Are Syrians Turning Against Jolani?

Telling Syrians that the free market will eventually improve their lives is not an economic plan. It is, as we say in Arabic, a talk in the air. And Syrians have heard enough promises.

Over the past few days, many people have been asking me whether Syrians are turning against Ahmed al-Sharaa, or Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, as most Syrians still know him. Is this the beginning of the end for the new regime in Damascus? My short answer is: not yet. I do not believe we are watching Jolani's final days, and I think people who jump to that conclusion are moving too quickly. However, the the people are boiling because you cannot build a country on rhetoric, ideology, foreign conferences and promises of reconstruction. At some point, people want to see tangible results. They want affordable energy, food, healthcare, education, security and the minimum conditions required to live with dignity. This was ultimately one of the main reasons Bashar al-Assad lost the willingness of large parts of the population to fight for the old state in December 2024. Whatever someone thought about Arab nationalism, resistance, and secularism of the former Assad regime, these slogans became much less convincing to a father who cannot feed his children. The same rule applies to Jolani or anyone else who rules Syria.

The latest protests are important because they are the most widespread protests Syria has witnessed since the fall of Assad. A sharp increase in fuel prices triggered demonstrations across several parts of the country, with protesters burning tires, blocking roads and even interrupting traffic on the Damascus-Aleppo highway. Diesel prices were raised by roughly 40 percent, while gasoline and gas prices also increased substantially. According to Reuters figures, 95-octane gasoline has increased by around 86 percent since the fall of Assad and diesel has more than doubled. When you impose this kind of increase on a population where 90 per cent of people are already living in poverty, you are destroying whatever left of the lower middle class and starving the poor. Because fuel prices impact almost everything. Vegetables have to be transported. Bread has to be transported. Factories need electricity and diesel. Taxis increase their fares. Shops increase their prices. Consequently, the entire economy adjusts upward while salaries remain where they were.

The official explanation is that Syria depends heavily on imports, that international procurement costs have increased and that disruptions involving Russian energy exports have created additional pressure. I am not saying these factors are completely imaginary. Of course international energy prices affect Syria, especially a Syria whose economic system has been devastated over fourteen years. But I do not believe this explains the structural direction of prices. During the Assad period, we were repeatedly told that the central problem was sanctions and the loss of the oil fields east of the Euphrates. Under Jolani, these sanctions were lifted and the new authorities regained access to the important energy resources held previously by the SDF. Yet the promised reduction in the economic pressure on ordinary Syrians did not materialize. Instead, prices continued to move upward. In my opinion, the more important explanation is the economic model being imposed on Syria itself: privatization, the removal of subsidies and the opening of strategic sectors to foreign investors whose calculations are based on profit margins rather than the purchasing power of the Syrian population.

When Chevron, BP or any other large international corporation enters a country, it invests because it expects a return. If multinational companies can receive a certain profit margin in Iraq, Jordan, the Gulf or another regional market, they won’t invest enormous sums in Syria if the government forces it to sell energy at subsidized prices far below the regional market. Logical.

The state can attract foreign capital, but foreign capital will also demand conditions under which it can generate profit. If those conditions mean raising electricity, gasoline, diesel and services toward regional prices, then somebody has to absorb the difference. That somebody will be the Syrian consumer.

Jolani himself essentially acknowledged that Syria is undergoing this economic “shock”. Speaking in the UAE while protests were spreading at home, he described the country as moving from a system resembling socialism toward a liberalized economy based more heavily on the private sector and the free market. He said that drastic economic transitions inevitably involve a shock and that people may temporarily feel the previous economic situation was better. Theoretically, I understand what he is saying. You cannot dismantle one economic structure and build another without disruption. More than a decade ago, I met Abdallah Dardari, the former Syrian deputy prime minister who was involved in economic reform during the Assad period between 2005 and 2010, and he explained a similar logic to me. He told me that if you want to construct a new open-market-based system, the pillars of the old system have to be dismantled.

The difference is that Syria between roughly 2005 and 2011 was not the Syria of today.
Back then, Syria still had functioning universities, vocational education, skilled workers, factories and an educated middle class capable of participating in such a transition. If you privatize a sector, you need engineers, accountants, managers, technicians, directors, lawyers, administrators and workers who can move into the newly created economy. Syria used to graduate large numbers of these people. Today, after fourteen years of destruction, sanctions, emigration and institutional collapse, many of those human resources have disappeared or have been badly weakened. Hundreds of thousands of educated Syrians are abroad. Universities have deteriorated. Vocational training has deteriorated. Industry was destroyed or relocated. The country is therefore attempting to carry out a much more radical economic transformation from a much weaker starting point.

This is why I believe if Jolani genuinely wants this economic model to succeed, he cannot simply invite foreign companies, privatize sectors and tell people to endure the shock. He has to rebuild the human foundation of the aspired economy. He has to invest in education and skills and create a Syrian class capable of participating in the new sectors instead of turning Syrians into low-paid consumers in an economy increasingly owned or controlled by external capital. Otherwise, the transition will be socially catastrophic.

The protests are already showing how quickly economic anger can spread. According to the mapping, protests had appeared in dozens of locations across multiple governorates, including Aleppo, Idlib, Hama and other parts of the country. The fact that protests appeared in Idlib is particularly important because this was Jolani’s historic stronghold. Damascus, at least at this stage, remained quieter, although anyone familiar with Damascus knows that the capital often waits to understand where the political winds are moving before large sections of society jump to a different wagon. The important point is that these protests should not be dismissed as one local disturbance created by one angry town. They are geographically broader, and they are rooted in an economic problem shared by Syrians across political and sectarian lines.

I was also struck by the comments of a man from Deir ez-Zor who did not present himself as some nostalgic supporter of Assad. In fact, he explicitly said he did not want to praise the former government. He said that, despite the Caesar Act, sanctions and all the problems of the old regime, he remembered being able to secure bread and survive more easily than he can today. He warned the current authorities that the same people who supported them could eventually rise against them if economic conditions did not improve. I think this phenomenon is more politically important than arguments on social media. Most ordinary people are not waking up every morning asking which geopolitical camp won the ideological debate over Syria. They compare yesterday with today. Can I buy bread? Can I afford fuel? Can I find work? Can I pay for medicine? Can my children study? If the answers become worse rather than better, political legitimacy begins to collapse.

Here, I want to be extremely clear because every time I criticize what is happening under Jolani, someone immediately assumes that I am waiting for Bashar al-Assad to return.

Assad is not coming back.

I do not want Assad to come back, and I believe people who imagine that the collapse of Jolani automatically means Bashar al-Assad will return to Damascus are detached from the reality Syria is living today. That chapter is finished. Assad himself, in my opinion, would probably not want to return to govern under these conditions even if somebody offered him the possibility. More importantly, he no longer possesses the political and material means that existed before December 8, 2024. He remains an extremely divisive personality among Syrians. People fought for him, people fought against him, and enormous numbers of Syrians were killed during that conflict. Why should we imagine that Syria, a country of more than twenty million people with thousands of capable Syrians, can only be ruled by one family forever? I defended the Syrian state against a regime-change operation. That does not mean I believe Bashar al-Assad must rule Syria today, tomorrow and forever. These are two completely different positions.

Now, let’s suppose the current regime collapsed. Whoever comes after Jolani, if Jolani eventually loses power, will inherit the same structural problem. Syria today does not possess the conditions that Hafez al-Assad built, or even that Bashar al-Assad possessed before 2011. The country is infiltrated by external powers and their assets, economically dependent, militarily fragmented and surrounded by states with their own projects. Whoever sits in Damascus will immediately face pressure from Turkey, Israel, the Gulf states, the United States and other regional and international actors. He will be blackmailed and pressured for political and economic concessions. So even if Hafez al-Assad somehow came out of his grave tomorrow, he could not govern Syria the same way he governed in the 1970s or 1980s because the material conditions that made that kind of centralized sovereignty possible no longer exist.

Now, let’s talk about the most dangerous misunderstanding surrounding the protests. Some people think that if Syrians protest enough, Jolani will simply leave. I do not think it will happen that way. If the current regime feels that its survival is threatened, it will resort to excessive repression and armed clashes will erupt among the very factions that helped create the current order. Syria is still full of weapons, ideological factions, Takfiri networks, tribal structures and rival security forces. A collapse of central authority could produce another round of civil war in which factions that are presently standing together begin devouring one another before the violence spreads outward into the rest of Syrian society. That is the scenario I fear the most.

The regional environment makes this even a stronger possibility because Turkey and Israel are not passive observers waiting to see what Syrians decide for themselves. Both have strategic interests inside Syria. Turkey has established deep political, military and economic connections in Syria. Israel has occupied a large swath of Syrian territory since the collapse of the Assad rule. Therefore, the collapse of central authority could produce more Syrian territory falling under the occupation of these surrounding powers.

This is why Jolani’s trip to the UAE is quite interesting. Officially, he was attending a conference in Abu Dhabi while Syria was experiencing this wave of protests. We know these international appearances have become an important part of the new regime’s effort to present itself as legitimate and economically open. But according to Jolani’s critics, the real purpose of the UAE visit is to seek financial support from Mohammed bin Zayed after other Gulf funding had become less reliable, including money required to pay the salaries of his military and security apparatus. There are also allegations that Jolani would secretly meet an Israeli delegation in Abu Dhabi and was prepared to make substantial concessions in order to preserve his authority. I cannot independently verify these allegations, and I do not present them as established facts. But the allegation is worth mentioning because it fits a broader question surrounding the current regime: how much political autonomy can Damascus really maintain if the survival of its institutions depends on outside financing?

My interpretation is that Jolani is searching for new external sponsors as the regional environment changes. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have played important roles around the new Syrian authorities, while the UAE maintains a particularly close strategic relationship with Israel. If Jolani can bring the Emiratis more deeply into Syria, then economic assistance from Abu Dhabi could also create a channel through which a new relationship with Israel becomes politically easier. Whether or not the alleged secret meeting took place, this broader direction is worth watching. The authority in Damascus desperately needs money. It needs money to pay soldiers, security personnel and civil servants. It needs outside capital to rebuild infrastructure. When a government is this financially weak, foreign assistance comes with political conditions.

What is happening economically in Syria reminds me, to a certain extent, of the transformation of Yugoslavia and the Balkans. I am not saying Syria and Yugoslavia are identical cases. But what I am comparing is the sequence: weaken a state, sanction it, destroy it, fragment its institutions, destroy its ability to manage parts of the economy, and then open what remains to privatization and foreign capital under conditions largely determined by outside powers. Many Syrians believe that the moment Western and Gulf companies enter Syria, living standards will automatically rise because the country has finally returned to the so-called international community. I suspect the opposite may happen in the short and perhaps medium term.

Because ss Syria is integrated into regional and international markets, Syrian prices will increasingly be compared with regional prices. Electricity, fuel, transportation, property, healthcare, education and services will begin moving toward the levels investors consider commercially profitable. Foreign companies will calculate their costs and expected returns relative to other markets where they can deploy their capital. But Syrian salaries are not going to magically become Emirati, German or American salaries because the economy has been liberalized. This is a fantasy.

In fact, the new economic model could produce the following:

Global prices. Syrian salaries.

This is what I fear Syrians are going to experience: Privatization, the gradual removal of subsidies and the commercialization of services. Therefore, Syrians will pay more for electricity, more for transportation, more for education, more for healthcare and more for basic commodities while their salaries struggle to keep pace with inflation. The people who own assets and have access to foreign capital can become much richer under such a system. The ordinary worker who possesses nothing except his salary will experience the transformation very differently.

This is why I am not persuaded when officials describe everything as a temporary economic shock and ask the people to wait. Maybe they are correct that some of the shock is temporary. But temporary until when? What is the plan? What are the measurable targets? Under the previous Syrian regime, whatever someone thinks about it, governments at least spoke in the language of five-year and ten-year economic plans and set targets for sectors, production and state expenditure. If the current authorities are asking Syrians who already survived fourteen years of war to endure another period of sacrifice, then they have to explain what the timeline is. Simply telling people that the free market will eventually improve their lives is not an economic plan. It is, as we say in Arabic, a talk in the air.

And Syrians have heard enough promises.

Editorial note: This article is an edited transcript of one of my livestreams. AI assisted with transcription cleanup and editorial editing. The analysis, arguments, and opinions are my own.

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—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian geopolitical analyst and the founder of Syriana Analysis.