Syria’s interim Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir (Reuters)
Co-published with The Conversation:
Dressed in a modest gray suit and tie with a light blue shirt, bald and bearded, the 41-year-old man addressed the nation from behind a desk in an empty conference room.
He introduced himself as Mohammed al-Bashir, the interim Prime Minister of Syria. Asking for “stability and calm”, he said he would serve as the head of a transitional government until 1 March.
Less than two weeks ago, any address would have been given by Bashar al-Assad, who had overseen the killing of hundreds of thousands of Syria’s citizens and the displacement of more than 11 million.
But Assad’s regime and 54 years of single-family rule collapsed after only 11 days of a rebel offensive. He and wife Asma were smuggled out of Damascus by Russian intelligence officers, flying them to Moscow.
Syrians Celebrate Liberation From Assad Regime
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Now Bashir was speaking to countrymen who were celebrating, hopeful of finally achieving the goals of the 2011 uprising but also wary.
For his position was thanks to the Islamist faction Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which led the rebel coalition that toppled Assad. Since the start of 2024, he was the political head of the Syrian Salvation Government, the administration of the HTS-led opposition area in northwest Syria.
Supported by Turkey, the HTS and SSG had ensured governance and a measure of stability in parts of Idlib and Aleppo Provinces since November 2017. But they had also been accused by human rights groups of abuses of power and discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities — and HTS, although it broke from Al Qa’eda in 2016 — is designated as “terrorist” by the UN, US, UK, and some European countries.
Asked by Italy’s Corriere della Sera about HTS’s past, Bashir responded:
The wrongful actions of certain Islamist groups have led many people, especially in the west, to associate Muslims with terrorism and Islam with extremism. There were mistakes and misunderstandings that distorted the true meaning of Islam, which is “the religion of justice”.
Precisely because we are Islamic, we will guarantee the rights of all people and all communities in Syria.
“Going Towards Stability”
Born in Idlib Province, Bashir graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Aleppo in 2007. He worked for the Syrian Gas Company, and after the start of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, was director of an institution providing education to children affected by the conflict. In 2021, he obtained a second degree in Sharia and Law from Idlib University.
The Prime Minister is the essential technocratic contrast to HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammed al-Joulani. It is the latter who reaps all the international attention and questions after Assad’s downfall.
Answering those questions, al-Sharaa addressed other countries:
Their fears are unnecessary, God willing. The fear was from the presence of the [Assad] regime.
The country is moving towards development and reconstruction. It’s going towards stability.
Bashir is the face of that stability. As rebels moved south from Idlib and Aleppo to liberate Hama city earlier this month, he not only hailed “a new dawn of freedom and dignity” but also pledged:
We promise you in the Salvation Government that we are committed to living up to your expectation, rebuilding your city to return it to its leading civilized status.
We will work to restore services, support the economy, and provide security and justice benefiting from the energies of the city’s people, including elites, academics, doctors, engineers, teachers and lawyers. This is a day of joy and pride, but it is also a day of work and responsibility.
That quest for responsibility and thus legitimacy is much more than the Prime Minister. Soon after his Tuesday address, he reported a meeting with “members from the old government and some directors from the administration in Idlib and its surrounding areas to facilitate all the necessary works for the next two months”.
The technocrats are already developing plans for administration, reviewing the regime’s bureaucracy. Mohammed Yasser Ghazal, seconded from Idlib to head the Damascus City Council, says:
It’s all going to become one. All the government bodies will be dissolved: no Salvation Government, no factions, nothing. It will all soon be dissolved into one Syrian republic.
Facing the regime’s five-decade legacy of corruption, cronyism, and centralized power, the new officials have asked department chiefs to list their remits and explain their departments’ functions. They have encountered staff quoting government handbooks from the 1930s and 1960s, while failing to answer direct questions about their duties or decision-making.
Rapid Moves in Early Days
It is early days but so far the rapid transition to rebel and now Government rule has been largely peaceful with the continuation of services and daily business.
The rebels, led by HTS, issued a statement pledging respect for all minorities. Facing the possibility of looting, they warned against any destruction of public or private property and imposed an overnight curfew.
Utilities have been maintained. In Aleppo city, one of the first acts was to install new mobile phone towers. The financial system has been secured, and airports will soon reopen. Salaries, which averages around $25 per month under the regime, will be increased in line with Syrian Salvation Government wages to around $100 per month.
A total amnesty for army soldiers, police, and security personnel was declared, provided they submitted paperwork for official clemency and identification cards. Hundreds of men queued up in the initial hours in Aleppo to complete the process.
Tens of thousands of detainees, some imprisoned since the early 1980s, have been freed. Among the facilities raided were the distribution centers for the amphetamine Captagon, whose sale generated billions of dollars for the Assad regime and its military.
Individual acts of retribution have been reported against key “criminals and informants responsible for the deaths of Syrians” through their connections with the regime. One of those executed was Jalal al-Daqqaq, implicated in the killing of more than 200 Syrian detainees, feeding their throats to his pet lion.
However, there has been general adherence to the rebel injunction to avoid violence. Sources from minority sects — includes Druze, Ismailis, and Alawites, whose members includes the Assads — confirmed that any revenge operations were not ethnically motivated.
The new government is cognizant that the maintenance of security and services is good politics. With the Assad regime leaving a basket-case economy as well as a crippled society, international assistance will be valuable. For that to be obtained, HTS will need to be taken off the UN, US, and European blacklists.
Ghazal summarizes that the plans of the technocrats “require political recognition [and addressing] the terrorist designation, which I think is soon”.
But that good politics will also have to convince Syrians who lived under the regime for decades.
At a store selling freshly printed Syrian revolutionary flags in Damascus, shopkeeper Fadi al-Mously was asked to identify the new Prime Minister.
He couldn’t. But whoever he is, “we don’t want him,” Mously said. “We want elections.”
