How inclusive is Syria’s new technocratic cabinet?

Over the weekend, the interim Syrian government announced a new set of 23 cabinet ministers, who are to run the country for the next five years until elections can be held.

At a ceremony in the Syrian capital Damascus on Saturday evening, the interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa, proclaimed that, “we are witnessing the birth of a new phase in our national journey, and the formation of a new government today is a declaration of our shared will to build a new state.”

Up until now, the caretaker government had been dominated by allies or members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the rebel group led by al-Sharaa that led the offensive, which toppled the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

If the new cabinet had continued to be dominated by religious men and former fighters from the province of Idlib where HTS was in charge, it would have been a worrying sign that HTS intended to consolidate its power, observers said. But if the cabinet was comprised of a mixture of Syrians who represent the country’s different communities, ethnicities and religions, that could be considered a positive sign.

New ministries created

International and Syrian observers and analysts, as well as ordinary citizens, have greeted the announcement of the new cabinet with cautious optimism.

As had been widely expected, HTS retained pivotal ministries, including foreign affairs, defense, justice and the interior. But around half of the new ministers are not affiliated with the group, offering a mix of community representation and professional qualifications.

Media outlet Syria.tv made comparisons between the new cabinet and previous ones under the authoritarian Assad family. The number of Alawite ministers has fallen from four to one, they reported, Christian ministers have gone from two to one; there are now two Kurdish ministers (compared to none at all in previous governments), while Druze representation has stayed the same, with one minister. Just as under the Assad regime, ministers who belong to the Sunni sect of Islam are in the majority.

The new cabinet has some new portfolios, has merged old ones and even got rid of some altogether.

New portfolios include a ministry of youth and sports and a ministry for emergencies and disaster management. Oil, water, electricity and energy have been merged into just one for energy. Economy and industry are also now together.

Health minister worked in Germany

On social media, many Syrians celebrated the technocratic nature of the new cabinet. Most of the new ministers are professionals, even specialists, in their fields, they said — often more so, in fact, than ministers in many other countries, including Germany and the US.

Examples include the new minister of finance.  Mohammad Yasser Barniyah studied economics in the US, trained at New York‘s Federal Reserve and previously worked as an economist at the Arab Monetary Fund. The new economy minister Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar is an economics professor who taught in Syria and the US. Al-Shaar actually held the same post between 2011 and 2012 and is one of several of the new appointees who previously worked for the authoritarian Asaad regime.

The new energy minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, trained as an electrical engineer and worked in the Syrian energy sector before the civil war. Most recently, he was prime minister of Syria’s interim government and before that the head of the civilian administration in HTS-held territory in northern Syria. But because the prime minister’s job has been eliminated in favor of a presidential system, al-Bashir has been given the energy ministry.

Syria’s new health minister, Musab al-Ali, is a neurosurgeon who had his qualifications acknowledged and worked in Germany after arriving there in 2014. He also became the head of the Syrian Community in Germany (SGD), an organization that fosters cooperation between Germans and Syrians, and was well known for volunteering his medical skills in opposition-held areas of Syria during the war. Most recently, he has been organizing delegations of German and Syrian doctors to travel to Syria as volunteers.

Notably, al-Ali replaces one of the interim government’s most controversial appointments up until now: Maher al-Sharaa, the brother of the Syrian president, had been acting health minister since last December. HTS also replaced another controversial appointee, the previous minister of justice, who reportedly oversaw executions in Idlib.

One of the most popular appointments is that of Raed Saleh, who co-founded and then headed the White Helmets, Syria’s volunteer civil defense force, for 10 years during the war. Appropriately, Saleh is now Syria’s minister of environment, emergencies, and disaster management.

The appointment of Canadian-Syrian lawyer Hind Kabawat as the new minister for social affairs and labor, has both drawn praise and caused controversy. The Christian peace activist was a senior member of the Syrian opposition’s negotiating team in Geneva during the war. Some critics have lamented the fact that Kabawat is the only woman in the 23-member cabinet and said there should be more women in power. Meanwhile, hardline Islamists have apparently been angered by Kabawat’s appointment because they accuse her of supporting LGBTQ rights. Many of the upset hardliners have harked back to 2015 when Kabawat overlaid a rainbow on her profile picture on the social network Facebook.

Kurdish criticism

But the most dissatisfaction with the new cabinet so far has come from the Syrian-Kurdish run Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, often referred to as AANES.

No members of AANES or the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), are in the cabinet.

But it does feature one Syrian Kurd: Mohammed Terko, who’s based in Damascus and studied in Leipzig, Germany, is the new minister of education.

Despite this, an AANES statement complained that the new cabinet failed “to take into account Syria’s diversity, continuing to maintain a single party’s control over it, and failing to provide fair and genuine representation for all components of the Syrian people.”

Differences between Syria’s Kurds and other Syrian communities are not new, but they deepened during the war and, despite a recent agreement between al-Sharaa and the SDF, are yet to be resolved.

On Monday, President al-Sharaa said that the new ministers were chosen for their competence because the government’s goal is to rebuild the country. At the same time, it “will not be able to satisfy everyone,” he said during a broadcast on state televison for the Eid holiday.

Editor: Anne Thomas