On 7 July, Damascus was rocked by explosions near the Four Seasons Hotel, where French President Emmanuel Macron was staying during a brief visit ahead of the NATO conference in Ankara.
Macron was meeting with his Syrian counterpart Ahmed Al-Sharaa in the Presidential Palace at the time of the explosions. At the time of writing, the Syrian authorities have not commented on the incident, no group has claimed responsibility, and the number of casualties is unclear.
The incident comes only five days after a bomb was detonated inside a coffeehouse just 70 metres from the Palace of Justice in Damascus, killing nine and wounding more than 20.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, and the investigation launched by the Interior Ministry has so far been unable to identify any suspects.
The two incidents combined have fuelled widespread and conflicting speculation about the perpetrators and their motives. Efforts to attribute responsibility are particularly complicated by the fact that the Syrian government’s many enemies, who are bent on destabilising it and dragging the country back into the spiral of violence, come from diverse and often mutually hostile backgrounds.
Foremost among them is the Islamic State (IS) group, which harbours ambitions to reassert its presence in the new Syria.
In June 2025, the Mar Elias Church in the Damascus district of Dweilaa was attacked, leaving dozens of worshippers dead or injured. A group calling itself the Saraya Ansar Al-Sunna claimed responsibility for the incident and threatened further attacks against Syria’s minority communities.
The government blamed IS for the Mar Elias Church bombing, but the relationship between it and the previously unheard-of group that claimed responsibility remained unclear. Blaming IS at the time also had the advantage of deflecting the widespread suspicion that extremist elements had infiltrated the new Syrian security forces in order to carry out attacks against minority communities, which already felt vulnerable under the interim government arrangements.
In the aftermath of the church bombing, the Syrian government clamped down on extremist Salafi-jihadi elements that rejected the authority of the new government. Al-Sharaa’s enemies within this current have accused him of abandoning the “true path” by pursuing policies aimed at unifying Syrians within an inclusive state.
He, in turn, has strengthened his government’s cooperation with the US, Turkey, and members of the International Coalition against IS to expand intelligence-sharing to avert similar attacks.
Since then, the Syrian Ministry of the Interior has claimed repeated successes in dismantling terrorist cells before they could carry out planned operations, which have included assassination plots targeting government officials and even the president himself.
While IS might want to target symbols of the new regime for betraying the jihadi creed by supporting secularist state-building and making common cause with the West, why would it target the Palace of Justice in particular? Syria’s nascent judiciary has not yet brought any IS detainees to trial.
After joining the International Coalition against IS in November 2025, the Syrian government focused on ground operations, which involved raids and combat operations leading to the destruction of IS bases and weapons caches.
Last month, the Interior Ministry announced that it had apprehended 235 IS members over a three-month period between March and May. The arrests, which included 198 Syrians and 37 foreign nationals, were carried out simultaneously in Damascus, Deir ez-Zor, Aleppo, Hama, and Homs.
US support consisted primarily of airstrikes against suspected IS strongholds. This was largely a response to an attack on American soldiers in Palmyra on 13 December 2025.
Earlier this year, US Central Command announced that it had struck around 100 IS sites and detained more than 50 militants. It subsequently announced that approximately 5,700 of the most dangerous IS detainees had been transferred from Syrian prisons to Iraq to stand trial before Iraqi courts.
In other words, the Syrian judiciary has not played a direct role in the actions against IS. Moreover, IS attacks have typically been carried out by suicide bombers infiltrating security or military facilities while wearing explosive vests. It therefore seems unlikely that the Palace of Justice bombing was carried out by an IS affiliate.
GROUPS: Many other groups are equally keen to frustrate the new government’s efforts to establish security across the country. Not least are the remnants of the former Al-Assad regime, who seek opportunities to return to power.
In recent weeks, the Syrian Interior Ministry has announced that it has dismantled several old-regime cells that were allegedly plotting to disrupt security and stability. The ministry linked these cells to Hizbullah in Lebanon.
On 5 May, the ministry stated that it had arrested members of cells plotting to carry out coordinated attacks across the country, including assassinations of senior officials, and that, with Hizbullah’s support, they had received organised training in Lebanon before returning to Syria to carry out the planned acts of sabotage.
Hizbullah has repeatedly denied any connection to these cells. There is little doubt that remnants of the Al-Assad regime are attempting to regroup and challenge the new authorities in Damascus. Moreover, this camp has been directly affected by the recent trials of senior security and military officials associated with the former regime that have taken place at the Palace of Justice in Damascus near which the latest bombing occurred.
However, it is still impossible to verify the extent of any external support members of that camp may have received from either Iran or Hizbullah, both of which have lost a key ally in Damascus and maybe seeking to disrupt the new order in Syria.
Other actors may also have an interest in establishing a Hizbullah linkage, and certainly the broader regional context introduces factors that muddy the picture. Last month, US President Donald Trump suggested that Syria could play a role in ending Hizbullah’s influence in Lebanon, sparking widespread controversy.
Many commentators in both Lebanon and Syria likened his remarks to the “green light” Syria received from the US to intervene militarily in Lebanon in 1976 and rejected any prospect of a renewed Syrian security mandate in Lebanon.
Al-Sharaa himself categorically rejected any military role for Syria in Lebanon, insisting that his country’s approach towards its neighbours was guided by aspirations for economic cooperation, reducing security tensions, and turning the page on a decades-long history of war and bloodshed.
He stressed that Syria was committed to halting the Israeli war on Lebanon. He argued that military solutions would not help towards this end and instead proposed a package of political and economic measures aimed at easing the burden on ordinary people and reducing sectarian tensions.
Last Thursday, Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al-Shibani visited Lebanon to meet with leaders from across the Lebanese political spectrum, in order to demonstrate his government’s impartiality and refusal to be drawn into the politics of polarisation.
He met President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, as well as Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, the Maronite Patriarch, the Grand Mufti of Lebanon, the Mufti of Tripoli, Kataeb Party leader Sami Gemayel, and Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea.
Together, these men represent Lebanon’s diverse and often opposing political and ideological camps, so in meeting with them all Al-Shibani underscored his government’s determination not to repeat the mistakes of the past in Lebanon.
His meeting with Nabih Berri was the most significant, as it effectively opened a direct channel of communication with the Lebanese official considered closest to Hizbullah. Berri is the leader of the Amal Movement, a longstanding Shia ally of Hizbullah, and is therefore widely regarded as an important back channel to the Lebanese resistance movement.
SYRIAN ROLE: Al-Shibani’s visit to Lebanon appears to reflect a growing international and perhaps regional consensus that Syria has an important role to play beyond its borders.
Washington has expressed increasing satisfaction with the performance of the new Syrian government on multiple fronts and has hinted that it might eventually entrust Damascus with tasks that could include security and military cooperation within the region.
The completion of the US military withdrawal from Syria before Washington and Tel Aviv launched their war against Iran earlier this year reflected confidence in the new Syrian government’s ability to manage internal security, and this was reflected in Washington’s encouragement of the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to integrate into the official Syrian armed forces.
Nevertheless, propelling the new Syrian army into risky regional schemes could jeopardise the country’s recently restored stability. This is why Al-Sharaa has resisted becoming entangled in security missions informed by Washington’s short-term calculations regarding regional security arrangements.
He does not want to risk squandering the political capital he has gained or to offer Israel services free of charge. Instead, he hopes to leverage the broad international and regional support for Syrian stability towards promoting deeper security and military cooperation, consolidating his rule, and generating more economic assistance for national reconstruction and development.
This strategy relies on solid alliances with both Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The former ensures access to Gulf financing for reconstruction while positioning Syria along an alternative overland energy transit route that bypasses the maritime corridors disrupted in the Strait of Hormuz.
The latter opens the door to military cooperation with NATO. Al-Sharaa is due to attend the NATO Summit in Ankara this week, which could pave the way to a framework for a broader strategic partnership that will enable Damascus to develop a more proactive defence policy without being drawn into ill-conceived adventures.
The writer is a senior researcher in Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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