At the entrances to Damascus branching off the Mezzeh highway, just before Umayyad Square, young men with a quasi-military appearance line both sides of the road, selling flags and banners for “Liberation Day.”
In narrower streets and at intersections leading deeper into the city, they are met by women in long dresses, some with headscarves pulled halfway across their faces. The women drag one or two children behind them and carry loaves of bread for sale, stacking them openly and thrusting them toward passersby and car windows — unwrapped, exposed to diesel fumes and the dust rising from the rubble encircling the capital.
Selling bread in this manner has gradually become a “profession,” largely female, expanding as poverty deepens. Women queue at bakeries to purchase their ration, resell it for a small margin, then return to the lines, repeating the cycle late into the night.
This scene is not confined to Damascus; it recurs across Syrian cities and regions I visited, from Homs and Idlib to Aleppo. Over time, this female presence has become woven into the landscape of a prolonged crisis, a quiet pillar of daily survival.
Widespread destruction
If women’s exhausted faces and roughened hands are the clearest witnesses to a catastrophe now nearing its fifteenth year, the unrelenting destruction bears equally stark testimony. Entire neighborhoods and suburbs, flattened to the ground, ring Damascus, choking it in dust and debris.
The same gray desolation dominates major cities and their surrounding countryside, stretching across vast expanses of the country. Driving more than 350 kilometers without encountering a single intact tree, neighborhood, or home offers a visceral sense of what over a decade of killing, destruction, and vengeance has left behind.
The scale of devastation reflects not only military confrontations or the superiority of one side, but a deliberate effort to annihilate people and livelihoods, to extinguish even the faintest hope of return. What bombs spared was often burned, looted, or rendered uninhabitable. And yet, returns are taking place slowly, haltingly, through sheer individual persistence.
Only a few enclaves have endured in Damascus and its markets, or beyond in certain towns and districts, some even prospering, driven by sectarian calculations or political and commercial interests, most notably those tied to the production and trafficking of captagon.
Damascus: The polished façade
Damascus was preparing for exceptional celebrations marking the first anniversary of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. Preparations were extensive: stages erected, loudspeakers installed, traffic rerouted, and banners raised proclaiming national unity, “One people... one nation”, and announcing that “the dark era has ended.”
Programs circulated via text messages urging citizens to participate and “celebrate freedom and hope... and complete the story.” But which story? The question reverberates through streets where bread is sold on bare asphalt while victory celebrations unfold.
Here, narratives multiply and diverge, sometimes to the point of contradiction, like neighboring bubbles that coexist without touching. A sharp vertical divide in perspectives remains, recalling 2011, when Syrians split to the brink between supporters and opponents, even as official discourse insists on projecting a seamless image of a new phase.
Silent security battle
Behind the celebratory façade, another battle is underway, which is quieter and more complex. “ISIS, especially the muhajireen [foreign fighters], poses our most serious challenge,” a senior Syrian security source who requested anonymity told Asharq Al-Awsat, noting that arrests and “neutralizations” are carried out regularly.
Another source explained that “security operations are conducted with precision and professionalism. Lists of those affiliated with extremist organizations under the broad ISIS umbrella are already in the hands of the security services.”
He added: “We know them individually. We monitor them closely. The former regime left behind an extremely detailed surveillance system that we continue to rely on.”
I met both sources days before the recent Palmyra incident. When it occurred, it appeared unsurprising; officials and those in sensitive positions had anticipated such scenarios as among several looming security risks, especially after Syria formally joined the counterterrorism coalition.
One source summarized these risks as three simultaneous confrontations: “First, the fight against ISIS and its offshoots, handled with extreme caution because it poses a personal threat to President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Second, the confrontation with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which threatens the emerging state and its identity over the long term. Third, a colder, less intense standoff with Israel linked to developments in Sweida.”
In a semi-official assessment, the security source did not rule out that those released from al-Hol camp could become “time bombs,” exploited to destabilize internal security and serve the agendas of extremists rejecting the current transition of power.
Such incidents could also signal abroad that stripping the SDF of its “counterterrorism” duties would be futile, potentially “opening the door to packs of lone wolves.”
Is a security approach enough?
The challenge confronting the state is not purely a security one, and a strictly securitized approach lacks consensus even within governing circles.
Contrary to those who view ISIS and extremism as a “technical problem” solvable through force alone, a figure close to the political leadership argues that “the core issue lies in absorbing a massive human bloc that spent years outside any normal social framework, without education, stable families, or organized structures of life.”
“The real challenge,” he added, “is integrating them into the idea of the state and rehabilitating them accordingly. Just as these adolescents were once pulled toward a specific form of extremism, today we must work to move them toward a middle ground.”
“If the president says we are leaving a factional phase and entering a state-based one, how does that happen at the grassroots level? Is it merely individual and security-driven, or is it societal as well?” he wondered.
In this light, one observer interpreted al-Sharaa’s statement — “Obey me so long as I obey God among you” — delivered from the Umayyad Mosque on the night of the grand celebration and widely criticized by civil and secular circles, as a message aimed at a different audience: a segment the state seeks to reassure through a religious call to obedience and rejection of rebellion.
If words come easily, lived reality does not.
Security is tightly enforced in major cities, such as Damascus and Aleppo, through heavy deployments and modern technologies, including drones, especially during sensitive periods like mass anniversary celebrations.
Beyond the cities, however, vast rural areas remain largely neglected, marked by immense destruction, extreme poverty, and rampant unemployment. Checkpoints line major inter-provincial roads, but side towns and village alleys are often left to fend for themselves.
Idlib, once cited as an exception for its services and administrative capacity, has lost much of that distinction since liberation. Opening to the rest of Syria exposed the city and its devastated countryside to the demands of ordinary life, revealing governance that had amounted largely to crisis management. That legacy persists even in everyday language: soldiers addressing civilians as “sheikh,” or telling them to “seek God’s help” as shorthand for “move along.”
Between Idlib’s countryside and Aleppo, villages and small towns are known for particular loyalties and affiliations — some far removed from the moderation celebrated on Damascus stages. Their reputations lead drivers to take longer routes considered “safer.”
In this belt, young men, especially the youngest, have long served as fuel for armed factions. In recent years, only Hayat Tahrir al-Sham maintained dominance on the ground.
After the fall of the regime, thousands joined the general security forces or the army, often for lack of alternatives. Many cannot afford to rebuild destroyed homes or recover looted livelihoods; barracks, offering food and shelter, remain preferable to civilian life.
A fabric of clashing identities
These identities crystallized during years of militarization, particularly after 2013, though their social roots run deeper. Today, anyone associated with the new authority is often labeled “Idlibi,” after Idlib — the stronghold of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham for nine years — a term frequently tinged with condescension in Damascus and Aleppo. Understanding the social and economic distinctions among these rural communities helps explain their divergent political and military choices.
Some towns, organized around extended families, land ownership, and later labor migration beginning in the mid-1980s, invested in education and professional paths while maintaining a socially rooted religiosity. These communities had previously experienced nationalist and Arabist currents before Baathist authoritarianism took hold.
Others, smaller towns built around sub-clans, relied on seasonal agriculture and service in the police and security apparatus of the former regime. They welcomed their sons’ joining the Nusra Front when it began recruiting, seeing in it both as an organized military path against Assad and a religious identity long suppressed.
Added to this are vast desert regions governed by tribal structures and shifting systems of mutual aid.
Though all are Arab Sunnis, their behaviors, loyalties, and alignments differed, shaping how radical factions penetrated some communities while failing in others, often setting one group against another.
Idlib and the keys to Damascus
When security officials say today they know extremists “one by one,” they rely partly on Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s security apparatus and its accumulated knowledge of radical factions it fought in recent years, such as Jund al-Aqsa and the al-Qaeda-aligned Hurras al-Din, along with informant networks.
Idlib remains, to a significant extent, a secure stronghold holding key levers of power. Courts, administrative bodies, and civil registries still operate under the “Sharia courts” established in mid-2013, unlike other regions, especially Damascus, where transactions are centralized.
Sources identify three main recruitment pathways used by ISIS and its offshoots: ideological recruitment, the fastest and most effective, especially among youth who embraced extremism and have yet to absorb Syria’s rapid changes; recruitment driven by money and revenge amid pervasive poverty and lost status; and recruitment among foreign fighters, embittered by abandonment and with little left to lose.
The emerging state and the ‘Sahwa’ model
When President al-Sharaa returned from Washington, he carried a daunting mandate: to “confront and dismantle terrorist networks” linked to remnants of ISIS, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah, and Hamas, according to US envoy to Syria Tom Barrack.
While Israel has targeted Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, Syria must contend with their residual networks. Yet the greater challenge remains ISIS and its offshoots, fighters who, until recently, were close “brothers in arms” to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
As observers await the form this confrontation will take, particularly in the absence of a unified army with a clear doctrine, Washington’s earlier experiment in post-Saddam Iraq looms large: the Sunni-on-Sunni “Awakening” (Sahwa).
The Sahwa rested on what an informed Iraqi source described as a “coalition of the harmed” from al-Qaeda, centered in Anbar province with its Sunni Arab identity and traditional religiosity. A similar model could emerge in Syria through an alliance of communities damaged by ISIS in the north and northeast, led by the emerging state that wants to fight extremism.
The Iraqi source, who closely followed the Sahwa’s rise and subsequent decline under then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, noted that tribes around Ramadi, especially al-Bourisha, al-Buallwan, al-Bou Fahd, and to a lesser extent al-Dulaim, formed the backbone of the fight after al-Qaeda devastated their trade and social fabric.
Though some were coerced into allegiance, clashes never fully ceased, culminating in atrocities such as the massacre of the al-Bu Nimr tribe, where nearly 2,000 men were executed. A Syrian parallel is the al-Shaitat tribe, which resisted ISIS and suffered one of the largest massacres, with around 1,800 young men killed.
Those who joined the Sahwa were required to publicly renounce al-Qaeda and integrate into security forces coordinated with US troops, in hopes of transforming that tribal bloc into a political actor.
From arms to politics
The Iraqi source highlighted a central lesson: despite the Sahwa’s security successes, it failed to transition into meaningful political participation. When its leaders entered elections, they achieved little representation and failed to build durable popular support.
That failure mirrors Syria’s core dilemma today: the collective transition from a factional, militarized reality confined to limited geography toward a state defined by broader political and administrative principles — and, militarily, by the monopoly of force within a single national army.
Between a woman selling bread on a street corner, a young man dancing in a public square, and institutions struggling to impose order and define the state, Syria appears as a country of overlapping bubbles: a glossy façade prepared for celebration, like a carefully designed postcard, and beneath it a fragile social and security depth whose battles remain unresolved.
