Opinion | Syria Is Trying to Rebuild Without Humanitarian Aid or Sanction Relief

Four months after the euphoria that marked the sudden ouster of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s brutal dictator, the fragility of the country’s new reality is clear.Syria, awash in weapons and trauma and with almost no money to rebuild, is exceptionally vulnerable.Its economy is in a state of collapse, 90 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and the state can only provide two hours of electricity a day.

Half of the infrastructure is either destroyed or dysfunctional.A recent U.N.

report determined that, at current growth rates, Syria would not regain its pre-conflict GDP before 2080.In this febrile environment, the Islamic State could re-emerge, and the caretaker government, starved for funds, could start trafficking in illicit goods, as the Assad regime did with the illegal amphetamine captagon.Iran, a longtime ally of the regime and an enemy of the new government, could return to cause havoc — Hezbollah is already exploiting vulnerabilities, joining the other external hostile forces that have already started to jockey for influence.That includes Russia — which helped the former regime raze the country, took in Mr.

al-Assad after his ouster and has been providing shipments of much-needed bank notes to ease Syria’s liquidity crisis while it tries to salvage Russian military bases in the country.And Israel, which has publicly declared its mistrust of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the rebel group that toppled Mr.

al-Assad, has conducted hundreds of attacks and invaded and occupied large areas of southern Syria.(Israeli forces are so close to the capital that their technology presence appears to have triggered cell notifications in southwestern Damascus that read, “Welcome to Israel.”)None of this is inevitable.

In December, Syrian civil society, full of enthusiasm, started returning to Damascus and pressing for more inclusive representation in government.A National Dialogue Conference in February, though rushed and imperfect, was notable for th...