part in any criminal activities during the civil war.

Remarkably, even the charities of former first lady Asam Al Assad are still run by those she appointed. Even al-Sharaa's first pick as the State Bank Governor, Maysaa Sabreen, was the deputy governor during Assad's rule. The Finance Ministry has reached out for advice to Dr Mohammad al-Hussein, who was Finance Minister for almost a decade under Assad, while the interior ministry still has thousands of employees from the previous Baathist regime, with the exception of the most senior officials who oversaw the repression, disappearances, and killings.

Lessons from Libya

Libya today struggles from a territorial tug-of-war between Khalifa Haftar, the warlord who controls land in the east, and the officially recognised government in Tripoli. Increasingly, former Gaddafi loyalists establish small fiefdoms in central and southern Libya. Whilst there are no sectarian issues in Libya (almost 100% of the population is Sunni), there are plenty of tribal, linguistic, and geographic divides, especially the historic animosity between Berbers and Arabs.

Bandar Al-Jaloud / Saudi Royal Palace — Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (R) watching as US President Donald Trump (C) shakes hands with Syria's interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, in Riyadh on May 14, 2025.

The international community failed to stabilise Libya in the aftermath of Gaddafi's fall, with open fighting and foreign actors intervening directly or indirectly, their geopolitics playing out between Haftar and Tripoli. One of the reasons Libya subsequently fragmented is that those who were wronged during Gaddafi's era were allowed to seek and exact revenge on those who supported the dictator.

Al-Sharaa inherited a far more complex sectarian and linguistic divide in Syria, with grievances no less burning, but has kept a balance in part by not imposing Damascus's will on the Kurds in the north-east, or on the Druze in the south, or on the Alawites on the western coast.

Furthermore, there have been public and transparent enquiries into the killings of Alawites and Druze, and he has punished those responsible. Al-Sharaa has also regularly met the leaders of Syrian Christians (who have been used as a pawn by both domestic and foreign interests) and declared them to be equal among all Syrians.

AFP — Armash Nalbandian, Armenian Apostolic Bishop of Damascus, blessing the water at the Christmas Mass at the Church of St. Sarkis in the East Door in Damascus. Ahmed al-Sharaa has sought to protect Syria's minorities.

In fact, al-Sharaa has sought to remove the word 'minority,' at least in a religious context, and despite Israel bombing Syria at the behest of Sweida's Druze leadership, al-Sharaa has refused to condemn those leaders. He knows that the world is watching and that he must maintain a balance between the desire of his more hardline fighters forces with his desire to avoid the kinds of violence seen in Iraq and Libya.

Al-Sharaa has been criticised for not arresting Assad insiders like Fadi Sakr and Mohammed Hamsho, but he is trying to give everyone time to adjust to the new realities, rather than order extra judicial killings by way of revenge. He has not gone on an Iraq-like hunt for Assad's aides, as they did for Saddam's lieutenants. He has even offered amnesties in return for help in fixing Syria. How al-Sharaa fares in the battle to keep this balance could determine the fate of the country.

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