Rebuilding Syria’s Healthcare System in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
On December 8, 2024, Syria once again made international headlines. In a stunning turn, rebel forces swept into Damascus, toppling Bashar al-Assad’s regime and ending more than a decade of bloodshed. From Aleppo to Latakia, crowds poured into city squares, celebrating. “We are over the moon…so, so happy,” one young man said, tears in his eyes.
Syria—home to one of the world’s oldest inhabited cities, Damascus—sits at the crossroads of the Middle East, shaped by a cultural legacy of Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic civilizations. But in 2011, a peaceful call for civil liberties was met with brutal repression, triggering a conflict that would devastate the country over the next 13 years.
By late 2024, an estimated 140,000 buildings—including 3,000 schools—had been destroyed. Vast parts of the country remain inaccessible due to landmine contamination, placing Syria among the most heavily mined nations on earth. Meanwhile, the country’s social fabric—a rich mosaic of ethnic and religious communities—has been fractured by five decades of authoritarian rule that have weaponized identity and division to maintain control. The toll has been shocking. More than 13 million Syrians have been displaced. Currently, 90 per cent of the population lives below the poverty line. The war has claimed over half a million lives, and the Syrian GDP shrank from $67.5 billion USD in 2011 to $9 billion USD in 2024.
Now, the country enters an uncertain transition. The political landscape could not be more fragmented, with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast, Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) in the north, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led rebel groups in control of Damascus, expanding Israeli forces in the south, ISIS dormant militia, and the continued presence of American, Russian, and Turkish military bases. These dynamics, combined with overwhelming humanitarian needs, leave the new Syrian government facing monumental challenges—arguably under near-impossible conditions.
As part of the reconstruction strategy, the new Syrian government is planning a nationwide census—the first comprehensive data-gathering effort in years. This presents a rare opportunity to build a modern national database, replacing outdated systems and enabling smarter policymaking. Such data infrastructure could also provide the foundation for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in rebuilding key sectors, including Syria’s healthcare system.
A decade of war, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and a devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in 2023, has brought Syria’s healthcare system to near-total collapse. Hyper-centralization, chronic underfunding, and a demographic reality in which more than 30 per cent of the population is under the age of 15 have only deepened the crisis.
This collapse was felt most acutely in the lives of ordinary Syrians. In Madaya, a town besieged in 2016, emergency nurse Khaled Naanaa became the sole trained health worker for nearly 20,000 people after the local hospital shut down. He taught himself surgical procedures through phone calls and YouTube, performing amputations, wound care, and fixing broken bones.
Stories like this reflect the daily realities faced across Syria. As of February 2025, only 57 per cent of hospitals and 37 per cent of primary healthcare centers are fully operational. The health workforce has been decimated: over 70 per cent of personnel have been displaced or killed, and more than 15,000 physicians have fled the country since 2011. Infant mortality increased from 15.1 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2010 to 20.5 in 2020, and the maternal mortality ratio rose from 26 to 31 per 100,000 live births over the same period. DTP3 vaccine coverage is now 82 per cent, and measles second-dose coverage has dropped to 64 per cent. In northeast Syria, only three dialysis centers remain functional. Years of systematic neglect have led to the re-emergence of preventable diseases such as measles, polio, and leishmaniasis, while chronic conditions remain severely undertreated.
AI has demonstrated real impact in low-resource post-conflict settings. During the Türkiye-Syria earthquake response, satellite-based tools like xView2 used machine learning to assess building damage and prioritize aid deployment within hours. Beyond infrastructure, AI-enabled tools have been used to support humanitarian agencies in anticipating surges in healthcare demand, detecting early signs of outbreaks by scanning online reports, news, and health data in real time or predicting medication shortages by analyzing prescription trends, supply chains, and delivery delays. In clinical environments, tools such as DeepMind’s AMIE could conduct patient interviews, flagging urgent symptoms, while other algorithms were used to manage ICU workflows, detecting sepsis, and interpreting CT scans and ECGs.
In Syria, these technologies could be adapted to confront the country’s most urgent gaps. With the severe shortage of doctors, AI-enabled assistants such as AMIE could support nurses like Khaled Naanaa and community health workers in making clinical decisions, while AI-powered telemedicine platforms could reconnect Syrian physicians abroad with patients inside the country. Given limited resources, predictive models could help anticipate and map shortages of essential medicines and vaccines across regions, ensuring that scarce supplies are directed where they are needed most. At the same time, satellite-based damage assessment tools could guide the prioritization of repairs to the country’s most critically bombed hospitals and clinics, helping restore access more quickly.
Many Syrian physicians view AI as a promising addition to healthcare. Yet deploying these tools requires reliable electricity, internet, and secure data centers—infrastructure not currently available in the country. Clinicians will also need training to operate AI systems, a significant challenge given the rapid pace of AI innovation and the associated costs. Introducing AI also raises ethical challenges, including risks of bias, the black-box nature of algorithmic reasoning, and concerns about privacy. AI alone cannot rebuild Syria’s collapsed health system, but with a clear strategic vision, it could become a powerful force multiplier in the country’s recovery.
Edited by Olivia Diamantopoulos
Featured Image: “Syrian Surgeon Working in Mask” by محمد عزام الشيخ يوسف is licensed via Pexels.
