How al-Sharaa’s Syria May Work with the Turkish Toolkit
Syria’s govt draws on the AKP’s mode of development and control. This frame shows how Islamist praxis adapts when survival requires efficient governance. Will this work, and who cares about democracy?
Contrary to the neo-orientalist imagination, the Syrian state’s core bureaucratic and administrative institutions are not run by men with long beards in military khakis or shalwar kameez but by technocrats who returned from exile and know what they are doing.
Just one small example: Syria’s 47-year-old minister of communications and information technology, Abdesselam Haykal. He fled the country in 2012 because he saw himself on the Assad regime’s arrest list, did his master’s degree at SOAS London and took over his family’s shipping and logistics business headquartered in Abu Dhabi. He now moves across the region seeking investors for his ambitious public and private ventures, including a plan to position Syria as ‘a digital Silk Road’ that would need 4500 km of fibre-optic lines and new…
