Demobilising NGOs

A decade of conflict has turned many Syrian NGOs into state-like institutions. They delivered essential services, built sophisticated management hierarchies, developed their own political economies, maintained foreign backers, and operated inside territorial spheres of influence. In an institutional sense — not a moral or legal one — they came to function much like armed groups: both established routines, networks and administrative roles that tied them into local governance. These arrangements embedded operating patterns that became difficult to reverse. A shift to formal state institutions is necessary; but dismantling these NGOs abruptly would destabilise the systems linked to them.

Aid organisations also became part of the war economy. Aid sustained entire sectors: transport, procurement, logistics and administration. It kept population centres viable, enabling conflict parties to hold territory. The Assad regime exploited and abused aid on the largest scale, using UN channels – plus currency manipulation, restrictive access rules and security vetting – to entrench patronage networks and punish perceived opponents.

Other, de facto, authorities developed their own versions of the model. In Idlib, for example, the HTS administration relied heavily on aid organisations to run health and education, allowing it to focus its own resources on security and military structures. Access permissions, protection fees and informal taxes generated revenue for armed actors and political authorities across all areas of control.

Throughout Syria, decades of entrenched corrupt practices seeped into the humanitarian sphere, giving local power-holders tools to reward loyalists, sideline critics and claim legitimacy at little cost.

Today, the capacity of the aid ecosystem rivals that of the emerging Syrian state. If Syria is to consolidate politically, it must redesign rather than simply shrink the system. Just as armed groups require DDR, NGOs need an institutional DDR programme that defines their place within a functioning state. In a coherent polity, civil society should be accountable first to national institutions and citizenry, not to self-appointed NGO elites or external donors. The lesson of the past decade and a half is that service delivery without principles entrenches unaccountable hierarchies. Aid transparency, quality of service delivery, and equity in distribution must become integral features of the system.

The conditions for such a transition are imperfect. A successful NGO DDR programme requires a clear path to the end of hostilities and a legitimate government capable of rebuilding institutions and repairing the social fabric. Syria today meets neither condition. And more than a decade of emergency practices has produced habits that are not easily undone.

Only one organisation integrated into the new state quickly: the White Helmets. Their absorption served political and symbolic needs. They brought international visibility and political capital; and their vehicle fleet, logistics systems and trained staff made them an instant asset. Their founding charter committed them to end operations once a legitimate government emerged, and at their general assembly in Damascus in June they voted that this condition had been met. The government rewarded the move by granting them formal status and appointing their leader, Raed al-Saleh, as Minister for Disaster and Emergency Management. 

Yet the integration came at a cost. In their official announcement, the White Helmets stated that their portfolios on justice, accountability and advocacy would be transferred to the relevant ministries and public bodies. While service delivery can move into public institutions, however, watchdog functions depend on organisational distance. Recognising this, the White Helmets plan to continue their transitional justice work through a new independent entity called Truth Guardians, born out of their Dutch foundation and also registered in Syria. Whether such distance from the government can be maintained in practice remains to be seen.

The White Helmets’ experience underlines the risks of assuming that every NGO should fold neatly into government structures. A healthy civic space requires independent oversight, rights monitoring and the ability to challenge authority — roles no government can credibly perform on its own.

No other NGO received anything like the attention accorded the White Helmets’ and many anyway have little desire to follow their path. NGO scepticism of the new government remains strong, especially among organisations rooted in the northwest, and even more among those in the northeast, whose future depends on the still-unsettled relationship between Damascus and the Autonomous Administration. But civil society is far from uniform. While many organisations seek pragmatic ties with ministries to maintain their business, some civil society organisation figures now appear proudly beside President al-Sharaa, making public long-standing relationships that were open secrets: many organisations in the northwest operated in close harmony with HTS, carried parts of its messaging, shaped donor narratives and channelled funds into the area. Others hover around ministries in Damascus, hoping for prestigious positions in the government.

International NGOs (INGOs) benefited from the system that emerged after the state withdrew from many parts of the country over the course of the war — and from the regime’s dependence on international aid in areas it continued to control. They became costly brokers, offering compliance frameworks and institutional credibility to government donors. Most funding into Syria passed through UN pooled funds, then through INGOs, before reaching Syrian NGO partners, and then finally Syrian citizens in need. UN agencies enjoyed extraordinary influence: they shaped coordination, needs assessments, priorities and the allocation of humanitarian and early recovery funds. Their narrow mandates – and at times thinly veiled political agendas – went largely unchallenged, to the point that support for normalising Assad could be presented as “humanitarian realism.” Little wonder the new government has little time for the UN.

Entities built in crisis featured key structural flaws, which persisted as they served personal interests at every stage along the financial chain. With budgets tightening and politics shifting, the entire aid architecture now needs serious rethinking. Yet most actors continue with familiar habits: donors still treat INGOs as their primary interlocutors, and direct funding to the new government remains off the table. UN agencies court the Sharaa administration for access but remain captive to the UN’s internal rivalries and the broader market logic that has long warped the humanitarian system. Some agencies, including UNICEF, UNFPA and UNDP, have already signed funding agreements with government ministries that would have been politically unthinkable under Assad. The money still avoids direct budget support, but it enters ministries through UN pipelines, signalling that previous red lines are being quietly relaxed. 

Whether that happens in line with humanitarian principles is a different question. “I don’t think there are red lines anymore,” a former UN official told Syria in Transition, “The UN will sell its soul to protect its bloated presence in Syria, because nothing terrifies them more than a world where contracts and cushy salaries have to be earned instead of defended.”

Syrian NGOs cling to the influence they accumulated during the war, and international salaries give them strong incentives to preserve the status quo. Western donors reinforced this dynamic for years by casting these organisations as the backbone of society and the moral voice of Syria — praise that fostered confidence, but also an inflated sense of self-centrality and a reluctance to cede space in a reconfigured system. The government, for its part, does not yet control large areas of the northeast and south. The struggle to reintegrate these regions gives Damascus reasons to use aid as a pressure tool — as seen in Suwayda. In short, INGOs, UN agencies and donors largely defend existing arrangements because they protect influence, bureaucracy and budgets. The government, meanwhile, wants all aid to go through its institutions. 

Entirely missing is a frank and structured conversation about the sector’s future aimed at elaborating a joint vision between donors, INGOs and NGOs, and the government that defines roles, responsibilities and modes of working. 

Accountability must sit at the centre of that debate. INGOs and UN agencies – whose added value in Syria must be much more clearly analysed and defined – need stronger accountability to Syrians and, in time, to state institutions. The recent withdrawal of SOS Children’s Villages after investigations showing that it had become entangled with regime abduction networks, is a stark reminder that INGOs are not automatic safeguards. But national bodies cannot inherit authority by default either. The former leadership of Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour were implicated in the Assad regime’s manipulation of aid and must first acknowledge that record and undertake meaningful reform if they wish to claim public and international trust.

At the same time, the idea that localisation — handing over responsibility from INGOs to Syrian NGOs — is the obvious panacea should be treated with caution. A Syrian humanitarian coordinator warned: “Frankly speaking, I have advised against advancing localisation, even when well-meant, because the corruption among Syrian NGOs is so exorbitant.” For Syrian NGOs to shift accountability from donors onto a national state, that state must first win legitimacy and capacity. Donors filled that role because a credible state was absent; now, with the political landscape shifting, there is at least an opportunity to rebuild legitimacy, and accountability should, in principle, move homeward if that process takes root. Engaging openly with those legitimacy questions can itself become part of national dialogue and reconciliation – for once, a meaningful application of the Humanitarian–Development–Peace Nexus.

Throughout the war, “civic space” was defined by distance from the state, often as a sign of resistance. In the new era, it needs a clearer structure. Service delivery — from health to education to emergency response — should, over time, be integrated into accountable public institutions. But advocacy, rights monitoring and public accountability must remain independent and grounded in law. They also need protection from becoming a new kind of business venture: already, some NGOs frame themselves as agents of state-building to secure funding, while government bodies cite civic participation as proof of legitimacy. If this dynamic hardens, both sides risk turning oversight into a transactional exercise rather than a safeguard of the public good. A national civic realm must be able genuinely to scrutinise authority while also contributing to policy, protected by constitutional guarantees.

Europeans have a role to play. For more than a decade they funded, trained and politically empowered Syrian NGOs, INGOs and the UN. That legacy, and the responsibility they owe their own taxpayers who expect that continued humanitarian and development engagement brings value-for-money, means Europe cannot stand aside. It should help broker structured dialogue between the aid sector and the new government and support the development of a shared vision and a practical roadmap that harmonises humanitarian and development work with state institutions whose capacity and professionalism are the only long-term antidotes to never-ending aid dependency. As a former senior Western diplomat told Syria in Transition, donors must “stop playing games and stop shaping their support according to their own domestic — and therefore short-term, short-sighted and frankly unethical — political interests, or relying on tick-the-box exercises that lack strategy and durability.”

Syria cannot allow its aid economy to remain adrift. Nor can it return to the habits of the past decade, where humanitarian urgency obscured political responsibility. Rethinking the aid system is a serious political endeavour. It is central to rebuilding a country kept alive for years by emergency structures that were never meant to remain in place forever.