Syria’s Imperiled Transition
Syria’s Imperiled Transition
How Shock Therapy Threatens the Post-Assad Peace
Sam Heller
September 22, 2026
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In Syria today, nearly everyone seems to be struggling. People of all classes and backgrounds can barely afford food, rent, utilities—the basics of a dignified life. The country is attempting to leave behind half a century of tyranny and 14 years of civil war for a new and freer political order. It is also recovering from an economic collapse so precipitous that it ultimately helped topple the dictator Bashar al-Assad in 2024. As the country has proceeded in its political transition under President Ahmed al-Shara, however, living conditions for most Syrians have only become worse. Costs have soared, and a promised post-Assad economic boom has not materialized. Syria’s new government has offered citizens some symbolic victories, including an end to international isolation, but, for most people, it has not delivered materially. In fact, a number of its policy choices have made their lives even harder.
Of all the problems Syria now faces, including intercommunal violence and the possible fragmentation of the country, the economy is the biggest one. Yet the country’s new leadership has insisted on austerity measures that have made the cost of living even more unbearable for the average Syrian.
Syria is by no means the only country experiencing an affordability crisis. But it is one of the world’s most politically fragile states. If the new government cannot provide for ordinary Syrians, it risks unrest that could derail the country’s post-Assad transition.
BITING COSTS
Syrian rebels led by the Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham ousted the Assad government in December 2024. Shara, the group’s leader, eventually assumed the presidency and has since overseen the consolidation of the country’s new institutions and its postwar recovery.
His administration has scored some real wins. After decades of political isolation, Syria has gained the support of regional and global powers, including the United States, and secured the removal of most international economic sanctions. Shara’s government has for the time being kept the country from breaking apart; after defeating Kurdish-led forces in Syria’s northeast earlier this year, it is now working to reintegrate the formerly semiautonomous region. It has in large part reined in revenge attacks and sectarian killings, although pro-government partisans perpetrated two massacres of minority Alawites and Druze last year. And Shara has mostly shielded Syria from the effects of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, even as it has spread elsewhere through the region.
Where the new Syrian government has fallen short is in its management of the economy. Of course, reviving commerce and industry was going to be a formidable challenge for any post-Assad government. Fourteen years of civil war displaced more than half the country’s population and caused the economy to contract by more than 50 percent. The World Bank has estimated that the war caused more than $108 billion in physical damage, largely in and around three economically vital cities, Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs. The World Bank reckons that two-thirds of Syrians now live in poverty, with an income below $3.65 per person per day. According to the UN Development Program, 90 percent of Syrians are living in poverty, and 66 percent in extreme poverty.
By the last several years of Assad’s rule, conditions had grown miserable. In fact, economic collapse contributed to the regime’s implosion in December 2024, as half-starved Syrian soldiers abandoned the front lines in the face of a rebel advance. In these circumstances, even an amply resourced, expert-led government would now struggle to restart the economy. The Shara government is neither of those things.
Of all the problems Syria now faces, the economy is the biggest one.
Syrians, impoverished by economic mismanagement and war, cannot afford even the bare necessities. The cost of living far exceeds the average citizen’s income. Based on the current unofficial exchange rate, World Food Program estimates that monthly needs for a Syrian household of five, including food and utilities, cost about $197. The Syrian Center for Policy Research, a Damascus-based think tank, puts the monthly abject poverty line at roughly $255. Yet the official monthly minimum wage is equivalent to only $95. Many Syrians depend on remittances from relatives abroad to get by.
To make matters worse, the cost of living in Syria has been rising steadily. The World Food Program calculates that the cost of essentials increased by 34 percent between July 2025 and 2026. Syrians’ purchasing power has been further diminished by a weakened currency, which initially strengthened after December 2024 but has since approached Assad-era lows.
More than 80 percent of Syrians lack reliable access to sufficient food. A joint assessment by the government and World Food Program found some improvement on this front from 2024 to 2025, but only insofar as the proportion of food-secure Syrians increased from 11.1 to 18.4 percent. After a severe drought that limited agricultural production in 2025, ample rainfall this year should improve the availability of domestically grown food. But it is unclear whether Syrians can actually afford to buy from local markets.
Housing costs have also skyrocketed. According to the Syrian Center for Policy Research, rents increased almost 66 percent between May 2025 and May 2026. After trying to live elsewhere, many people have returned to homes and neighborhoods shattered by the war after they found themselves unable to afford the rents in less damaged areas. Costs are biting even for middle-class and upper-middle-class Syrians, who need to contend with rents that have doubled or tripled, as well as rising school tuitions.
HALF-BAKED
Although much of Syria’s hardship can be chalked up to the devastation of war and decades of Assad-era mismanagement, some of the country’s problems are the product of the Shara government’s policies. The country’s new leaders have undertaken a shock therapy program of economic liberalization without, it seems, fully accounting for the acute vulnerability and poverty of most Syrians.
In the Assad government’s final, most threadbare years, it slashed subsidies that it could no longer afford. The Shara government has gone even further. Months after taking power, it increased the price of state-subsidized bread—the staple of the Syrian diet—by nearly 1,400 percent. Although the state has since held the price of a standard bread bundle steady, it has repeatedly shrunk the amount of bread per bundle. Early this year, the government massively increased electricity tariffs, in some cases by as much as 800 percent. This new pricing effectively shifted the cost of restoring the country’s power infrastructure to consumers and businesses; many people have simply stopped paying impossibly high bills.
Syria’s new authorities brought fuel prices in line with global averages early on, sharply increasing costs for farming, transportation, and other sectors. On September 13, the government raised fuel prices again—40 percent in the case of diesel—while citing global energy markets and ongoing repairs to a key Syrian refinery. Protests erupted across the country in response to the price hike. They are the largest demonstrations since Assad’s ouster.
The Shara government has tried to compensate for inflation by increasing public-sector salaries: in March alone, it approved a 50 percent raise. The benefit of these higher wages is diminished by continuing inflation, however, and it has not been distributed equally. The government laid off hundreds of thousands of Assad-era employees last year, even as it hired many of its own loyalists, including for the newly reconstituted military and security services.
The Shara government has additionally opened the country to most imports, dismantling strict controls that conserved foreign currency reserves and protected local manufacturers. Syrian producers already working in adverse conditions now struggle to compete with cheap imported goods.
AMATEUR HOUR
The economic challenges facing the Shara government are daunting. It inherited a state that was effectively bankrupt. The government has projected some revenue from customs duties and consumption-related fees and taxes, and it is working to position Syria as a regional trade hub by developing road and rail links and embarking on new pipeline projects. It has retaken control of the country’s northeast, which is comparatively rich in natural resources and farmland. Yet restoring oil and gas production in the northeast will require substantial investment, and increasing wheat production might be a net drain on government coffers.
Foreign governments have not supported Syria to the extent Damascus may have expected. The United States has helped reconnect Syria to international financial networks and encouraged investment in the country, but it has not made large commitments to its recovery or convened a “friends of Syria” conference to mobilize donors—as it did for Iraq, for example, in 2016. Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar have sent some assistance, including support for public-sector salaries, but they have not agreed to keep Syria afloat financially. Their ability to further support Syria is also in question as these powers deal with the effects of the Iran war.
The World Bank has provided grants, but the Shara government’s decision to eschew international loans has ly cut off Syria from additional liquidity in the near term. The government has not spelled out why it rejects international borrowing, although Shara has said he doesn’t want Syria “to live on assistance, or on politicized loans.” Humanitarian aid has in any case fallen away; earlier this year, cuts to donor funding, especially from the United States, forced the World Food Program to end its subsidized bread program and halve general food assistance.
More than 80 percent of Syrians lack reliable access to sufficient food.
Shara has envisioned a recovery powered by private investment, not aid. Yet he seems to have believed that investment would be more forthcoming. Many of the memorandums of understanding that his government initially announced with would-be investors have not translated to real commitments. Significant obstacles to foreign investment persist: the security situation is still unsettled, and Syria lacks legal and regulatory frameworks and a fully functional financial system. Investments that have been announced skew toward real estate megaprojects that seem disconnected from the country’s development needs.
The Shara government is short on economic expertise. The president relies on a handful of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham veterans as key advisers and policymakers. Their experience in governing is limited to running a small rebel-held enclave in northwestern Syria between 2017 and 2024. Shara has stripped power from legacy state institutions such as the ministries of economy and transportation and concentrated it in a handful of newly created, opaque entities linked to the presidency, including a so-called sovereign fund meant to manage a vast portfolio of state-owned assets and property appropriated from business figures linked to Assad.
The lack of know-how shows. Major policy announcements, such as this month’s fuel price increase, are abrupt and seemingly made without real study or outside consultation. And although reliable economic data has long been hard to come by in Syria, the Shara government has sometimes presented dubious figures. In March, Shara himself announced that the Syrian economy had grown between 30 and 35 percent the previous year. The Syrian Center for Policy Studies estimated that the real growth rate in 2025 was only 0.3 percent.
PATIENCE RUNNING THIN
Although the policies of the Shara government have not foreclosed an eventual recovery, they have ly delayed it and made life harder for ordinary Syrians. If basic needs are not met soon, people could lose faith in the country’s post-Assad political order.
According to polling by the magazine Syria in Transition, 52 percent of Syrians disapproved of their government’s performance in June—up from 44 percent in April. A majority of respondents in both April and June said they struggled to cover their living expenses at least once a month, and in April (the latest month with available data), 66 percent said the government was not doing enough to curb high prices. Between April and June, the number of respondents pessimistic about the country’s trajectory jumped from 30 to 46 percent.
Immediately after Assad’s fall, Syrians were willing to excuse their new government’s shortcomings. Nearly two years later, they seem more ready to express frustration. That discontent probably won’t take the form of armed struggle because Syrians are, on the whole, tired of war. But they are increasingly mounting smaller-scale protests and strikes to demand economic relief and improved public services.
Syrians don’t have endless reserves of patience for Shara’s government.
Economic hardship also adds to Syria’s general combustibility, making other political and sectarian issues potentially more explosive. The Shara government is now trying to reintegrate the Kurdish northeast, including by folding Kurdish militias into the national military. At the same time, though, it is removing subsidies in the formerly semi-autonomous region—which had its own economic regime for years—hugely increasing the cost of fuel and other essentials for people living there. On the Mediterranean coast, meanwhile, authorities are trying to establish a functional relationship with the Alawite community at a time of acute economic stress. Alawites not only face the same cost-of-living pressures as their fellow Syrians but also have suffered disproportionately from public-sector layoffs and the dissolution of the Assad’s military and security services. Many are afraid to leave their villages because of safety concerns. On the coast and elsewhere, rising prices and mass unemployment are a recipe for social instability.
A Syria that is poor and violent is in no one’s interest. After years of misery and bloodshed, the country needs a chance, finally, to recover. Now, as the Shara government tries to revitalize the economy, it needs to do so with social stability in mind. The authorities must prioritize affordability so that the country’s most vulnerable are not casualties of liberalizing reforms. The government should develop new subsidies for bread, electricity, transport, farming, and industrial production while the country is emerging from economic collapse. Its international partners, meanwhile, need to provide Damascus with the resources to deliver meaningfully for ordinary citizens, and to provide a social safety net as it pursues structural reforms. Investing in energy and real estate won’t be enough to revive Syria.
The government also needs to open more channels of communication with the public to build confidence and manage discontent as Syrians endure what was always going to be a difficult transitional period. That means communicating frankly and transparently about the rationale for its economic decision-making, consulting with Syrian businesses, and empowering the newly formed parliament to play a meaningful oversight role.
Syrians were relieved to see Assad finally go, but they don’t have endless reserves of patience for Shara’s government. The country’s new leaders need to improve material conditions for ordinary Syrians immediately, or risk losing the people’s trust.
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