Idlib: Decentralized Governance
The governorate that Assad punished hardest became the governorate that ended him. What it built in the interval is the governance story of Syria’s reconstruction.
This is the fifth in a series of city-level analyses by SIMA Partners examining Syria’s reconstruction through the lens of investment opportunity. Previous issues covered Aleppo (the industrial thesis), Damascus (the institutional thesis), Homs (the corridor thesis), and Hama (the sustainability thesis). Idlib is the decentralised governance thesis.
Each issue follows the same framework: what the city was, what happened to it, what has changed since December 2024, the arithmetic, where capital can go, and what can go wrong. The format is designed for investors, economic researchers, and policy professionals who need a single reference they can act on.
This analysis is written from Damascus, where SIMA Partners has been based since mid-2025. The author’s family is from Maarat al-Numan, in the heart of Idlib Governorate.
What Idlib Was
Idlib was given the mildest possible label, Idlib al-Khadra, Green Idlib, named for its olive trees, as if a governorate that contains 700 preserved ancient settlements, the birthplace of one of the Arab world’s greatest philosophers, and families who helped draft the Syrian constitution and shape the institutions of Syrian independence in the 1940s and 1950s were nothing more than a grove. The label served a specific purpose, since a governorate reduced to its olive trees does not require investment, institutions, universities, or political attention, and can therefore be neglected without explanation.
Before it became a byword for siege and displacement, Idlib Governorate was a sophisticated agricultural economy of uncommon depth. Its landscape was a limestone plateau broken by olive groves whose trees have the circumference of small rooms, terraced orchards running south from the Turkish border toward the plain of the Ghab, and durum wheat fields that produced the highest-grade grain in the country, feeding populations far beyond its own borders, and doing so without interruption for several thousand years.
The plateau between Aleppo and Idlib contains what UNESCO inscribed in 2011 as the Ancient Villages of Northern Syria, approximately 700 abandoned settlements from the first to seventh centuries AD, preserved in extraordinary condition because the stone does not decay and because the villages were abandoned gradually rather than destroyed. They are known as the Dead Cities, but the name misleads, since they are intact towns of stone houses with carved lintels, bathhouses, olive presses, and colonnaded streets, each element legible after fifteen centuries. Ebla, within Idlib Governorate, was one of the most powerful city-states of the third millennium BC, and its palace archives rewrote the known history of the ancient Near East. Measured by documented layers of human civilisation per square kilometre, Idlib has no equivalent in Syria.
The city of Idlib was a market town, smaller than Aleppo and less celebrated than Hama, functioning as the commercial node for the surrounding agricultural plain. Maarat al-Numan, sixty kilometres to the south, was the birthplace of Abu al-Ala al-Maari, born there in 973 AD and blind from the age of four. He was a rationalist philosopher who argued that reason was the only trustworthy guide to knowledge, a skeptic of all authority, political and clerical alike, and his Risalat al-Ghufran, written around 1033 AD, predates Dante’s Divine Comedy by nearly three centuries. His work was suppressed by the authorities of his era and again by the Ba’ath state, which preferred citizens who deferred to power rather than philosophers who questioned it.
Idlib Governorate, and Maarat al-Numan in particular, was home to one of Syria’s most sophisticated and cultivated classes: the landowners, merchants, lawyers, and physicians who had engaged with the Arab world’s intellectual and political currents for generations, and who formed the governing class of Syrian independence. The Hiraki family is the most documented example. Hikmat al-Hiraki, born in Maarat al-Numan in 1886, was elected to Syria’s first parliament in 1919, served in the constitutional drafting process of the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria in 1920, served continuously in parliament through the 1940s, became Syria’s first Minister of Supply in 1941, and financed the anti-French uprising in Hama and Maarat al-Numan from his own wealth in 1945. His house was a gathering place for the country’s politicians and poets. The Ba’ath coup of March 1963 dismantled the formal political power of that class almost immediately, but what it could not dissolve was the social capital, the civic habits, and the professional formation those families carried into diaspora, which Syria’s reconstruction now requires back.
Idlib was not punished for any single act but for its disposition, a governorate of independent farmers and market traders with no economic dependency on Ba’ath patronage. The Assad family’s abandonment of the place traces to a specific moment recounted across Idlib’s oral history: when Hafez Assad visited the city, a crowd pelted him with tomatoes and a shoe, after which he never returned. The gesture expressed something more fundamental than rudeness. The governorate had never accepted the transaction the Ba’ath offered, deference in exchange for patronage, because it had never needed the patronage. His response was strategic neglect across every dimension that mattered: no adequately funded public university, no major industrial investment, no infrastructure beyond the agricultural minimum, no institutional development that might give the governorate the capacity to challenge the centre. The educated class was forced to seek advancement elsewhere. What the regime could not extract or suppress was the disposition itself, a population of unusual self-reliance formed over decades of deliberate marginalisation, which became, when the moment came, the foundation of something the regime never anticipated.
What Was Lost and What Was Built
The 2011 uprising reached Idlib early and with unusual intensity. The Syrian Network for Human Rights documented Idlib as the most heavily bombed governorate in Syria across the conflict period, with the Russian air campaign from 2015 onward reducing entire towns in the southern countryside to rubble. The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria documented attacks on hospitals, schools, and markets that it assessed as deliberate, constituting potential war crimes under international humanitarian law. On 4 April 2017, the Syrian Air Force dropped sarin over Khan Shaykhun, a farming town in the Maarat al-Numan district. The OPCW Fact-Finding Mission confirmed the use of sarin, the OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism attributed responsibility to the Syrian Arab Republic, and the Idlib Health Directorate documented at least 89 civilians killed and more than 541 injured, the deadliest chemical attack since Ghouta in 2013.
Dr. Mohammed Feras al-Jundi, a physician from Maarat al-Numan, was among the first doctors on call, and his testimony from inside the hospital was reported by CNN, where he described hundreds of patients lying across every available surface, entire families killed together by asphyxiation, and a memory he said would stay with him for the rest of his life. In the years that followed, he kept his hospital open when every other physician had left, treating anyone who came through the door, and welcoming the displaced from Aleppo, Homs, and Ghouta alongside his own community. He maintained his practice through barrel bomb campaigns and airstrikes that destroyed two of the hospitals he worked in, each time moving to whatever structure remained standing and continuing, and he survived two assassination attempts, once by bullets and once by rockets. When the 2019 to 2020 offensive emptied Maarat al-Numan, he was among the last civilians still there, returning after December 2024 to reopen his hospital and being elected to parliament to represent Maarat al-Numan and Idlib. The arc runs from Khan Shaykhun through hospital always open through last physician in Maarat to elected representative, and that is the Idlib story compressed into one life.
Maarat al-Numan was subjected to a sustained campaign of barrel bombs, missiles, and airstrikes between 2019 and 2020 that Human Rights Watch documented as deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure. A single Russian strike on the city’s market on 22 July 2019 killed 43 civilians and wounded 109. After eleven days of constant bombardment, the city was emptied and then stripped. Furniture, appliances, doors, window frames, and copper wiring were pulled from every house, and rooftops were systematically bombed after residents fled, not to destroy combatants but to ensure no one could return. By the time the March 2020 ceasefire froze the frontlines, a city of nearly 100,000 had become a shell.
Every major offensive elsewhere in Syria, in Aleppo, Homs, Eastern Ghouta, and Deraa, produced displaced populations that moved northwest, and Idlib absorbed them all. By 2023 the governorate held an estimated four million people, the largest concentration of internally displaced persons anywhere in the world at that time, in a territory built for 1.5 million. It did so without the political backlash, the anti-refugee sentiment, or the institutional resistance that characterised the response of far wealthier countries to far smaller numbers, while European governments debated border controls in response to Syrian refugee arrivals numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Idlib absorbed four million without, as The Syria Campaign documented, a single public voice raised against their arrival, and a society that can triple its population under bombardment without social fracture has a kind of institutional resilience that no external aid programme produces.
The destruction was immense, but what matters more is what was constructed inside it, under sustained aerial bombardment by the Syrian and Russian air forces and ground pressure from Iranian-backed militias. The Syrian Salvation Government, established by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in November 2017 as a civilian administration to govern northwest Syria, ran courts, collected taxes, operated municipal services, administered schools and hospitals, and built governance institutions without a state behind it across seven years of active conflict. It delivered functioning municipalities in bombed cities, maintained social order across a displaced population of four million, built educational institutions from primary schools to universities, and achieved levels of gender participation in public life that compared favourably with several recognised Arab states. That record of institutional construction, produced under those conditions, has no parallel in the modern Arab world.
By 2023, over 70 percent of areas under the Salvation Government’s administration were connected to the electrical grid, supplied through a commercial partnership with the Turkish private company Green Energy, which delivered 636 GWh to northwest Syria that year. Damascus was delivering two hours of electricity daily, Baghdad was rotating diesel generators on neighbourhood subscriptions, and Beirut had long since normalised darkness as a structural feature of urban life. Idlib had continuous electricity, produced through a commercially negotiated arrangement that an institution without sovereign recognition built and operated for a population under active aerial attack.
The Syrian American Medical Society opened an oncology centre in Idlib in November 2018, the only one of its kind in the region. By 2020, SAMS operated 40 medical facilities including 12 hospitals, treating 500 to 600 cancer patients monthly, while the Syrian Board of Medical Specialisation built a credentialling system that no Syrian ministry had managed to establish in decades, and Dana and Sarmada developed commercial economies comparable to functioning Turkish provincial towns, built by private operators working within a governance framework that set the rules.
The liberation offensive launched from Idlib on 27 November 2024 reached Aleppo in three days, Hama in nine, and Damascus in eighteen. The Salvation Government’s prime minister became, briefly, the first prime minister of transitional Syria, and the governorate the regime had labelled Green Idlib, reduced to its olive trees, had produced the institutions, the personnel, and the offensive that ended Ba’ath rule.
What Has Changed
While Damascus recorded $14 billion in investment commitments at a single ceremony on 6 August 2025, and while Hassia Industrial City in Homs attracted investment applications, Idlib has attracted no equivalent headline commitment. No sovereign wealth fund has anchored a Syria strategy here. No Gulf developer has claimed the Bab al-Hawa logistics corridor. No major industrial group has announced a Maarat al-Numan rehabilitation programme. The terms for every sector that matters in Idlib are still being written, without competition, and in a post-conflict economy, the first actor to structure a credible investment shapes the terms for everyone who follows. That window is open in Idlib in a way it has already begun to close in Damascus and Aleppo, and the vacancy reflects not weak opportunity but a discovery process that has not yet started, since the institutional assumption in regional capital markets is still that Damascus is where Syria reconstruction begins and ends.
The Arithmetic
The World Bank estimates Syria’s reconstruction at $216 billion, against a national power generation that has declined by more than 80 percent from pre-war levels. That is the national anchor against which Idlib’s numbers, distinctive enough to merit separate accounting, must be measured.
The governorate sits at the heart of a national olive sector with more than 100 million trees across roughly 670,000 hectares, and Idlib alone is estimated to produce more than 100,000 tonnes of olives annually, the single largest concentration of the crop in the country. The International Olive Council recorded Syrian olive oil production at 80,000 tonnes for the 2024/25 crop year against a pre-war peak above 200,000 tonnes, and the 2023/24 season fell to 95,000 tonnes from 125,000 the prior year, a production gap reflecting processing capacity loss and drought stress rather than agricultural collapse. The trees survived; the cold-press lines, the certification infrastructure, and the bonded export logistics did not.
The energy picture inverts the national pattern. While Damascus delivered two hours of electricity daily through 2024, the Salvation Government’s territory was 70 percent grid-connected by 2023, supplied through a commercial partnership with Green Energy of Turkey, a working baseline no other Syrian governorate can claim, achieved without sovereign recognition or sovereign credit.
The third number is institutional capacity. Idlib retained, through more than a decade of conflict, a Health Directorate, a credentialled medical workforce, an established educational network from primary to university level, and a commercial economy operating under cross-border pressure with Turkey, all of which now sit available to private investment for the first time. That stock of institutional capacity is a constraint on urban services and a market in itself: trained physicians, engineers, technicians, and administrators concentrated in a single governorate at a density no other Syrian region can match.
The fourth number is logistics throughput. The Bab al-Hawa crossing was the highest-volume sustained land border in Syria across the conflict period, operating without sovereign customs infrastructure but at industrial scale, and processing the majority of commercial goods and humanitarian aid entering northwest Syria. Pre-war national figures across all five active borders combined sat at roughly 1,200 daily commercial crossings, and Bab al-Hawa alone, under conditions of active conflict, was approaching a substantial fraction of that pre-war national total.
Where Capital Goes
The six sectors below are sequenced by time horizon: what generates revenue in 12 to 18 months, what in 2 to 3 years, what in 3 to 5 years, and what in 5 or more. The sectors are partially interdependent, in the sense that logistics formalisation accelerates olive oil exports, water rehabilitation unlocks agro-processing, and healthcare infrastructure attracts the diaspora professionals whose presence accelerates everything else.
Olive oil, immediate: Idlib’s tree count is the largest concentration in Syria outside the northern Aleppo countryside, the trees are producing now, and the constraint is commercial rather than agricultural: cold-pressing capacity, traceable supply chain, EU organic and PDO-equivalent certification, and brand positioning into specialty channels. Italian and Spanish extra-virgin olive oil at IOC-certified provenance trades at €5–8 per litre wholesale into EU specialty retail, against €2.20–2.80 for North African commodity oil at Bari and Jaen reference prices. Tunisia, the closest direct comparator, captured roughly a third of EU specialty market growth between 2018 and 2024 by certifying volume rather than improving agronomy. A 5,000-tonne facility taking 4 percent of current Idlib production at a €3-per-litre premium over commodity benchmark generates €15 million in incremental revenue against $12–15 million of capital for cold-press lines, certification, traceability software, and bonded export logistics. At a 35 percent EBITDA margin on the premium spread, payback sits at 28 to 36 months in a market where no Syrian competitor currently holds EU organic certification at scale. The Bab al-Hawa crossing provides direct access to Gaziantep’s food processing infrastructure, and from there to European import channels actively looking for provenance-certified Mediterranean oils to fill volume that drought has cut from Spanish and Greek production. Entry structure: private direct investment, JV with established Syrian olive cooperatives, or BOT under Presidential Decree 114/2025 where land concessions are involved.
Logistics, near term: The Bab al-Hawa throughput is functional and commercially proven, supply chains connecting Idlib to Gaziantep, Hatay, and the broader Turkish market are operating now, and the investment case is formalisation: bonded warehouses, customs pre-clearance facilities, cold storage at 5,000 to 8,000 pallet positions, and digital freight management connecting the existing informal network to international buyers. A purpose-built logistics park at $20–30 million captures a fee structure on flows already moving through the corridor. At conservative throughput of 200,000 tonnes of mixed cargo annually, a quarter of current Bab al-Hawa volume, handling, storage, and value-added service revenues at $25–35 per tonne yield $5–7 million in annual gross revenue, with payback inside five years before adding bonded warehousing fees and the upstream olive oil and agricultural processing volumes that will move through any formalised corridor. No equivalent facility exists north of Aleppo. Entry structure: BOT concession under Presidential Decree 114/2025, with Syrian customs and the General Establishment for Free Zones as counterparties.
Healthcare, near term: Idlib has the most advanced sub-national health system in Syria, built by SAMS, the Health Directorate, and the Syrian Board of Medical Specialisation over seven years of conflict. That is a platform. A credentialled medical workforce, an established referral network, and a regional demand base that extends into the cross-border medical tourism market through Gaziantep and Hatay constitute the demand side of a private healthcare market that the new regulatory environment will, for the first time, allow to operate with proper licensing and repatriation rights. Private hospitals, diagnostic centres, and specialist clinics in Idlib city and Maarat al-Numan can serve both the local catchment and the Turkish patients already routing through Gaziantep and Hatay for procedures unavailable in northwest Syria. Capital requirement is $5–20 million per facility depending on specialisation, and the public infrastructure built by SAMS and the Health Directorate de-risks the private investment by providing the referral base, the trained workforce, and the regulatory precedent that a greenfield private healthcare market in any other Syrian governorate would have to build from scratch. Entry structure: PPP/BOT through the Ministry of Health and Syrian Investment Authority.
Agricultural processing, medium term: The southern Idlib countryside holds productive irrigated land whose constraint is water infrastructure repair rather than soil quality. FAO has launched a $286.7 million Emergency and Recovery Plan of Action for Syria covering 2025–2027, targeting 9.7 million people, with explicit components for irrigation rehabilitation, seed system restoration, and rural production recovery, public investment in water infrastructure that precedes and structurally de-risks private processing investment. A private agro-processing facility at Maarat or Saraqeb captures the output of both the Idlib plain and the northern Hama countryside at the intersection of the M5 highway, giving road access to Aleppo in the north and Damascus in the south. The facility is viable once the FAO water investment is complete, making it a 3–5 year horizon rather than an immediate one, but with the public de-risking mechanism already committed. Capital requirement is $15–35 million depending on product mix. Entry structure: BOT or JV, with the General Organisation for Land Development as the regulatory counterparty.
Education and training, medium term: Idlib built universities under siege, and the population that demanded education during bombardment will demand it during peace and will pay for quality. A private technical training institute linked to the logistics, agro-processing, and healthcare sectors fills a gap that no public institution in Idlib currently addresses at the vocational level, and a university partnership with a Turkish institution, building on the precedent set by the Health Directorate’s partnership with Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, extends that model into engineering, business, and agricultural sciences. Capital requirement is $3–10 million depending on the model. An education investment in Idlib is also the mechanism through which the diaspora professionals who built the city’s institutions can transfer their expertise at scale into the next generation. Entry structure: private foundation model or PPP through the Ministry of Higher Education.
Heritage tourism, long term: The Dead Cities UNESCO World Heritage Site, 40 villages grouped in eight archaeological parks across a 12,290-hectare property, is the most significant unvisited archaeological landscape in the Middle East now accessible without regime-era restrictions. The Maarat al-Numan mosaic museum, the largest collection of Roman and Byzantine floor mosaics in the world, is being assessed for restoration, and Syria’s Ministry of Culture announced on 3 December 2025 the recovery of 1,234 archaeological tablets and 198 artifacts to the Idlib Museum, preserved by local residents through the conflict and including pieces from the ancient kingdoms of Ebla and Mari. A boutique lodge on the Jabal al-Zawiya, an interpretation centre at Serjilla, and a heritage hotel in Maarat constitute a heritage circuit at $10–25 million with no equivalent in Syria. The time horizon is long because heritage tourism depends on security normalisation, infrastructure, and international visibility that will take years to develop, but the asset is extraordinary, and the first mover sets the standard for a circuit that will eventually draw visitors from across Europe and the Arab world. Entry structure: private concession in coordination with UNESCO and the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums.
What Can Go Wrong
The HTS designation: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham remains designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the United States and as a terrorist entity by the United Kingdom and the European Union as of the date of this analysis. A US person investing in a project where a designated entity holds any economic interest faces potential material support liability under US counterterrorism law regardless of commercial merits. Until the FTO designation is lifted or a formal OFAC carve-out established, Western capital entering Idlib carries legal risk that capital entering Damascus or Aleppo does not, while Gulf and Turkish capital faces no equivalent constraint, which means the first wave of Idlib investment is likely to be structured through those channels and the Western capital window opens later than it does for the rest of Syria.
Turkish dependency: Turkey’s economic presence in Idlib provides stability and introduces structural risk. The electricity supply, the cross-border trade, the cold chain, and a substantial portion of the consumer goods market all run through Turkish infrastructure under arrangements made when no Syrian sovereign was contesting them. As the new Syrian state asserts monetary and regulatory sovereignty, the terms of Idlib’s Turkish economic integration will require renegotiation, with tariff harmonisation, customs jurisdiction, and currency settlement all needing to be reset. An investor entering northern Idlib without a clear view of how those relationships evolve is entering without the full picture, and a Turkish counterparty whose terms have not been reconfirmed under the new sovereign framework is a counterparty whose contracts may not survive the transition intact.
The transition from wartime to peacetime governance: The Salvation Government’s competencies, managing displacement and delivering services under siege, differ from those peacetime economic governance requires: property rights registration, commercial courts, investment licensing, and budget allocation within a national treasury framework. The personnel who ran the wartime system are not automatically equipped to run the peacetime one, and the institutional architecture that worked under bombardment may not scale to a national framework. Integrating Idlib into a national system while preserving the fiscal autonomy that made local governance functional is the institutional challenge Idlib now faces.
Heritage preservation pressure: The Dead Cities have been on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage in Danger since 2013. Quarrying, agricultural encroachment, and informal construction are slower threats than bombardment but more certain in their cumulative effect, and the displaced population pressure on the Idlib plain has accelerated all three. Any heritage investment must be structured in explicit coordination with UNESCO and the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums, with a management plan that addresses encroachment before it forecloses the asset’s tourism value. The sites are not at risk of single-event destruction but of gradual degradation, until the international visibility that justifies the investment thesis no longer applies.
The Parallel
Spain’s transition from Franco offers the most instructive precedent for what Idlib and Damascus now face together. After Franco’s death in November 1975, Adolfo Suárez’s government faced a question structurally identical to Syria’s: how to absorb the functioning elements of a regional and institutional inheritance into a new constitutional order without dismantling what worked. Catalonia’s industrial economy, the Basque Country’s financial sector, and the technical civil service that had operated under Francoism were all functioning systems that the new democracy could either dissolve into a uniform central administration, on the French Jacobin model that Spain’s reformers explicitly studied and rejected, or integrate into a national framework that preserved their distinctiveness while reasserting central sovereignty. The 1977 Moncloa Pacts and the 1978 Constitution chose the second path, creating an estado de las autonomías that gave regions genuine fiscal authority and legislative competence rather than the administrative autonomy that central capitals usually concede.
The economic outcome vindicated the sequencing. Spanish GDP per capita rose from roughly half the Western European average in 1975 to near parity by the mid-1990s, and the regions that retained the most autonomy, Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, became Spain’s most economically dynamic rather than its most secessionist. The lesson is not that imperfect institutions should be preserved indefinitely; it is that absorbing a functioning regional economy into a national framework, on terms that preserve what made it functional, produces growth, while dissolving it into central uniformity produces neither growth nor loyalty.
The distinction is sequencing and pace. Idlib is not Catalonia, and the Salvation Government is not the Generalitat. But the new government’s stated commitment to absorbing rather than dismantling the institutions that ran northwest Syria, combined with the appointment of Salvation Government personnel into national ministries rather than their replacement by Damascus appointees, suggests Syria’s reconstruction may follow the Spanish path of preserved regional distinctiveness on terms that preserve what made northwest Syria functional during a decade of conflict. Capital entering Idlib in the next eighteen months bets on that trajectory holding.
The Thesis
Aleppo is the argument that Syria’s industrial economy can be rebuilt through its legacy manufacturing base. Damascus is the argument that reconstruction follows institutional formation. Homs is the argument that geography determines investment returns regardless of destruction levels. Hama is the argument that geographical constraint is the design specification for a circular economy.
Idlib is the argument that decentralised governance, private sector leadership, and diaspora-international cooperation are not emergency arrangements that a post-conflict state phases out as it normalises, but the architecture that produces results, and the people who built that architecture now run the state.
What was constructed in Idlib between 2013 and 2024, under sustained aerial bombardment by the Syrian and Russian air forces and ground pressure from Iranian-backed militias, was a governorate-level operating system: courts, taxation, electricity, education, healthcare, and municipal services delivered without sovereign recognition, without international banking access, and without the institutional inheritance that comes from controlling an existing state. Three specific factors produced these outcomes, each of which the Ba’ath state had deliberately suppressed and each of which Syria’s reconstruction now requires at national scale. When the state stepped back, the private sector solved problems commercially that no Syrian government institution had ever solved, including energy supply, logistics networks, and commercial services at a price and quality the market would sustain. International NGO-diaspora partnerships transferred knowledge and built permanent systems rather than delivering temporary relief, with SAMS establishing cancer treatment infrastructure where none had existed, the Syrian Board of Medical Specialisation building professional credentialling, and universities training the physicians, engineers, and civil servants a functioning society requires. Decentralised governance gave local institutions the authority to make decisions at the speed their situations demanded, what economists call subsidiarity, the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest level capable of making them well, which Idlib practised for a decade under active war, with the outcomes visible in the electricity coverage data, the health statistics, and the institutional record. What Idlib built between 2013 and 2024 is the most successful sub-national governance experiment in the Levant in the past two decades.
The people who designed and ran that experiment now lead the Syrian state, and they are sending the right signals. Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government has committed publicly to private sector-led reconstruction, to decentralisation of administrative authority, and to international partnerships for knowledge and capacity transfer, commitments that align precisely with what made Idlib work. Commitment and architecture are different things. The Salvation Government model was built to govern a governorate, while governing Syria requires fiscal policy, monetary sovereignty, and national infrastructure coordination at a scale the Salvation Government was never asked to develop. The question is whether the new state designs its national systems on the Idlib model, decentralised, private sector-led, diaspora-integrated, with real fiscal authority at the governorate level, or whether the weight of inheriting the centralised Ba’ath bureaucratic architecture pulls it toward the system it replaced. That architecture is still largely in place: the ministries, the regulatory frameworks, the budget allocation systems, the civil service. The people at the top have changed. The machinery has not.
Syria should institutionalise the pillars that made Idlib function. That means giving governorates genuine fiscal authority rather than administrative autonomy over budgets that Damascus controls. It means creating legal frameworks that allow diaspora professionals to serve formally in Syrian institutions without requiring permanent relocation. It means treating international NGO-diaspora partnerships as a permanent fixture of the state, the primary mechanism through which Syria integrates global clinical, technical, and governance standards into its own institutions. And it means building a regulatory environment that lets private actors lead in sectors where the state has historically failed: setting the rules, ensuring competition, and stepping back from decisions private operators are better placed to make.
What remains in Idlib is the institutional infrastructure that the new state inherited, the political muscle that produced the transition, and a population that has earned a fair share of reconstruction funding and project allocation, which is not charity but the minimum a country owes the governorate that made its reconstruction possible.
The people who ran Idlib built universities in a governorate the regime had kept without one, delivered electricity that three regional capitals could not, established cancer treatment where none had existed, and launched the offensive that ended fifty-four years of Ba’ath rule, all while absorbing Syrian and Russian aerial bombardment continuously for nearly a decade. Dr. Mohammed Feras al-Jundi, who treated the wounded at Khan Shaykhun in 2017, survived two assassination attempts, was the last physician serving Maarat al-Numan before the city was emptied, and is now its elected representative in parliament, has an arc that is not exceptional but the median arc of the people who built what Idlib became: physicians, engineers, teachers, judges, municipal administrators, and farmers who held a system together under conditions that would have collapsed most states, and who now hold formal authority in the one Syria is becoming. A regime that called this place Green Idlib and treated its olive trees as its only story produced instead the institutions and the people that ended it. Whether Syria’s reconstruction is built on what they made, or whether the old machinery they inherited bends them back toward what they replaced, is the question this country must now answer. The answer will not be found in Damascus, but in whether the institutional weight of the new state flows to Idlib and Maarat al-Numan with the seriousness those places earned.