Less than two weeks after rebel forces led by Ahmad al-Sharaa ousted Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, a U.S. State Department delegation arrived in Damascus to talk with the country’s new leader.
It was a meeting few could have predicted. Roughly a decade earlier, the U.S. had declared al-Sharaa — a onetime Al Qaeda commander who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — a designated global terrorist with a $10 million bounty on his head.
But Syria shares borders with five key regional actors in the Middle East: Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon. And with Syria in transition after years of Assad’s rule and a devastating nearly 14-year war, diplomats across the globe saw engaging with al-Sharaa as a chance they couldn’t afford to miss.
“From day one, when Ahmad al-Sharaa took Damascus, he talked about peace and reconciliation, reunifying the country,” says Charles Lister, director of the Syria Initiative at the Middle East Institute. “He talked about disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration. He used all of the phrases that you would read in a textbook about a political transition.”
And so “the world rushed to Damascus,” Lister says, with foreign leaders “amazed by this historic opportunity — first time in more than 50 years — to reshape the heart of the Middle East for the better.”
In the above video drawn from FRONTLINE’s new documentary Syria After Assad, members of the U.S. delegation that met with al-Sharaa in December 2024 describe their impressions of the jihadist-turned-statesman.
“Having worked for many four-star generals in the American military, I felt like I was talking to a very senior general, not that different than an American commander who had a very deep understanding of warfare, economics, policy, what he wanted to achieve, how he might want to achieve it,” says Roger Carstens, who worked at the State Department in the first Trump administration as well as the Biden administration. “I walked away impressed.”
Barbara Leaf, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs at the time and the delegation’s leader, found the way al-Sharaa spoke about one of Syria’s neighbors in the Middle East striking.
“I mean, I had to almost close my eyes and remind myself I was talking to a Syrian official, with the very easy way he talked about Israel,” she tells correspondent Martin Smith, who in 2021 was the first Western journalist to interview al-Sharaa. Leaf says that unlike Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father who ruled Syria for nearly 30 years, al-Sharaa gave “No diatribes, no recitation of 40 years of history.”
At the time, Israel — long in a state of war with Syria — had started bombing and dismantling Syria’s remaining military capabilities. As the video reports, the Israelis say they told the Biden administration what they were planning to do. Al-Sharaa asked Leaf to get Israel to stop.
“He was very matter-of-fact in his request,” Leaf tells Smith. “He said, ‘Could you get the Israelis to stop bombing? They’re scaring my people.’ And he was at pains to say repeatedly, ‘We have no argument with Israel.’”
Michael Herzog, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. at the time, tells Smith, “I don’t doubt that al-Sharaa has no interest in going to war with Israel.” But he said Israel was particularly worried about Assad’s weapons and chemical stockpiles falling into the wrong hands, especially in light of al-Sharaa and his associates’ jihadist backgrounds.
Israel has continued striking targets for months, killing an estimated two dozen civilians in the process. Israel has also seized land in southern Syria, expanding what it calls its security zone. Syrian academic Murhaf Jouejati says Israel’s actions are a “recipe for future violence, not for peace”; Smith notes that Israel doesn’t “see it that way.”
As the documentary goes on to explore, the geopolitical situation al-Sharaa is now shepherding Syria through is not the only challenge he faces as he tries to rebuild the country.
People in the country’s minority groups — including the Kurds and the Druze — say the new leader’s efforts at peace and unity haven’t gone far enough. And Alawites, who belong to the same sect as Assad, now fear retribution and sectarian violence from al-Sharaa’s forces and non-government militias.
In the documentary, Leaf later tells Smith that al-Sharaa is “making mistakes,” and that it’s “a hard, hard road ahead.”
“If he wants a stable Syria, he’s going to be compelled to take into account the changed landscape of Syria — changed by 14 years of this brutal civil war, but he has to look at a longer scope of history where these communities were pitted against one another,” she says.
Several months after the U.S. diplomats’ Damascus sitdown with al-Sharaa, there was another meeting that would have once seemed unthinkable: President Trump met al-Sharaa in May and announced that he would order the lifting of sanctions against Syria to give the new government a chance at “stabilizing the country and keeping peace.”
As Syria After Assad examines, the stakes are high inside Syria, in the volatile surrounding region, and beyond.
“What happens in Syria impacts all of the Middle East,” James Jeffrey, a top diplomat in the region during the Bush, Obama and first Trump administrations, tells Smith in the film. “Syria can generate massive refugee flows. And it has terrorism that does not stay in the region, as we saw all over Europe in 2015-16 with the Islamic State. These are issues at the center of the Middle East.”
For the full story, watch Syria After Assad starting July 1, 2025, at 7/6c at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS App, and at 10/9c on PBS stations (check local listings) and FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. The documentary will also be available on the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. Syria After Assad is a FRONTLINE production with Rain Media, Inc. The producers are Martin Smith, Brian Funck and Marcela Gaviria. The co-producers are Hoda Osman and Scott Anger. The writer and correspondent is Martin Smith. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.