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War-battered Syria is trying to capitalize on a narrow window it says it has carved out during the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran: staying outside the fighting while portraying itself as a safer route for regional trade. In Damascus, the interim government and foreign ministry officials have argued that neutrality has allowed Syria to reopen conversations with Arab and Western countries that shunned President Bashar Assad’s regime before he was ousted by rebels in December 2024.
A resident story underscores the stakes of movement in a conflict that has widened beyond immediate battle lines. Ahed Badawi, who lived for more than a decade in Bahrain during Syria’s 14 years of civil war, said the Gulf state provided refuge for her family and that “Nothing at all ever happened there,” adding that, in her view, “the Bahrainis don’t even know what war is.”
But as the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran and a regional war followed, Bahrain and nearby Gulf countries hosting U.S. bases came into Iran’s crosshairs, according to the reporting. Badawi and her family returned to their home in Aleppo, which had once been among the hardest-hit areas during the civil war but, in their account, has offered a safer environment amid the latest conflict.
Syrian officials say the pivot to neutrality has been deliberate. “Syria has ‘presented itself as the solution to strategic crises in the region,’” said Obayda Ghadban, an official with the Syrian Foreign Ministry. At a meeting of European leaders in Cyprus, interim Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa said Syria has “today chosen, through the will of its people and institutions, to be a bridge to security and a fundamental pillar of the solution,” and he described the country as “the alternative and secure artery connecting Central Asia and the Gulf to the heart of the European continent.”
That effort is tied to the transport routes that have emerged as shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has been disrupted. The reporting said that since Iran blocked access to the strait, oil shipments have been trucked from Iraq into Syria and sent to European markets via Syria’s Baniyas port. It said a key border crossing between northern Iraq and Syria reopened last month after being closed for more than a decade, and officials tout it as an additional route for energy exports. Syria’s overland route is described as less efficient and more expensive than Hormuz shipping, but the approach is pitched as a workaround while Iran controls the sea channel.
Officials also portray the neutrality as a refusal to align with either side of the wider struggle. Ghadban said Syria had no interest in joining the war, describing the participants as “strategic enemies of Syria,” whether discussing Iran and its affiliates or Israel and its “aggressive expansionist policy in Syria.” The same reporting tied Iran to Assad during the civil war and said Hezbollah and allied Iraqi militias backed him, while noting that Israel has been suspicious of Syria’s new Islamist-led authorities and has seized and occupied a U.N.-patrolled buffer zone in southern Syria after Assad’s fall.
Even as Syria has positioned itself away from the conflict, the reporting said it still experienced the pressures of a wider regional confrontation, including missiles sometimes falling on Syrian territory. Noah Bonsey, a senior adviser on Syria with the International Crisis Group, said Damascus was clear from the start that it wanted “no part of this war and signaled to everyone accordingly,” but he said Syria’s ability to stay out was also linked to timing and military posture. He said the U.S. had drawn down its presence in Syria before the war with Iran began; after fighting in January between central Syrian government forces and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces in northeastern Syria, the U.S. military moved thousands of suspected Islamic State militants held in Syrian detention centers to Iraq, while scaling down its own presence in Syria where its main mission had been preventing an IS resurgence.
Bonsey also warned that neutrality does not eliminate Syria’s economic exposure to the regional conflict. The reporting said Damascus had been looking for investment tied to postwar reconstruction from wealthy Gulf Arab countries, but that those countries now face less bandwidth to support projects beyond their own defense priorities. It said Syria’s new government is also facing rising discontent as the economy flags, even as Bonsey suggested longer-term infrastructure projects—including proposed rail lines and gas pipelines linking the Gulf to Turkey and European markets—would, if pursued, take years.
For Badawi, the benefits of returning are immediate, even if the broader economic and security picture remains uncertain. “There’s nothing like being in your own country,” she said. “When you’re in your own country, you feel a different kind of security.”