Has the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad’s government presented Syria with an opportunity to rebuild after over half of century of civil war? The World Bank estimates that this reconstruction will cost between $140 and $345 billion, with a conservative best estimate of $216 billion. That they are snatching figures out of the air is indesputable. But undoubtedly the costs will be gargantuan. Yet at this pivotal moment, international donors are reducing or withdrawing humanitarian aid.
Humanitarian aid alone cannot rebuild Syria, but it is the necessary bridge between emergency relief and long-term reconstruction. Aid provides the food, shelter, health services and basic social stability that any rebuilding depends on. That foundation is being dissolved before the interim government, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, has the capacity, legitimacy or resources to take over. While there has been some progress in the form of partial sanctions relief and growing interest from foreign investors – cuts to international humanitarian assistance have deepened a social crisis in Syria. If aid requirements go unfunded, reconstruction becomes less likely, more unequal, and Syrian society risks slipping further backward.
Aid retreat in Syria
Among the agencies affected is the World Food Programme (WFP). In May 2026, the WFP halved its emergency food assistance in Syria, from 1.3 million people to 650,000. To be fair it did so EVERYWHERE because its own funding was slashed because of reduced support from the governments of the word. It also suspended its nationwide bread subsidy, which had supplied more than 300 bakeries with fortified wheat and helped subsidised bread reach up to four million people a day. In 2025, the WFP reached 5.8 million people across all 14 Syrian governorates through food assistance, livelihood programmes and social protection initiatives. With donors cutting funding, those operations are being forced to shrink to just seven governorates. The WFP stress that the cause is not reduced need in Syria, but dwindling donor support, and says it urgently requires $189 million over the next six months to restore critical operations inside Syria.
This is part of a global retreat in humanitarian assistance. The United States, historically the WFP’s largest donor, has sharply cut its foreign aid budget under Donald Trump, with other major donor governments including United Kingdom and Germany following suit. In 2025, the UN sought $47B for global humanitarian operations but received only around $12B, the lowest in a decade. Of the UN’s 2026 appeals, Syria’s is the largest regional plan requiring $2.8 billion to support 8.6 million people yet it remains just 20% funded.
Syria is far from the only country facing these withdrawals. But in a more stable country, aid withdrawal might be absorbed gradually by the government and local authorities. In Syria, those systems have barely begun to be rebuilt: state institutions remain weak and political control is fragmented.
Why this is a reconstruction problem
It is easy to read aid cuts as a tragedy unrelated from reconstruction. But in Syria, aid is the foundation on which reconstruction is built. Rebuilding ultimately depends on Syrians being physically able to work, restart businesses, repair homes and take part in local economies. 7.2 million Syrians remain acutely food insecure. Households struggling to meet daily food needs simply cannot participate in reconstruction; ensuring survival – which is what aid does – consumes the time, financial resources, and stability that rebuilding a society requires. Withdrawing assistance risks “forcing more families into negative coping strategies” at the very moment the country is trying to rebuild.
Aid cuts also weaken the local systems that reconstruction will later rely on. Municipalities, NGOs, and community organisations are often the channels through which future reconstruction efforts are delivered. When funding is cut, staff are laid off and coordination collapses. In northeast Syria, for example, the NGO forum that coordinated the regional response – Northeast Syria (NES) – was 80-90% US-funded. Due to defunding, 22 of its 36 cluster leads for coordinating lifesaving aid ceased operations. Such institutional capacity is slow and difficult to rebuild, and its loss exacerbates instability.
The politics of where aid is withdrawn
Donors may not choose which regions lose aid for political reasons, but in a country as regionally divided as Syria, the effect becomes political regardless. The country is fragmented between a Sunni-controlled government and Kurdish, Alawite and Druze communities, among others, each shaped by different political and sectarian dynamics. Aid cannot resolve these divisions but withdrawing it unevenly can deepen them.
The communities where agencies remove their operations – such as the seven governorates where the WFP will cease operations – will read the withdrawal as selective or politically driven. Areas that already feel marginalised will interpret it as exclusion from a ‘New Syria’. This matters as foreign investment will likely concentrate first in Damascus and other areas where security, access and political relationships are clearer. Meaning rural areas that previously relied on aid, and that investors are unlikely to target, risk feeling left behind. If reconstruction centres on the capital while humanitarian support retreats from the peripheries, Syria could recover and rebuild unevenly. Peversely and indefensibly, the World Food Programme is NOT a transparent organisation and WITHOLDS information on what it is doing. It refuses to state which seven governorates it will not support. The reality is that these will be minority areas and the World Food Programme will thus reinforce and promote the sectarian division of Syria. They should be named and shamed as contributing to sectarian division.
Aid dependency
Syria should not remain indefinitely dependent on humanitarian aid or it risks a fragmented reconstruction made up of disconnected regional projects rather than a coordinated national plan. The better solution lies in sustained investment to build functioning Syrian institutions, accountable public services and a state capable of meeting Syrians’ needs. But cutting aid before those institutions exist risks pushing households deeper into poverty and removing the basic stability on which recovery depends.
What Syria requires is a managed transition from emergency relief to Syrian-led recovery. That means maintaining humanitarian funding while the state builds the capacity to take over. It also means making clear which services are being handed over, to who, under what rules and with what funding. This matters because if foreign capital arrives without transparent systems, it will sustain the forms of cronyism once associated with the Assad era that have become a hallmark of the new Al Sharra government.
Conclusion
Aid and long-term reconstruction work are largely dependent on each other, which is why the immediate funding gap cannot be ignored. The WFP’s $189 million funding requirement, among others, must be met so that critical food operations, and basic assistance can be restored. This is a practical investment in the stability needed for Syria’s reconstruction to begin. The fall of Bashar al-Assad may have opened an opportunity for Syria to rebuild, but its success depends in large part on the international community sustaining, not retreating from, funding the aid that underpins recovery.
