A government praised abroad, questioned at home

"Last year, I said that Syria had returned. Today, I say that Syria is rising," Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa told the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, one year after becoming the first Syrian leader in nearly six decades to address the body.

Speaking on the second day of the General Debate, al-Sharaa arrived with what he called "a record of achievements and facts." He declared the war had "come to an end," that bloodshed and destruction had stopped, and that Syria had begun "its journey of recovery and revival."

Al-Sharaa pointed to the end of Syria's international isolation: roughly one hundred countries have opened channels of communication with Damascus, and some sixty diplomatic missions now operate in the capital.

He cited cooperation with the OPCW and IAEA, efforts against Captagon trafficking and organized crime, and the repeal of the Caesar Act sanctions. Describing Syria as "an international trade corridor by land, sea and air," he noted more than 20,000 aircraft had crossed its airspace in a single month. 

He also touted rising agricultural output, the reconstruction of schools and housing, and the return of 3.5 million refugees and displaced people, framing a new push for "a Syria without refugee camps."

On territorial matters, al-Sharaa insisted "the Golan will remain Syrian land», calling for the withdrawal of Israeli forces to the lines of 8 December 2024 and rejected Israeli attempts to impose “a federal” arrangement, as well as what he described as aggression undermining peace and security.

“The opportunity for peace and security is available to those who wish to live in peace,” he said, calling for a “just peace that maintains the rights of all”. 

A speech that outpaces the facts on the ground

The confident tone, however, sits uneasily alongside a considerably messier reality documented by rights groups over the past year.

Since al-Sharaa's Islamist-rooted government, led by former Hayat Tahrir al-Sham commanders, took power, sectarian violence against Syria's minorities has continued largely unchecked.

Between March and July 2025, an estimated 1,500 Alawite civilians were killed in coastal massacres carried out by militias nominally aligned with government forces, attacks US intelligence assessed likely occurred "outside the direct control of the authorities," raising uncomfortable questions about how much command al-Sharaa actually exercises over his own fighters.

Deadly sectarian clashes also erupted in Sweida in July 2025 targeting Druze and Bedouin communities, and Amnesty International has documented ongoing abductions and sexual violence against Alawite women continuing into 2026. 

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom concluded this year that conditions for religious minorities in Syria have "continued to worsen" since Assad's fall, citing threats to Alawites, Druze and Christians alike, while Open Doors recorded the largest single-year jump in Christian persecution worldwide in 2025.

Structurally, minority representation remains largely symbolic: Sunni Islamists dominate the cabinet's most powerful posts, and Christians, Alawites, Druze and Kurds remain almost entirely absent from Syria's security and intelligence leadership, an exclusion analysts warn risks entrenching a new sectarian order rather than the pluralist state al-Sharaa has promised. 

Roughly 155,000 people remain displaced from Sweida alone, a region that still sits outside the interim government's effective control.

None of this negates the genuine, measurable progress al-Sharaa can point to: sanctions relief, diplomatic normalization, a resumption of trade and travel, and the return of millions of refugees are not small achievements for a country emerging from over a decade of civil war and half a century of dictatorship.

But the gap between the confident narrative delivered in New York and the accounts still emerging from Syria's coast, Sweida and its minority communities suggests that "rising" may be less a finished fact than a claim still very much being tested, one investigation, one massacre, and one community at a time.