Based on an extensive analysis of Persian and Arabic sources and geographic imaging, this paper examines how Iran has instrumentalized reconstruction, development, and aid to promote its geopolitical interests in Syria and how these efforts have mitigated and exacerbated violent conflict and societal backlash locally and transnationally. While helping the Islamic Republic, the Assad regime, and their allies control territory and consolidate power, these efforts have also provoked conflict and backlash in Syria and Iran due to a politicized, exclusive, distributive, and top-down approach. The paper contains significant scholarly implications in the fields of Middle East politics, international relations, and security studies for three reasons. First, Iranian reconstruction, development, and aid highlight the external soft power intervention by Iran to further its geopolitical interests inside the country and wider region. Second, these programs and activities have likely caused or correlated with violent conflict or the risk of renewed conflict in Syria, Iraq, and beyond, even after the declared defeat of ISIS/ISIL and other insurgent groups. Third, these processes and outcomes demonstrate the contextual factors and transnational linkages related to conflict drivers and social backlash in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. The scholarship on Iranian foreign policy and the Syrian civil war focuses mainly on military and economic assistance as well as ideological indoctrination and religious proselytization. This scholarship has downplayed reconstruction, development, and aid as a soft power mechanism that forges and enhances relations with other countries. Similarly, the literature on the Syrian civil war largely confines Iran’s involvement to the military realm through the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Lebanese Hezbollah, and other Shiite militias that have advised and fought alongside the Syrian Army under the umbrella of the National Defense Forces. This literature excludes the reconstruction, development, and aid institutions of Iran and its clients and partners as a primary means to improve relations with and advance their interests in Syria and beyond.