Syria has become the graveyard of Middle Eastern certainties. What once looked like a frozen conflict—managed by dictators, militias and foreign patrons—has collapsed into something far more unsettling and far more consequential. The fall of the Assad regime in late 2024 did not deliver peace; it detonated a long-suppressed reckoning. More than a decade of war had already killed at least 350,000 people, displaced over half the population and shrunk the economy by more than 50 per cent. What followed Assad’s exit was not closure, but exposure: of wounds untreated, contracts broken, and a regional order that no longer holds. Syria is no longer a distant humanitarian tragedy. It is a live test of whether post-war states can be stitched […]