Syria: 10 Key Appointments by the New Authorities

HTS takes the key roles, and a cohort of university-educated engineers born in the 1980s gets a chance to run Syria.

Since the fall of Damascus on December 7-8 to a coalition led by Ahmad al-Sharaa/Abu Muhammad al-Jolani and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (Syria Liberation Group, HTS), the outlines of a new government have taken shape. Al-Sharaa is functioning as acting head of state, and has been highly visible in Western and Arab media.

If “personnel is policy,” as the cliché goes, who are the other key figures in the emerging authority structure?

1. Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir: Born in 1983, al-Bashir was trained as an electrical engineer and worked for Syria’s national gas company in his twenties and possibly even after the revolution broke out in 2011. He rose to become development minister (2022-2024), and later prime minister (2024), in the Salvation Government established by HTS in Idlib Province in 2017. He is often described as the technocratic face of HTS and the Salvation Government.

2. Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaybani: Born in 1987, al-Shaybani earned a B.A. in English language and literature at Damascus University, and then an M.A. in political science and international affairs at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University in Turkey, where he has more recently been completing his Ph.D. A longtime member of HTS and its predecessor organizations, al-Shaybani was also a top leader in the Salvation Government, and at times functioned as HTS’ de facto foreign minister. His first trip as Syria’s new foreign minister was to Saudi Arabia.

3. Intelligence Chief Anas Khattab: Born in 1987, Khattab studied architectural engineering at Damascus University. Gravitating towards jihadism, he left for Iraq to fight the Americans, and was a founding member of HTS’ predecessor organization Jabhat al-Nusra (Support Front). He occupied various key positions in Nusra and HTS, becoming intelligence chief for the latter formation and leading HTS’ anti-Islamic State efforts.

4. Defense Minister Murhaf Abu Qasra/Abu Hassan al-Hamawi: An agricultural engineer by training and born circa 1983, Abu Qasra was leader of HTS’ military forces for the past five years and helped lead the operation that overthrew Bashar al-Assad. AFP interviewed him in December. He was one of several armed group commanders given formal ranks/promotions by al-Sharaa/al-Jolani, in Abu Qasra’s case the rank of general.

5. Chief of General Staff ‘Ali Nur al-Din al-Na‘san: Originally from the area around Homs, al-Na’san became a top military figure in HTS. He was one of the cluster of commanders who received promotions along with Abu Qasra. I could not find much biographical information about him.

6. Governor of the Central Bank Maysaa Sabrine: An accountant by training and a top official at the Central Bank when the conquest occurred, Sabrine is tasked with overseeing the unfolding liberalization of Syria’s economy as well as navigating international sanctions.

7. Finance Minister Mohammed Abazaid: Strangely, I can find no serious biographical information about the new Finance Minister, either in English or Arabic. Al Jazeera interviewed him here, and he has been associated with several key decisions so far, including an imminent 400% boost to public sector salaries.

8. Damascus Governor Maher Marwan: Born circa 1983 and trained in Islamic law, Marwan is from Damascus but spent the post-2011 period largely in Idlib, eventually taking up senior positions in the Salvation Government. He caused some controversy over remarks he made - or that were attributed to him, depending on who you ask - about peace with Israel in an interview with NPR.

9. Head of the Office of Women’s Affairs Aisha al-Debs/al-Dibs: Syrian liberals, Western media outlets, and others are watching assiduously to see how the new authorities under al-Sharaa will treat women. Al-Debs, somewhat lesser known outside Syria than the other figures, is a civil society activist (see profiles of her here at the Syrian-run Rozana website, and here at Al Arabiya). She walked into considerable controversy with some initial remarks she made suggesting that she had little sympathy for secularist views of women’s place in Syrian society.

10. Aleppo Governor Azzam al-Gharib: Born in 1985, al-Gharib earned a degree in medicine from the University of Aleppo as well as an M.A. in Islamic Studies from Turkiye’s Bingöl University. Once the revolution broke out in 2011, he passed through several important movements, from Ahrar al-Sham (Free People of Syria) to the Syrian National Army (SNA), where he became commander of the Northern Front, a key component of the SNA. Aleppo is Syria’s second most populous city/governorate, and al-Gharib’s appointment there is part of HTS’ power-sharing with other allied factions - indeed, several other key governorships also went to SNA leaders.

I see two basic patterns here.

First, multiple top figures in the transitional government have roughly the same demographic profile: they were born in the 1980s, they are Sunni Muslims primarily from the western part of the country, they went to university in Syria (often to study engineering, strikingly), joined the revolution, and then at some point came into the orbit of HTS and/or the Salvation Government. That’s not the profile of everyone here, of course, but there is a generational overlap between al-Jolani/al-Sharaa, al-Bashir, al-Shaybani, Khattab, Abu Qasra, etc. Then you have something of a biographical divergence between the career jihadists (now let’s call them post-jihadists) such as al-Sharaa and Khattab, and the more “technocratic” figures such as al-Bashir, but there is also a significant convergence by the mid-2010s. Let’s note too that the substantial presence of university graduates in the top echelons of the Salvation Government and now the transitional government makes Syria’s current experiment somewhat different than Afghanistan under the Taliban or the hypothetical situation of a future scenario for Mali where a reformed JNIM takes power. It’s not that a university education makes one automatically worldly and wise, but the HTS crew comes across as less parochial and insular than the Taliban.

Second, HTS took the appointments most closely associated with coercion (intelligence, defense, military), and also took the prime minister and foreign minister posts. In other words, much of the ultimate power lies with HTS and allies, and if there is some inclusion of outsiders in the financial/economic posts, HTS also has a presence there as well; the Economy Minister is Basel Abdul Aziz, who served as Economy Minister in the Salvation Government (and fits the demographic profile mentioned above, to a tee - born in 1984, engineer, etc.). While HTS has given some key appointments to the SNA and even to a previous regime official in the case of the Central Bank, the transitional government is very much HTS-dominated.

On a final note, I learned a lot relevant to this post by reading the updates and analyses of Orwa Ajjoub, Cédric Labrousse, and Ömer Özkizilcik. Following news about Syria is complex, to say the least, and it helps to read multiple analysts (this is only a sliver of who’s out there, of course) and then do some triangulation among news sources. Many of the links in this post come from Western news sources or from major Arabic-language outlets such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya; there’s no neutrality anywhere, obviously, but I tried to stay away from unknown/obscure sites.