Bombs in Damascus complicate a rehabilitation the West has already decided to bless.
For a country trying to persuade the world it has turned a corner, Syria has an unfortunate habit of finding its milestones overshadowed by violence. On 2 July, a bomb planted under a table in a café near Damascus’s Palace of Justice killed ten people, six of them lawyers, and wounded 22. Syrian officials suspect remnants of the old regime, who have watched the courthouse next door put Assad-era enforcers on trial and appear keen to disrupt both the proceedings and the international rehabilitation those trials are meant to support.
Five days later, as French President Emmanuel Macron travelled to a landmark meeting with President Ahmed Al-Sharaa, two more devices detonated near his Damascus hotel; the toll was eventually revised to one dead and 36 wounded. A photo opportunity meant to symbolise Syria’s return to the diplomatic mainstream instead became a reminder of how far it remains from achieving normalcy. No one has claimed either attack, and Mr Sharaa saluted Mr Macron’s “courage” for pressing on regardless before flying to a NATO summit in Turkey for a face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump.
Mr Sharaa, a former jihadist commander, has managed the trick of holding a fractious, war-battered country together while courting the very Western governments that spent a decade bombing his former organisation, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham. In barely eighteen months, Syria has gone from pariah state to diplomatic darling: freed from most Assad-era sanctions, receiving European delegations and currently in the process of being struck from Washington’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, a 47-year-old designation now in a 45-day congressional review period that lawmakers are unlikely to block. Asked in Ankara about whether Syria should be removed, Trump replied: “He’s done a great job … I think we should.”
But the pace of legitimisation has run well ahead of the pace of state-building, and nothing illustrates the gap better than parliament. President Sharaa’s list of 70 appointees, completing the final third of a 210-seat transitional assembly that remained vacant after the old legislature was dissolved when Mr Assad fled, was finally released on 1 July. Three seats reserved for Suweida, the southern Druze-majority province that descended into a bloody sectarian conflict in mid-2025, remain vacant until security conditions there allow elections. The chamber’s first sitting was scheduled for 6 July. Days beforehand, and without explanation, the government postponed it indefinitely. A government keen to show that the state now sets the country’s rhythm could not, in the end, keep its own parliament on schedule.
The security services are fighting more than one war. Loyalists of the old government, including former officers, Ba’ath functionaries and intelligence men, are suspected of running sabotage operations aimed at derailing both transitional-justice trials and Syria’s Western courtship. Armed factions in the Druze-dominated Suweida and the Kurdish-held north-east, shaped by their own histories of state violence and persecution, retain the capacity to contest Damascus’s authority outright. And Islamic State remains a persistent threat: UN monitors put its combined strength in Syria and Iraq at between 1,500 and 3,000 as of last August, but Iraq’s intelligence chief, Hamid al-Shatri, told the Washington Post in January that the group’s ranks inside Syria alone had grown roughly fivefold in a year, to about 10,000, with many recruits drawn from fighters who defected from factions aligned with Mr Sharaa’s own government once they soured on its direction.
In centralising power, Mr Sharaa has sidelined the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led force that spent a decade dismantling Islamic State’s caliphate and running the intelligence networks that kept the north-east from relapsing into insurgency. Damascus has inherited SDF territory without inheriting its tradecraft, leaving precisely the kind of vacuum Islamic State exploits.
There are other challenges as well. Some 15.6 million Syrians — nearly 70% of the population — need humanitarian assistance this year, and by mid-May, the UN’s $2.9 billion appeal had received barely 16% of the funds it needed. Financing shortfalls have already forced the World Food Programme to halve its emergency food assistance, from 1.3 million people to 650,000, and to suspend a nationwide bread-subsidy scheme that had kept prices down for up to four million people a day. Diseases once brought under control, including measles and hepatitis A, are climbing again, and roughly a million displaced people remain in tented camps despite Mr Sharaa’s pledge to close them by 2027. Meanwhile, Israel still holds positions inside Syrian territory beyond the 1974 disengagement line; in late June its soldiers killed two armed men who approached its fence near al-Khader.
None of Syria’s fault lines are new; what is new is the widening gap between how the country is discussed in Paris, Ankara and Washington and how it still functions on the ground. A government cannot claim a monopoly on force while a province three hours from the capital sits outside its writ, nor summon the credibility of a normal state while ten citizens can be killed in a bombing that nobody has bothered to claim responsibility for, because no one feels the need to — or while it cannot reliably convene its own legislature. International legitimacy has arrived before genuine governance did, and economic reconstruction without deeper political and security reform risks merely postponing the next crisis rather than preventing it. The West’s bet is that engagement now buys stability later. It may prove right. But bets are, by definition, made before the outcome is known, and Syria’s last fortnight suggests the odds remain far from settled.