In late 2024, a lightning offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist faction that broke from al-Qaeda, drove Bashar al-Assad from power in 11 days. Assad fled to Moscow , where he remains today. Syria is now governed by HTS commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former jihadist once known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. His government is Sunni-led, and for the minorities who make up much of the country the question is not whether Syria has changed but whether it has grown any safer.
Minorities had never been simply content under Assad. Every major group turned on him in its own way. The Druze of Suwayda had been in open revolt since August 2023, when protests over fuel prices hardened into demands for his fall; when the end came, Druze factions inside the “Southern Operations Room” reached Damascus first , hours ahead of HTS.
The Kurds were also anything but passive. Their commanders welcomed Assad’s fall as historic, and as regime and Iran-backed forces abandoned the east, Kurdish troops swept into Deir ez-Zor , even as Turkish -backed factions used the same chaos to seize the Kurdish towns of Tel Rifaat and Manbij .
And the community Assad trusted most failed him too, as rank-and-file Alawite conscripts deserted the Syrian army in droves, burning their uniforms and walking home rather than die for a president they no longer believed in. His protection racket, the claim that only he stood between Syria’s minorities and the abyss, collapsed the moment those minorities stopped believing he was the lesser evil.
Nearly 18 months have passed since al-Sharaa was named president in January 2025. State Department officials have offered positive initial assessments of his leadership, and President Donald Trump has announced the removal of Syria from the state sponsors of terrorism list.
But a question remains: how is life for Syrians today? The answer is… it depends. Syrian Sunnis are likely more supportive of the new government, because they cannot point to the same adverse policies or acts of aggression experienced by Alawites, Druze, Christians, and Kurds. Those communities remain far more skeptical, and for good reason.
Minority Report
Concentrated in the southwestern governorate of Suwayda, the Syrian Druze hold suspicions of Damascus that stem from prior and scarring violence. In 2015, Jabhat al-Nusra, a predecessor to al-Sharaa’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, massacred Druze in the village of Qalb Lawzah. In April 2025, government-allied armed factions killed Druze militia members across several communities. Tensions ignited again in July 2025, when a Bedouin robbery of a Druze vendor set off tit-for-tat kidnappings that escalated into full-scale clashes killing more than 1,700 people, violence the UN later documented as likely war crimes by government forces and Druze militias alike. When Syrian government forces and foreign fighters entered Suwayda, Druze militias fought them rather than disarm.
For Syria’s Kurds, the threat has been less immediate mass violence than political betrayal. Concentrated in the northeast, in Rojava, Kurds control roughly 80 percent of the country’s oil and gas, its agricultural belt, and significant water resources including the Euphrates. Their armed wing is the 100,000 -member, U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). After weeks of negotiations, Damascus and the Kurds reached a broad agreement : the SDF would fold into the Ministry of Defense, Kurds would receive a meaningful share of oil revenues, and al-Sharaa would recognize them as fully Syrian with guaranteed constitutional rights. Three days later, he issued a new constitution that kept the name “Syrian Arab Republic,” never mentioned Kurds by name, and changed Islam from being “a main source” of legislation to being “the main source.”
Where the Kurds encountered broken promises, Alawites faced something more openly violent: collective punishment for the Assad regime’s crimes. A minority sect, they nevertheless became the backbone of Assad’s security state after Hafez al-Assad deliberately staffed its most feared institutions—the Mukhabarat, the Republican Guard, and the Fourth Armored Division—with Alawite loyalists. After Assad’s fall, the new government treated the entire community as collectively guilty for his crimes rather than distinguishing regime loyalists from ordinary civilians. In March 2025, in response to an uprising by thousands of Alawite loyalists , armed factions operating alongside government forces went door to door in coastal Alawite towns, asking residents their sect before killing them. The UN later concluded the violence likely constituted war crimes and left over 1,400 civilians dead.
Christians have not been spared either. Syria jumped 12 spots to become the sixth most dangerous country in the world for Christians in 2026, a ranking earned through church burnings, cemetery desecrations, and a suicide bombing at the Greek Orthodox Mar Elias Church in Damascus on June 22, 2025, that killed at least 30 worshippers during Divine Liturgy.
Political Exclusion
These episodes are not isolated outbreaks of violence. They reflect a political system in which minority communities remain largely excluded from meaningful power in Syria.
Al-Sharaa’s transitional cabinet , announced in March 2025, seats 23 ministers: an Alawite at transport, a Druze at agriculture, a Kurd at education, and one Christian woman at social affairs, while every security portfolio stayed with al-Sharaa’s own loyalists . None of the four minority representatives comes from their community’s political or armed leadership .
The seven-member committee that drafted the transitional constitution included no Alawite, Druze, or Kurdish member, an exclusion minority organizations immediately condemned . The People’s Assembly followed the pattern. Roughly 6,000 electors picked by government committees chose two-thirds of its 210 seats, voting was postponed indefinitely in Suwayda, Raqqa, and Hasakah, and of the 119 members elected, six were women, two were Christians, and not one was Druze .
For over a year, the assembly never met while al-Sharaa legislated alone; he finally named his own third of the chamber on July 1. Here, too, al-Sharaa’s choices of minority representatives do not necessarily reflect the mainstream of their communities, with Kurdish parliament members opposed to the SDF and a Druze member who sided with the government against her own community.
Fragmentation
As confidence in Damascus has declined, minority communities have begun constructing their own political and security institutions. In Suwayda, dozens of local factions merged last August into a National Guard answerable to the community’s most prominent sheikh. On the coast, the Supreme Alawite Islamic Council , run partly from exile, has become that community’s most significant political institution. Syria’s rival Kurdish parties held a rare unity conference in Qamishli in April 2025 around a shared demand for decentralization. Last August, the Kurdish administration hosted a gathering at which the Druze and Alawite leaders, appearing by video, joined Kurdish, Christian, and other minority figures to demand a decentralized state and a rewritten constitution. Damascus denounced the meeting as separatism and pulled out of planned talks in Paris in response.
Cross-minority alliances remain weak. But each community now has a recognizable standard bearer of its own, from Suwayda in the south to the Kurdish northeast, the Alawite coast, and the Christian churches of Damascus.
Foreign Patronage
That fragmentation of Syria has also opened the door to foreign states, each presenting itself as the protector of a different Syrian constituency. Turkey stands squarely behind the Sunni government it helped install, signing a defense pact with Damascus in August 2025 to train and arm the new army while pressing for the dissolution of the Kurdish forces in the northeast. Iran, which spent a decade and tens of billions of dollars propping up Assad with Hezbollah fighters and Shia militias, lost Syria overnight and now sponsors remnant resistance factions, most visibly the Islamic Resistance Front in Syria. And the United States, which built the Kurds into its most effective regional partner, has spent the past year handing that partner over to Damascus.
Israel, meanwhile, is providing military assistance to the Druze with an eye toward destabilizing the government in Damascus. Roughly 3,000 Druze fighters in Suwayda now receive Israeli rifles , ammunition, and monthly salaries. According to an August 2025 public opinion poll , 55 percent of Syrians see Israel as their greatest external threat. If Damascus keeps failing its minorities, will they keep looking elsewhere for the security guarantees their own state won’t provide? The Druze already have.
Today’s Syria has produced some genuine gains, and more than 1.6 million refugees have returned home from neighboring countries. But millions more displaced Syrians are still asking whether a country that cannot protect its minorities is safe to return to. Western reception of al-Sharaa deserves the same scrutiny. He has landed a UN address , removal from terrorism watchlists , and a White House visit , all within about a year and a half of taking power. He has benefited from one simple fact: he is not Bashar al-Assad. Western governments, exhausted by 14 years of a war they could neither solve nor escape, saw in his rise a chance to call the Syria problem solved and move on. Many Western leaders, like Donald Trump, want to send Syrians home, whether they want to return or not.
But changing the man at the top is not the same as changing the state beneath him. Syria has changed rulers; its minorities still lack security, representation, and trust in the state.
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