Syrians on Sunday were digesting the overnight announcement of a caretaker government that will be in power for the next five years, accepting with some resignation the continued dominance of the rebel group that seized power in December but welcoming its inclusion of independent voices and wider representation.
The rebels who overthrew President Bashar al-Assad in December have since been acting as Syria’s de facto authorities, naming their leader, Ahmed al-Shara, interim president to oversee a transitional government.
Mr. al-Shara announced the much anticipated new government late on Saturday night, swearing in 23 cabinet ministers in a ceremony that ran into the early hours of Sunday — the last day in Syria of the fasting month of Ramadan before the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr.
The government appears to be a studied compromise between meeting calls for a more diverse cabinet that could unite the war-scarred and deeply divided country, while keeping Mr. al-Shara’s allies in the most powerful ministries.
Among Mr. al-Shara’s appointees are seven ministers affiliated with the provincial administration he once led in the rebel-held city of Idlib. But he also appointed nine independent ministers, among them technocrats and former activists, and included five ministers who served in the early years of the Assad regime before the country descended into civil war.
He named ministers from each of the main ethnic minorities, Kurds, Druze, Christians and Alawites, the sect of Mr. al-Assad. Among them was the lone woman minister, Hind Kabawat, who is Christian, to lead the Ministry of Social Affairs.
“No doubt some voices will feel excluded still,” Abdy Yeganeh, policy director at the Independent Diplomat, a London-based nonprofit advisory group, said ahead of the swearing-in ceremony. But overall, he said, “there is a sense of cautious optimism with the transition in Syria, including with the announcement of the new government.”
Mr. al-Shara had been under pressure from Western countries and from members of Syria’s civil society to form an inclusive government. Those calls took on greater urgency after sectarian violence erupted this month among Alawite communities in Syria’s coastal region.
“There is a need to widen the circle,” Ibrahim al-Assil, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., said ahead of the announcement, referring to Mr. al-Shara’s small circle of allies that had been running the transitional government since December. “There is a need to be more inclusive, from one perspective to reflect Syrian society, and from another because they need them. They cannot run the show on their own.”
For many Syrians, following the makeup of the government and studying ministers’ biographies was a novel experience.
Several of the new ministers hold degrees from Western universities or served under the Assad regime. Among the former Assad officials are Yarab Badr, the new transportation minister, a civil engineer who earned a doctorate in transportation sciences in Paris, and Nidal al-Shaar, an international banker and economist, who was named economic minister.
At least two ministers had been detained as political prisoners under the Assad regime, including the new justice minister, Madhhar al-Weys, who promised to establish the rule of law and pursue transitional justice for victims of Mr. al-Assad’s oppression.
Still, Mr. al-Shara made sure to keep much of the power of the state close at hand. He left close allies leading the ministries of defense and foreign affairs, and moved his former intelligence chief, Anas Khattab, 38, to head the Interior Ministry.
In a speech on Saturday night, Mr. al-Shara said his main aim was to unite the country. “Together as a people and a government we will build a strong country,” he said, to “work through our hardships and create a Syria we deserve.”
His appointments reflect the balancing act that Mr. al-Shara has been trying to toe. He has been grappling with insurgencies from remnants of the Assad regime and from the Islamic State — both of which threaten to exacerbate sectarian and ethnic divisions in the country.
Mr. al-Shara is also seeking to avert regional tensions with neighboring countries, and to persuade Western countries to ease sanctions imposed during Mr. al-Assad’s regime. He has come under intense scrutiny because some of the groups allied to him — and on which he relies for security — are designated by the United States and others as terrorist groups, according to analysts.
The Trump administration, alongside other Western governments, has made any further lifting of sanctions conditional on Mr. al-Shara’s commitment to fighting terrorism and on specific action against foreign jihadists in militias aligned with him, Mr. Yeganeh of the Independent Diplomat said.
Mr. al-Shara is also balancing complex geopolitical pressures from regional players that could destabilize the country. Israel and Turkey have vied for influence in Syria, and both have used military strikes in recent weeks to reinforce their presence in the country. Russia retains troops at an air base on Syria’s coast, and the United States has 2,000 troops in northeast Syria.
Muhammad Haj Kadour contributed reporting from Damascus.
