After the Fall: Digital Safety in Today’s Syria

Just over a year after the fall of the Assad regime, a longtime SalamaTech project leader shares her take on what’s changed in Syria — and why digital resilience matters as much as ever.

SalamaTech began in 2012 in the wake of the crackdown on Syrians calling for change. It was the Foundation’s first long-term project. And for 14 years, the team has worked alongside at-risk communities to reduce digital harm in an environment shaped by surveillance, retaliation, and fear. Over that time, the team built something just as valuable as its technical expertise: a trusted, locally rooted network able to adapt as Syria’s needs changed.

Then December 2024 brought change on an entirely new scale. The fall of the Assad regime transformed Syria’s political and social landscape overnight. And while the digital threat environment is evolving too, the need for digital resilience is as pressing as ever. To better understand what this new reality means for Syrians, we spoke with Nada, a longtime SalamaTech project leader who recently travelled to Syria for the first time since 2009.

Nada’s trip was both a homecoming and a reset: a chance to finally sit across the table from field team members she’d worked with remotely for years. She tells us she came back carrying two things: relief at what has changed in Syria, and a clear-eyed sense of what hasn’t.

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You just spent several weeks on the ground with the team in Syria. What feels most different about the digital risks people are facing now, after the regime’s fall?

Nada: Well, you no longer have that ever-present repressive state. In regime-controlled areas, state surveillance and retaliation often felt like the biggest threats. That’s why we created SalamaTech, and moving past that is huge. There’s a whole new sense of openness online now.

But honestly, things are changing so fast that we’re still figuring out what it means for people’s digital risks. Syria is racing to modernize and digitize — to move from being a shunned state to rejoining the global economy, with investment and tourism returning. You see that push everywhere, from business development to public services moving online. There are real positives, but also new risks when so much shifts online so quickly.

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Before we go deeper into those new risks, how about the opposite question? What has not changed with the fall of the regime?

Nada: Digital harms were never only about the state. We’ve always been helping people deal with scams, identity theft, harassment, and sextortion — and that hasn’t stopped. The constant here has been instability, which fuels vulnerability that opportunists exploit. And there’s still instability as Syria transitions out of conflict and into a more digital life.

Internet connectivity is also still very uneven, even in big cities. We hear this from organizations trying to move operations into Damascus — they’re struggling with reliability. And when the internet is unstable, it affects everything: work, coordination, access to services….

Also, people still can’t access a lot of online services. Even with the removal of sanctions, you can’t download many apps from their official sources. That leaves people getting software from unofficial sources, which has always been a huge opening for malware and hackers.

What also didn’t change overnight is that many people don’t recognize digital risk until something goes wrong. They’re not thinking about security all day — they’re trying to live their lives. They click the wrong link, reuse passwords, or trust the wrong message. That’s why SalamaTech works so hard at public awareness: to prevent harm before it’s a crisis. And that matters more than ever with Syria’s new focus on the digital economy and e-services.

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Can you tell us more about Syria’s push toward government e-services? Is it a good thing? Are there downsides?

Nada: They’re looking at moving many services online, from utility payments, to business registration to applications for passports, drivers’ licenses and so on. There’s a big focus on improving and unifying digital infrastructure, which has been fractured across different zones. There’s also a push for a unified digital identity system that’s more resistant to corruption.

There can be positives in this, for sure. E-services can make things easier and faster for people in different parts of the country. It’s also a way of keeping corruption out of the system — which did happen in some places, with people demanding bribes for services. But like I said, rapid digitization does come with new digital risks. People suddenly have to deal with logins, links, codes, and official-looking messages. If you don’t know what a real government site looks like, it’s easy to click a scam link or share information you shouldn’t.

The way to make sure this really works for people is to make sure digital literacy and digital resilience keep up.

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This is a big theme for you: the promise but also the perils of digitization.

Nada: If you think about it, this is the space that every SecDev Foundation program lives in. We want to help people use digital tools to overcome old barriers — but without becoming victimized by those same tools. The promise always comes with peril, and our answer is digital resilience.

When we step back, I see Syria facing two big hurdles. The first is global isolation — and that push to rejoin the global digital economy. There’s real hope in this, but also danger for people with low digital literacy, older devices, shared phones, and so on.  And it’s not just individuals at risk but also small civil society groups we’re counting on to support people through the transition.

The second hurdle is local instability. After years of trauma, there’s going to be tension between communities that grew up inside and outside regime-controlled. There are also inequalities in access to resources and opportunities as rebuilding starts. And online dynamics can make things worse: blackmail and propaganda, misleading posts, and sectarian hate speech can spread fast, raise tensions in real life, and threaten civil peace.

To get through these hurdles, we need to think about digital resilience as more than a nice-to-have extra. We need to treat digital resilience as critical infrastructure — for communities, for the economy, for social stability.

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So with Syria entering this new chapter — rebuilding, digitizing, reconnecting — how is SalamaTech’s role evolving?

Nada: Our biggest shift is probably our growing emphasis on civil society. Local organizations play a critical role in Syria’s transition, and we want to make sure they have the digital resilience to do that safely and effectively. I’m especially thinking of frontline groups that are already supporting people under pressure: women, youth, returning refugees. These are usually small operations, with no IT budget for traditional digital security. So we focus on habits, behaviours, and simple tools that actually work in real life. We draw on the Foundation’s CyberSTAR approach — which actually has its roots in Syria.

So these civil society groups are key to rebuilding, and they get targeted. If you want to intimidate communities, spread fear, or derail progress, you probably go after the small organizations that hold people together and help them across divides. We want to help these groups protect themselves so they can keep going strong.

That’s where the Digital Safety Champion model has been so powerful. We want knowledge and capacity to live on in organizations. So when we do an organizational digital-safety assessment, we train one or more DSCs inside the group — local people who keep digital safety alive day to day. Since the regime fell, we’ve trained more than 20 DSCs in organizations moving back into cities like Damascus and Aleppo. And they’re not just supporting their own groups: they’re taking their expertise into the community. Last quarter alone, DSCs reached nearly 1,000 community members through awareness sessions and digital clinics.

So for SalamaTech, the shift is this: we’re moving from a small team trying to do everything to a system where digital resilience is also embedded in the local organizations people already trust. That’s also how we’ve been able to expand into areas that used to be regime-controlled. Some field team members did re-deploy, but we’ve also got Champions working there.

And we’re not starting from scratch. Fourteen years of work has given us a team, trusted relationships, and approaches that work. The country is changing fast, and we’re adapting what we’ve built to what Syrians need next.

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When you think about Syria’s future, what gives you hope? And what does a safer digital future need to look like?

Nada: For me, a safer digital future looks like people using digital tools to open doors that used to be closed: to learn, to work, to build businesses, to connect, to organize, to access services. Digital can help people move around old barriers. But it only helps if people aren’t being hurt or punished for being online.

What gives me hope is seeing what Syrians can do when a door does open. On this trip, I spent time with Ragheed al-Tatari. Here’s a man who spent more than four decades as a political prisoner of the Assad dynasty. The team knew him through prison-related work over the years, but our time together was something else. What struck me was his calm, after everything he’d been through. He had this patience and steadiness that made me feel: rebuilding is possible, with people choosing dignity and connection over rage.

That’s why digital space matters so much. It can help people reconnect, rebuild trust, and participate — or it can deepen fear, division, and harm. Digital literacy needs to spread as fast as digitization, so people can benefit without becoming targets. And civil society groups need support to protect themselves and their critical work.

The good news is that we know how to build on this. When trusted local people have the right tools, prevention becomes possible. And after spending time with the SalamaTech team, I’m honestly in awe of this group. Each one has been through so much, but they keep showing up for us and their communities. And they keep coming back with stories of resilience from the people that we’re trying to help. That’s what makes me believe this can work.