The ongoing conflict in Syria drew considerable attention towards the urgent need to protect world heritage sites. During the eight years of war, hundreds of cultural heritage locations are affected ranging from full destruction to slight damage, while archaeological work entirely halted. Recently, few reticent international endeavors restarted cultural heritage preservation projects and archaeological research in Syria. This collaboration between some members of the international community and the Syrian regime representatives implies the move towards restoring the status quo before the uprising in 2011. These attempts do not only hurt national archaeologists, who condemn the practices of the regime, but also deny them the opportunity to participate in owning their past. In the case of normalizing relationships with the regime, to protect cultural heritage sites. The following paper addresses the implications of resuming international archaeological projects in Syria while embracing the interchangeable, dysfunctional practices introduced by colonial and neo-colonial powers and later fortified by the strategies of nationalist ideology. Drawing on various academic publications, news articles, the first section of the paper uses quantitative and qualitative methods to identify the groups, who benefited from the Syrian cultural heritage until 2011. Furthermore, this section illustrates the consequences of submitting to neo-colonial agendas to formulate the goals and the spheres of Syrian archaeology. The next section of the paper explores the challenges of Syrian archaeologists, who aspired to play a vital role in protecting and preserving the cultural heritage sites before the uprising and how the conflict did not only damage their research area but correspondingly transformed their ambitions to rubble. Nonetheless, various national initiatives continue to work on salving and protecting cultural heritage sites and materials inside and outside the country. The last section of the paper argues the essentialness of addressing how to rectify the framework of archaeological practices in southwest Asia, before creating the future vision of cultural heritage institutions and policies. Consequently, the parties involved in this multifaceted platform will manage to avoid replicating comparable results to the past five decades, when only designated countries and privileged individuals had the advantage to maintain cultural heritage sites and to conduct archaeological investigations, while most of the national archaeologists are kept marginalized and powerless.