Lina Sergie Attar is a Syrian-American architect and writer from Aleppo and the founder and CEO of the Karam Foundation.
Amr Al-Azm is a Syrian archaeologist and professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio and the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University.
Line Khatib is the author of Quest for Democracy: Liberalism in the Modern Arab World and Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba’thist Secularism.
In late April, Democracy in Exile brought together Syrian writers and scholars for a wide-ranging discussion about the country's future after the collapse of the Assad regime. The online panel followed a recent Roundtable in Democracy in Exile on the threats to Syria's political transition—from how to rebuild a country in ruins to whether the new authorities in Damascus can contain sectarian reprisals. Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian-American architect and writer from Aleppo and the founder and CEO of the Karam Foundation, joined Amr Al-Azm, a Syrian archaeologist and professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio and the Gulf Studies Center at Qatar University, and Line Khatib, a fellow at the Center for Syrian Studies at the University of St Andrews and the author of Quest for Democracy: Liberalism in the Modern Arab World and Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba'thist Secularism. They expanded on their responses in the Roundtable and spoke in depth about the biggest threats to a post-Assad transition, shaped by their impressions of Syria after finally being able to return to their country after Assad's fall.
—Frederick Deknatel, Executive Editor
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
The struggle of what we are as a country, who Syrians are—that is a question that is very open in my mind.
- Lina Sergie Attar
Frederick Deknatel: Lina, you wrote in the Roundtable about what you called the "existential crisis" that Syrians face going forward—not just the legacy of the civil war, but much more deeply than that, the legacy of 54 years of Assad family rule. How Syrians can reimagine themselves as citizens in a country that's not living under the Assad regime anymore, under constant surveillance and torture and all of the other brutalities of both Hafez al-Assad and his son, Bashar. Was that impression already formed before you were able to go back to Syria in January for the first time in many years?
Lina Sergie Attar: I really appreciate your invitation to the Roundtable to help me think through things and formalize my thoughts into writing, which I've found very difficult to do over the past few years. As you know, being Syrian and watching how everything has unfolded and really beginning to believe—for me personally, but I think it's widespread among many Syrians—that there really was no more hope. I no longer had hope of ever seeing my homeland again.
I became very focused on the work that the Karam Foundation does—on refugee communities and supporting the people that we can, especially young people, to be able to reach their full potential and find their place in the world. I spent many years working with young Syrians in southern Turkey, right on the border of Syria, telling them that you have a responsibility to be holding your country in the future wherever you are. Building wherever you are. Being a good citizen wherever you are. And that is actually what our Syria is. I imagined it as a very fragmented country, distributed across millions of displaced people and a new diaspora across the world. The last time I was in southern Turkey was in mid-November. I've had this ritual of going and standing at the border, looking across onto the internally displaced camps, and telling the people who would be with me: "I know this is going to be the closest I'll ever be to Aleppo in my lifetime."
Then to have, just a few weeks after that, on Thanksgiving evening, the beginning of the liberation of Aleppo, which we did not know was to be a liberation. And then actually that possibility of—will we be able to see our country again? And then 11 days later, that becoming a reality, flipping the switch, literally, for Syrians, of this new reality of being able to return. It has opened up floodgates of: What does it mean to be Syrian now?
We've been seeing that over the past few months with a new government formation and people being able to go back. I was able to go back in January and finally visit my home in Aleppo that I'd been in exile from, that was looted by the regime—still much, much luckier than millions of other Syrians who have experienced greater loss. Seeing the landscape of destruction that is Syria is overwhelming, even though we knew it and we watched it in real time happen over 14 years. I'm hearing a lot from people that go back. It's a shared experience, a roller coaster of emotions daily—feeling this extreme joy, this extreme sense of not being afraid, which is very surreal. Not being able to speak, watching other people speak. And then sorrow and grief, witnessing the destruction, witnessing the poverty.
The struggle of what we are as a country, who Syrians are—that is a question that is very open in my mind, even while being here, living outside Chicago, and watching a lot of discussions happening on social media as the government is evolving and as events are evolving in Syria. We're watching conferences and organizations and investments and people—really, everybody—wanting to build a project in Syria.
I think there is a core piece which I saw reflected in many of the other people's responses in this group, which is that justice and accountability will be one of the biggest questions and the biggest threats to the future, if not being taken into serious consideration. As I think about what my place will be in the future of Syria and what Karam's work will be, it is very important to think about: How do we deal with the loss? How do we deal with this mass grief? Where do we go when every single Syrian family has this extreme loss of home, of people—of people who have been disappeared, people have been tortured, people have been killed? This has happened to 24 million people and the diaspora. How we will deal with the aftermath of this and how we will deal with the question of justice, the question of how we hold the criminals accountable, is going to be a big part of how we build ourselves back as a country.
Deknatel: Amr, since the beginning of the Syrian uprising and then the early years of the civil war, among the Syrian opposition and other activists and exiles abroad, there was this question of the "day after" and what could be possible. What would a Syria look like the "day after" Assad? As the war dragged on, I think many people, if not most people, were sort of resigned to the fact that the regime was not going to go anywhere and that Syria was just this shattered country—which is why the shock of the rebel offensive that ended the regime so suddenly in December took so many people by surprise. What do you see going forward, as someone who's been involved in some of that work abroad over the last 14 years? You had identified in the Roundtable this question of whether the new authorities in Damascus under Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new self-declared "interim" president, can move beyond the factionalism that these rebel groups represent to a more unified state. What do you think is the biggest challenge to getting there?
Amr al-Azm: Thank you for bringing up the "day after." I'm one of the co-founders of an organization called The Day After. This question came up quite early on, as early, I would say, as the third, fourth, fifth month of the uprising back in 2011. As things were happening, some of us started asking ourselves, well, what happens if and when the regime does fall? Many people thought the regime's fall was imminent; it was just a matter of weeks, maybe months. I was always on the pessimistic side. I always said it was going to take a lot more. I thought it would take 18 months if there was a Benghazi-style scenario. But this is 2011 and, of course, we all know how things panned out.
That said, what about the day after now? I'm glad you brought up the factionalism, because I think this is going to be a key hallmark of the day after. Can the current administration move forward, move beyond this very odd coalition of disparate groups, many of whom don't like each other? This has been a real test for them. They've had to come together for this. And I don't know how long this is going to last. In conversations I've had with different people, they have not forgotten that there is also blood between them. They also have fought very severe battles amongst each other. We're not talking about fighting the regime; we're talking about fighting each other. They've been able to kind of suppress this, but I don't think they've been completely able to bypass these issues, and I think this is all going to come back.
When we think of the day after, we have to think of the fact that you have this very odd, non-homogeneous mix of different factions that got together to topple the regime, and now somehow they have to figure out what comes next. And while Sharaa and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham made a power grab and had himself declared head of the state, the real next stage is to basically move from this chiefdom kind of arrangement—which is exactly what he is—to an actual head of state that runs and operates within and through statist institutions, rule of law, etcetera.
This is very much not happening right now. We see bits and pieces of it here and there. We see vestiges of the old institutions. We see efforts to bring new changes, but by and large on the ground, there is still a lot to do, and they still have a long way to go.
I would also say one other thing: Many people who have gone to Syria, many of us, really only went to Damascus. I actually ventured a little outside, and I can tell you, Damascus is a bubble. Aleppo is a little bit less, but it's still a bubble. You go beyond those, and it's a very different landscape—and not a healthy one. The economic situation is very dire, and the rule of law and the state institutions that are supposed to function and run things and essentially be in charge are almost nonexistent. The services they're supposed to be offering are almost nonexistent. You're dealing with a very volatile landscape, with these factions very much still in control, and Sharaa and the current administration essentially having to rely on them to maintain their position.
Just one last point, we won't really know exactly what "the day after" is going to finally be until this issue is resolved. And when I say resolved, either Sharaa is going to be able to essentially take out the factions that won't give in, or they're going to take him out. I'd say between now and the end of the year. I don't think this is an unrealistic timeline. The next six to eight months, something's going to give somewhere along the line, and then we can start to see what's going to come afterwards. That's what I'm seeing right now. Maybe it's not as optimistic as people would like me to be, but I've never been an optimist.
Deknatel: I can understand not being so optimistic, Amr, given everything that you identified there.
Line, as a scholar who has written a book on Ba'ath Party rule in Syria, how do you see the prospects of the state that existed under the Assad regime being transformed in some way under the new authorities? Do you think that's possible? Is it possible to even reform or use the state institutions that had existed for the past 50 years for a democratic Syria?
Line Khatib: That's a very good question. I think absolutely these institutions can be re-used. We should not be dismantling institutions at this point. I want to take that and go to my answer for the Roundtable. I think the main problem in Syria is disinformation. To me, it's the biggest threat because it fuels and amplifies all the other threats.
What we're witnessing inside and outside Syria is rampant disinformation. Millions of posts, videos, articles, commentaries and photos are spreading this often-fake news that is then picked up by influencers, bloggers, YouTubers and conspiracy theorists all over the world. What this does is undermine any kind of project that Syrians are up to. It undermines the sense of unity they can achieve in their collective identity as Syrians. I think that is the purpose of the disinformation.
Disinformation exaggerates the reality of the sectarian violence, for example, and of the physical violence in Syria. It exacerbates the existential crisis that Lina was talking about. It promotes foreign agendas and narratives that are divisive, that try to maintain the fragmentation that Syrians witnessed for such a long time under the Assad regime. This is robbing Syrians of their ability to devise their own solutions to problems—to make their own history, if you want. It shatters their ability to make informed decisions, to devise organic solutions to actual problems they have. Disinformation even takes away the ability to delineate the parameters of the problems altogether and to prioritize which problems should be tackled first.
One last thing that is very problematic, that has fed the disinformation and explains why the disinformation is spreading so rapidly and disempowering Syrians in so many ways—I think it's because of our perceptions of the people who stormed Damascus on the eighth of December 2024 and ended up liberating the country. HTS and the Islamists are generally presented as fundamentally scary, as fundamentally different. They're demonized and dehumanized in so many ways—and I understand that. But the conceptual category of Islamism and discourse surrounding them is ripe with unconscious biases, with clichés, with othering at best, with Western foreign policy concerns. Scaring Syrians about Islamists is nothing new. The Assad regime did it since the 1970s, to divide Syrians through this discourse of how the Islamists are so different and so terrifying and violent. This perception runs deep and explains why so much of the disinformation is generally being believed and being shared, even the craziest stories I'm seeing being shared all over the place.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, since taking over, has not mentioned democracy once. He is not interested in a democratic transition. Democracy has nothing to do with what his plans are.
- Amr al-Azm
Deknatel: Disinformation was also the subject of an article published recently in Democracy in Exile from a Syrian activist in Homs, Ola Suliman, who is working to document disappearances and other sectarian violence since Assad's fall. As she wrote, without clear information about what has happened, rumors have instead filled the void, including disinformation "by actors whose survival depends on the country's chaos." Some of this disinformation also fed into the sectarian violence in early March along the Syrian coast. Those sectarian reprisals against Alawite villages, after other revenge killings in recent months, also raise the question of how much control Sharaa and the new government really have over the entirety of Syria.
Al-Azm: Sharaa and the current administration probably control only one-third to one-half of the country. You take out the eastern region, east of the Euphrates. You take out Quneitra. You take out Suwayda. Daraa is give and take; there's bits and pieces. And then the coastal region. While the current administration does have a presence in the main cities—Latakia, Tartus—out in the countryside, again, their control is relatively limited. This is a significant problem, and the lack of resources to truly take control, not just in the hard military notion, but as a state—with its institutions, with its rule of law, with its courts, with its administration—that's not there.
I think that's causing a serious problem, and that takes us back to the bigger issue of justice and transitional justice. If the state and its institutions that are supposed to instill and enforce the rule of law are either not there, unable to function or just not viable, then how is anyone going to get justice? You have thousands, maybe even millions of people who all have suffered throughout this conflict and who all have grievances that need to be addressed, and they don't see a way.
For me, one of the biggest issues—and literally, from day one, we were screaming at anyone who would listen—is transitional justice. At least give people a sense of what they can expect. How are we going to start this process, where can we go? Then at least people can say, "Well, I don't agree with this," or "I agree with this," or "I want this." But demonstrate that you're actually going to do something about it. And so far, we've had almost nothing. We've just had lip service paid to it at best. They formed this committee, supposedly, that was supposed to look at the terrible events of March that happened on the coast. Nothing's come out of it. You have people who for the last 14 years have been living in camps and have lost so much and hold huge grievances. And now you have added another group who also feel aggrieved because they've suffered these terrible atrocities that occurred on the coast. This is just going to increase the pressure on everybody, and with little release that I see happening.
Syrians want three things: They want security, they want economic stability—and those two alone are not enough, because in a way, we had those under Assad. What they also want is accountability. If you don't add accountability in there, then it's going to fail. Accountability has to come from where you have a government and an administration with the rule of law, with institutions that function. That's why it's so critical. That's why I keep going back to this.
Sergie Attar: I agree completely on the lack of institutions that can provide any kind of an outline for justice and accountability. Specifically with the disappeared, we have seen a lot of activists and local groups reminding the new government of the over 100,000 disappeared. We still don't know where they are, or what their fate is.
But some people know. When you talk about being outside of the bubble, being in the countryside, in smaller towns, and even within the bubble, this is not an abstract problem. You have millions of people who have lost their homes, hundreds of thousands of people who have been killed, hundreds of thousands detained, tortured. The everyday violence was happening by Syrians that people know. People know who took their home. People know who the torturers in the prison were, and a lot of these people are walking amongst them.
Continuing the cycle of violence with no answers to what we can do to provide justice and answers to the families who have these grievances—that's my biggest fear, that the cycle of violence, although much smaller, will continue and that we slip back into a war in the future, because these questions have not been answered for the people who are demanding freedom and dignity. We're living after the era of fear, but when you have millions of people being able to say what they think, there has to be some kind of mechanism for listening and answering people's demands for accountability and justice.
Sarah Leah Whitson: One question I have is whether there's a bit of a disconnect between the external political circumstances that led to the fall of Assad and the continuing geopolitical drama that's dominating Syria, in terms of an Israeli occupation, a Turkish occupation, negotiations with Russia over its military bases there, U.S. occupation—versus what we're talking about here, which are issues of domestic democracy, disarming of militias, transitional justice and so forth. It's hard for me to gauge what's real. Is there more to what's happening in Syria? Can we talk about the demands and requirements of a real democratic transition when it seems that there is so much that is happening that is externally orchestrated and negotiated?
Al-Azm: The elephant in the room for me is Sharaa himself and what his plans are. At the end of the day, we should not kid ourselves. You just mentioned democracy. This guy, since taking over, has not mentioned democracy once. The guy is not interested in a democratic transition. Democracy has nothing to do with what his plans are. This man and his core team around him have been very open: They're planning to basically take over the country and create their version of the next authoritarian style of rule. The best that can perhaps come out of it is that it may be more benign than their predecessor. But talk about democratic transitions here is not the issue.
The question for us, I think, as Syrians who are concerned with democracy, who want freedoms, who want to be able to talk and express ourselves, and break from the repressive past we've had—this is a very important issue, even though the current situation on the ground is so catastrophic that most people are not even thinking like that. I have the luxury of being able to think beyond that because I'm not living there. I'm not having to literally struggle every day just to find enough to feed my kids or pay the rent or find electricity. If Sharaa is able to consolidate control and exert the kind of power takeover that he's clearly planning and working towards—I think, in a way, that is why other things have fallen by the wayside, because that has been his primary focus.
This is why rule of law and transitional justice have not really been prioritized, because Sharaa's main focus is on taking control. How do I maintain control over what I've taken? And how do I keep others from trying to grab it from me? I think that's partly why he's been distracted, or the administration and its institutions have not been able to rise to address the needs of the people.
When I look at this situation and think of where it might take Syria eventually, it took Hafez al-Assad between 1970 and 1982 to fully consolidate control. For Sharaa, if things stabilize quickly and he's given the support he needs, he will become another version of an Assad-type ruler within the next five years. Maybe that's why he gave himself five years, because he reckons if he locks things down, he can become that absolute ruler. Therefore, ironically maybe, the fact that he is weakened at the moment, the fact that he does not have all this control, the fact that there are areas like the eastern region and the south and the mountains that are making it very difficult for him to exercise complete control, are to our benefit, because they are essentially also preventing him from consolidating another authoritarian regime.
What we have right now has all the makings of becoming one of those things. The international community has always looked at Syria, and any problem like Syria, from a containment lens. It's all about containment, as long as the problem is contained. That's why for them, if Sharaa can demonstrate that he can contain what's inside Syria right now, they have no problem with all the other stuff. They just want to see it contained. Stability and containment is what they're looking for.
