Since the Assad regime fell in early December 2024, years of alienation have receded and certain Syrians have started saying phrases like “I’m from Halfaya” or “I’m from Idlib” with a degree of pride. These are replies to the age-old question Syrians ask when they encounter unfamiliar young faces that have appeared in their institutions, police stations, security branches and government bodies. The need to know where people are from has roots that run deeper than the war and its territorial divisions, let alone the subsequent capture of state power in Syria.
Syrians understand the question instantly, knowing it is anything but innocent; it never has been. It is a quintessentially Syrian question, asked with remarkable frequency at every encounter and introduction. It has never been purely about geography; it is mainly about the specific cluster of behaviors and prior judgments that place names carry within them — what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “habitus.”
Before the war, a Syrian would ask it to gauge the person across from him, whether a rival, partner or neighbor. During the war years, the same question would meet you at checkpoints manned by whichever armed faction controlled the road, and your answer could mean your survival or your death.
In the Syrian mind, the answer to “Where are you from?” carries hidden markers that are grasped intuitively: Birthplace signals sect, accent signals origin or region. Since the fall of the Assad regime, the question has acquired yet another layer of concealed meaning: Did this person’s hometown take part in the revolution, or did it belong to the old regime’s territory, or perhaps to the Kurdish-held areas? The situation has changed today, but the meaning of the answer has changed far more than that of the question.
These days, the answers Syrians give are sorting themselves into distinct camps. There are “the children of the revolution” and their sympathizers; there are “the grays” who stayed on the fence; there are the regime’s sons, “the traitors” who refuse to accept that Syria had a revolution at all. And there is one more category, the most socially prominent since the Assad regime’s fall: the very “architects of the revolution.”
When some Syrians answer, “I’m from Halfaya” or “I’m from Idlib,” they place themselves squarely in that last camp. The answer is not always a verifiable fact; it can just as easily be the residue of a missed opportunity or an aspiration. You can see the disbelief in the heads that shake in response. But why has the answer “from Halfaya” or “from Idlib” been cropping up so frequently in Syrian conversation? The answer, as will become clear, has less to do with the scale of Halfaya’s sacrifices than with what happened after the regime fell: The town’s sons made the journey from being fighters to ministers and security chiefs, raising one of history’s recurring questions: Who reaps the fruits of a revolution, any revolution?
Calling yourself an architect of the revolution does not make you an architect of the state that follows. That is the question Halfaya is testing today, without yet fully grasping it. Both Halfaya and Idlib are living a new story that resembles that of Qardaha, the center of gravity of Assad’s Syria, though with notable differences.
Halfaya is an agricultural town lying to the northwest of Hama on the Orontes River, known for its potato and cumin crops and its freshwater fish farms. Its fame among Syrians comes from the Halfawiyya, a rudimentary vehicle invented by the town’s metalworkers using locally available materials. The vehicle proved its worth hauling potatoes, cumin and the rest of the Syrian countryside’s harvests to urban markets with acceptable reliability at a time when car imports had dried up and prices had become prohibitive. Today, with the fall of the Assad regime and thousands of modern cars flooding into the country, the Halfawiyya’s days appear numbered.
This image of Halfaya, familiar to ordinary Syrians and beyond politics, sits alongside another bound up with the history of the civil war. Part of the town’s population joined the protests against Assad’s regime early on, marching from its main mosque chanting a mocking rhyme: “Ya Bashar, ya wawi, manak add al-Halfawi” (“O Bashar, you jackal, you’re no match for a Halfawi”). On Dec. 23, 2012, Halfaya witnessed one of the earliest massacres the Assad regime committed against the revolutionaries; 43 people were killed in what became known as “the bread massacre,” as documented by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
It was not long before armed brigades began emerging from this small town: the Abu al-Almayn Battalion in March 2012, the Mujahideen of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq in mid-2012, the Farouq Brigades, and others. During the conflict, these brigades merged with others, and by late May 2025 they had joined some 130 further factions under the umbrella of the new Syrian Army, meaning that dozens, if not hundreds, of Halfaya’s sons now serve within that military structure.
Like many Syrian towns and cities, Halfaya contained every possible contradiction at once: Pro-Assad militias were also established there by one Saleh al-Hammoud, who was later assassinated. Among the Caesar photographs, the smuggled images documenting torture in Assad’s prisons that were leaked in 2018, were pictures of people from Halfaya killed by Syrian security forces. The town also produced one of the founding figures of Jabhat al-Nusra, Saleh al-Hamawi, a former friend and confidant of President Ahmad al-Sharaa, who today has become one of his sharpest critics and writes on X under the name @Osalsera3sham (“The root of the conflict in the Levant”). Reports also point to the brief appearance of a figure from Halfaya known as Iyad Halfaya, who served as a companion to al-Sharaa before being arrested by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) on charges of spying for the U.S.-led international coalition against the Islamic State group. Iyad Halfaya’s fate remains unknown.
These contradictions were alive and active in Halfaya when Assad’s forces retook the town in April 2017. Then, in early December 2024, the opposition seized it as part of the offensive codenamed Operation Deterrence of Aggression. Fewer than two weeks later, the Assad regime collapsed, and Halfaya’s sun rose in a way its most optimistic residents could never have imagined.
Fifteen years after the revolution began, Halfaya’s sons from the armed factions reached Damascus, led by the agricultural engineer Murhaf Abu Qasra, known by his nom de guerre “Abu al-Hassan 600,” who would go on to become minister of defense. Some of those who left Halfaya for the front lines and reached Damascus did not stay long; they came back to Halfaya, now carrying the keys to office.
In the caretaker government formed in the weeks following Assad’s fall, four ministerial portfolios went to figures from Halfaya: defense (Murhaf Abu Qasra), internal trade (Maher Khalil al-Hassan), agriculture (Muhammad Taha al-Ahmad, who subsequently became ambassador to Egypt), and religious endowments (Sheikh Alaa Hussein al-Mousa). More followed.
Over the first year of al-Sharaa’s rule, individuals from Halfaya filled key positions of authority across the new Syria. What we were able to document is as follows. In internal security, Brig. Gen. Muhammad Qarmaz heads Syria’s internal security apparatus. In Damascus, Col. Ahmad Daghmah runs the Criminal Security Branch. Abd al-Mu’in al-Halabi oversees criminal security in the Ghab region. On the southern border, Baha Mujbar “Abu al-Yaman” commands the border guard. On the northern border, Ayman Abu Qasra, the defense minister’s brother, runs the strategically vital Jarabulus crossing with Turkey. Within the army, Brig. Gen. Muayyad al-Hassan oversees the armed forces’ supply chain (food, clothing and logistics), with Brig. Gen. Wissam al-Sheikh Hamid serving as his deputy. All of these men received their military promotions directly from al-Sharaa.
In the economy, Maher Khalil al-Hassan moved from minister of internal trade to deputy minister of economy. In local administration, Ahmad al-Sayyadi took charge of the Mhardeh district and its surroundings. At the Foreign Ministry, Amer Yahya al-Qasoum runs the oversight and inspection department. In sport, Zayd Abu Zayd heads the Syrian Arab Equestrian Federation, and among his relatives is Brig. Gen. al-Hajj Rabi Abu Zayd.
In the energy sector, Hassan Abu Qasra, an engineer, held four separate posts in under a year following his return from Turkey to Syria. According to the Syrian media outlet Zaman al-Wasl, these were: director of the Latakia Fuel Branch (Ministry of Energy); head of the Technical Branch at the Fuel Directorate (Ministry of Defense); head of the Central Quality Control Department (Ministry of Energy); and deputy director of the Energy Services Directorate (Ministry of Energy). Also from the Abu Qasra family is Ahmad Abu Qasra, an aide to the defense minister who accompanied him on al-Sharaa’s visit to Moscow. That gives us at least 20 figures from a town whose population does not exceed 30,000. They do not all share a single surname, but they all share the same hometown.
What happened in Halfaya is not an isolated case but a concentrated expression of a broader phenomenon: The regions that formed the backbone of the armed revolution, and above all Idlib, have become the primary recruiting ground for the new ruling elite. Five of the defense minister’s deputies come from Idlib. Three are from Taftanaz: Brig. Gen. Fahim Issa (a civilian of Turkmen origin and founder of the Sultan Murad faction); Maj. Gen. Muhammad Khayr Hassan Shabib (a former civilian); and Brig. Gen. Muhammad Diya Saleh “Abu Saleh Tahhan.” Staff Brig. Gen. Fadlallah al-Hajji, an officer who defected from the Assad regime’s forces, is from Kafr Yahmoul; the religious scholar Brig. Gen. Ahmad Issa al-Sheikh is from Sarjeh. From the village of Mahmbal in rural Idlib comes Alaa Muhammad Abd al-Baqi, a civilian graduate of an engineering institute and a former HTS member who became a colonel by military decree (No. 8, Dec. 28, 2024) and was given command of the supply branch of the 90th Division of the Syrian Armed Forces.
Even the media has not been spared. The platform Creative Syrians, which operated out of Idlib, has seen its cadres take over official Syrian state media: Alaa Barsilo as the director-general of the General Authority for Radio and Television; Muhammad Abu Zayd as the deputy minister of information; Ziad al-Mahamidi as director of the SANA news agency; Hamza Qurtawi as the director of digital media; and Bani Faroun, the platform’s own director and a 2024 graduate of the University of Idlib, as the head of the Syrian News Channel.
This “Idlibization” of so many levers of state power, and the filling of every reachable post with relatives and affiliates, is best exemplified by the Abu Qasra family of Halfaya, though it is far from alone. The defining example, it seems, is the family of the transitional president himself.
Within just four months, the transitional president distributed the meatiest posts among his immediate family. Having previously served as minister of health in the transitional government, his brother Maher al-Sharaa became secretary of the presidency. Another brother, Hazem, was made head of the Investment Authority. His brother-in-law Ahmad al-Droubi became secretary-general of the central bank. His other brother-in-law, Maher Marwan Idlibi, was appointed governor of the capital. This is the same man who issued the widely controversial ban on the sale of alcohol in Damascus. Among Ahmad al-Sharaa’s wider circle of relatives, a certain Qutayba Badawi, the first lady’s cousin, was appointed director-general of the Land and Sea Crossings Authority, and the president’s brother-in-law “Abu Hamza” works in Maher al-Sharaa’s office.
In December 2025, Uways al-Sharaa, 35, the president’s cousin, was named Damascus’ overall security chief. He had previously held a security post within HTS, and was promoted from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general in just two months, a progression that normally takes Syrian officers at least 20 years of service, courses and examinations.
This scramble for office, laying the foundations for a return to clan rule, only now plural rather than singular, prompted the SOHR to publish a report with a stinging headline: “Nepotism Appointments in the Spotlight: Transitional State Officials Follow in the Footsteps of Assad and His Family.” The report documented widespread discontent in both popular and media circles, with criticism directed at the ministries of religious endowments, emergency affairs and defense, where close relatives had been placed in sensitive posts. One of the new authorities’ media figures, Hassan al-Dughayim, offered a defense: Such appointments were “perfectly normal, since the country needs competences.” Yet the published CVs of most of those appointed reveal no expertise other than proximity to the official who hired them.
These appointments and justifications are not mere lapses. They are an expression of the nature of the new regime itself. Post-Assad Syria has not yet taken on a clearly defined shape; it might best be described, for now, as a “fluid state”: one that came into being through an international consensus. This means it is not solely the regime of HTS or Ahmad al-Sharaa alone. Turkey, which backed multiple factions, has secured its share of this arrangement, as have other states. This multiplicity of regional and international centers of influence creates fertile ground for the emergence of second- and third-tier local power centers within this fluid state. Yet this fluidity, this dispersal of influence, has not produced a more just or competent system, but something else: the return of nepotism and patronage politics in new forms.
Syrians who had wagered on a clean break with Assadism have found themselves confronting a disturbing reality: not only the Assad family but the al-Sharaa family too; not only Qardaha but multiple “Halfayas.” The Assad system had a single center of gravity: one family from one town, controlling key nodes of the state through critical military, security and economic posts (the 4th Division under Maher al-Assad, the 90th Division under Zuhair al-Assad, the Military Housing Establishment under Hilal al-Assad, the lucrative sectors of the economy under Rami Makhlouf). The new regime distributes its posts more openly and across more hands: ministries, internal security, border crossings, the central bank, with fast-tracked promotions that bypass legal procedures.
Murhaf Abu Qasra represents a first-tier center of gravity: a defense minister who distributes relatives across sensitive posts. Foreign Minister Asad al-Shaibani, related to al-Sharaa through marriage, offers another model: he placed his brother Ra’fat at the head of the Arab Advertising Corporation, and established the General Secretariat for Political Affairs that functions as a practical counterpart to the dissolved Baath Party, but with considerably wider powers.
These multiple centers of gravity — Halfaya-based, Idlib-based, family-based — did not emerge by accident, nor are they a uniquely Syrian phenomenon. They are a recurring pattern in military and authoritarian regimes throughout history, from Iraq to Vietnam to Rwanda. In such regimes, the birthplace of the ruling elite tends to become a political, military and economic center of gravity, a place ordinary people make pilgrimages to in order to solve their problems through whoever holds influence there. But in those other countries, these centers of gravity grew slowly over decades. In post-Assad Syria, we are witnessing a rapid crystallization of new centers in the wake of Qardaha’s fall, with local and regional powers scrambling over the spoils.
The emergence of these centers is often rooted in the regime’s nondemocratic, violence-based legitimacy. To protect itself, such a regime must recruit people from networks of kinship and proximity: relatives, in-laws, comrades-in-arms, or descendants of the same areas. They are selected for their loyalty to “the inspired leader.” Appointments follow a chain that bypasses the law and is built neither on merit nor on bureaucratic ascent.
In Iraq, President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, himself from Tikrit, brought in the man who would eventually overthrow him: Saddam Hussein, both of them belonging to the al-Beikat clan of the al-Bu Nasir confederation from Tikrit. Saddam in turn brought with him a personal aide from Tikrit, Abd Hamoud al-Tikriti, and Defense Minister Hardan Abd al-Ghaffar al-Tikriti, and the list goes on. Saddam invested heavily in Tikrit and its infrastructure, transforming it over the decades into an economic and social hub boasting some of Iraq’s finest hospitals, schools, universities and roads, as well as dozens of presidential palaces. Tikriti clans, particularly from the village of al-Awja, filled sensitive positions across the ruling party, the army and the security apparatus. After Saddam’s regime fell in 2003, Tikrit went from a center of power to a pariah city, its residents targeted for sectarian violence because of their association with the old order. Today, Tikrit is not a place people are drawn to.
Assad’s relationship with his hometown differed from Saddam’s with Tikrit. Qardaha, the Syrian village where Hafez al-Assad was born, was a center of gravity throughout Assadist rule, supplying the president’s brothers, Rifaat and Jamil; his sons, Maher and Bashar; and his daughter, Bushra, as well as commanders of the security and military services from the Makhlouf family, Assad’s in-laws.
In the imagination of many Syrians, it became a city of wealth and luxury. The reality, however, was otherwise: an Associated Press investigation found that ordinary residents of Qardaha did not share in the prosperity associated with the Assad family, and that most lived in poverty. “Everyone assumed Qardaha was built on marble,” one resident said. The reality was farming, manual labor and then forced conscription into the army. After the regime’s fall, thousands of its residents disappeared or were imprisoned.
Yet the Assad dynastic stronghold possessed one quality that is absent today: Hafez al-Assad’s rule, and to a lesser extent his son’s, was undergirded by a multidenominational ideological structure, i.e. the Baath Party, which genuinely encompassed all of Syria’s sects and ethnicities. This ideological vessel allowed Assad the father to avoid falling into the sectarian trap; his senior officers, including security figures, were drawn from the Sunni majority, including men like Naji Jamil, Ali Zaza and Hikmat al-Shihabi.
In this, he was aided by the Arab nationalist movement that dominated political life in the 1970s. No such vessel is available to al-Sharaa, who did not choose this Sunni majority but instead chose its least substantial strand, jihadist Salafism, which today fills the centers of gravity around him and will cause him serious problems down the line, not least because of its deeply rural character.
The transformation of these rural towns into centers of gravity, controlled by one family or a handful of families, automatically consigns the majority of their local population to life on the margins. A tour of Halfaya a year and a half after Assad’s fall reveals that little has changed in the texture of daily life. The defense minister, accompanied by the justice minister, presided over the inauguration of Halfaya’s main mosque after it was restored by a Turkish relief organization at the start of last Ramadan. The town itself, meanwhile, suffers from a long list of service failures. Electricity has improved, but prices have become prohibitively high; healthcare is poor, to put it charitably. The roads are not up to standard. Repair work on the Taybat al-Imam-Halfaya bridge, the town’s only link to Hama, has been ongoing for six months with completion still months away. The town’s hospital has reopened thanks to German funding.
These “development inaugurations” cannot conceal the fact that daily life has not changed for most people. Displaced residents are still waiting for reconstruction before they can return home and leave the camps. “Even with the weak services, everyone will go back to their town,” said one resident of Halfaya, who has begun patching up his ruined house. Perhaps it is this very patience that has given the new authorities room to build a world apart from those they purport to serve.
In post-Assad Syria, a system has taken shape in which new families and rural clan networks parcel out the levers of the state as spoils of war. The difference is that the Assad system, for all its authoritarianism, maintained the mask of a state: It had a constitution, a parliament, laws, and institutions that distributed posts according to bureaucratic mechanisms — however engineered those mechanisms were. A Syrian who wanted a government job needed connections, yes, but also needed a degree and a record. The law could be circumvented, but it existed.
In the new system, it no longer raises any eyebrows when an engineering institute graduate becomes a supply officer in a combat division, or when a 35-year-old is promoted from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general in two months — a climb that used to require decades in uniform. The diplomatic appointments to Syrian embassies around the world illustrate how the new state is being built: on relationships and families rather than expertise, with a sprinkle of media management on top.
Upon these appointments, new centers of gravity are taking shape across Syria as competing poles. Each center wants its cut; each region wants its share. This multiplicity of centers does not distribute power so much as it hollows out the state’s coherence, dissolving central authority into hidden rivalries over positions of influence. In the past, the Council of Ministers held collective responsibility for all state institutions. Today, each ministry constructs its own world. The presence in every ministry of an unannounced “sheikh,” figures with military or religious backgrounds that have no bearing on the expertise needed to build a state, means that policy is not shaped by any unified, coherent or national vision. Not simply because expertise is absent, but because these figures are, and always have been, engaged in competition for power and the division of spoils.
This has nothing to do with the decentralization that many Syrians long for. Quite the opposite. This hidden contest between centers is actively destroying any attempt to loosen the grip of central control, replacing it not with more localized governance but with erratic, damaging subcenters in the governorates. The governor of Latakia announced a ban on makeup in government offices; the governor of Damascus banned alcohol in the capital; the governor of Hama banned public gatherings, and so on. Every governor has his own universe; every “sheikh” has his ministry.
The new centers of gravity in the new Syria are overwhelmingly rural in character. Sons of rural Idlib are running the port of Tartus, the Latakia fuel branch and the internal security apparatus, while the names of the traditional urban bourgeois families are almost nowhere to be found in any governmental post.
This raises a troubling question: Will the Syrian countryside that rose at the expense of the cities in the 1950s — through the army first and then the Baath Party, producing a strongly centralized state, for all the objections to it — now reproduce the catastrophe by dismantling bureaucratic and democratic mechanisms of selection and creating a failed state?
Whatever the causes of the Syrian revolution, its outcome is that the rural world that governed Syria for six decades through the Baath, and which then rose against itself, has returned to govern again, this time through armed organizations and competing centers of gravity. The result: a weaker state and a deeper disorder. The difference is that yesterday’s failure was slow; it took six decades. Today’s failure may come faster, because what exists is no longer a state but an archipelago of competing centers of gravity.
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