Premieres Tuesday, July 1, 2025 at 10:30 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app
Amid chaos and conflict in the Middle East, a new FRONTLINE documentary investigates high-stakes questions about the future of a country at the center of the region: Syria. The country shares borders with five key regional actors, Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon, and faces an uncertain trajectory in the wake of the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad after a nearly 14-year war that led to hundreds of thousands of Syrian deaths.
The man who led the offensive to topple Assad — and now leads the fragile country — is jihadist-turned-statesman Ahmad al-Sharaa. FRONTLINE’s new documentary, "Syria After Assad," examines al-Sharaa’s rise to power, the current threats to Syria’s stability, and how what happens in Syria under al-Sharaa’s rule could have consequential effects across the region and beyond.
“What happens in Syria impacts all of the Middle East,” James Jeffrey, a top diplomat in the region during the Bush, Obama and first Trump administrations, says in "Syria After Assad." “Syria can generate massive refugee flows. And it has terrorism that does not stay in the region, as we saw all over Europe in 2015-16 with the Islamic State. These are issues at the center of the Middle East.”
"Syria After Assad" is from an award-winning team led by writer, producer and correspondent Martin Smith, producers Marcela Gaviria and Brian Funck, and co-producers Hoda Osman and Scott Anger. Smith’s coverage of the Middle East spans decades ("Obama at War," "Confronting ISIS," "Inside Assad’s Syria," "Bitter Rivals: Iran and Saudi Arabia"), and in 2021, he became the first Western journalist to interview al-Sharaa, who then went by the jihadi nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani. The prescient and groundbreaking documentary that resulted, "The Jihadist," examined al-Sharaa’s past as an al Qaeda operative, his fight with Assad, and his efforts to change his image into that of a viable leader who presents no threat to the United States and Europe.
In "Syria After Assad," Smith returns to a Syria run by al-Sharaa and examines how he has wielded power so far, finding fierce hope among some sectors of Syrian society and deep skepticism among others.
“The fall of Assad and the rise of al-Sharaa is one of the most extraordinary events in Middle Eastern history,” Smith says. “But beyond the victory celebrations of last December, this documentary takes viewers across the length and breadth of the nation to investigate the many challenges Syria now faces. I found a deeply divided nation where hope hangs by a thread as sectarian and ethnic hatreds threaten to quash any chance that Syria can shed its violent past and succeed.”
In the documentary, Smith speaks with U.S. diplomats who met with al-Sharaa after he ousted Assad, and who express cautious optimism about his leadership: “Having worked for many four-star generals in the American military, I felt like I was talking to a very senior general, not that different than an American commander who had a very deep understanding of warfare, economics, policy, what he wanted to achieve, how he might want to achieve it,” says Roger Carstens, who worked at the state department in the first Trump administration as well as the Biden administration. “I walked away impressed.”
But the geopolitical situation al-Sharaa is now shepherding Syria through is precarious. And though al-Sharaa has continually pledged unity and peace, members of the country’s minority groups — including the Kurds and the Druze — say they have been excluded. So do members of the country’s Alawite sect, to which Assad belongs; Alawites now fear retribution and sectarian violence from al-Sharaa’s forces and allied Sunni militias.
Barbara Leaf, who led the U.S. State Department delegation that met with al-Sharaa after Assad’s fall, tells Smith al-Sharaa is “making mistakes,” adding that “if he wants a stable Syria, he's going to be compelled to take into account the changed landscape of Syria–changed by 14 years of this brutal civil war, but he has to look at a longer scope of history where these communities were pitted against one another.”
“The situation is very fluid; we just have to wait and see what happens,” Murhaf Jouejati, a Syrian academic and diplomat, tells Smith. “We need to see this new administration be inclusive of all Syrians. We need to make sure that Syria will no longer be a center of terrorism.”
As "Syria After Assad" explores, the stakes are high for Syria’s people, the regional players that have long engaged in deadly proxy battles in Syria, and the world.
“If Syria can be united and stable and Iran can be kept out, then the temporary tactical defeat of Iran and proxies will become a permanent defeat,” Jeffrey tells Smith. “If not, if Syria becomes a failed state, if it goes back to active fighting and various outside forces intervening and split up, it will open the door for Iran again.”
Watch On Your Schedule: "Syria After Assad" will be available to watch at pbs.org/frontline and in the PBS app starting July 1, 2025, at 7/6c and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel.
Credits: A FRONTLINE production with Rain Media, Inc. The producers are Martin Smith, Brian Funck and Marcela Gaviria. The co-producers are Hoda Osman and Scott Anger. The writer and correspondent is Martin Smith. The executive producer for FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
