Since the early days of the Syrian uprising in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has made it a priority to keep state agencies running, allowing Assad to claim that the regime is the irreplaceable provider of essential services. Breaking the regime’s monopoly on these public services and enabling the moderate opposition to become an alternative source of them would weaken the regime and prevent the radical jihadist Islamic State from emerging to fill power vacuums across the country.
How the Regime Tightened Its Grip
- Syrians depend heavily on the state for income, essential goods and services, and administrative documents. Once its survival was at stake, the regime intensified efforts to entwine itself with state institutions that provide these necessities.
- The once-sprawling bureaucratic functions of the Syrian state have been consolidated during the war into highly defensible urban power centers under the regime’s control.
- To maintain its monopoly on the provision of essential services, the regime destroyed alternative structures that the opposition created in liberated areas.
- The rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State—which has brutally suppressed populations under its control—as the only other entity in Syria able to provide a degree of public administration has reinforced the regime’s narrative that it is the sole real option Syrians have if they are to receive essential services.