Another day, another shootout. On February 26th security forces in Latakia, Syria’s biggest port, killed four people including an army officer from the recently overthrown regime who was supposed to be protected by an amnesty. A day later in Qardaha, the ancestral home of Bashar al-Assad, the deposed president, locals attacked a police station after the authorities set up a checkpoint and shot a protester. That evening fighting broke out in three coastal cities after supporters of the new, Sunni Islamist government rode through neighbourhoods dominated by Mr Assad’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiism, brandishing machetes and al-Qaeda flags. Two days later gun battles erupted in Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus, after government forces tried to dismantle barricades erected by local Druze, another minority sect.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new leader, has promised to unveil a new government that might help to unite the country after 14 years of civil war and more than 50 years of dictatorship. But the date set for the unveiling came and went on March 1st without any announcement. As The Economist went to press, the all-male, all-Sunni government of loyalists Mr Sharaa brought with him from his stronghold in the province of Idlib remained in office. The self-declared president, a supposedly reformed jihadist, appears to be wrestling with the dilemma of whether to appease his Islamist followers by tightening his grip or to share power with Syria’s many sects and ethnicities. So far he has been neither assertive enough to maintain order nor inclusive enough to reassure minorities and the international community.
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Under Mr Assad Syria sank from middle-income status to abject poverty. Women saw branches off trees for heating. Children scavenge in dumpsters for food. Men pull copper wire from buildings and telecoms cables to sell. The government is broke and banks are running out of cash. “The economy is tanking,” says one of Mr Sharaa’s advisers.
The urge to purge
Mr Sharaa’s circle say they have learned the lessons of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in neighbouring Iraq in 2003. Mercifully, Syria has so far escaped the looting that followed Hussein’s fall. But Mr Sharaa seems to be mimicking America’s gutting of the Iraqi state, which contributed to rampant disorder. He has dissolved the army and the security services, abolished all political parties, including the ruling Baath, and purged the civil service. Most Alawite city councillors in Damascus have lost their jobs, but not those from other sects. By some estimates, almost half the old regime’s 1.3m government workers have been dismissed. The rebels-turned-rulers have also turfed many former officials’ families out of their homes.
Like the old regime, the new one has a weakness for nepotism and prioritises loyalty over merit. Mr Sharaa has made his older brother, Maher, the health minister, and assigned him a former general’s five-storey home in Damascus’s swanky West Mezzeh district. He is said to have appointed another brother, Hazem, who previously ran a Pepsi bottling franchise, to head the investment authority. A brother-in-law is the new governor of Damascus.
Many functionaries from Idlib, the province Mr Sharaa previously ran as head of an Islamist militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), have been shoehorned into senior jobs, from Damascus’s new chief of police to the head of the department of antiquities. The new manager of all Syria’s industrial zones previously ran a tiny one in Idlib. The new dean of political science at Damascus University used to be dean of Idlib University. Typically the new arrivals sport flashy watches, pencil-thin ties and lots of hair gel—like Mr Sharaa himself.
Good riddance
Some changing of the guard was inevitable. The old regime was notoriously sadistic and corrupt. Many of the millions whom it first dispossessed and then blitzed with barrel bombs in the rebel-held cities to which they fled desire some form of retribution. Even more assume the fall of the regime will bring an end to penury, unemployment and homelessness. Many observers warn of a backlash if Mr Sharaa ignores their plight. Some already accuse him of selling out.
But the overnight Idlibisation of Syria has left many others aghast. The newcomers have removed relatively liberal imams at some Damascene mosques and replaced them with ones espousing the doctrinaire version of Islam practised in the province during Mr Sharaa’s decade-long rule. “Alawite?” ask bearded militiamen at checkpoints. In Tartus, a relaxed coastal city, the new head of the education department has segregated girls from boys in primary schools. Many, though not all, pubs in Damascus have closed for the fasting month of Ramadan. A long-ignored prohibition on consuming alcohol near mosques and schools has been revived, says a bartender in the capital’s cobbled old town. She fears her workplace will never reopen.
Mr Sharaa’s management style is more suited to an embattled militia than a government. He has an aversion to delegation, but his inner circle is overstretched. One reason why Qatar has not transferred promised aid, says an insider, is because Asaad al-Shaibani, the foreign minister, is too busy to answer Qatari officials’ calls.
Israel also looms. Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, has sent tanks into the UN-patrolled no-man’s-land that used to separate Israeli and Syrian forces and advanced to within 25km of Damascus. His warplanes bomb Syria’s remaining stockpiles of weapons to defang Mr Sharaa’s regime. After the fighting in Jaramana Mr Netanyahu said Israel was ready to protect Syria’s minorities.
Resistance to Mr Sharaa appears to be growing. The Kurdish militia that runs three provinces in the north-east does not accept his rule. Tribesmen in Daraa province, Druze in Suwayda and Alawites in the coastal areas have all resisted the deployment of Mr Sharaa’s henchmen to their regions and have spurned demands to hand over their weapons.
Some Alawites fear that a vengeful rampage by HTS and other Muslim militias has only been postponed, not averted. Some 60,000 have already fled abroad, according to the UN. “A passport doesn’t get you far: Ghana, Indonesia, Nigeria are our choices,” says the Alawite mother of two young girls in Tartus.
But others, including her father-in-law, a retired four-star general, are more steadfast. Much of the former regime’s 150,000-strong professional army has fled to villages in the mountains, he says. Some talk about holding off hostile forces with grenade-launchers. Of late, several Alawite councils have surfaced on the coast, purporting to champion self-rule. “The failure to reconcile with Alawites will be Sharaa’s biggest mistake,” says Jalal al-Mesady, a would-be mediator. “It will explode.”
Syria may yet avoid that. Many hope the country is too exhausted by the long civil war to start fighting again. No one, Alawites included, wants the old regime back. Nor do many welcome the prospect of the country disintegrating into ethnic and religious cantons. Most Alawite officers abetted the toppling of the regime by standing aside as Mr Sharaa’s fighters advanced. Like other Syrians they have welcomed Mr Sharaa’s abolition of the draft and an end to soldiers demanding bribes from people passing checkpoints.
Many Syrians remain determined to make the new order work. Although a football coach in Homs barred Alawites from playing, the town of Jableh proudly parades its non-sectarian team. Former regime commanders who have met Mr Sharaa profess to respect him. “He’s the only one who can spare us from the wolves,” says a former Assad loyalist. It is possible to imagine concessions that might win over other groups, too, such as senior military posts for Druze militiamen or some sort of nod to federalism to placate the Kurds.
On some issues, Mr Sharaa shows surprising flexibility. The same bottle blondes who did so under Mr Assad are still reading the evening news on state television. Although he appointed a sharia-court judge as justice minister, he has held back from applying Islamic law. The old regime’s judges—male and female, Muslim and non-Muslim, veiled and unveiled—still uphold its laws. Damascus’s criminal court has even retained its unisex loos. A hedonist in Latakia claims to have spied the province’s new security chief frolicking in his favourite nightclub. The nature of the new Syria is yet to be determined. ■