On a recent visit to Europe, Syria’s former rebel leader-turned-president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, had a pitch that would have been hard to imagine just a year and half ago. He told a packed audience at Chatham House in March that his government was trying to “transform Syria into an economic destination” for the entire Middle East. By investing in Syria’s reconstruction, Europe could tap into what Sharaa called the country’s “strategic geopolitical location in the region” while allowing millions of Syrian refugees to finally return home.

Sharaa has been busy making a version of this pitch ever since he toppled Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024. Whether hosting foreign officials in Assad’s old presidential palace, or traveling abroad to meet heads of state such as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and U.S. President Donald Trump, Sharaa has honed an investor-friendly message for how his country might rebuild after decades of dictatorship and civil war.

Indeed Sharaa’s foreign itinerary as president has often looked more like an investment tour. He has made four trips each to Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia; three to the United Arab Emirates; and two each to Russia and the United States. They correspond with early investment pledges for reconstruction, including a slew of projects unveiled last year that made headlines with their $14 billion price tag. In all, since coming to power, Sharaa’s government has touted tens of billions of dollars in investment deals to rebuild the country. These include major energy infrastructure such as power plants and oil and gas pipelines but also fanciful, speculative real estate schemes that you’d expect to see somewhere in the Gulf, not in one of Syria’s many war-ravaged cities.

The question now is, can Sharaa deliver on his lofty promises of a “new Syria” rising from the ruins? The answer may hinge on whom the real customer is for Sharaa’s rebuilding: ordinary Syrians or wealthy foreign investors.

Given the enormity of destruction across Syria, where many cities and towns still look as though the war only just ended, the government’s need for investment is easy to understand. Reconstruction is estimated to cost upwards of $400 billion ($80 billion just to rebuild housing, according to the United Nations), and that’s in a country with a GDP of some $20 billion (down from $60 billion before the war) and a decimated economy.

Strikingly, Sharaa’s government has publicly shunned international loans and aid, instead prioritizing foreign investment to fund reconstruction. “We chose the path of reconstruction through investment. We did not choose the path of rebuilding Syria through aid and assistance,” Sharaa told potential investors last October at a financial conference in Riyadh. He has said this approach is intended to make sure Syria is not a “burden for anyone.” But it is also true that loans and assistance, whether from foreign countries or the International Monetary Fund, would come with outside scrutiny and potential strings attached.

Whatever the motive, Sharaa continues to tell audiences that the opportunity in Syria is enormous and there’s room for everyone. It is an urgent pitch for a leader whose hold on power may ultimately rest on whether his government can bring in money to provide jobs and restore livelihoods for millions of Syrians impoverished by the war. “The economy is still the soft underbelly for this government, and tied to that is reconstruction,” said Amr al-Azm, a Syrian scholar and founder of The Day After project, an NGO that supports Syria’s democratic transition. As he explained, “If you’re not able to get people back to work, if you’re not able to provide for them, if you’re not able to rebuild their homes, then how’s that going to work out?”

But Sharaa the salesman can sometimes sound as if he is putting investment—some of it from shady business barons with ties to the Assad regime—over the dire needs of the many Syrians who lost their homes in the war. The conflict destroyed more than 60 percent of Syria’s infrastructure, while 90 percent of the population lives in poverty. A vast sea of rubble surrounds Damascus—what was, before the war, the capital’s densely populated suburbs—while the centers of cities such as Homs and Aleppo have been in ruins for years.

“You have 2 million people sitting in tents in Idlib. Why aren’t you trying to house them? Why are you focused on investment?” Azm said. “They’ll announce some big project that’s supposed to be part of the ‘recovery,’ but it is not going to rebuild a country that has suffered such catastrophic losses or turn the economy around.”

Azm’s is a growing critique in Syria as many see flawed reconstruction plans taking shape. Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, has called Sharaa’s reconstruction agenda a “mishmash of disconnected economic policy decrees and investment projects” that won’t really address Syria’s needs. According to the U.N., 5.5 million Syrians are still internally displaced, even as 1.5 million refugees have returned since Assad’s fall, mainly from neighboring countries. A further 1.8 million have returned home from displacement camps, but what they have gone back to is mostly rubble.

Many Syrians fear that the huge capital projects Sharaa has announced for reconstruction, such as the $14 billion worth unveiled last summer, are not for them. These were billed as “major strategic projects” in infrastructure, transportation, and real estate, yet their terms were opaque and seemed designed mostly to attract investor interest—and trumpet that this new Syria was open for business.

Consider the $4 billion project to turn the tired Damascus International Airport into a “world-class” transportation hub. It features a futuristic master plan by Zaha Hadid Architects and is led by a Qatar-based developer, UCC Holding, run by billionaire brothers originally from Syria. Or consider the prospect of a brand-new subway system for Damascus, built from scratch, with $2 billion from the UAE’s National Investment Corp. Or another $2 billion for a high-rise development known as Damascus Towers by an obscure Italian shell company or nearly $600 million for more high-rises and a mall in central Damascus.

These deals—struck by the president and an insular clique that effectively governs by decree—also offered a sign of Sharaa’s personalist rule. Last year, for example, Sharaa created a new but murky sovereign wealth fund that is managed by his loyalists. Washington seems fine with all this. Trump’s envoy to Syria, the billionaire financier Tom Barrack, who also serves as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, was at the signing ceremony last August in Damascus to cheer on the $14 billion in reconstruction deals. Barrack, typical of those around Trump, has a web of his own business ties in the region, including with countries, such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia, that are investing in Syria’s reconstruction.

Fears that this reconstruction agenda could be plagued by cronyism and corruption are exacerbated by the inclusion of individuals whose own shady ties stretch back to the ousted Assad regime. The Syrian-born brothers behind the flashy Damascus airport renovation, Moutaz and Ramez al-Khayyat, have a notorious uncle: Assad-era tycoon Mohammed Hamsho, according to Jihad Yazigi, the editor of The Syria Report, an authoritative source on the Syrian economy.

A construction baron who was reportedly close to Assad’s brother Maher, Hamsho was called the “The Rubble King” for his war profiteering. Regime soldiers and militias under Maher’s command—known as “men of Hamsho”—would strip steel and iron from the ruins of former rebel-held areas after they had already been heavily bombed and depopulated. The looted metal would end up in Hamsho’s steel factory. In Assad’s last years in power, some of that steel was used to begin building Marota City, the regime’s dystopian vision of reconstruction on its kleptocratic and authoritarian terms: a Dubai-style development of luxury towers rising over land seized by the regime on the edge of Damascus and displacing tens of thousands of people.

Like several other Assad-era business barons, Hamsho recently reached a “settlement” with the new authorities. He is said to be insulated, in part, by his ties to Qatar.

And then there are the Trump connections. As the New York Times has reported, a third Khayyat brother, Mohamad, lobbied lawmakers in Washington last year for the lifting of U.S. sanctions on Syria—the biggest obstacle to any money for reconstruction—while pitching a “Trump-branded resort” on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. At the same time, his brothers, who have won at least $11 billion in Syrian reconstruction deals through UCC Holding (including $7 billion for a UCC Holding-led consortium to build several power plants), negotiated a real estate partnership with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to finance a huge, multibillion-dollar resort in Albania—and are now eying joint real estate projects with Kushner in Syria.

“None of these initiatives really have anything to do with reconstruction,” Azm said. “They’re all private enterprise, supposedly, that just pay lip service to reconstruction and to reviving the economy.”

Indeed, many Syrians have already become cynical. As one woman from the devastated Damascus suburb of Darayya told the Middle East Research and Information Project, “Our neighbors are displaced, everyone is displaced, yet they are building towers instead of helping us to rebuild homes.” As Syria Direct has reported, residents in several demolished suburbs of Damascus have called the government’s plans to rebuild them through private investment “theft,” as they would only partially compensate property owners. Some have even likened these investment plans to the notorious Assad-era laws and decrees that seized property from displaced Syrians throughout the war and which paved the way for the construction of Marota City. Reconstruction “should not come at the expense of our rights,” said one resident of Jobar, now a wasteland on the outskirts of Damascus. Speaking to Syria Direct, he explained that “Jobar is not for sale. … After our homes were destroyed and we were displaced for years, we were waiting to return and be compensated—not to lose out.”

In its race to attract investors and sell Syrian reconstruction as a business opportunity, Sharaa’s crony agenda could backfire. Rather than rehabilitate the country, an unequal rebuilding would lay the groundwork for resentment and popular discontent. If the foundations of Sharaa’s “new Syria” end up looking too much like the old one’s, it will be a recipe for instability. “The risk of an exclusive and elite-led reconstruction process will only reproduce social inequalities, impoverishment, a concentration of wealth in the hands of a minority, and the absence of productive development,” Joseph Daher, a Syrian political economist, has argued. “All these elements, it should be remembered, were at the root of the popular uprising against Assad rule.”

“Sharaa is promising everything to everybody,” Azm said. “But their coffers are empty,” which explains the race for foreign money. Azm is quick to note that “whatever is happening today is infinitely better than what was happening under Assad.” This, he believes, means that if nothing else, there is room for Syrians to demand a more equitable form of reconstruction. Under both Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez al-Assad, Azm said, “there was no oxygen for anyone to breathe, except what was provided by the regime.”

“Right now, there’s a lot of free oxygen or enough,” he added. “How long it can stay—it’s up to us.”