Syria’s deals with Assad-era cronies raise unsettling questions

Less than a week after the initiative's launch, the Hamsho settlement was finalised. The commission's announcement was strikingly light on detail. It stated only that the agreement followed "extensive investigations" and a "comprehensive review" of Hamsho's assets and financial declarations. The timing, which paired the initiative's rollout with a high-profile settlement, appears intended to signal the programme's seriousness and encourage other regime-linked businessmen to pursue similar arrangements, particularly as officials say the commission is targeting a far broader list of names, estimated at as many as 900.

The amnesty rationale

The government's justification for cutting deals with Assad-era cronies rests on what it portrays as an unavoidable trade-off: recovering stolen wealth quickly and reintegrating it into the formal economy without further destabilising what remains of Syria's economic system.

From this perspective, settlements are framed as a pragmatic necessity. Prosecuting regime-linked businessmen through the courts would be slow, resource-intensive, and vulnerable to collapse. Syria's judiciary is overstretched, investigative capacity is limited, and hard evidence is often difficult to secure. Rather than risk high-profile cases that fail, yield nothing, and allow suspects to claim vindication, officials argue that settlements deliver immediate recoveries with less institutional strain. They also offer a faster route to reasserting state authority over key sectors of the economy.

The commission has sought to anchor the initiative in international precedent. Officials say the programme draws on UN recommendations on asset recovery in post-conflict settings, presenting voluntary disclosure and economic settlements as tools to address conflict legacies, promote stability, and support social cohesion.

At the same time, the commission insists these arrangements do not amount to political absolution. Settlements, it maintains, apply strictly to illicit enrichment and do not grant immunity from other avenues of justice—whether transitional justice mechanisms, public prosecution, private legal claims, or any existing or future legal rights.

Widespread backlash

Despite these justifications, the deal with Hamsho has sparked widespread backlash. Beyond online condemnation, protests have erupted in rejection of the settlement, and reports suggest some victims are preparing to pursue legal action against him.

The reaction is hardly surprising. Hamsho is one of the former regime's most recognisable economic powerbrokers, and his entanglement with the Assad system is difficult to overstate. More importantly, he has long been accused not only of financing Assad's war machine, but of directly profiting from the country's destruction.

Reports and testimonies have linked his companies to the organised stripping of metal from devastated neighbourhoods, recycling looted steel and rebar for use in his factories. The looting, in some accounts, went beyond rubble: intact homes were allegedly dismantled piece by piece to extract metal, turning wartime devastation into a supply chain.

For many Syrians, this is not an abstract record of corruption. It is personal, and its consequences are still being felt.

Settlements over justice

Beyond personal outrage, several structural factors have further inflamed anger over the deal. Beyond personal outrage, several structural factors have further inflamed anger over the deal. Chief among them is the rollout of reconciliation arrangements while justice for victims of Assad-era crimes remains stalled. Hamsho is not the only Assad-era figure to have been quietly brought back into the fold. The Supreme Committee for the Preservation of Civil Peace has relied heavily on opaque trade-offs to neutralise potential spoilers. These arrangements—often involving amnesties for former security and military officials as well as militia commanders—have effectively recast alleged war criminals as agents of peace.

At the same time, regime figures implicated in wartime abuses have yet to be brought before a court to answer for crimes committed during the conflict. In that context, the Hamsho settlement is widely viewed as yet another compromise the authorities are willing to strike with regime-era affiliates, reinforcing a familiar pattern of backroom-brokered impunity.

The lack of transparency has only deepened the resentment. While the commission acknowledged that a settlement had been reached, it offered no meaningful detail about how it was negotiated, by whom, under what conditions, or—most importantly—how any recovered funds will be used. The prevailing perception is that Hamsho has effectively been forgiven for exploiting his ties to the former regime in exchange for an undisclosed sum, without accountability or even a public reckoning with the harm he is accused of causing.

Hardening perception

That perception hardens further because those who suffered from Hamsho's wartime enrichment appear to receive nothing in return, both because the deal remains opaque and because there is no clear mechanism to compensate victims.

Claims that such settlements serve the public good ring hollow when the public is kept in the dark about exactly how they do so. The transitional authorities have yet to build the credibility and legitimacy needed to broker deals behind closed doors and expect Syrians to simply take their word that everything is above board. Trust is earned over time, and only through transparency and accountable governance.

The apparent failure to allocate even a portion of recovered funds to victims, whether through compensation schemes or a public victims' fund, only deepens public bitterness. For many Syrians, the promise that money has been "returned to the state" is meaningless in itself. People want to know what was recovered, how much, and where it will go—especially in a country shaped by decades of corruption. The transitional authorities will be considered different only when they demonstrate it through transparent action and credible oversight. Anything less will be met with scepticism.

Trust deficit

The Hamsho settlement is not just about one businessman or one deal. It is a test case for how Syria's transition will confront the economic architecture of the Assad era, and whether it will do so in a way that rebuilds public trust or simply reproduces old, opaque practices under new labels.

The core issue is not only whether the logic of such settlements is defensible, but how they are implemented and with whom. Not all regime-linked figures carry the same degree of responsibility. Yet the current approach risks blurring those distinctions, normalising rehabilitation without clear red lines, and turning "stability" into a blanket justification for selective forgiveness, all without public input.

For a society that endured mass dispossession, destruction, and loss, the central question is not merely whether stolen wealth can be recovered, but who benefits from its return, and who gets to decide. Without disclosure, oversight, and credible mechanisms to compensate victims, economic amnesty will be seen less as a transitional tool than as impunity repackaged.

Syria's leaders insist these arrangements are compatible with justice. But transitions are judged not by assurances, but by practices that can withstand public scrutiny. If reconciliation proceeds without accountability, and rehabilitation without acknowledgment of harm, the message to Syrians will not be that the past is being confronted, but that it is being quietly negotiated away.