One year after Assad: Is the West celebrating a mirage? |
December 8 marks the first anniversary of the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad and the arrival in power of Ahmed al-Sharaa. It is a date that many Western capitals celebrate as the beginning of a new era: a Syria finally turning toward reconstruction, stability, and perhaps even a form of regional normalization. I understand this aspiration. I hope it comes true. After 15 years of war, economic collapse and social fragmentation, who would not wish to see the emergence of a pragmatic leader eager to turn the page and rebuild his country?
But this hope, however legitimate, cannot replace analysis: One year later, the results are not there.
The temptation to believe in the “pragmatism” of the new regime rests on a misunderstanding. Certainly, al-Sharaa masters the codes of a head of state, and a young one at that. He speaks of economy, administration, foreign investment; he presents himself as open to regional dialogue, including, verbally, with Israel. But beneath this varnish lies a fact that too few diplomatic actors are willing to look in the face: the new Syrian power was not born of any institutional or democratic process, but of an internal compromise between Islamist factions supported by Turkey and Qatar, the most structured of which remains directly linked to Al-Qaeda. In other words, Syria has not broken with the ideological matrix that fueled the worst excesses of the past decade; it has merely reconfigured it into a form of Islamism with more moderate appearances.
The truth must be said: the notion of a “moderate” Islamism, regulated by the responsibilities of governance and the necessities of reconstruction, is a fiction that has........