Syria has become the graveyard of Middle Eastern certainties. What once looked like a frozen conflict—managed by dictators, militias and foreign patrons—has collapsed into something far more unsettling and far more consequential. The fall of the Assad regime in late 2024 did not deliver peace; it detonated a long-suppressed reckoning. More than a decade of war had already killed at least 350,000 people, displaced over half the population and shrunk the economy by more than 50 per cent. What followed Assad’s exit was not closure, but exposure: of wounds untreated, contracts broken, and a regional order that no longer holds.

Syria is no longer a distant humanitarian tragedy. It is a live test of whether post-war states can be stitched back together without sliding into revenge, fragmentation or permanent dependency. It is also a reminder that the costs of neglecting diplomacy are measured not just in lives lost, but in decades stolen.

The numbers alone tell a story of national exhaustion. By 2024, 16.7 million Syrians—around 71 per cent of the population—required humanitarian assistance, according to the United Nations. Food prices were more than 130 times higher than a decade earlier. Entire cities lay hollowed out; schools and hospitals were rubble; electricity grids barely functioned. Reconstruction estimates ranged from US$216 billion to well over US$400 billion, depending on how honestly the damage was counted. This was not a country waiting to rebound. It was a country surviving on fumes.

Yet the collapse of the old regime also cracked open political space that had not existed since independence. The interim government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa inherited a........

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