In the caretaker government formed in the weeks after Assad’s fall, four ministerial portfolios went immediately to figures from Halfaya: defence, internal trade, agriculture, and religious endowments. Over the following year, men from the same rural networks filled key positions across internal security, border control, and regional administration throughout the country. The pattern is documented in a June 2026 essay for New Lines Magazine by Syrian journalist Kamal Shahin, titled “How Halfaya and Idlib Replaced Qardaha at the Heart of Syrian Power.” The argument it makes is more troubling than the headline suggests.
The question Shahin raises is not only whether Ahmad al-Sharaa has consolidated control. It is whether what looks like consolidation is actually fragmentation in a new form. Post-Assad Syria, he writes, is a “fluid state,” shaped not only by HTS and al-Sharaa but also by Turkey and by a scramble among competing centres of gravity in which Halfaya and Idlib have replaced Qardaha without producing anything more coherent than what came before.
Halfaya Is Not Qardaha, But It Rhymes
Shahin’s comparison with Assad’s Qardaha is the essay’s sharpest tool.
Under the Assads, Qardaha functioned as a dynastic centre of gravity, supplying relatives, in-laws, and loyalists to the security and military system. Yet Shahin argues that today’s arrangement is even less coherent. Instead of one centralised family fortress, Syria is getting a constellation of smaller rural strongholds, Halfaya supplying security and administrative posts, Idlib supplying a parallel stream of revolutionary legitimacy, neither anchored to anything resembling a functioning state institution.
That difference matters politically. Qardaha sat inside a larger state machine organised by the Baath Party, however repressive. Shahin argues that Assadism still had a multidenominational ideological vessel that reached across sects and institutions. No equivalent vessel exists around al-Sharaa, who has chosen a narrower current, jihadist Salafism, and surrounded himself with people whose legitimacy comes from armed struggle and rural revolutionary networks rather than from state institutions or urban political traditions.
Family Fills the Core
The essay becomes sharper still when it turns to family appointments.
Within four months of Assad’s fall, al-Sharaa placed brothers and brothers-in-law into some of the most important offices, from the presidency and investment authority to the central bank and the governorship of Damascus. His cousin Uways al-Sharaa was rapidly promoted to Damascus security chief. Shahin’s argument is that this lays the foundations for a return to clan rule at exactly the moment when Syria needs the opposite: bureaucratic selection, institutional depth, and a broader civic basis for authority.
That is also why the absence of Syria’s traditional urban bourgeois families matters in the essay. The names historically associated with city-based influence are, as Shahin writes, “almost nowhere to be found” in the new governmental order. The countryside has returned to rule, but now through armed organisations rather than through a party-state. A postwar state cannot be rebuilt sustainably if the commanding heights are distributed through kinship and wartime loyalty alone.
A Faster Failure
The bleakest line in Shahin’s essay is also its most persuasive. Yesterday’s Syrian failure was slow and took decades. Today’s may come faster because what now exists is not a state so much as an archipelago of competing centres of gravity. Rural revolutionary legitimacy can seize a state. It does not automatically know how to run one.
Post-Assad Syria is not merely replacing one ruling class with another. It risks replacing a centralised authoritarian order with a looser, rougher, and possibly more brittle form of rule, one that may fail faster precisely because it has fewer institutions holding it together and more competing centres pulling it apart.
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