Syria’s transition has entered its most dangerous moment since Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus in December. Over the past several days, fighting and sectarian violence have erupted across the country’s Mediterranean coastal region after gunmen associated with remnants of Assad’s former security forces attacked personnel belonging to the new government. Forces aligned with the authorities in Damascus responded, but the violence quickly spread beyond clashes between armed groups. Reports have emerged of large numbers of civilians from the Alawite community, the minority to which Assad’s family belongs, being killed in reprisals. President Ahmed al-Sharaa has appealed for national unity and promised accountability for abuses committed by government-aligned forces, but the violence presents the first major test of the political order that replaced Assad. The problem is larger than whether Damascus can defeat armed remnants of the old regime. A post-authoritarian state becomes legitimate only when people who supported, benefited from or were merely associated with the defeated government believe the new state will still protect them as citizens.
This is the difference between regime change and state formation. The coalition that overthrew Assad had a relatively clear shared objective: remove Assad. Once that objective disappeared, Syria inherited a much harder coordination problem. Sunni opposition fighters, Kurds, Christians, Druze, Alawites, former regime employees, secular activists, Islamists and millions of refugees do not necessarily agree on what should replace him. A successful state does not require them to agree ideologically. It requires them to believe political disagreement can occur without threatening their physical survival. The coastal violence therefore attacks the foundation of the new order because it risks turning political defeat into communal fear.
Alawites face a particularly dangerous position because the Assad regime deliberately intertwined its survival with their community. Assad’s security apparatus recruited disproportionately from Alawite networks, particularly in senior and sensitive positions, while the regime portrayed itself as the protector of religious minorities against Sunni Islamist extremism. This created a powerful political trap. Many Alawites could fear the opposition without necessarily supporting every Assad policy because the regime convinced them that its collapse might produce collective retaliation. If civilians are now killed simply because they are Alawite, the new authorities risk retroactively validating Assad’s central argument.
That would be strategically disastrous. The strongest way to discredit the old regime is not merely to remove it. It is to demonstrate that the fear on which it relied was unnecessary.
An Alawite family that discovers it can live safely under the new government loses much of its incentive to support an Assad restoration or insurgency. An Alawite family watching neighbours killed by government-aligned fighters acquires exactly the opposite incentive.
This is why minority protection is counterinsurgency policy.
Governments defeat insurgencies partly by separating armed organisations from the communities from which they recruit. Collective punishment reverses that mechanism by making civilians and insurgents perceive a common threat.
Suppose only a small proportion of former regime supporters initially wants to fight Damascus. If security forces punish entire villages in response, previously neutral residents may conclude that remaining neutral offers no protection. The insurgent coalition expands.
Repression therefore can manufacture the political constituency required for the rebellion it is trying to eliminate.
This is the repression-mobilisation paradox we saw in Bangladesh last year, but under much more dangerous conditions because Syria already contains enormous quantities of weapons and recent memories of sectarian war.
The new government therefore needs to distinguish three categories aggressively.
Former regime officials credibly implicated in crimes.
Armed groups currently attacking the state.
Ordinary Alawite civilians.
Conflating them would be catastrophic.
The first category should face evidence-based investigation and prosecution.
The second can legitimately be confronted through proportionate security operations.
The third must receive the same protection as every other Syrian citizen.
This is individualised responsibility, and Syria’s future may depend on whether the government can enforce it.
The difficulty is that the new authorities do not yet possess complete control over everyone fighting nominally on their side. The coalition that defeated Assad included numerous armed factions with different histories, commanders and ideological orientations. Integrating them into one national military was always going to take time.
This creates a dangerous principal-agent problem.
Al-Sharaa can announce that civilians must be protected.
A local commander can ignore him.
A fighter seeking revenge can commit an atrocity.
The victim experiences the violence as state violence because the perpetrator is associated with the victorious government.
The government therefore becomes responsible for behaviour it may not have directly ordered.
This is why monopolising legitimate force is one of the fundamental tasks of state-building.
A government cannot claim sovereignty while simultaneously saying armed groups carrying its flag are outside its control.
Authority and responsibility travel together.
If Damascus wants recognition as Syria’s legitimate government, it needs command structures capable of disciplining fighters, investigating abuses and punishing perpetrators regardless of which faction they fought for during the revolution.
This will test al-Sharaa personally because his political project depends heavily on convincing Syrians and foreign governments that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s transformation from jihadist insurgency into national government is real.
Rhetoric helped create initial diplomatic space.
Behaviour now determines whether that space survives.
Western governments have cautiously reopened engagement.
Sanctions relief is being debated.
Gulf governments are considering reconstruction support.
Minority massacres could reverse that process rapidly.
This gives Damascus an external incentive for restraint alongside the domestic one.
Economic reconstruction depends heavily on international confidence.
A country where sectarian violence appears uncontrolled will struggle to attract investment or persuade refugees to return.
This is the security-investment link.
Capital is forward-looking.
An investor does not ask only whether today’s factory site is safe.
They ask whether the political system will still protect the asset five years from now.
A Syrian refugee in Germany, Turkey or Jordan performs a similar calculation before returning.
Will my family be safe?
Will my property claim be recognised?
Will another militia control the neighbourhood?
Will my religious identity determine how police treat me?
If the answer is uncertain, remaining abroad can be rational even when people desperately want to return home.
The coastal violence therefore damages one of Syria’s largest potential economic assets: its diaspora.
Millions of Syrians abroad possess skills, capital and international networks the country desperately needs.
Political stability can bring some back.
Sectarian fear pushes them further away.
The violence also reveals why transitional justice cannot be postponed indefinitely. Syria contains enormous legitimate anger towards people responsible for torture, disappearances and mass killing under Assad. If formal institutions do not create credible mechanisms for justice, individuals will attempt to create justice themselves.
Revenge fills the vacuum left by courts.
That means the new government needs investigations, evidence preservation, transparent detention procedures and trials capable of distinguishing perpetrators from people who simply lived under the old system.
This is administratively difficult.
Assad’s security apparatus was enormous.
Records are incomplete.
Witnesses are traumatised.
Some alleged perpetrators fled.
Others remain inside communities where arrest operations can trigger resistance.
But imperfect due process is still better than communal attribution.
The alternative is collective guilt, and collective guilt has no natural endpoint.
If all Alawites become responsible for Assad because Assad was Alawite, another faction can eventually apply the same logic to Sunnis because HTS is Sunni-dominated.
Sectarian politics becomes self-reinforcing because every community acquires historical evidence that it needs armed protection from the others.
That is precisely the equilibrium Syria needs to escape.
Lebanon demonstrates how durable such structures can become. Its political system still distributes offices substantially through sectarian categories partly because communities do not trust a purely majoritarian state to protect them.
Iraq developed its own sectarian power-sharing architecture after Saddam Hussein.
These systems can prevent domination.
They can also institutionalise the identities they are designed to manage.
Syria therefore needs to decide whether minority protection should come primarily through communal power-sharing or individual citizenship backed by decentralisation and constitutional safeguards.
There is no easy answer.
A purely majoritarian system can frighten minorities in a country where Sunni Muslims form the large majority.
Rigid sectarian quotas can make every political issue a competition between religious groups.
A hybrid system may be more plausible: constitutional protections, local autonomy, independent courts and enough representation to prevent one group monopolising the state without permanently assigning every citizen a political identity according to religion.
The Kurdish question creates a parallel challenge. Earlier this week, the Syrian government and the Syrian Democratic Forces remained engaged in negotiations over integrating Kurdish-controlled institutions and forces into the national state.
The underlying principle is the same.
Damascus wants sovereignty.
Local communities want guarantees that surrendering autonomous military power will not leave them exposed.
Disarmament therefore requires credible protection after disarmament.
This is the central state-building problem across Syria.
Alawites fear surrendering former-regime networks.
Kurds fear surrendering the SDF.
Local factions fear surrendering weapons.
Everyone wants the state eventually to possess a monopoly on force.
Nobody wants to be the first community to give up force before knowing what the state will become.
This is a security dilemma inside a country.
Each group arms because it fears the others.
The others interpret the arms as evidence they also need protection.
The result is a state that cannot monopolise force because everyone fears the consequences of allowing it to do so.
The solution is not simply stronger central government.
It is a central government trusted enough that communities voluntarily accept stronger central authority.
Trust therefore becomes a form of state capacity.
That sounds abstract.
It produces very concrete outcomes.
A trusted police force needs fewer checkpoints.
A trusted army encounters less local resistance.
A trusted court requires fewer people to seek protection from militias.
Legitimacy reduces the cost of governing.
This is why authoritarian regimes can appear strong while actually being extremely expensive. They need surveillance, coercion and patronage to produce compliance that legitimate institutions receive more cheaply.
Assad’s state demonstrated this perfectly.
It looked formidable because security institutions were everywhere.
When the external support and fear sustaining those institutions disappeared, much of the apparent strength evaporated.
The new Syria should not attempt to recreate that model under different leadership.
There is also a regional dimension because outside powers can exploit sectarian insecurity. Iran lost enormous influence when Assad fell and Hezbollah weakened. If Alawite communities become frightened enough, external actors could eventually find opportunities to rebuild influence through promises of protection.
This is how proxy networks grow.
They rarely begin because entire populations suddenly adopt a foreign state’s geopolitical programme.
They begin because local actors need money, weapons or security.
Domestic insecurity creates markets for foreign intervention.
A Syrian government protecting minorities therefore reduces Iran’s future opportunity to rebuild networks more effectively than anti-Iranian rhetoric does.
The same applies to Israel’s concerns over southern Syria.
A fragmented country filled with autonomous armed groups creates uncertainty along Israel’s border.
A functioning Syrian state capable of controlling its territory could eventually become more predictable even if relations remain hostile.
Neighbouring powers therefore have a long-term interest in Syrian state capacity.
Their short-term incentives may still encourage fragmentation because weak neighbours are easier to influence.
This is the regional prisoner’s dilemma discussed after Assad’s collapse.
Turkey wants influence in the north.
Israel wants security buffers.
Iran wants lost networks restored.
Russia wants strategic access.
Each can pursue narrow objectives through local actors.
Collectively those strategies can prevent Syria from becoming stable enough to stop generating threats for everyone.
The international response to the coastal violence should therefore focus on strengthening accountability rather than immediately assuming the entire transition has failed.
Al-Sharaa has publicly promised investigations and called for perpetrators to be punished. Those statements now need institutional follow-through.
Who investigates?
Are findings published?
Are commanders removed?
Are perpetrators prosecuted even if they belong to victorious factions?
Can Alawite communities report abuses safely?
These are measurable tests.
The distinction between condemnation and accountability matters.
Governments condemn atrocities easily.
Accountability imposes costs on their own supporters.
That is where credibility appears.
If Damascus prosecutes only former Assad personnel while ignoring abuses by government-aligned fighters, transitional justice becomes victor’s justice.
If it prosecutes both according to evidence, the state begins demonstrating neutrality.
That is how institutions acquire legitimacy.
The stakes extend far beyond this week’s death toll.
The violence could become a short, horrific episode followed by serious accountability and stronger central control.
Or it could become the beginning of a persistent coastal insurgency organised increasingly around Alawite communal fear.
Those paths diverge according to decisions being made now.
This is why post-war periods can be as strategically important as wars themselves.
Military victory creates a temporary asymmetry of power.
The winners decide how to use it.
They can punish collectively and create permanent enemies.
Or they can constrain themselves and make opposition less existential.
Self-restraint after victory is one of the strongest signals a new political order can send.
It tells minorities that citizenship matters more than which side they supported.
It tells armed groups that demobilisation does not mean annihilation.
It tells foreign governments that sanctions relief will not finance another authoritarian system.
It tells refugees that returning home does not require belonging to the victorious community.
Syria needs all four messages.
Assad’s government survived for decades partly by telling minorities that only dictatorship could protect them from the majority.
The revolution defeated Assad militarily.
It has not yet defeated that idea politically.
That is what the coastal violence now tests.
If the new authorities protect Alawites while prosecuting individuals responsible for regime crimes, they demonstrate that Syria can separate identity from responsibility.
If they allow revenge to become communal, Assad’s political logic survives even after Assad himself is gone.
That would be one of the most tragic outcomes possible.
A revolution could overthrow the dictator while preserving the fear that made dictatorship possible.
The new Syrian state therefore faces a deceptively simple test:
can it protect people who did not necessarily want it to win?
If the answer becomes yes, Syria may actually be building a state.
If the answer becomes no, the country risks rebuilding another collection of armed communities waiting for the next war.
