Damascus’s battered fairgrounds, on the outskirts of the city, hosted a reconstruction fair this fall, billed as an international exhibition to rebuild the country. Like everything in Syria since the sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, it had an optimistic tagline, promising an “economic breakthrough” where “the future of the new Syria is written.”
Yet the reconstruction plans emerging from Syria’s new government are actually more reminiscent of Syria’s past: developments announced by decree, opaque and undemocratic decision-making, and cronyism.
The new president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has worked hard to hone messaging that emphasizes inclusion and radical changes. Reconstruction, with an estimated cost of up to $400 billion—some twenty times the size of Syria’s GDP—is one of the biggest tests of Sharaa’s rhetoric. So far, the reality is falling far short of the marketing. Many Syrians are worried, and international policymakers should be, as well. Without reforms, reconstruction risks ushering in a new era of clientelism and corruption in Syria, benefiting only Sharaa’s allies and international developers, while the Syrian people continue to be locked out of the decisions that will shape their future.
Echoes of Assad
As Syria’s civil war dragged on, and with most of the world eventually assuming Assad would prevail, his regime saw reconstruction as the next stage of the conflict—a propaganda tool and vehicle for ending its international isolation, with the added bonus of regime elites cashing in on crony development schemes spun as rebuilding Syria.
The Assad regime hosted reconstruction fairs in Damascus throughout the conflict—even as fighting raged just beyond the capital’s fairgrounds in the rebel-held suburbs. “The process of eradicating terrorism has reached its final stages, and the reconstruction phase is knocking on the doors,” boasted Hussein Arnous, then Syria’s minister of housing and public works, at a 2018 exhibition prematurely billed as a reconstruction fair. There were few attendees; during a similar trade fair the previous year, a mortar attack on the fairgrounds killed six people.
As Syria’s civil war turned into a stalemate, the regime seized on emerging reconstruction efforts to consolidate its authority and project an image of triumph over the war. Assad even declared, in sinister rhetoric, that the war had cleansed Syria, with “a healthier and more homogeneous society” emerging from its ashes.
When Assad fled the country in the middle of the night in early December 2024 to escape a lightning rebel offensive, that triumphalism melted away, just like Assad’s soldiers. Syria’s new authorities have pledged an inclusive new political order since Sharaa was declared president in a vaguely defined political transition. But when it comes to reconstruction, the signs from Damascus raise more questions about Sharaa’s aims in the “new Syria.” Could Assad’s version of “victor’s justice” be replaced by a different form of triumphalism under Sharaa? The new government is already focusing on reconstruction to attract foreign investment, arguably as a spoil of war. Reconstruction contracts might be used to buy the loyalty of the disparate factions that came together to topple Assad, but whose cohesiveness may now be fraying.
No Transparency
A year after Assad’s fall and the end of a brutal regime established by his father, Hafez, in 1971, reconstruction barely exists in Syria, beyond pledges on paper—in the form of big-ticket investment deals with foreign companies, many from Turkey and the Gulf. Besides being short on details, these deals prioritize investment-driven real estate schemes centered in Damascus, while millions of Syrians remain displaced throughout the country, many living in tents. With the Syrian state and economy hollowed out after nearly fifteen years of war, Syria will undoubtedly require some foreign investment to cover the cost of reconstruction. Sharaa’s government has also signaled a reluctance to take on major international development loans to finance the colossus of reconstruction, instead eyeing foreign investment as its main driver. “We chose the path of reconstruction through investment; we did not choose the path of rebuilding Syria through aid and assistance,” Sharaa told an audience of financial elites at an investment conference in Riyadh in October. “We don’t want Syria to be a burden for anyone. We want to build Syria ourselves.”
But who does Sharaa really mean by “we”? There have been no public consultations at all about reconstruction, despite a tentative revival of Syrian civil society.
Edicts account for most policy, and are increasingly issued by an opaque clique of loyalists running new governing entities.
Reconstruction is only one example of how insular governance has been under Sharaa. Edicts account for most policy, and are increasingly issued by an opaque clique of loyalists running new governing entities, including a sovereign wealth fund that Sharaa himself created by decree. Instead of transparency—say, an independent judicial system and new laws ensuring accountability in rebuilding—the new government’s approach to reconstruction has been ad hoc, deeply personalist, and largely hidden from the public. Despite a new parliament (formed after flawed and partial elections in October 2025), it is clear that power really resides in Assad’s former presidential palace, but with Sharaa now commanding the meetings with foreign dignitaries.
Those dignitaries include American officials from the administration of Donald Trump, who have already cultivated transactional ties with Sharaa’s government outside the usual diplomatic channels. U.S. engagement on Syria’s reconstruction has almost entirely run through Thomas Barrack, the billionaire financier and longtime Trump friend who now serves as both U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Trump’s special envoy for Syria. Barrack, not surprisingly, has been a cheerleader for these investment deals—many with countries in which he also has his own business interests, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Sharaa has prioritized foreign ties—including with a visit to the White House in early November, the first-ever visit by a Syrian head of state—because of their investment potential. In August, the Syrian government signed a slew of investment deals totaling $14 billion with foreign companies, many of them from the Gulf and Turkey. Those projects include an expansion of the aged international airport near the Damascus fairgrounds, in a deal with a Qatari developer; plans for a brand-new Damascus metro by an Emirati developer; and several gaudy real estate projects that appear air-dropped from Dubai.
Plans for high-rises and new malls seem more motivated by their investment potential than in providing the millions of displaced Syrians with the new housing they need. And for all the headlines about reconstruction efforts driven by foreign investment under Sharaa, these deals were merely nonbinding memorandums of understanding, with few details and little guarantee they will actually happen.
Favoring Investors over Syrians
Sharaa’s approach pins reconstruction in Syria on investor relations—and by extension, on courting foreign governments drawn in mostly by speculative real estate—rather than on Syria’s actual reconstruction needs, like basic infrastructure and housing for a shattered country. The investment pledges serve as a signal from Sharaa’s government of a new, business-friendly environment in post-Assad Syria, but one that might only serve Sharaa’s inner circle.
Turkey looks to be a main beneficiary. Istanbul indirectly aided Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Sharaa’s former rebel outfit, in its statelet in northwest Syria in the years before Assad’s ouster. By one estimate, Turkish companies and entities have secured more than $11 billion in contracts for major infrastructure projects in Syria in recent months, including new power plants and a gas pipeline, in addition to the Damascus airport expansion. Saudi Arabia has pledged more than $6 billion in investments in Syria for reconstruction, nearly half of that for real estate projects. The Emirates and Qatar, for their part, were behind most of the $14 billion in infrastructure pledges unveiled in August.
But the worrying lack of transparency and public accountability over these deals risks replicating the cronyism and corruption of the Assad era, which was symbolized by a project the regime touted as the model for Syria’s reconstruction on its authoritarian terms: Marota City. A collection of luxury high-rises being built over expropriated land in a Damascus neighborhood that the regime seized during the war, displacing tens of thousands of residents, Marota City was promoted as Syria’s largest investment project in the last years of Assad’s rule. Syrbanism, a Syrian research organization focused on urban rights and justice, described Marota City as “skyscrapers for the phantom wealthy in place of houses, shops and workplaces for war-weary ordinary citizens” and a “grim warning of the current ‘reconstruction’ agenda.”
Marota City’s fate in the new Syria is unclear. Samer Foz, the regime financier who was one of the project’s biggest investors, fled Syria in April 2025, reportedly for the Emirates, after failing to reach a settlement deal with Syria’s new authorities.
Under Assad, a scheme similar to Marota City was also underway in Homs, in the devastated former rebel-held neighborhood of Baba Amr, for another crony real estate project for regime insiders built over its ruins and masquerading as reconstruction. That development proposal seemed to resurrect a reviled regime project to remake Homs, first unveiled back in 2007, known as “Homs Dream,” which had become a byword for land seizures, forced evictions, and corruption in Syria’s third-largest city before the 2011 uprising.
Homs Dream and its zombie successors apparently died with the old regime. But months after Assad’s fall, in June 2025, signs appeared in Homs for a sweeping new redevelopment project called the “Boulevard of Victory,” apparently involving a Kuwait-based real estate company. “It appeared to be a residential complex on destroyed land,” Ayham Dalal, a Syrian architect and scholar who worked on master plans for Homs before the war, wrote of the project. “But who owned that space? And who had the right to reinscribe it?”
Local backlash was immediate, with residents comparing it to Homs Dream. In an unexpected twist that, one hopes, signals differences with the Assad era, the Kuwaiti company behind the Boulevard of Victory project then canceled it—or at least, its most contentious elements, which would have displaced many Homsis and erased their property rights.
Still, the episode was an example of how investor-driven reconstruction, steered by Sharaa and his inner circle with little transparency and no public input, is colliding with the hopes and dire needs of Syrians desperate to rebuild their lives amid so much rubble, from Damascus to Aleppo and beyond. “Rebuilding in a way that is just and inclusive will be a slow process,” Dalal wrote. “This is not compatible with a neoliberal planning model that recognizes only economic growth.” Yet such a model is exactly what Syria’s new rulers are prioritizing, as they hold together a fragile coalition of factions and push for investment from foreign patrons to prop it all up.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image: Children play in Ali bin Abi Talib Mosque at sunset on Eid al-Adha in Yarmouk camp, Damascus, on June 6, 2025. The mosque was badly damaged during Syria’s civil war. Source: Ed Ram/Getty Images.
Tags: syria, reconstruction
Syria’s Reconstruction Risks Cutting Out the Syrian People
Damascus’s battered fairgrounds, on the outskirts of the city, hosted a reconstruction fair this fall, billed as an international exhibition to rebuild the country. Like everything in Syria since the sudden fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024, it had an optimistic tagline, promising an “economic breakthrough” where “the future of the new Syria is written.”
Yet the reconstruction plans emerging from Syria’s new government are actually more reminiscent of Syria’s past: developments announced by decree, opaque and undemocratic decision-making, and cronyism.
The new president, former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, has worked hard to hone messaging that emphasizes inclusion and radical changes. Reconstruction, with an estimated cost of up to $400 billion—some twenty times the size of Syria’s GDP—is one of the biggest tests of Sharaa’s rhetoric. So far, the reality is falling far short of the marketing. Many Syrians are worried, and international policymakers should be, as well. Without reforms, reconstruction risks ushering in a new era of clientelism and corruption in Syria, benefiting only Sharaa’s allies and international developers, while the Syrian people continue to be locked out of the decisions that will shape their future.
Echoes of Assad
As Syria’s civil war dragged on, and with most of the world eventually assuming Assad would prevail, his regime saw reconstruction as the next stage of the conflict—a propaganda tool and vehicle for ending its international isolation, with the added bonus of regime elites cashing in on crony development schemes spun as rebuilding Syria.
The Assad regime hosted reconstruction fairs in Damascus throughout the conflict—even as fighting raged just beyond the capital’s fairgrounds in the rebel-held suburbs. “The process of eradicating terrorism has reached its final stages, and the reconstruction phase is knocking on the doors,” boasted Hussein Arnous, then Syria’s minister of housing and public works, at a 2018 exhibition prematurely billed as a reconstruction fair. There were few attendees; during a similar trade fair the previous year, a mortar attack on the fairgrounds killed six people.
As Syria’s civil war turned into a stalemate, the regime seized on emerging reconstruction efforts to consolidate its authority and project an image of triumph over the war. Assad even declared, in sinister rhetoric, that the war had cleansed Syria, with “a healthier and more homogeneous society” emerging from its ashes.
When Assad fled the country in the middle of the night in early December 2024 to escape a lightning rebel offensive, that triumphalism melted away, just like Assad’s soldiers. Syria’s new authorities have pledged an inclusive new political order since Sharaa was declared president in a vaguely defined political transition. But when it comes to reconstruction, the signs from Damascus raise more questions about Sharaa’s aims in the “new Syria.” Could Assad’s version of “victor’s justice” be replaced by a different form of triumphalism under Sharaa? The new government is already focusing on reconstruction to attract foreign investment, arguably as a spoil of war. Reconstruction contracts might be used to buy the loyalty of the disparate factions that came together to topple Assad, but whose cohesiveness may now be fraying.
No Transparency
A year after Assad’s fall and the end of a brutal regime established by his father, Hafez, in 1971, reconstruction barely exists in Syria, beyond pledges on paper—in the form of big-ticket investment deals with foreign companies, many from Turkey and the Gulf. Besides being short on details, these deals prioritize investment-driven real estate schemes centered in Damascus, while millions of Syrians remain displaced throughout the country, many living in tents. With the Syrian state and economy hollowed out after nearly fifteen years of war, Syria will undoubtedly require some foreign investment to cover the cost of reconstruction. Sharaa’s government has also signaled a reluctance to take on major international development loans to finance the colossus of reconstruction, instead eyeing foreign investment as its main driver. “We chose the path of reconstruction through investment; we did not choose the path of rebuilding Syria through aid and assistance,” Sharaa told an audience of financial elites at an investment conference in Riyadh in October. “We don’t want Syria to be a burden for anyone. We want to build Syria ourselves.”
But who does Sharaa really mean by “we”? There have been no public consultations at all about reconstruction, despite a tentative revival of Syrian civil society.
Reconstruction is only one example of how insular governance has been under Sharaa. Edicts account for most policy, and are increasingly issued by an opaque clique of loyalists running new governing entities, including a sovereign wealth fund that Sharaa himself created by decree. Instead of transparency—say, an independent judicial system and new laws ensuring accountability in rebuilding—the new government’s approach to reconstruction has been ad hoc, deeply personalist, and largely hidden from the public. Despite a new parliament (formed after flawed and partial elections in October 2025), it is clear that power really resides in Assad’s former presidential palace, but with Sharaa now commanding the meetings with foreign dignitaries.
Those dignitaries include American officials from the administration of Donald Trump, who have already cultivated transactional ties with Sharaa’s government outside the usual diplomatic channels. U.S. engagement on Syria’s reconstruction has almost entirely run through Thomas Barrack, the billionaire financier and longtime Trump friend who now serves as both U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Trump’s special envoy for Syria. Barrack, not surprisingly, has been a cheerleader for these investment deals—many with countries in which he also has his own business interests, such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
Sharaa has prioritized foreign ties—including with a visit to the White House in early November, the first-ever visit by a Syrian head of state—because of their investment potential. In August, the Syrian government signed a slew of investment deals totaling $14 billion with foreign companies, many of them from the Gulf and Turkey. Those projects include an expansion of the aged international airport near the Damascus fairgrounds, in a deal with a Qatari developer; plans for a brand-new Damascus metro by an Emirati developer; and several gaudy real estate projects that appear air-dropped from Dubai.
Plans for high-rises and new malls seem more motivated by their investment potential than in providing the millions of displaced Syrians with the new housing they need. And for all the headlines about reconstruction efforts driven by foreign investment under Sharaa, these deals were merely nonbinding memorandums of understanding, with few details and little guarantee they will actually happen.
Favoring Investors over Syrians
Sharaa’s approach pins reconstruction in Syria on investor relations—and by extension, on courting foreign governments drawn in mostly by speculative real estate—rather than on Syria’s actual reconstruction needs, like basic infrastructure and housing for a shattered country. The investment pledges serve as a signal from Sharaa’s government of a new, business-friendly environment in post-Assad Syria, but one that might only serve Sharaa’s inner circle.
Turkey looks to be a main beneficiary. Istanbul indirectly aided Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, Sharaa’s former rebel outfit, in its statelet in northwest Syria in the years before Assad’s ouster. By one estimate, Turkish companies and entities have secured more than $11 billion in contracts for major infrastructure projects in Syria in recent months, including new power plants and a gas pipeline, in addition to the Damascus airport expansion. Saudi Arabia has pledged more than $6 billion in investments in Syria for reconstruction, nearly half of that for real estate projects. The Emirates and Qatar, for their part, were behind most of the $14 billion in infrastructure pledges unveiled in August.
But the worrying lack of transparency and public accountability over these deals risks replicating the cronyism and corruption of the Assad era, which was symbolized by a project the regime touted as the model for Syria’s reconstruction on its authoritarian terms: Marota City. A collection of luxury high-rises being built over expropriated land in a Damascus neighborhood that the regime seized during the war, displacing tens of thousands of residents, Marota City was promoted as Syria’s largest investment project in the last years of Assad’s rule. Syrbanism, a Syrian research organization focused on urban rights and justice, described Marota City as “skyscrapers for the phantom wealthy in place of houses, shops and workplaces for war-weary ordinary citizens” and a “grim warning of the current ‘reconstruction’ agenda.”
Marota City’s fate in the new Syria is unclear. Samer Foz, the regime financier who was one of the project’s biggest investors, fled Syria in April 2025, reportedly for the Emirates, after failing to reach a settlement deal with Syria’s new authorities.
Under Assad, a scheme similar to Marota City was also underway in Homs, in the devastated former rebel-held neighborhood of Baba Amr, for another crony real estate project for regime insiders built over its ruins and masquerading as reconstruction. That development proposal seemed to resurrect a reviled regime project to remake Homs, first unveiled back in 2007, known as “Homs Dream,” which had become a byword for land seizures, forced evictions, and corruption in Syria’s third-largest city before the 2011 uprising.
Homs Dream and its zombie successors apparently died with the old regime. But months after Assad’s fall, in June 2025, signs appeared in Homs for a sweeping new redevelopment project called the “Boulevard of Victory,” apparently involving a Kuwait-based real estate company. “It appeared to be a residential complex on destroyed land,” Ayham Dalal, a Syrian architect and scholar who worked on master plans for Homs before the war, wrote of the project. “But who owned that space? And who had the right to reinscribe it?”
Local backlash was immediate, with residents comparing it to Homs Dream. In an unexpected twist that, one hopes, signals differences with the Assad era, the Kuwaiti company behind the Boulevard of Victory project then canceled it—or at least, its most contentious elements, which would have displaced many Homsis and erased their property rights.
Still, the episode was an example of how investor-driven reconstruction, steered by Sharaa and his inner circle with little transparency and no public input, is colliding with the hopes and dire needs of Syrians desperate to rebuild their lives amid so much rubble, from Damascus to Aleppo and beyond. “Rebuilding in a way that is just and inclusive will be a slow process,” Dalal wrote. “This is not compatible with a neoliberal planning model that recognizes only economic growth.” Yet such a model is exactly what Syria’s new rulers are prioritizing, as they hold together a fragile coalition of factions and push for investment from foreign patrons to prop it all up.
This commentary is part of “Networks of Change: Reviving Governance and Citizenship in the Middle East,” a Century International project supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Open Society Foundations.
Header Image: Children play in Ali bin Abi Talib Mosque at sunset on Eid al-Adha in Yarmouk camp, Damascus, on June 6, 2025. The mosque was badly damaged during Syria’s civil war. Source: Ed Ram/Getty Images.
Tags: syria, reconstruction