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Maria Kastrinou and Salam Said: How to kill a country: Feeling history in scenes of pillage

Image 1: “This is a photo of my mother looking at our village from afar, when she learned they were demolishing our homes—destroying her house, her history, and every moment of love she lived there. This image makes me cry.” © Photograph by Nadeem, Suwayda, January 2026.

We write at a time of genocide, war, and the feeling that whoever has the more guns can do whatever they want. We ask how different forms of violence — physical, symbolic and economic — undo the fragile infrastructures of coexistence and national belonging. We are scholars of Syria, coming together from different disciplines: Maria is an anthropologist who has been working in and on Syria since 2008 writing about the Druze,i sectarianism and the state. Salam is a Syrian economist who has been working on the political economy of olive oil, the Syrian army, and social justice. For the past year we have shared our doubts, hopes and devastation as we have witnessed, from afar, the sectarian violence in the Druze-majority governorate of Suwayda in southern Syria that took place in July 2025.

Between 14 and 16 July 2025, Suwayda witnessed a sectarian assault of shocking scale. Testimonies describe executions inside homes, killings in the main hospital, people forced to jump from balconies, ritual humiliations and beheadings—often filmed by the perpetrators. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, up to 1,700 people were killed in a week in July alone; hundreds remain missing, including 235 women (HRW 2026). The majority of those killed are civilians of the Druze religion. The violence was disproportionate and indiscriminate towards anyone who was seen as a religious other, as both Druze and Christian communities in Suwayda were attacked.

We have asked each other where did all the hatred and racism come from? We’ve found no satisfactory answer (Kastrinou & Said 2025).

On 15 July, Israel struck Syria’s Ministry of Defence and the Presidential Palace inside the Syrian capital Damascus, proclaiming a duty to “protect” the Druze.ii The United States brokered a ceasefire on 21 July 2025.

As the dust and the blood from the massacres ‘settled,’ we shared our profound uneasiness with the political repercussions and aftermaths of this violent attack: the rising calls for Suwayda’s autonomy, and especially those calling for Israeli ‘protection.’ It has been incredibly taxing both to write about acts of extreme violence, like the July attacks; as well as to write about the aftermath of this violence, namely the emergence of conservative pro-Israeli forces within Suwayda. As scholars, we find ourselves profoundly opposed to the notion that a state that erases Palestinian lives, can ever ‘protect’ the Druze or the Christians, or anyone else, for that matter, in Syria. But isn’t the basis of anthropology to grapple with the moral dilemmas of being human? Can we not extend our understanding to those that we disagree with?

In Salam’s latest visit in Syria, in December 2025, some friends, family and acquaintances were convinced that the Syrian Druze are not safe under the current “Islamist and terrorist” – descriptions they used – “regime” in Damascus. Those who did not support succession had quieter voices and uncertain plans. Salam was told often: “Khalas, there is no other way. As long as there is this regime, we can only rely on Israel for survival.” Even those who are explicitly against Israel said “We don’t like Israel but we have to admit without its intervention, the Druze community would have been completely exterminated,” or that “we are too small and too weak to decide on Suwayda, while the majority of the Druze community fears being killed.” A sense that the sectarian attack by the new Syrian regime, and the subsequent Israeli intervention was part of a “done deal” is what comes out of our connections and friends in Damascus and in Suwayda.

Using anthropology as a grounding tool, we juxtapose three scenes of rupture from the violent assault in Suwayda in order to put together the local forms of shock and betrayal that can help us sense the local contours of trauma, shock and revenge. These vignettes are not ‘ethnographic’ in the usual sense: the first is taken from a published piece of non-fiction detailing the experiences of a Druze nurse resident of Suwayda city, as narrated over the phone by herself to her former medical colleague, who is a doctor and a writer. Maria interviewed the author, and we use this piece as an ethnographic example, even if not collected by us, that elucidates the breakdown of society at the microlevel. The second is a vignette based on a conversation with a survivor that Salam met in a recent visit in Syria. And the third is the sense of historical change as gleaned from the opinions, delivered through WhatsApp and Facebook of one of Maria’s longest Syrian friends. Collected from afar and without being there, these are scenes of rupture with the past that permit us to put together a sense of history in the making, and at the same time prohibit and question the emergence of certainty of the unfolding and messy ways that history is felt in Suwayda and in Syria today. Perhaps we are as vulnerable and naïve for trying. Perhaps anthropology itself, can be a way through which to sense, to get a feeling of the past and the present.

First, we start with an introduction to the geographic and local conflicts that intersect and complicate the telling this violent and treacherous story.

What is New?

The ‘new’ Syria that emerged after the fall of Assad on December 8, 2024, is inseparable from the ‘new’ Middle East shaped through the violence, strangulation and ongoing genocide against Palestinians by Israel and its allies. What is ‘new’ about a ‘new’ Syria, or indeed about a ‘new’ Middle East? Is there perhaps new hope for peace and justice? ‘New,’ here, if anything is a bitter irony: despite Assad’s fall, and the battering of the Axis of Resistance — Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — there is no new hope for the region’s peoples. What appears instead is a deepening condition of permanent war and pacification.

Since 2023, Israel, with the arms and the backing of all the world’s strongest powers and their coalitions, has caused the direct death of more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, while criminally attacking, and in some cased invading and occupying, its neighbours in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. It is within the context of the supreme military and technological might of Israel combined with the international powers’ carte blanche (despite the pending arrest warrants for its leaders), that the formerly internationally ascribed terrorists of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), with the crucial backing from regional and international allies, were able to make a lightening advance that soon reached Damascus and ushered a ‘new’ Syria.

Is there anything ‘new’ in HTS – who are leading the state of Syria? The short answer is ‘no.’ HTS is a political coalition based on conservative and authoritarian premises, who strategically broke away from Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but whose ideological basis is shared, and whose governing experiment in the north-western Syrian governorate of Idleb has been described as ruthless and foreign to the Syrian national experience.iii The first act of their government was to make all political parties illegal – a prohibition still standing more than a year later.

What has changed is that HTS is no longer ascribed ‘terrorists’ but has become an ‘ally’ to the most powerful backers, especially USA. Why this change? Not because HTS changed, but because the regional alignment changed: the so-called ‘Islamist extremists’ are now good for doing the reconstruction business with. In the regional chessboard, the change of regime has been advantageous for Turkey who wanted to expand its regional influence and crush any hope for Kurdish autonomy; and good for Israel who crushed Hezbollah in Lebanon, wants to destroy Iran, and has a long-term strategic goal to establish a demilitarized zone in Syria and Lebanon beyond its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights.

Despite the new geopolitical context, were there local reasons and past grievances that festered the ground upon which the sectarian massacre was carried out?

Syria is home to many of the region’s diverse religions and ethnic groups, but also home to a strong nationalist and politically pluralist heritage. Indeed, Suwayda, although the only Syrian governorate with a Druze majority, is also home to Christian and Sunni Muslim villages and neighbourhoods, as well as seasonal populations of Bedouin and farm workers that migrate periodically in and out of the region. Conflict, especially between Bedouins and Druze are not new but these conflicts, and the logics of their revenge and honour codes, are not sectarian or indiscriminate as the July attacks were (Dukhan & Chatty 2025). Fourteen years of war have indeed eroded trust between and within Syrian communities, some of whom see non-Sunni or non-Arab communities if not as complicit with the previous regime, then as unfairly treated. This image, often projected by the HTS-government in Damascus, is that Suwayda’s politics is tarnished by its former association with the Assad regime, and, after the Israeli intervention in July 2025, its current association with Israel. Neither of these allegations are true.

During the early years of uprising, Druze areas in Syria were as split between pro-and anti- protesters as any other place in Syria. As the uprising was weaponised and turned into a proxy war, Druze areas such as Jaramana and Suwayda were able to maintain a relative autonomy and broker local deals, from the central government as well as with surrounding rebel militia. In practice, that meant that Druze areas became safe havens for the internally displaced persons evading violence, the majority of which where peri-urban, or rural, and poor. Moreover, Druze areas are known to be liberal, educated, and politically progressive, and despite the rise of religious-military power in the years of war, many Druze were members of left non-sectarian parties, and many youth formed and participated in NGOs and other political organisations focussed on political change, solidarity and aid for the displaced.iv

What is new, therefore, is the increasing sectarianisation of political discourse and volunteering practice within Suwayda and Jaramana. Druze flags, Druze institutions, and NGOs, even religious attire are on the rise. Indeed, the community seems to be now, after the massacres in July, undergoing a profound change in the interrelations within their society as well as in their relations within Syria and beyond. A new sense of brotherhood across borders is emerging, especially between the Druze in Suwayda and the Druze in northern Israel/Palestine. What is certainly not new is Israel’s propaganda of using Druze religious difference as a means by which to sow sectarian hatred in the place of national belonging in both Palestine and in Syria. And certainly, many in Suwayda see and fear of this history, and feel afraid to call it out.

Scenes of rupture

The following scenesv not only tell us about the violence used, but also about the violence perceived to have been used. Betrayal, sexual depravity, scorched earth: these scenes of rupture are both instances of violence as well as violence perceived – and how different forms of violence carry the seeds of different histories and different futures.

Scene 1

The first scene comes from a nurse in Suwayda, and has been published in Arabic by Dr. Najat Abdul Samad in Daraj Media. Abdul Samad’s journalistic account centres on the nurse’s experience, whom we get to know with her initials, S.F., as she speaks of a lifetime of neighbourly coexistence with her Bedouin friends. Their children played together, families visited each other’s homes, everyday life unfolded through proximity rather than doctrine. Yet, this relationship began to fracture after the transitional government took power. Her friend’s husband forbade visits to Druze households, declaring them not “true Muslims.”

According to the nurse, the massacre was premeditated — an agreement between General Security and certain Bedouin tribes who were given weapons and promised the loot and homes of Druze families they would kill. Her testimony describes the assault between 14 and 16 July 2025. Entire families slaughtered, women and children among the dead, survivors hiding in terror.

What struck her most, however, was the economy of betrayal that preceded the violence. In the days before the attack, S.F. notes that Bedouins were buying large quantities of flour, sugar, and cigarettes; all on credit. When she asked a shop owner why he allowed such risk, he replied that his profits came from such sales, that payment was due Monday, 14 July, and that since even big merchants like Salim Ashti trusted the buyers, he would too. On 15 July, they tied up and robbed Salim Ashti, the elderly owner of the largest shop in the neighbourhood, in front of his shop, to watch its destruction, and then killed him.

The nurse’s account continues with more graphic accounts of deaths and torture in the hands of former neighbours. All of which is utterly harrowing. Yet, focusing on credit and death, this scene reveals not only the horror of neighbour turning on neighbour, but the collapse of trust itself. The breaking of economic credit mirrored the breakdown of social bonds. As anthropologists we know too well that debt and credit are not merely transactions, but forms of sociality, reciprocity, and trust — for example as shown in Paul Anderson’s work on merchants and exchange in Syria (2023). The collapse of credit and trust marks the unravelling of coexistence among the living. But in Suwayda, violence did not stop there.

Scene 2

When Salam returned to Syria in December 2025, she wanted to meet with Nidal, an old acquaintance whom, she had heard, had gone through a terrible ordeal. When they met, his first words were “I’m a refugee here. I have lost everything.” Salam could sense that he was angry, deeply sad, but had not surrendered. Nidal is a journalist with a degree in law. In the years of the Syrian war, he had been working in the Gulf in order to build a house of his own in his hometown in Suwayda, a house he described not as an investment, but as a return. He showed Salam a photograph of the house on his mobile: vibrant, carefully painted, surrounded by a tended garden. The next image was almost unrecognisable. The house had been reduced to blackened ruin; the garden trees cut down. Salam recalls the shock of seeing the images on his phone.

Nidal described the assault as faz`aa. In Arabic, this term carries references to a tribal call to mobilisation, an appeal to men and women to come to the defence of their kin. Since July 2025, many Druze residents used this word to describe the entry of armed Bedouin fighters into their villages. While the government did not officially frame its intervention in these terms, and President al-Sharaa denies sectarian intent, the local interpretation among survivors is that the violence unfolded through precisely this idiom: a tribal logic of collective mobilisation that blurred into state-backed force.

As discussed in the introduction, Druze–Bedouin tensions in southern Syria are not new. Clashes have occurred intermittently over land, honour, smuggling routes and patronage. Yet these conflicts were rarely narrated as indiscriminate or exterminatory. They coexisted with everyday interdependence, such as shared markets, seasonal labour, migration in and out of the region, and forms of pragmatic coexistence within a broader national framework. What Nidal experienced in July 2025 felt, to him, like a decisive break from those earlier logics. This was not framed as dispute or revenge within a shared moral world, but as eradication.

During the assault, Nidal remained inside his house until the early morning of 19 July, when he was kidnapped. Blindfolded and transported to Daraa, he was held for six days in a small, filthy, dark location. He did not wish to speak in detail about that experience. Yet, what he did want to emphasise was that he was “struck” most from a conversation he overheard among his captors: “we are here not to loot houses, but to kill the Druze.” Killing the Druze was articulated as an objective. For Nidal, this language marked the rupture. It suggested not punishment, nor bargaining, nor coercion into submission, but the targeting of a community as such.

After his escape, he began collecting photographs documenting the destruction. One image he described — because Salam could not look at it — showed “naked bodies of women stacked on top of each other. The bodies show gunshots in the knees to prevent resistance while raping them.” For him, this exceeded looting or punitive violence. It amounted to terror aimed at making future coexistence impossible. It was not, he insisted, about disciplining Suwayda or integrating it into the “kingdom of the new Emir” in Damascus. It felt instead like an effort to erase a community, and with it, the fragile national compact within which previous conflicts, however bitter, had been contained.

Nidal, like many people we spoke to from Suwayda and Jaramana, are quick to point to the change in the use of violence from the Assad-era to the Al-Sharaa-era. They say that part of the historical rupture is the change in the kinds of violence used, and the end results that the violence is used to usher. The killings and torture under Assad regime functioned as a form of punishment and a means to eliminate a political opposition that might challenge the existing political order. Similarly in the past, localized tensions between Druze and Bedouin tribes have often been driven by struggles for land, influence or economic power – a competition over resources. However, in the case of massacre of July, however, testimonies such as Nidal, like many people we spoke to from Suwayda and Jaramana, is quick to point to the change in the use of violence from the Assad era to the al-Sharaa era. For them, part of the historical rupture lies in the kinds of violence used, and in the ends that such violence is meant to achieve. Killings and torture under the Assad regime functioned largely as punishment and as a means to eliminate political opposition that might challenge the existing order. Similarly, earlier tensions between Druze and Bedouin tribes were often driven by struggles over land, influence, or economic resources.

In the July massacres, however, testimonies such as Nidal’s suggest that the violence cannot be reduced to struggles for control or collective punishment. Rather, the violence appears directed not at disciplining a political foe but at eliminating a community as such. Five months on, Nidal remained petrified for his life. He wanted Salam to understand that “they see us as kuffār, and they believe they will be rewarded for killing us, exactly what happened to the Yazidis.” The reference, often invoked by survivors, is to the Yazidi ethnic cleansing carried out by ISIS in Iraq in 2014. For Nidal, this form of torture and killing reflects an ideology that frames the destruction of his community as legitimate, even righteous. The violence experienced thus marks both a rupture with earlier forms of state violence and a dangerous present: many now fear that even if Suwayda were to align with a centralized Syrian state, this would not guarantee the Druze’s safety. Targeted violence could continue as long as this ideology persists and its perpetrators enjoy impunity.

Scene 3

Maria met Nadeem in 2008, when she was living in Damascus, in the Druze suburb of Jaramana. It was a different Syria. Nadeem was smart and passionate, working as a photographer hoping to support himself through university. When the war came, he continued photographing. Over fourteen years he created an extensive archive of the first days of the uprising and the war that followed.

In the early hours of July 14, 2025, his village in western Suwayda was attacked. Snipers, he wrote, shot indiscriminately at anyone entering or leaving. Many fled, those who did not were killed. His uncle was beheaded. When Nadeem returned briefly to the village, he found only death, pillage and scorched earth. His house was burned, and his photographic archive was either burned or stolen. “They killed everything,” Nadeem texted Maria on WhatsApp on July 17, 2025.

Nadeem’s story returns us to the question of what, precisely, is being destroyed. Once a revolutionary who smuggled food into Yarmouk camp and documented protest, he briefly joined the popular defence in Suwayda after the massacres. Yet what distinguishes his account is not only what he lost, but how he interprets it. For him, the struggle is between remembering and forgetting. Forgetting, he argues, aligns with colonial and authoritarian power. He points to the abolition of Yawm al-Shuhadāʾ (Martyrs’ Day), which used to be commemorated on 6 May in memory of Arab nationalists executed in 1916 by the Ottomans, and long woven into Syrian narratives of nationalist sacrifice. Its removal by the new authorities is read by him as part of a broader erasure of shared national memory. Alongside the diminishing of national commemorations and the seizure of Syrian land by Israel, he sees a single trajectory: the demolition of national consciousness and its replacement with religious, sectarian and tribal identities.

“This regime is a puppet of all colonial powers,” Nadeem texted in October 2025, asking for my editorial help before he uploaded his opinion in English on Facebook. His message continued: “brought about through the agreement of imperial forces to tear apart Syria’s social fabric, uproot and kill all revolutionaries, and destroy the Syrian state along with all its institutions. If the people do not awaken, they will cease to be a people, and will instead turn into tribal, sectarian, and religious factions.”

For Nadeem, displacement is not only material. “I never wanted to leave my homeland,” he wrote, “but how can I live in a country where I see a flag flying over my land that is not my own. Nor will I accept being defined by my religious sect.” He refers to both the new Syrian flag, but also to the flag of the state of Israel which has been raised in the city of Suwayda by some. He has searched online and through networks in Deraa for traces of his looted equipment. During the fourteen-year war, displaced Syrians were often shocked to encounter their own furniture for sale in Damascus’s “Souq al-Sunna,” known for looted goods (Tizini 2013).

For Nadeem, the burning of his archive and the abolition of Youm Al Shuhadaa (Martyrs’ Day) belong to the same process. The violence of July 2025 was not experienced simply as sectarian brutality. It was felt, by Nadeem and others, as an attack on the very idea that Syria could still be imagined as a common national home.

Making a killing

The historian Usama Makdisi, in The Age of Coexistence (2019: 84), contrasts different killings to show how violence can serve different purposes: the hanging of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in 1821 as warning within an imperial order, and the mutilation of Bishop Chrysostomos in 1922 as an act of elimination. This distinction, more than 100 years ago, reminds us that violence can discipline coexistence — or seek to extinguish it. In the Ottoman Empire, it foreclosed the future of the Turkish, Greek and Balkan states, and acted as a foil for bilād al-shām, modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, where and the politics of sectarianism and co-existence emerged.

What unfolded in Suwayda in July 2025 was experienced by many not as a warning within a shared political order, but as an assault on the very possibility of living together. The violence scarred bodies and the relations through which people lived together, altering trust, neighbourliness, credit and the expectation that governance might restrain rather than unleash force. As Lisa Malkki (1995) reminds us, such violence marks people’s bodies in culturally specific ways. When credit turns into betrayal, archives are burned, commemorations erased, and neighbours mobilised through sectarian idioms, what is undone is not only lives but the infrastructures of national belonging. When violence reaches this point, it no longer aims to discipline coexistence, but to extinguish it, killing not only people but the very idea of a country held in common.

Maria Kastrinou is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London and Research Fellow at ZMO Berlin. Her work focuses on Syria and the Golan Heights, examining kinship, death, land, and sectarian violence through long-term ethnographic research.

Salam Said is an economist and researcher specialising in Syrian political economy and conflict dynamics. She has published widely on sanctions, reconstruction, and regional geopolitics.

References

Abdul Samad, N. (2025, September 10). شهادة ممرّضة عن مجازر السويداء: “هلق بتروح تجيبلي إبني أو بفجّر حالي فيي وفيكن…” Daraj Media. Retrieved from https://daraj.media/شهادة–ممرّضة–عن–مجازر–السويداء–هلق–بت/

Anderson, Paul. Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, language, and patriarchy in preconflict Aleppo. Cornell University Press, 2023.

Davis, H. (2025, March 10). Sectarian violence simmers in Homs. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/sectarian-violence-erupts-in-homs/

Dukhan, Haian & Dawn Chatty, 2025. ‘The Druze-Bedouin clashes in Syria were not a sectarian conflict.’ AlJazeera, 2 Sept 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/9/2/the-druze-bedouin-clashes-in-syria-were-not-a-sectarian-conflict, accessed March 1st 2026.

Hassan, R. (2023, March 15). In Homs, revenge is the only law left standing. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-homs-revenge-is-the-only-law-left-standing/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Human Rights Watch. (2026, January 15). Syria: Accountability lacking for Sweida abuses. Human Rights Watch, URL: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/15/syria-accountability-lacking-for-sweida-abuses

Kastrinou, M. (2023) ‘Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan,’ FocaalBlog, 16 November. Available at: https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/

Kastrinou, M., & Said, S. (2025, July 28). Suwayda: Not a local conflict, but geopolitics in disguise. Qantara. https://qantara.de/en/article/suwayda-not-local-conflict-geopolitics-disguise

Kastrinou, Maria, Salam Said, Rawad Jarbouh, and Steven B. Emery. “Still There: Politics, Sectarianism and the Reverberations of War in the Presences and Absences of the Syrian State.” Conflict and Society 9, no. 1 (2023): 147-166.

Kastrinou, Maria. “From a window in Jaramana: Imperial sectarianism and the impact of war on a Druze neighbourhood in Syria.” In The Syrian Uprising, pp. 271-289. Routledge, 2018.

Makdisi, U. (2019). Age of coexistence: The ecumenical frame and the making of the modern Arab world. University of California Press.

Makdisi, U., 2019. Age of coexistence: The ecumenical frame and the making of the modern Arab world. University of California Press.

Malkki, L. H. (1995). Purity and exile: Violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. University of Chicago Press.

Said, S. (2025, August 12). Assad’s shadow looms over fractured Syria. Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/assad-shadow-looms-over-fractured-syria

The Jordan Times. (2025, September 16). Jordan, Syria, US ink roadmap to end crisis in Suwayda, stabilize southern Syria. https://jordantimes.com/news/local/jordan-syria-us-ink-roadmap-to-end-crisis-in-suwayda-stabilize-southern-syria?utm_source

Tizini, Tayyeb (2013). “The Sunni Market and the Plundered Syria”. Al etihad. In Arabic. URL: https://www.aletihad.ae/wejhatarticle/70812/%C2%AB%D8%B3%D9%88%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%8F%D9%86%D9%8E%D9%91%D8%A9%C2%BB-%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%8F%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AD%D8%A9#google_vignette , Accessed on 14.01.2026

i With its roots in Shia Ismaili Islam, the Druze faith developed during the Fatimid Dynasty in the 11th Century. It holds all prophets of the people of the book sacred, but it combined gnostic, neo-platonic, and Sufi ideas. Historically it emerged as a radical religion doing away with collective ritual, and abolishing polygamy and slavery. Druze societies practice endogamy, meaning that a Druze should only marry another Druze, and they believe in a form of reincarnation called taqammuṣ whereby a constant number of immortal Druze souls is continuously recycled into Druze bodies. But Druze societies are better understood as national ethnoreligious groups. This is because you can only be born a Druze, but you don’t have to be religious. In fact only about 10% of any Druze community can read the Holy books, and only by initiation. The largest number of Druze is located in Suwayda, whilst in Syria there are large communities in Damascus suburbs of Jaramana and Sehnaya, and in the mountains of Idleb. Moreover, stateless Syrian Druze have been living under Israeli occupation in the Golan Heights since 1967. There are Druze communities in Lebanon, Northern Israel, Jordan and there are large diasporic communities globally. They estimate a total of 1-4 million people. But whilst their souls can travel between nation-states and borders, they form integral parts of different social and political histories and cultures in Syria, Israel and Lebanon.

ii There is a Druze minority in Israel/Palestine, live predominantly in the north, hold Israeli citizenship and the men are conscripted to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces. The highest religious-cum-political authority in Suwayda, Shaykh al-ʿAql Hikmat al-Hijri, thanked Prime Minister Netanyahu and called for international protection. The United States brokered a ceasefire on 21 July 2025. Moreover, the role of religious authority itself has changed as a result of the years of war. Druze shaykhs — once respected but marginal religious elders — shifted. They became consensus political mediators between Druze communities, the state, and opposition forces. Local sectarian militias formed, serving both as protection and as part of the wider war economy. Assad struck agreements integrating some militias into the national army while allowing them to remain in their areas in exchange for allegiance. In places such as Suwayda, some shaykhs commanded militia factions, reshaping the alignment of religious, political and military authority. It was within this matrix that religious authority was remade and figures such as the current shāyikh al-ʿaql, Hikmat al-Hijri, emerged as politically representative leaders. Sectarianisation was thus a product of war. Druze communities suffered violence during these years — in Idleb under al-Nusra in 2015, in Suwayda in 2018 during attacks by al-Nusra and ISIS, and in the Golan and northern Israel, where Druze ambushed ambulances transporting al-Nusra fighters for treatment. See Kastrinou et al, 2023.

iii Writing about Idleb, Bakkour and Stansfeld trace the politicisation of religious identities, a process that they quote as the ‘jihadisation of Idleb’ (2025: 247), noting how the eventual win of the Salafist al-Nusra, that would become HTS, in Idleb “refused to participate in any political process that not accompanied by … the establishment of a religious state.” In Idleb, as in Aleppo (Chalhoub 2025: 224), this kind of Islamist government often was seen as a foreign intervention “they banned smoking and want to close shops during prayers. This is how they do it in the Golf not in Syria.”

iv Maria and Salam have previously written about the changes that the Syrian war brought on Druze areas, see Kastrinou 2018; Kastrinou, Said, Jarbouh & Emery 2023.

v We have obtained consent and the right to review and withdraw from everyone involved and have taken care to anonymise and not publish sensitive information.

Cite as: Kastrinou, M. & Said, S. 2026. “How to kill a country: Feeling history in scenes of pillage” Focaalblog March 31. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/31/maria-kastrinou-and-salam-said-how-to-kill-a-country-feeling-history-in-scenes-of-pillage/

Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Zoya Masoud: Of Exclusive Victimhood and its Competitive Narratives in Post-Assad Syria

Image 1: The city of Jableh on the Syrian coast witnessed extreme stress between Alawite and Sunni communities since December 8th, 2024. © Zoya Masoud, 2017.

In this contribution, I investigate continuities and ruptures across various patterns of exclusive victimhood in Assad- and post-Assad Syria. Having been born and spending the first 24 years of my life in Damascus, I witnessed the peaceful demonstrations that erupted in 2011, the subsequent outbreak of war in 2012, and its repercussions. Since 2015, I have conducted interviews with Syrians as part of my academic and professional work focusing on heritage destruction and how experiencing loss (re-)constitutes heritage and ascribes new values to it. These interviews contained testimonies about imprisonment and/or forced migration due to indiscriminate shelling and bombing and various forms of pervasive violence. After the euphoria over the Assad regime’s collapse in December 2024 had faded in the wake of massacres against some Syrian communities, I witnessed some public responses of my earlier interviewees to these acts of violence. In the following, I invoke these two kinds of material to probe the possibility of imagining a practice that recognizes the extreme experiences of violence beyond attributing exclusive categories of victims and perpetrators to any certain group. I do this from a position of uncertainty, as events continue to accelerate and unfold.

Ruptures of the dictator-era

At the beginning of the peaceful demonstrations against the Assad regime in 2011, social media platforms became an arena for heated debate over the “truth” of what happened in Syria. Over nearly a decade and a half of an “infra-state conflict” (Vignal 2014), polarisation regarding the events in Syria led to extreme segregation in the virtual sphere of social media: pro-Assad supporters unfriended/unfollowed those opposing him, and vice versa. Pro-Assad mass media outlets framed the peaceful demonstrators of 2011 as “sleeper-cells” of terror and “incubators” of terrorism, while the pro-revolution media channels portrayed it as a legitimate act of resistance against the repression policies of the Assad regime.

The regime had been implementing systematic and widespread violations against the Syrian population, including arbitrary detention, torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial executions. International organisations such as the United Nations and Amnesty International characterise the Syrian war as a state of exception in which strategies such as “surrender or starve” have been implemented (Amnesty 2017, Daniels 2020).

The rebel areas inhabited by a Sunni majority were intensively bombed by the Assad government, supported by both the Russian army and Iranian and Lebanese Shi’a military forces (Alkousaa 2016, Graham-Harrison 2016, Grant & Kaussler 2019, Neumann & Schneider 2022). Various reports have interpreted the large-scale bombing by the Syrian-Russian coalition as a form of collective punishment (e.g., Vignal 2014, Clerc 2014, Sharp 2016, Abou Zainedin 2021). Individuals were exposed to constant fear of being murdered everywhere and at any time. Achille Mbembe names such a constellation of modern terror as “death-worlds;” namely “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead“ (Mbembe 2016:92). Many Syrians fled the death-worlds and sought refuge in neighbouring countries, in Europe and the rest of the world.

After 14 years of war, a militia named Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), supported by allied Turkish groups, led a coalition of military factions that on November 27, 2024, launched a military offensive campaign entitled “Deterrence of Aggression” against the Assad troops. The campaign was successful, and in the early morning on December 8, 2024, the fall of the Assad regime was officially announced, after Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus to Moscow, ending a 54-year-long dictatorial regime of the Assad family.

In a matter of hours, social and mass media were full of images and videos depicting the ongoing return of numerous refugees to Syria. Since then, and for the following weeks and months, many individuals I interviewed, who either remained in Syria throughout the war or returned after the fall of Assad for a visit, shared pictures of themselves in their cities on their social media profiles. Other visuals emerged documenting moments of liberating political prisoners from Assad’s torture-security centres, evoking a dual response: they are both horrifying and glorious visuals. The glory lies in the fact that individuals who endured captivity in dark underground prisons can now experience sunlight again. In contrast, the disturbing nature of the photographs from these facilities revealed the extreme conditions to which these prisoners were subjected. Each individual in Syria was exposed to the fear of entering such horror facilities. Those who were “living dead” in death-worlds before December 2024 got the chance after the collapse of the Assad dictatorship to speak out and articulate their experiences of injustice and get attention in the public sphere. The Assad regime not only marginalised their suffering but also stigmatised them as criminals and a risk to Syrian society.

Same slogans, different names

Before the collapse of the Assad regime, slogans glorifying Assad and portraying him as the saviour of Syria took an extreme form of self-destruction. For example, “al-Assad au la Ahad” (Either Assad or no one); “Al-Asad au Nahruq al-Balad” (Either Assad or we will burn the country). In the final months of 2025, similar slogans referring to Al-Sharaa appeared from the region around Deir az-Zour, particularly from al-Asha’er (Bedouin groups). Some people displayed messages on their cars, “al-Sharaa au Nahruq al-Zare’” (Either Al-Sharaa or we will burn the agricultural crops). These parallel uses of wording and terminology seem neither coincidental nor accidental; rather, they represent a continuity of belief in the exclusive occupation of power.

Though the impact of war was drastic in all of Syria, Sunni majority rebel regions faced disproportionately higher levels of violence during the conflict compared to areas controlled by the regime or inhabited predominantly by minorities (as documented also by Mazur 2021). The mass media of the Assad regime did not record these acts of destruction and killing in rebel areas as crimes, but as collateral damage of dismantling the danger from terrorists. While the regime categorized its own casualties as “shahis” (martyrs), it designated those who fell from the opposing side of rebels as terrorists. This oppressive pattern of collective punishments especially against certain rebel areas and of denial of victimhood for the Syrians living in these areas was arguably linked with a systematic instrumentalization of minority protection as a tool to consolidate the authoritarian regime’s power in Syria. Also, before 2011, the Assads portrayed any alternative to their rule as a direct road to sectarian chaos. Especially after they successfully suppressed Sunni Islamist opposition of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s, they presented themselves as a bulwark against Islamists who would persecute religious and ethnic minorities if they came to power.

Propagating the image of Assad as the sole guarantor of security for Syria’s minorities – particularly Alawites, Christians (including Armenians, Assyrians), Druze, Ismailis, and others – did not reflect the reality. Many minority communities lived below the poverty line without proper infrastructure. Additionally, many of their male members were forced to serve the compulsory military service, where they often faced injury or death.

When the regime fell, assaults against Alawites were often dismissed by the transitional government as “individual cases,” but they escalated on March 7, 2025. Following attacks on the new security forces by armed Alawite Assad-loyalists, a systematic massacre of Alawite communities began on that date. Human Rights Watch reported on identity-based killings against Alawites (2025). Records reported around 1400 victims (UN News 2025), with probably a greater number of undocumented cases. Since then, reports of abducted Alawite Women and girls frequently emerged. The perpetrators, many of whom belonged to the Ministry of Defence of the al-Sharaa government or to militias allied with it, filmed themselves and proudly posted evidence of their crimes (Reuters 2025). There have been reports of forced migration, eviction from homes and villages and the prevention of these communities from returning to their property (Syrians for Truth and Justice 2026).

Until now, the government’s response to the abduction and sexual enslavement has been limited to publishing a belated report by the Ministry of Interior that claims to record only 42 suspicious cases of abduction. However, the report found that 41 of the 42 suspicious cases were falsified or incorrect, and that only one abduction case was proven. No further details around the only one abduction were mentioned (see the Enab Baladi report on the investigation of Ministry of Interior, Syrian National News 2025).

As the Assad regime forcibly displaced Syrians, there are reports about a new practice of evicting Alawite families from their houses. For example, there was a mass forced displacement of predominantly Alawite villages in the eastern rural areas of Hama. Villages like al-Zughbah, Muraywid, al-Talisiyah, Ma’am, al-Faam and Abu Mansaf were directly attacked following the collapse of the Assad regime on the 8th of December 2024 (Syrians for Truth and Justice 2026). Though the scale of displacement might have been greater during the Assad era against Sunni communities, it is still an unethical vantage point to accept evicting families from their houses due to their sectarian identity.

The mass media under Assad labelled peaceful demonstrators as “infiltrators” (mundassūn), or “revenge seekers” (Mawtwrūn) and ascribed political opponents of Assad to be “terrorists” and “criminals.” Then, many families suffered the fateful disappearance of family members and watched them later on Syrian Television, admitting their participation in terrorist attacks on governmental facilities. These confessions were extracted from the victims under torture in Assad’s security centres. After Al-Sharaa came to power, the abduction of Alawite girls and women became increasingly common. Over time, more families began to raise their voices about the whereabouts of their daughters. Some female victims of sexual violence returned to their families and appeared in videos broadcast on social media accounts of the official Syrian TV channels. These videos were produced under obscure circumstances and aimed to systematically negate and deny the reality of the females’ abduction. The explanations given for their disappearance were trivial and nearly impossible to believe: visiting a friend in another city, forgetting to inform their family; finding a job in a faraway city and travelling there without giving notice to their relatives; experiencing family stress, or having fallen in love with another man, leaving their husband and kids behind without any note of their decision. One should keep in mind that Syrian society, and the Alawite community from cities and villages in the coastal area, is conservative and considers such behaviour of females to be unacceptable. Here, too, the practice of extracting fake confessions is repeated in both the Assad and Al-Sharaa eras.

The amount of discrediting directed at Alawite victims on social media and intergovernmental mass media shows a pattern of discrimination against these women, stripping them of their rights to be heard and believed. Such videos of Alawite females explaining their disappearances to be voluntary or forced due to family stress and not abduction are omnipresent on social media. I prefer not to quote these stories and reproduce their violence. For documented cases of unpublished cases, see the work and summary of the campaign’s documentation on cases of women’s abduction in Syria (February–December 2025) of the grassroots campaign “Stop the Abduction Of Syrian Women” in English and Arabic on their social media page, and the reports on the website of the Syrian Feminist Lobby (2025, 2026).

Exclusive victimhood

Since the beginning of 2025, my social media feeds have been filled with testimonies and news of horrifying incidents of sexual violence. Posts from friends of friends in the cities and villages where my aunts and cousins live – the same places where I spent my childhood vacations at my grandmothers’ and relatives’ houses on the Syrian coast – have been particularly unsettling. Social media also played a crucial role in shaping narratives around these events, with many blaming the victims due to their alleged ties to the former regime. The acceleration of events was accompanied by waves of amplified polarisation and campaigns that oversimplified complex issues on social media, resulting in effects with global repercussions. Syrians around the globe participated in such debates. Some individuals, whom I interviewed for my research before the fall of Assad, expressed discriminatory views against Alawite victims and shared pejorative jokes about Alawite women, suggesting they were disloyal to their men, hence blaming the victims for the sexual violence imposed on them. Even some of my female interlocutors engaged in such social media discourses.

In this contribution, I will share insights on two patterns of my former interviewees and their reactions to the violence against Alawite women. There are other patterns within my interview samples, supporting Alawite victims. However, this contribution focuses only on these two patterns.

The first group did not actively celebrate the violent events but rather focused on celebrating the achievements of the interim government without mentioning the atrocities committed against the Alawite communities. For instance, they celebrated an agreement between the interim Syrian president Ahmad al-Sharaa and Mazlum Ibadi, the leader of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which was signed on March 10, even as attacks on Alawites were still unfolding. This agreement promised to affirm the inclusion of Kurds in the political transition process and guaranteed their rights and interests. Some interviewees posted about this but failed to mention war crimes against the Alawites. During the Assad era, members of this same group of interviewees accused any Syrian who did not openly condemn the regime’s criminal acts of complicity and indirect participation in causing their suffering. Nevertheless, in March 2025, they themselves ignored the suffering of Alawites.

The second group of my interviewees did not remain silent; but engaged with the news about the massacre, responding with the “haha” emoji and claiming that the victims were adopting a fake “mazloumiyya” (oppression position). According to them, Alawites were misusing and abusing their victimhood to undermine what the people posting perceived to be a fair and just interim government of Syria. They labelled anyone who shared information about sexual violence or the murder of Alawites as “fulul” (remnants of the Assad regime). The landscape on social media became extremely polarised.

Many of my interviewees before December 2024 experienced the horror of the death-worlds and stepped out of their previous home cities, traumatised with scars on their personal biographies. Following the downfall of the Assad regime, however, these individuals, who had been denied their rights to representation, experienced a moment of recognition. Those who were defeated and denied their civil rights of freedom of speech and were either forcibly displaced or imprisoned under the Assad era, celebrated what they considered a victory after the fall of the Assad dictatorship. Nevertheless, they also managed to deny or justify the crimes against the Alawite communities in post-Assad Syria.

The cluster of social media reactions around the Alawite massacres showed that some of these interviewees internalised the dominant discourse of the interim government and aimed to be virtual defenders of Ahmad al-Sharaa in a dogmatic attitude, denying the pain of others.

Al-Sharaa’s government is thus establishing a hegemonic discourse that mirrors that of Assad, marginalising the sufferers of certain groups, while framing the suffering of its own group as singular, unique, incomparable, or morally superior. This approach comes at the expense of acknowledging harm to others. By introducing competitive narratives of suffering, the government positions its own persecution as the only legitimate one, delegitimising other narratives and framing victimhood as bound solely to its social groups of allies. This transforms suffering into a political category to be instrumentalised to justify own committed crimes, rather than acknowledging it as a universal human experience. Within post-conflict communities worldwide, these transformations have been a recurring theme (see Druliolle and Brett 2019). Institutionalising such exclusive spaces also means consolidating them through commemorative practices. For example, certain Syrians posted pictures of humiliations of Alawites on social media on the first anniversary of the massacres against Alawites in March 2025. Some even indicated that the 7th of March 2025 was an “extension of the revolution,” as one post put it.

The interim government aims to capitalise on and appropriate the trauma of the death-worlds, which Syrians went through in a single cast that aligns with its objectives, namely, a trauma or persecution of Sunni communities, which the new regime argues was inflicted mainly by the Alawite minority. In doing so, the new government downplays or mitigates the suffering of Alawite individuals under its reign and frames the atrocities against them as fragmented and as a quest for rightful revenge against a perpetrator. This sense of exclusive victimhood stems from the intensity of suffering and its temporality. One interlocutor captured this sentiment by saying, “We suffered first.” This quote reflects the broader tendency recorded in several excerpts. In an interview on the official Syrian TV, a narrative of disproportion between Sunni and Alawite perpetrators was propagated (Syrian National News 2025). Even if we entertain the concept of accusing all perpetrators of atrocities in the Assad era of being Alawite, this still does not justify attacking civilian Alawite women and abducting them, nor does it justify assassinating Alawite perpetrators. The latter must be brought before the court and held accountable for their crimes. The instrumentalizing or manipulation of one social group’s victimhood to legitimise or justify further violence, are evident here.

But what constitutes Sunni trauma? Many victims of the Assad regime, who were born to Sunni families, are advocating for Alawite victims. Some of those celebrating the sectarian atrocities remained silent during the Assad era, especially the ones who stayed in Syria and did not flee the war. These latter individuals did not lend their support to Assad’s victims regardless of their sect and ethnic backgrounds. Jeffrey C. Alexander (2012) defines collective traumas in his social study as “reflections of neither individual suffering nor actual events, but symbolic rendering that constructs and imagines them.” The ambiguity of mental images on trauma resulted after the Assad era played the role of an incubator for spacing processes, assigning all Alawites as perpetrators, and all Sunnis as victims. These claimed homogenous groups have never existed as such in the Syrian society: some Sunni elite actors cooperated with the regime, and some Alawites opposed the regime and vice versa. Here, trauma appears to be not only socially constructed, but also fails to resonate with any holistic, alleged homogenous group of Syria.

In a post-dictatorship Syrian setting, implicit or explicit comparisons of suffering treat recognition as a scarce resource rather than a shared moral and ethical obligation. This reproduces the Assad regime’s mechanisms for treating individuals and groups unevenly based on their sect, political, and ethnic affiliations, and definitely reproduces the exclusive patterns of binary thinking: those “good” citizens loyal to the interim government against those “bad” citizens who oppose it.

Of multidirectionality

The primary issue with such a competitive narrative is its drastic effects on civic identity and a sense of belonging in post-Assad Syria. Michael Rothberg (2009) introduced the concept of multidirectional memory, going beyond competitive memory. This invites us to promote multivocality and plurality in our thinking of identity’s discourses. It is essential to create a representational space that encompasses all human communities that have historically inhabited the geographical territory known as Syria. To truly celebrate our plurality and diversity, rather than suppressing it under the dominant narratives of majorities and minorities, we must actively engage economically, politically, and socially marginalised groups in public discourse. These groups should be empowered to articulate their suffering, their rights to the city, village, heritage, and express their identities.

When marginalised populations, who often lack representation in official discourses, raise their voices through narratives that reflect their histories and heritage, they challenge the prevailing interpretive systems that govern societal discourse. By elucidating their demands for safety, justice, and dignity, both spatially and socially, they play a crucial role in shaping the conversation around governance.

Interim governments should be held accountable for refining the discourse surrounding a unified Syrian national identity by emphasising the pluralism inherent in historical narratives. This entails fostering democratic spaces that facilitate the representation of diverse identities within the public sphere. Achieving fair and democratic representation necessitates ongoing negotiation and dialogue regarding the foundations and narratives of these identities, alongside a commitment to honouring the lived experiences of all citizens. This is particularly crucial given Syria’s complex and painful legacy of 54 years under dictatorship and violent repression.

The painful stories of those affected by this tumultuous history must not be overlooked, as they are integral to understanding the social fabric of contemporary Syria. Integrating and acknowledging the experiences of all individuals and communities identifying as Syrian can foster chains of solidarity and mutual support. This approach promises to assist in the sustainable reconciliation and enhance social relationships among Syrians.

Zoya Masoud is an urban researcher, currently conductign her Project “Irrestitutable” within the ERC Project “BEYONDREST”. Her work engages in critical inquiry into identity, architecture, heritage, commemoration, violence, and knowledge production.

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Cite as: Masoud, Z. 2026. “Of Exclusive Victimhood and its Competitive Narratives in Post-Assad Syria” Focaalblog, March 30. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/30/zoya-masoud-of-exclusive-victimhood-and-its-competitive-narratives-in-post-assad-syria/

Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Charlotte Al-Khalili: Transitional Justice from Below: Demands for Truth and Social Reparations

Image 1: Mural painting of Daraa’s disappeared. © Charlotte Al-Khalili

What do transitional justice aspirations look like a year after the downfall of the Assad regime for Syrians in the country? What can transitional justice mean for a people who have lived through several decades of an extremely brutal dictatorship? If the violence of the Assad regime culminated after the start of the 2011 revolution, the methods used by the son, Bashar, had already been tried by his father, Hafez. It was under the latter that the security apparatus, the infamous mukkhabarat services and Syria’s prison archipelago were established (Seurat, 1989; Munif, 2020). Methods of mass repressions against civilians and any kind of political opposition had already been trialled in the 1980s, leading to the siege of the city of Hama that resulted in the killing of over 20,000 civilians and its widespread destruction. The prison of Tadmor (Palmyra) was already infamous for its large-scale torture and killings of political opponents and the massacre of hundreds of them orchestrated by Hafez al Assad’s brother in 1980 (e.g., Khalifa, 2007; Al-Sarraj 2011).

In the fourteen years that spanned from the beginning of the Syrian revolution until the downfall of the regime on December 8, 2024, over 600,000 Syrians were killed, more than 140,000 were jailed, disappeared and tortured in the regime’s prisons. While only 1,300 detainees were freed from the regime’s jails in December 2024, mass graves have been found in different locations, rendering the hope that some of the remaining disappeared might still be alive rather elusive. Many towns and cities were heavily destroyed through the use of heavy weaponry by the regime and its Russian and Iranian allies, leading to widespread “urbicide” (Munif, 2020).

In this context of extreme political violence and mass atrocities, where should a process of transitional justice start? And how can it operate in a country that still has to rebuild itself, with a population in dire need as the vast majority lives below the poverty line; and as violence has not stopped in all parts of the country? Moreover, how does this violent past appear in the present transitional phase in Syria?

A year after the downfall of the Assad regime, my interlocutors – the majority of whom live in the Southern city of Daraa, which has long been considered a revolutionary stronghold, as the revolution started there on 18th of March 2011 – are questioning the slowness of the transitional justice process. In most of the discussions I have had on this topic since my first field-trip in the country on January 2025, it is the question of the detainees and the missing that is central.

These discussions have led me to look at aspirations and claims for justice in post-Assad Syria. In a research project recently started in the country’s south, I ask: What ideas and practices of justice emerge during and after mass atrocities? How can we think of justice in contexts of mass political violence beyond the global frame of “transitional justice” and beyond a universal-secular idea of international law? The project explores local ideas and practices of justice focusing on different temporalities, spaces and modalities of justice.

What I present in this blog is work-in-progress based on fieldwork that I have started inside Syria in the spring of 2025. It presents questions and hypotheses that have emerged from conversations in the city of Daraa, but also from discussions that happened with long-term Syrian interlocutors and friends I met during fieldwork in Gaziantep and Beirut and who were still displaced at the time (see Al-Khalili 2023).

With the overthrow of the Assad regime, the families of those detained and/or disappeared and their advocates have started to occupy the streets of Syria’s towns and cities, protesting, holding meetings and circulating pictures of the missing. Relatives of detainees and disappeared persons have formed committees and organisations in exile and former victims of torture have sought justice in foreign courts. Some of these claims have been successful, with condemnations of those responsible for the torture of prisoners in Assad’s jails heard in landmark cases in French and German courts. With the downfall of the regime, the hope to put these perpetrators on trial in Syrian courts has become more present, but has not become a reality yet, despite the new government and the UN launching specialist commissions to look into the disappeared files, following classic transitional justice paths and top-down approaches (e.g., Kent 2016).

Working in areas that have been marked by the arrest and enforced disappearance of many, I had expected to hear much more about acts of revenge, demands of accountability and legal prosecutions. In the country’s north where I visited friends and interlocutors, daily killings of shabbiha (pro-regime thugs) took place in the city of Aleppo, and demands of accountability and actions against the return of shabbiha in the city of Idleb (Al-Khalili 2025). But in Daraa, where such extra-judiciary killings have happened in 2018, and where most people claim “we don’t have shabbiha here”, considering them either gone after the Liberation or dead before, my interlocutors seemed primarily concerned with uncovering truth and demanded concrete acts that would impact the regime-supporters’ everyday lives and their livelihood. In their claims, they place justice on a collective rather than individual scale and in the social rather than the legal domain.

These scales and domains are, however, not fixed and unique but rather dynamic. Social justice can be seen as both claims for truth and demands of reconstruction. The truth that interlocutors demand often appears as an individual claim when expressed by relatives of missing while reconstruction seems to operate on a collective scale. But these two scales are permeable and become interchangeable and juxtaposing. Such fluidity and multiplicity are also linked to the very nature and intensity of the violence that has unfolded on the Syrian people over the last decades.

Exploring the justice claims of my interlocutors and the situation inside Syria, transitional justice appears first of all to be a social matter: it is about reconstructing social trust and the social fabric, as well as social reparations. Justice thus means to open the archives and learn about the fate of the disappeared and to support those who have lost everything supporting the revolution and fleeing their homes. Those who have fled because of their involvement in the revolution and have then lived in precarious conditions as a result of the destruction of their neighbourhoods, in the rebuilding of a home, of their city and to help them start a new life.

The disappeared: archives, truth-seeking and reparations

Back in December 2024, with news of the opposition forces’ advance through Syria, many of my interlocutors displaced outside the country were particularly impatient to hear of the fates of the country’s many detainees, as they feared they might have been killed before they could be liberated. The opening of the regime’s prisons and security branches reignited hope, as relatives of detained and disappeared people dared to believe they might reunite with their loved ones, or at least learn about their fate (see Al-Khalili & Al-Khalili 2025).

Despite doubts and fear, many hoped to reunite with their detained relatives, leading many detainees’ families to rush to the newly opened prisons. This search for answers and the immense hope of locating detained relatives or discovering the truth about their fate for their relatives.Yet, these early hopes quickly faded away; indeed, if demands for truth, justice and accountability multiply as Syrians can finally speak out, they do not have a legal framework for their claims to be examined yet. Moreover, these don’t seem to be among the government’s immediate priorities.

Over a year after the downfall of the Assad regime, time has now come for many of my interlocutors to question the new government’s actions. Sentiments that I keep hearing– especially among my interlocutors who have missing relatives, but also from lawyers and civil society organisations – conclude “there is no law”, “we don’t have a constitution” and “how can we seek justice?”

Frustration over the new government’s dealing with these issues, and with the withholding of information, is something that I also heard among mothers of the disappeared. One of them, Umm Ayman, a teacher in her sixties whose son has been missing since 2012, told me:

“The state (al dawleh) is now saying that the transitional justice process is over and that we just need to turn the page. But what page? We haven’t even learned about our sons’ fate! … Where is the information (al malumat)? The state has all the information; why is the new government not telling us anything about the detainees’ fates?” She then spoke about her disappeared son: “Imagine that I have been searching for my son for 12 years! I haven’t stopped searching! My son was arrested on December 29, 2012 … We don’t even know what happened to him – I just want to know so my heart eases a little. I want to know where he was for the last 12 years. I want to have answers. I want to know if he is alive or dead, and if he died when and how he died. I want his body! Where are the bodies?”

Such demands for truth were echoed by many. As I waited at the local court to meet a friend of mine who is a lawyer there, a family entered the lawyer’s office and to discuss the possibility to issue a death certificate for their missing son. But the lawyer said there was no way to do that: “the detainees (al-mawtaqalyin) and the missing (al-mafqudyin) are not [officially] dead (maytyin) ” he told them. Yet, in the absence of details about the missing’s whereabouts nothing can be done.

As a forty-year-old man, who presented himself as a “revolutionary at heart” and as a former detainee, said in a collective discussion on transitional justice in Daraa :

There is no transitional justice happening in the country at the moment; ten months after the liberation, nothing has happened yet! Now the shabbiha are walking free, they are not being held accountable … Where is the transparency (shahafiyeh)? There have been no changes in law and no accountability (muhassabeh), so where is the justice? Where are the people who arrested me? It is human nature, especially for those who were detained, to want justice!

Hence, while the possibility of legal justice and accountability in the hands of the current government was met with circumspection, for some of my interlocutors, the claims rather became formulated in collective and social terms: it meant rebuilding the country and insuring a brighter future for Syrians.

In a conversation with Yara, a young second-generation displaced woman from the Golan Heights now living in Daraa’s Palestinian camp, she told me how her father and one of her brothers had been arrested by the regime and detained in Sednaya prison. When I asked her if she or any family member had joined families going from Daraa to Sednaya as the prison was liberated, she said that they had not. They were sure her father and brother would not be there. As they reasoned, they were from Daraa, they had been imprisoned since 2012, and there were strong and believable indications that they had died in the prison several years ago. Discussing Yara’s dreams and aspirations for the future, we touched on the question of legal justice and accountability for those responsible for detainees’ torture and death, and for her dad and brother in particular. It seemed to her reframing justice in individual terms was not the priority. She told me, “Justice is the downfall of the regime and a brighter future for Syria”. To her, justice appeared as a collective end. She envisioned it as a better future that entailed the possibility of resuming school and later accessing higher education, and better job prospects for herself as well as for those who lost their main breadwinners, and help to rebuild their destroyed homes.

As another interlocutor tellingly said: “There is no transitional justice if there is no trust in the government … The issue at the moment is that we can’t trust a government that cannot provide its people with the essentials to live. Did you see how the price of bread went up since liberation?” Here again, transitional justice appeared as tightly related to social justice.

This question of justice’s scale (individual and collective) as well as domain (legal and social) also arose in a conversation I had with Yassin, a long-term interlocutor from Daraa now in his fifties, had been detained in Sednaya prison for eight years before the revolution for his political activism. When we met in Damascus in April 2025, the former detainee had returned to Syria after 14 years of exile and needed a lift to Daraa, where I was also going with a friend. We picked him up at Damascus airport and started discussing his feelings and impressions.

During our two-hour drive, we discussed the recent changes in the country, and it was then that questions of justice and accountability came up. Yassar, his younger cousin who was arrested for his participation in the revolution in 2012, asked Yassin if he planned to visit Sednaya to achieve closure. Yassin raised his eyebrows and clicked his tongue, meaning “no”. Yassar then recounted his own experience of returning to the military branch where he had been arrested and detained, and the intense feelings of peace and justice it induced. Yassar asked Yassin, “You don’t want to find peace going back there? You don’t want to see it all over again now that we got some justice back?” Yassin immediately replied, “What justice? Justice is not the liberation of detainees, justice is the reconstruction of the country, and that will take time!” To Yassin, justice could only be served at the collective, not the personal scale. Justice was not achieved when the regime fell, nor when the detainees were liberated, but would only be realized in the (probably distant) future.

As we entered his city and drove through some almost totally destroyed neighbourhoods, as he saw his family home razed to the ground, Yassin seemed reinforced in his position of justice: What could justice be if not the rebuilding of the country for future generations? What did his personal story have to do with it?

Ruins as evidence? Ethnographic and legal traces

To conclude, looking at ruins – some now used as homes, others as mass graves – brings questions of justice into focus; questions about rebuilding, reconstruction and the disposal of large amounts of rubble as much as questions about body identification, about the souls of the deceased, about truth and transitional justice. The ruins point to the violent past and the immense destruction that occurred, to an unstable and precarious present, and to the shape of the future, stimulating questions about what will be rebuilt, for whom it will be rebuilt and who will carry out the work. The Syrian ruins are not only the marks of past political violence, they also induce political and legal questions about transitional justice. They are, indeed, ruins-as-legal-evidence, and invoke the highly vexed question of what kind of future can possibly be available to those who have lost everything. But they are also what seems to call for social reparations. As Daraa became a stronghold and a symbol of the revolution its city was systematically destroyed. The destruction of Daraa and other towns and neighbourhoods, and the displacement of its inhabitants and disappearance of many, bring to mind the question of truth and social reparation: those people and cities who have given everything to the fight against the Assad regime, and who have lost so much in this struggle, how can they be supported to rebuild their lives, their livelihood, their present and future?

Charlotte Al-Khalili is a Leverhulme early career fellow in anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on revolutionary politics and subjectivities, religious temporalities and practices and forced displacement in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. Her research explores the effects of mass political violence and its aftermaths on displaced communities’ lifeworlds. She is the author of Waiting for the Revolution to End and the co-editor of Revolution Beyond the Event. She is currently working on a new project looking at conceptions and practices of justice in Syria titled “Traces and Archives of Mass Political Violence: Justice and Return in post-Assad Syria”

References cited

Al-Khalili, C. 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity, London: UCL Press.

Al-Khalili, C. & Al-Khalili, M. 2025. “Recalibrating hope and revolutionary temporality in tbe wake of al-Assad’s downfall”, allegralab https://allegralaboratory.net/recalibrating-hope-and-revolutionary-temporality-in-the-wake-of-al-assads-downfall/

Al-Sarraj, M. 2011. ‘Aṣī al-dam. Beirut: Dār al-Adāb.

Evans, 2019

Khalifa, M. 2007. Al-qawq‘a: yawmiyyāt mutalaṣiṣ. Beirut: Dār al-Adāb.

Kent, L. 2016. “Transitional justice in law, history and anthropology”, Australian Feminist Journal, vol 42, N1, pp.1-11

Munif, Y. 2020. The Syrian Revolution: Between the politics of life and the geopolitics of death. London: Pluto Press.

Seurat, M. 1989. L’Etat de Barbarie. Paris: le Seuil.

Cite as: Al-Khalili, C. 2025 “Transitional Justice from Below: Demands for Truth and Social Reparations” Focaalblog March 25. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/25/charlotte-al-khalili-transitional-justice-from-below-demands-for-truth-and-social-reparations/

Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Thomas Pierret: The Sunni Ulama: Syria’s Parliamentary Era as a Golden Age

Image 1: The Umayyad Mosque in December 2025, © Thomas Pierret.

One might intuitively assume that the Syrian Sunni ulama (religious scholars) would valorize periods emblematic of Islam’s bygone grandeur, such as the Umayyad or Ottoman empires. In practice, however, their historical narratives accord greater significance to the era of parliamentary rule spanning the late French Mandate through the early years of independence (1932–1963). This emphasis stems in part from the fact that this period is portrayed by Syrian ulama as a nahda (“renaissance”) of Islamic knowledge. Yet this focus on the parliamentary era is also driven by political considerations. First, against a backdrop of sectarian violence, the ulama have underscored the harmony that purportedly characterized interreligious relations during that period, attributing this in particular to the efforts of religious leaders to foster such concord. Second, during the parliamentary era, the ulama enjoyed an unprecedented degree of autonomy, a circumstance that once again stands in sharp contrast to the present situation.

December 8, 2024: Islamic conquest or liberation?

The new Syrian authorities and their supporters have drawn a parallel between the rebels’ capture of Damascus on 8th of December 2024, on the one hand, and the 7th-century Islamic conquest (fath) of Syria, on the other hand. As early as January 2012, current President Ahmad al-Sharaa signed the first statement of his organisation (then named Jabhat al-Nusra, “the Support Front”) as “the Conqueror (al-fatih) Abu Muhammad al-Julani”. This grandiose title (e.g., the Ottoman Sultan who is commonly referred as “the Conqueror” is Mehmed II, who captured Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire) was far from an obvious fit for a complete unknown whose only achievement, back then, was the establishment of a small underground organisation.

The notion of “Islamic conquest” remained central to al-Sharaa’s organisation until 2015-2016, which saw the successive establishment of the Army of Conquest (jaysh al-fath), a Nusra-dominated rebel alliance, and of the Levant Conquest Front (jabha fath al-sham), a revamped version of Jabhat al-Nusra following the latter’s decision to sever its ties to al-Qaeda. In 2017, however, the organisation renamed itself the Levant Liberation Committee (hay’a tahrir al-sham, hereafter HTS), a means to distance itself from pan-Islamic Jihadi ideology while moving closer (rhetorically at least) to the Syrian revolutionary mainstream.

The 2024 collapse of the Asad regime, which many Syrians perceived as an unexpected miracle, gave new impetus to the use of the term fath by members and supporters of the new regime. In a speech he gave on 29 January 2025 in front of the military commanders who were about to appoint him as president, al-Sharaa himself used the Quranic expression al-fath al-mubin (“the Clear Victory”) to describe the toppling of the former regime.

A few Sunni religious scholars, although supportive of the new regime, expressed polite disagreement as to this use of the term fath. Among them was Dr Imad al-Din al-Rashid, who was appointed as the Dean of the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Damascus in March 2025. In a Friday sermon he gave shortly after the fall of Assad and his own consequent return to Syria, al-Rashid warned that speaking of fath implied that just like early 7th-century Damascus, pre-December 8 Damascus was not a Muslim city. Speaking in a well-off neighbourhood of the capital that had experienced relatively little violence and displacement during the war, he insisted that, on the contrary, those who had remained in the city during the past fourteen years were in fact “steadfast guardians of Islam” (murabitin), provided, of course, they had not actively collaborated with the former regime. It was, therefore, more correct to speak of “liberation” (tahrir) rather than fath.

This viewpoint has officially prevailed: as per a presidential decree issued in October 2025, nationwide celebrations were held on December 8 of that year on the occasion of “Liberation Day” (‘id al-tahrir). The term fath has not disappeared, however,i as it endows the new rulers with greater religious legitimacy than the more “secular” tahrir.

The Umayyads: multi-faceted symbolism

“We are Muslims, not Umayyads”, Mufti of A‛zaz Mahmud al-Jabir (a well-known critique of the new regime) stated in May 2025 in response to increasingly frequent references to the Umayyad dynasty among constituencies loyal to al-Sharaa. In February, for instance, prominent pro-government media figure Musa al-Omar had posted a video of the president riding a horse to a song praising the Umayyads’ “golden lineage” and their name that “sent fears in Persian kings.”ii

For mainstream Sunni religious scholars, the Umayyads are problematic in two respects. First, they were key protagonists in the conflicts occasioned by the succession of Prophet Muhammad, a topic most ulama tend to avoid as they profess love for the Al al-Bayt (family of the Prophet) while acknowledging the legitimacy of the Umayyads on a pragmatic basis, namely, their victory over the descendants of Ali. Second, Umayyad Caliphs are not remembered as particularly pious rulers except for ‘Umar bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (r. 717-720), who is, for this very reason, the only member of the dynasty to regularly feature as a role model in mainstream Sunni religious discourse in Syria.

A more distinctly anti-Shia tradition epitomized by Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) and currently championed by Salafi scholars (who have remained a minority among Syria’s ulama) has set the Umayyads up as a symbol of exclusionary Sunni identity. A notable example was that of Zahran ‘Allush (1971-2015), a Salafi preacher and founder of the Islam Army (jaysh al-islam). Following the Lebanese Hezbollah’s 2013 military intervention in support of the Asad regime, ‘Allush recorded a speech in the ruins of the Umayyad palace of Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi (near Palmyra). Likewise, addressing Shia supporters of the Asad regime, he famously promised that “the Umayyads’ glory will return to Damascus, whether you like it or not!” Twelve years later, TV preacher ‘Adnan al-‘Ar‛ur, who had first made a name of himself in the late 2000s with his anti-Shia programmes, came back to the homeland after a fifty-year long exile in Saudi Arabia. From Damascus’ Umayyad square, he proudly stated: “We have returned to the capital of the Umayyads, the capital of Mu‘awiya” (this is the founder of the dynasty and, as such, a particularly hated figure among the Shia). Likewise, at the Umayyad Mosque, al-‘Ar‛ur reminded his listeners that they were “the descendants of the Umayyads.”

Umayyadism conveys more than anti-Shia and anti-Iranian sentiments, however. Because the Umayyads turned the Arabs into major players on the world stage, and because they had their capital in Damascus, they also constitute a potent symbol of Syrian Arab identity, which is why their memory was also cultivated by the former regime: Hafez el-Assad had his name engraved on the façade of the Umayyad mosques in Damascus. Like its counterpart in Aleppo, the latter was the only historical monuments in Syria whose restoration was directly funded by the Presidency.iii Other characteristics of Umayyad rule can be emphasised to the attention of specific constituencies, such as their pragmatism (as mentioned above, they were often not very devout Muslims) and relatively tolerant treatment of Christians, who remained a majority of the population in the territories of today’s Syria under Umayyad rule.iv

A last, and so far, more subliminal implication of the reference to the Umayyads, is the fact that they were a monarchy. When al-Sharaa visited Jordan in February 2025, for instance, HTS-aligned social media accounts praised the encounter between the Umayyads and the Hashemites.v In the summer of 2025, rumours that al-Sharaa was considering turning himself into a king were debated on the pro-government Syria TV. Whatever the truth to this rumours, this latter aspect of Umayyadism has gained little traction among the country’s Sunni religious scholars: first, because embracing that rhetoric would immediately identify them as unreserved sycophants of the new regime; second, because many of them quietly harbour reservations about al-Sharaa’s ambitions of unchecked personal rule.

The Ottomans: codename for ‘Turkey’

In the 1960s and 1970s, extolling the virtues of the Ottoman Empire was a means for some ulama to voice their critique of Arab nationalism, that is, the main ideological pillar of the Baathist regime. Dr Sa’id Ramadan al-Buti, who in the following decades became one of the Assad family’s most ardent religious supporters, then famously branded nationalism as a virus that European imperialism and Freemasonry had introduced into the Ottoman Empire to destroy it from within.vi Conversely, “Ottomanostalgia’ was encouraged during Bashar’s first decade in power to legitimise Syria’s fast-paced rapprochement with Turkey. In 2009, for instance, head of the al-Fath Islamic Institute Sheikh Husam al-Din Farfur emphasized the two countries’ “half a millennium of common history”. Al-Buti concurred, hailing the newfound friendship between Damascus and Ankara as “the premise of the coming Islamic unity.”vii

Another countervailing shift occurred after 2011 as a result of Turkey’s support for the Syrian opposition and, as of 2016, its direct military intervention in the war. Pro-Assad ulama then revived the Arab nationalist narrative of “Ottoman occupation’. The latter, for instance, was blamed by Minister of Religious Endowments Muhammad ‘Abd al-Sattar al-Sayyid for the establishment of the Grand Muftiship, a “historical error” that the president “corrected” by abolishing that position in 2021.viii

By contrast, and counter-intuitively, references to the Ottoman past became exceedingly rare in the outward discourse of those Sunni ulama who turned against Assad and sought refuge abroad. Most settled in Istanbul, where they established the Syrian Islamic Council in 2014. Although overtly grateful for Turkey’s support, and generally favourable to its policies in Syria, they also tried to preserve some level of autonomy, a trend notably illustrated by the Council’s criticism of Ankara’s tentative rapprochement with the Asad regime in 2022-2023. Back then, just like today, references to the Ottoman past seem to have been avoided because they act as reminders of an unpleasant reality, namely, the fact that Turkey is both an indispensable and overbearing ally.

A (liberal) golden age

The historical period that the Syrian Sunni ulama most enthusiastically evoke in their public discourse is the liberal era stretching from the end of the French Mandate to the early years of independence. Their nostalgia of this period is primarily rooted in reasons that are strictly internal to the country’s Sunni religious scene. It is remembered as an era marked by a “renaissance” (nahda) of religious knowledge, a traditionalist revival that is entirely distinct from the (predominantly modernist) Arab Nahda that has received far greater attention in Western historiography. The Mandate-era renaissance of religious knowledge is credited to Sheikh Badr al-Din al-Hasani (1850-1935) in Damascus and to the Islamic seminary established in 1922 at Aleppo’s Khusrawiyya madrasa. Such narratives of refoundation are key to the legitimacy of the newcomers who came to dominate Syria’s religious scene in the second half of the 20th century, owing to the disappearance of the ancient ulama families, whose sons were now embracing more socially desirable careers as physicians, lawyers, or politicians. Evocations of this episode has remained a staple of Syrian Sunni religious discourse until today, as illustrated by an interview with Sheikh Abu al-Khayr Shukri shortly before his appointment as Minister of Religious Endowments in March 2025.

Syrian ulama also exalt the mid-20th century as the period during which the Syrian people succeeded in foiling France’s attempts at dividing the country along sectarian lines. Speaking at the presidential palace a few weeks after the March 2025 massacres of Alawites in the coastal region, Grand Mufti Usama al-Rifa‛i reminded the audience that his own mother was born, as per her birth certificate, in the short-lived State of Damascus, which the French had established alongside similar statelets like the State of Aleppo, the State of the Alawites, and the State of the Druzes. Yet al-Rifa‛i insisted, Syrians resisted such policies as they “remained a single hand and a single heart”. Religious leaders, the Grand Mufti claims, had played a critical role in the cultivation of inter-religious harmony at the time. In a previous speech, he had told the story of the friendship between prominent Sunni Muslim scholar Bahjat al-Bitar (1894-1976) and Christian Prime Minister Faris al-Khuri (1944-1945 and 1954-1955)—as the latter had once forgotten his hat, he recounted, the former lent him his turban.

Finally, the ulama fondly recall the level of freedom they enjoyed during the liberal era. Generally cordial relations with the political elites of the time translated into official religious institutions that enabled the ulama to manage their own affairs with limited executive oversight. Although they only exerted limited influence over decision-makers, they were at least free to take advantage of the liberal political system to make their voice heard by issuing statements, petitions, and voting instructions. For instance, upon his appointment as Grand Mufti by the Syrian Islamic Council in 2021, al-Rifa‛i recounted how his predecessor Abu al-Yusr ‘Abidin (in office 1952-1963) organised a press campaign against the Minister of Tourism, who had ignored his demand to have a poster showing a half-naked female dancer removed from the facade of a cabaret.

Lastly, between 1946 and the 1963 military coup, the ulama ran their own political organisation, the League of Ulama, which issued voting instructions and even fielded its own candidates, though with limited success. The Syrian Islamic Council that was established in 2014 was, in essence, a reincarnation of the League in a broader form. Yet al-Sharaa ordered its dissolution in June 2025 against the will of al-Rifa‛i and many of his colleagues. Against this backdrop of re-emerging authoritarian governance, Syrian ulama will probably continue to idealize the bygone days of parliamentary rule.

Conclusion

Recent history occupies a more prominent place in the historical imagination of the Syrian Sunni ulama than the distant past. Invocations of the Islamic conquests or the Umayyad Caliphate may be deployed to affirm—or to dispute—the religious legitimacy of the al-Sharaa regime, just as recollections of the Ottoman period evoke Turkey’s tutelage over the new Syrian state. Yet it is the parliamentary era of 1932–1963 that endures as the ulama’s true golden age. Remembered as a time of religious revival, intercommunal coexistence, and institutional autonomy from state control, this liberal interlude functions as both retrospective ideal and political critique. In elevating that moment, the ulama articulate not only a rebuke of authoritarian rule but also an enduring aspiration to transcend political subordination.

Dr Thomas Pierret is Senior Researcher at the Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim World (IREMAM), National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Aix-Marseille Université in Aix-en-Provence, France. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po-Paris and the University of Louvain. He was previously Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. His publications include Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), and the chapter on Syria in the 10th edition of Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, forthcoming). 

i See for instance this statement by the Ministry of Religious Endowment: Taht al-Majhar, 7 December 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20260119224406/https://www.almjhar.com/ar-sy/NewsView/2212/296160/اجتماع_موس_ع_في_جامع_سعد_بن_معاذ_يجمع_كبار_علماء_دمشق_ومسؤولي_الدولة_تأكيد_على_دور_المساجد_في_ترسيخ_الأمن_والوعي.aspx.

ii The New Umayyads. Syria in Transition 23, https://web.archive.org/web/20260119230946/https://www.syriaintransition.com/en/home/archive/issue-23/the-new-umayyads.

iii Stéphane Valter. La Construction nationale syrienne. Légitimation de la nature communautaire du pouvoir par le discours historique (CNRS éditions, 2002).

iv Aaron Zelin. Christians in the New Syria: Accepted, but at-risk. The Caravan, December 9, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20251210052600/https://www.hoover.org/research/christians-new-syria-accepted-risk.

v The New Umayyads.

vi Thomas Pierret. Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2013): 78.

vii Thomas Pierret. Sunni Islamists: From Syria to the Umma, and Back. In M. Cimino (ed.). Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 229.

viii Thomas Pierret. Minister vs. Mufti the struggle over ‘moderate Islam’ in wartime Syria (2011–2021), Mediterranean Politics. DOI: 10.1080/13629395.2024.2385780 : 18.

Cite as: Pierret, T. 2025. “The Sunni Ulama: Syria’s Parliamentary Era as a Golden Age” Focaalblog March 24. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/24/thomas-pierret-the-sunni-ulama-syrias-parliamentary-era-as-a-golden-age/

Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Christine Crone: Constructing post-Ba’athist Syria through Cultural Heritage: the role of the Syrian Arab News Agency

Image 1: Screenshot of one of SANAs articles about Ahmad al-Sharaa’s speech in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus, December 8, 2025, marking the one year anniversary of what SANA refers to as “the liberation” (screenshot by the author)

In the years leading up to the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad and the downfall of the Syrian Ba’athist state, the Syrian state propagated what I referred to in previous publications, as a ‘post-war narrative’ (Crone 2023; 2025). This narrative became particularly evident after the last-remaining area of rebel-held Aleppo was recaptured by the state army on December 22, 2016. The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported on the reopening of schools, re-asphalting of damaged streets, recovering business life in once war-torn neighborhoods and other stories that fed into a narrative about the return of ‘normal life’ in Syria. While far from reflecting reality on the ground, the media focus on the reconstruction of the country became an important element in the constructed narrative about Syria being in a post-war state.

A particular feature at SANA was the coverage of ongoing reconstruction projects of important cultural heritage. In 2024, in the article “Reconstructing Ba’athist Syria through Cultural Heritage and State Media”, I investigated SANA’s coverage of the reconstruction of The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque and the old souq in Aleppo (Crone 2025). I argued that the Syrian Ba’athist state was utilizing the narratives of both the destruction and reconstruction of important cultural heritage: on the one hand, to prove the oppositional groups were barbaric terrorists; and on the other hand, to promote the state as the civilized protector of Syrian cultural history and world heritage, thus the natural successor of the ancient nation. Moreover, I argued that the narratives of reconstruction in Aleppo should be understood as an attempt to symbolically retake control over Aleppo by (re)connecting important national cultural heritage to the Ba’athist state.

Not long after I finished the article, Bashar al-Assad and the Ba’athist state became remnants of the past and new rulers had grabbed power in Syria. However, the topic of cultural heritage is as relevant as ever before. My argument still holds that the reconstruction of cultural heritage is part of “a battle over national symbols, narratives and memories, the outcome of which is of crucial importance in determining which Syria is to rise from the ruins” (Crone 2025). The fall of Bashar al-Assad – and with him the collapse of the Ba’athist state which was pivotal for the identity of post-colonial Syria – has created a need to renegotiate national identity. This is currently playing out in armed fighting, in political discussions, in social confrontations and in cultural battles. In this process, the role and meaning of national cultural heritage is (once again) up for contestation. What sites are considered important? What do they symbolize? And what political message should they embody?

In this blog post, I revisit SANA and its reporting on (the reconstruction of) sites of national cultural heritage. I take a look at how this has unfolded in the first year after the toppling of Assad to gain insights into the roles and meanings the new rulers in Syria envision for cultural heritage – from the past to the future. I find that in many ways, they appear to replicate the discourses and narratives of the Ba’athist Syrian state with the small adjustment of Damascus overtaking Aleppo’s key role in the Ba’athist post-war narrative. Although one might have expected that the new rulers wished to promote a different narrative about the past (for instance a more univocal focus on the Islamic parts of history), they appear to be promoting (or at least permitting) a multifaceted focus on the rich cultural heritage of Syria that continues former practices. I suggest that this serves to legitimize the rulers of the country by staging them as caretakers of Syria’s long and proud history, similar to the strategies used by the Baath state.

Below, I first introduce SANA and reflect on the role of cultural heritage in nation-building projects. I then look back at how SANA reported on the reconstruction of Aleppo’s three most important sites of cultural heritage, The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque, and the old souq, before moving on to examine differences and similarities in SANA’s post-Assad reporting.

SANA as a site of state propaganda

Since its foundation in 1965, SANA, the official, state-owned news agency in Syria, has been a central platform for propagating the ideological discourse of the state. Thus, they direct state media in general on how to report on current events. In the days leading up to December 8, 2024, its website, SANA’s website, suddenly became inaccessible and remained inactive for weeks. While the new rulers in Syria used Telegram, WhatsApp and other social media platforms as their main communication tools, SANA was quickly up and running again after a superficial makeover (mainly replacing the old Syrian national flag with the new). The website continued its previous role as a mouthpiece of the rulers; it reports on Ahmad al-Sharaa’s good deeds now, rather than those of Bashar al-Assad. Yet there seems to also be irony in this continuity. News articles from the Assad-era were still available on the website, and for those browsing the site, this collapse of successive ruling regimes in an online space created the schizophrenic experience of articles praising Bashar al-Assad performing his official duties next to praise of al-Sharaa’s latest accomplishments.

Image 2: Screenshot of SANA 11.11.25 that illustrates the peculiar situation where SANA at the same time is reporting on Ahmad al-Sharaa’s whereabouts and latest accomplishments while old stories from the time of Bashar al-Assad are still searchable at the website (the author).

The website was thoroughly remodeled and relaunched on August 22, 2025, promising independent and critical journalism. However, the co-existence of parallel realities at SANA continued as Assad-era articles remained searchable until the end of 2025. The peculiar phenomenon of having news stories from the two political eras available on the same site displayed in an absurd manner the disappointing tendency that SANA has continued its uncritical reporting on national politics and the state leader’s whereabouts. Likewise, it accentuated the continuation of previous rhetorical and visual communication styles – also when covering (reconstruction projects of) national cultural heritage.

Cultural heritage and (Ba’athist) nation building

Most nation states engage in the construction of “useable pasts” (Edgerton 2001) in order to build national identity and legitimize state-building. In post-colonial states in the Middle East and beyond, cultural heritage often plays a central role in this type of political project as it materializes imaginaries of ancient national history, thus naturalizing the postcolonial nation state. This was indeed the case for the Syrian Ba’athist state. Through its 61 years of rule, in different ways, the state has used the historical past of the area that today constitutes Syria to write about national history, thus constructing national narratives. As mentioned earlier, in the last years of the Ba’athist rule, destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage came to play a central role in the post-war Ba’athist narrative. Whereas monuments destroyed during the war (regardless of who the responsible actor was) served as proof that the opposition consisted of uncivilized terrorists, the following reconstruction initiated by the state (often in collaboration with international actors and organizations) proved Bashar al-Assad as the protector of Syrian cultural history and world heritage. In SANA, reconstruction projects of e.g. The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque, and the old souq in Aleppo became platforms for staging Bashar al-Assad as the man who could restore national order and re-establish civilization.

In addition to promoting al-Assad and the Ba’athist state as those who re-establish Syrian civilization, SANA’s coverage of the reconstruction projects also served to regain control over the symbolic meaning of national cultural heritage. The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque and the old souq in Aleppo had all been locations of intense fighting during the battle over Aleppo (2012-2016) while under the control of changing actors. Thus, the media reports of the ongoing reconstruction of these sites served to overwrite the years of war and assign a particular role to these national symbols within the state’s post-war narrative.

This was most spectacularly evident in the visual coverage of Bashar and Asma al-Assad’s visit to Aleppo in July 2022, together with their three children. The trip was staged as a happy reunion between the al-Assad lineage and the ancient city. Images of the family touring Aleppo quickly circulated the news stream, including cheerful images from the crowded and colorful (restored) old souq and more serious images from the presidential couple’s inspection of the ongoing reconstruction work at the Umayyad Great Mosque.

These and other images served to connect the Assad rule with historical monuments and places of symbolic importance in Aleppo – what Assmann calls ‘memorial signs’ (2008) – to regain control over the symbolic meaning of national cultural heritage, and thus over the city, that had been outside state control for four years (Munawar 2022). However, for such signs to be effective, as Halbwachs (1992) reminds us, they must operate within ‘social frames’; they must resonate with or have emotional meaning for people. The Citadel, The Umayyad Mosque and the old souq in Aleppo were – and still are –examples of cultural heritage sites of strong significance for most Syrians, as they are loaded with symbolism not only in Syria but across the world. However, what they represent is less clear and potentially contested. This has been the case with other historical symbols that over time have acquired multilayered meanings while adapting to changing historical and political contexts. Moreover, when cultural heritage is damaged or destroyed during wartime, decisions about whether and how to reconstruct it add new layers of symbolism (Viejo-Rose 2011). Below, I move from SANA’s coverage of cultural heritage during the time of Bashar al-Assad to the time of Ahmad al-Sharaa to sketch out potential difference and similarities in how SANA narrates ‘the new Syria’.

Cultural heritage in ‘the new Syria’

Shortly after the Syrian Army had recaptured the rebel-held parts of Aleppo in December 2016, SANA posted photos of The Citadel decorated with an enormous (then) Syrian national flag and equally huge posters of Bashar al-Assad. Regaining control over this ancient monument of medieval Islamic fortress architecture – Aleppo’s hallmark and a cherished site of national and world cultural heritage – obviously mattered beyond its military value. However, The Citadel itself was damaged from the war, and only reopened in 2018. Already from the summer 2017, the city council arranged a number of concerts in the amphitheater situated behind the walls of The Citadel. SANA enthusiastically celebrated its reinstatement as Aleppo’s cultural center stressing that it symbolized how the city’s long history of civilization and steadfastness had defeated the terrorists while staging Ba’athist Syria as both the protector and perpetuator of Aleppo’s important historical legacy.

Serving as a scene for several official events, The Citadel has obviously maintained its high importance to the new rulers and has appeared frequently in SANA reporting during the year that has passed since the overthrow of Bashar Al-Assad. This was the case, for example, when Ahmad al-Sharaa visited Aleppo on Saturday, 29 November 2025, to participate in marking the one-year anniversary of the city’s liberation. Another example includes the official reopening of The Citadel two months prior, on September 29. At SANA, this was covered with multiple videos of the celebration taking place on the stage of the old amphitheater with speeches by the minister of culture, Mohammad Yassin al-Saleh and other important officials. Al-Saleh declared that the reopening of The Citadel was a “prominent symbol of recovery and revival”. The governor of Aleppo stated, “We reopen the gates of the citadel, for the history, the pride and the hope, and we open a new era made of the blood of martyrs, the patience of mothers and the dreams of children”. Other speakers stressed how the ancient monument symbolizes the steadfastness (sumud) of the Aleppian people. This article, The article, ends by concluding:

The Citadel of Aleppo is an ancient historical jewel that rose on its hill thousands of years ago to be an impregnable fortress and a stage for successive civilizations – from the Arameans and Greeks to the Umayyads, Ayyubids and Mamluks – with its towering walls, majestic gates and stones that embrace history. It has remained a symbol of the city’s steadfastness and pride. Today, the citadel opens again, not as a fortress for war, but as a beacon of culture and the arts, and a mirror that reflects Syria’s bright face to the world.

(author’s translation)

Despite the new political context, which of course is reflected in the statements and speeches quoted at SANA, the overall discourse in the coverage is surprisingly similar to that of the Assad-era. The coverage includes: the same images of an illuminated citadel and an amphitheater with musical performances, official speeches and a cheering audience; the same narratives of the citadel as a symbol of Aleppo’s ancient history, the Aleppians’ steadfastness and Syria’s proud civilization and culture; and, not least, the same ambition of connecting the almost 1000-year-old ancient military monument with the current rulers in power.

The old souq and the Omayyad Mosque in Aleppo have both received less attention at SANA than was the case in al-Assad’s post-war narrative; however, their Damascene counterparts – and Damascus in general – have appeared as important locations. This may not be surprising, as Syria’s new rulers had a less difficult task of gaining symbolic control over Aleppo than what could potentially be the case with Damascus, since it had remained under Assad’s control until the end of his rule. Thus, just as SANA through its reporting made an effort to reinstate Bashar al-Assad as having symbolic control over Aleppo’s ‘memorial signs’ after the Syrian Army had regained military control over the city in 2016, SANA has been working to place Ahmad al-Sharaa as having a connection with other important ‘signs’. Most importantly, of course, with its reporting on his first anniversary speech in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus on December 8, 2025, they marked Bashar al-Assads flee to Russia and Ahmad al-Sharaa’s rise to power. The fact that he was able to address the Syrian population from the ultimate national and religious symbol – the Omayyad Mosque – proved his (partial!) success in ruling not just Idleb but all of Syria. SANA, of course, reported on the event by circulating images of the president from the Mosque as he gave a speech and performed the dawn prayer (wearing the same uniform as he did one year previously when he entered Damascus). Similar to the Assad family’s visit to old Aleppo a few years earlier, the images of al-Sharaa in old Damascus positions a contemporary leader within an ancient national history in order to strengthen his own political legitimacy and perform instant nation-building. In the case of al-Sharaa, his staging in the Umayyad Mosque also served to connect him to the Umayyad Empire, and thus, albeit subtly, spoke to the popular narrative of al-Sharaa representing the return of the Umayyads (see Holst’s introduction to this feature, Pierret’s contribution to this feature).

In a Damascus context, the reconstruction of cultural heritage obviously takes up a less prominent role in SANA reporting, since the city was neither bombed nor a site of intense fighting during the years of war. However, this has not discouraged the news agency from highlighting the historical treasures of the ancient capital – quite the contrary. Since the relaunch of SANA in August 2025, it has continued to promote and highlight cultural heritage in Damascus and beyond, depicting how the new rulers of the country are committed to preserve and protect this national heritage. SANA’s interest in the topic neatly corresponds with the official discourse. On the last day of 2025, the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities and Museums launched a new national strategy for the protection of Syria’s cultural heritage. In reporting SANA’s coverage on the strategy, they highlight how this initiative aims at remedying the previous regime’s mismanagement and neglect, They cite the directorate for stressing that

The Syrian cultural heritage, both the material and the non-material, constitutes one of the main pillars of the national identity and the memory of the Syrian society, which carries of civilizational depth that extends for thousands of years.

(author’s translation from Arabic)

The message seems to be clear: post-Assad Syria is a smooth and natural continuation of the country’s long and proud history. Syria remains the cradle of civilization, and the Syrian state is the guardian of important cultural heritage. Thus, the same, familiar narrative from the time of the Ba’athist state continues to serve as an important element for the Syrian state in consolidating national identity and legitimizing political power.

Christine Crone is an assistant professor in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. She is a Middle East scholar working on Arab media. She is the author of Pan-Arab News TV Station al-Mayadeen: The New Regressive Leftist Media (Peter Lang, 2020). She has published on topics such as TV drama, Syrian media and documentaries, and the use of images in Arab media.

References

Assmann, Aleida (2008). “Transformations between History and Memory”. Social Research, 75 (1): 49–72.

Crone, Christine (2025). “Reconstructing Baʾathist Syria through Cultural Heritage and State Media”. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 17 (4): 295–315.

Crone, Christine (2023). “Re-narrating the Past, Producing the Present and Unlocking

the Future: Haris al-Quds, a tv-dramatization of ‘post-war’ Syria”. Middle East Critique 32 (3): 305–321. http://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2023.2229188.

Edgerton, Gary R. (2001) “Television as History: A Different Kind of History Altogether”. In: Edgerton and Rollins (eds), Television History: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age. Pp. 1-16. The University Press of Kentucky.

Halbwachs, Maurice (1992). On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Munawar, Nour A. (2022). “Reconstructing Narratives: The Politics of Heritage in Contemporary Syria”. Journal of Social Archaeology 22 (2): 172–190. https://doi.org/10.1177/14696053221073992.

Viejo-Rose, Dacia (2011). “Destruction and Reconstruction of Heritage: Impacts on

Memory and Identity”. In: Anheier, Helmut and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (eds.), Heritage,

Memory & Identity, pp. 53–69. London: Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250839.

Cite as: Crone, C. 2026. “Constructing post-Ba’athist Syria through Cultural Heritage: the role of the Syrian Arab News Agency” Focaalblog March 23. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/23/christine-crone-constructing-post-baathist-syria-through-cultural-heritage-the-role-of-the-syrian-arab-news-agency/

Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Kræn Kielsgaard: Rewriting Syria´s history – the case of Israel in Syrian schoolbooks after December 8, 2024

Image 1: Syrian postage stamp commemorating the Yom Kippur War, 1998. Author unknown, copyright expired. Source: Wikimedia commons

This post examines how the new Syrian state seeks to reconstruct public memory through revisions of public-school curricula in a period of profound political and social transformation after December 8, 2024. It unfolds how education, and more specifically official historiography, are employed by the new state as symbolic tools through which the former regime is delegitimized as not authentically Arab. It focuses particularly on how the new state achieves this through a reconfiguration of the portrayal of Israel and of the historical relationship between Israel and Syria. Israel has figured prominently as an enemy character in official rhetoric and legitimization efforts of the Assad regimes. The post discusses how this has changed with the new al-Shara regime and suggests that a realpolitikal emphasis on non-antagonism towards Israel as well as an agenda to downplay the achievements of the previous regime is at the heart of these changes.

Background – revision of schoolbooks

On December 8, 2024, the rule of Bashar al-Assad came to an end after 14 years of uprising and civil war when the Islamist militia Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies marched into Damascus and the former president fled to Moscow. A major priority of the new regime´s reconstruction efforts has been dedicated to education. This has included physical reconstruction as the war has left more than 7000 schools destroyed and more than 2 million children without schooling (Vignal, 2021). It has also entailed revisions of Syrian schoolbooks with a specific focus on differentiating the content from the former regime´s curricula.

In early January 2025, the Syrian ministry of Education of the recently installed caretaker government published 12 pages via its official Facebook page bringing immediate changes to all levels of Syrian schoolbooks (Syrian Ministry of Education, 2025). It also announced that the subject National Education would be cancelled all together and that Religious Educationi would substitute it as a graded course (Mortensen, 2025). The new minister of education Nadhir al-Qaderi explained in an interview in February that the course would be replaced by a new one, and that the ministry was working on “creating a genuine, nationalistic subject that will raise a Syrian people on the basis of citizenship and a real national feeling.” (al-Arabi, 2025). The curricula revisions generated strong criticism. The ministry was accused of transgressing its mandate as an interim caretaker government, and of Islamizing Syrian education and changing its history (al-Jadid, 2025). Al-Qaderi defended the changes saying that it was necessary to erase references to and “wrongful understandings” of the former regime. But the changes went further than just removing the old flag and pictures and quotes of the former president(s). They included deleting pictures of figurines of pre-Islamic Gods from history books (in addition to the word āliha “Gods”), leaving out the theory of evolution from biology and changing nationalistic formulations such as “in defense of the homeland” to the religious wording “in defense of belief” (BBC News عربي, 2025).

A new Minster of Education took office in March 2025, and in October 2025 the revisions were implemented in the new textbooks that were distributed to the schools and uploaded to the ministry´s curricula website. In some cases, the revisions went further than the “emergency changes” announced by the caretaker government in January. However, the minister has insisted that the changes are only “deletions” – most recently in an interview with the state-run Ikhbariyya TV in December 2025 (al-Ikhbariyya, 2025). New paragraphs were added to contemporary Syrian history describing the 2011 revolution, its goals, and major events leading up to the revolution like the Kurdish intifada in 2004 (also known as Qamishli Uprising), the Damascus declaration and the regional context of Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. Other changes include removals of whole chapters that are not related to the former regime like a paragraph on the Alepine Nineteenth-century thinker and reformer, al-Kawakibi. Yet, the revisions are moderate as they have been based on the 2013-versions of Syrian schoolbooks and thus bypass major revisions by the Assad-regime in 2017 that aimed at promoting a version of Syrian history emphasizing Syria as a land of religious coexistence where Islam was but one of several religious traditions shaping Syrian culture and nationhood (Mortensen, 2026). Also, the 2017 versions have a more thematic and skills-oriented approach, whereas the older versions are classic chronological textbooks.

The revision process has not been very transparent. Whereas the older schoolbooks listed the authors, this is not the case with the revised versions. Furthermore, it is not clear how the emergency revisions from January turned into the revisions that we now see in the books. One thing that is certain is that this should not be seen as the final product but a “work in progress”. Still, it reflects what the new regime deems relevant information and framings of historical periods for a new generation of Syrians. Therefore, it is not surprising that the textbooks that underwent the most substantial revisions were history books. This is a pattern recognizable from other states emerging from political rupture where historiography is mobilized to rework public memory (Wertsch, 2002; Fukuoka, 2023; Lavabre, 2009; Greene, 2013).

The relationship with Israel

A major revision—closely linked to Syria’s position within the international and regional order and, simultaneously, a key component of the former regime’s legitimization strategy (Beetham, 1991) —concerns the reinterpretation of the wars with Israel and Syria’s role in the Arab world under the former regime. The two Assads consistently portrayed Syria as the final bulwark against Israeli hegemony in the Middle East and as a central member of the Iranian-led “resistance axis” (a narrative it maintained until its very last days). For several years the pan-Arab Baath-flag – identical to the Palestinian flag due to their shared origins in the 1916 Arab revolt – was the most common on public buildings until the Syrian flag gradually substituted it as part of an effort to downplay pan-Arab Baathist rhetoric after Bashar took power in 2000. In Syria under Bashar al-Assad – especially after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah – pictures of Hasan Nasrallah (then head of Hezbollah) and Iranian leaders became ubiquitous and state sponsored demonstrations against Israel in the streets of Damascus during the wars on Gaza were a common sight. Syria also hosted several Palestinian factions -PFLP, PFLP-DC and Hamas that, however, fell out with the regime in 2012 over its public endorsement of the Syrian revolution (Danin, 2012). The Golan Heights that were occupied by Israel in 1967 and annexed by Israel in 1981 were a daily feature on Syrian state tv. News segments celebrated the steadfastness of the Syrian citizens in the Golan and emphasized that Syria had a rightful and lawful claim to the area. This intensified especially after the Trump administration’s recognition of the annexation in 2019.

A central pillar in this state promoted narrative was the surprise attack on Israel that Syria launched in October 1973 (Tishreen in Arabic) in coordination with Egypt. Although the war ultimately proved a strategic failure, it was carefully embedded in official state ideology through school curricula, commemorative events, a major memorial complex in Damascus, and the naming of hundreds of state institutions, neighborhoods, and even a dam in Northern Syria. In older history textbooks, the war was described as “one of the greatest achievements of the Corrective Movement” (12th grade, 2013).ii To underscore its significance, a national Tishreen Day was celebrated annually from 1973 in schools, in the public squares all over Syria and in state media where a reporter in the street would ask ordinary Syrians about their memories from the war (Syrian Ministry of Interior, 2020). After the 2011 revolution, the commemoration was adapted to the new reality as the Syrian army’s efforts to repress the uprising were presented as retaking lost areas from an enemy that was working in the service of the Zionist enemy.

Under the new al-Shara regime, this national holiday has been abolished by presidential decree along with the Martyrs Day that commemorated the execution of Syrian and Lebanese nationalist activists by the Ottoman governor in 1916 (Souriaalghad, 2025). Also, public institutions such as Tishreen University in Latakia have been renamed (Burhan, 2025), as has the official newspaper, now titled Freedom الحرية)). The official name of the war in state discourse has been changed to the “1973 War” instead of the celebratory “the Tishreen War of Liberation”, a shift that was already announced in the January 2025 revisions that were published on Facebook.

Overall, the description of Israel has not undergone significant changes, but the framing of Syrian-Israeli relations has changed in schoolbooks. A comparison of new and old versions of the history and the social studies curricula reveals that the books’ authors are still exploring what language to appropriate and how to forge a coherent narrative around the historically fraught relationship between Israel and Syria.

In the 12th grade history curriculum, we see that the description of the 1967 Israeli surprise attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria has been changed from “the Zionist entity with the support of imperialist forces launched a widescale aggression on the Arabic states neighboring occupied Palestine (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt” (12th grade, 2013). This framing emphasized the centrality of Palestine to the conflict and sought to delegitimize the Israeli claim to statehood. In contrast, the revised version adopts a more neutral tone. It states: “Israel started the war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria on June 6, 1967.” (12th grade, 2025).” The new version also describes the war as the al-Naksa (“the setback”). This term typically signifies the collective trauma of the defeat and contains a critique of the Arab political systems that situates their shortcomings as a partial explanation of the defeat (Bilal, 2017). While the older versions explicitly attributed the war to the inherent expansionist motive of the Zionist ideology – stating that “Zionism adopts aggression as a way to expand” – the new versions only partially retain this explanation. It notes that the attack was in “accordance with [Zionism’s] expansionist and aggressive nature” and thereby preserves only elements of the previous framing.

Regarding the terminology employed to describe the State of Israel, a degree of continuity is evident. Though the neutral “Israel” or “the Israeli Army” are added in the new versions, numerous instances of more ideologically charged language persist, including “the Zionist Entity”, “the Zionist Enemy”, and “the Zionist terrorist Enemy”. The latter in a chapter on children´s rights in 5th-grade social studies where Israel is sidelined with the Assad regime as perpetrators of crimes against children (Social Studies, 5th-grade, 2025, pp.41).

While we see some continuities in how Israel is described, the role of Syria as an actor in this conflict has been subject to significant revision. Most notably, responsibility for Syria’s territorial losses is now attributed to Hafez al-Assad in several books. The revised texts assert that Israel occupied the Golan Heights in collusion with Hafez al-Assad, who, according to the new history books for 12th and 9th grades, declared the territory occupied a day before the actual event occurred. In the 12th grade book this information is added in a yellow information box on the left side of the page. Hence, it is highlighted as particularly relevant information. By contrast, in the 9th grade book the information is part of the main body of text that states that the Syrian Golan was occupied “in collusion with the Syrian Defense Minister at that time (Hafez al-Assad)” (Ministry of Education, 9th grade, 2025, pp. 30). Significantly, this claim has been put forward previously as well. It was made in an Al-Jazeera documentary on the 1967 war broadcast in 2015 (al-Jazeera 2015) and gained widespread currency in opposition circles even though many Syrians would dismiss it as a conspiracy theory.

The same narrative trope – presenting the Assad-regime as secretly collaborating with Israel and undermining the Palestinian cause – is evident in chapters on modern Lebanese history as well. Here, we find the claim that the Sabra and Shatila massacres, perpetrated by the Lebanese Phalange militia, was in fact committed in cooperation with the Syrian regime. It is also mentioned that the former regime intervened in Lebanon and committed massacres against the Palestinian people. Here the 1976 Tel al-Zatar massacre is highlighted without including the Lebanese militia that did the actual killing. Whereas the Syrian forces were without doubt implicated in the siege of and killings at Tel al-Zatar camp this was not the case with Sabra and Shatia, which were besieged by the Israeli army that had launched a full-scale invasion of Lebanon that year (Khalidi, 2021).

This narrative is part of an attempt at presenting the former regime as acting against broader Arab interests through its alliance with Iran against the “brotherly” Iraq (here adopting typical pan-Arab discourse), and through the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri – as well as other Lebanese “nationalists” like Kamal Jumblatt. The Syrian revolution, with its conclusion in the 2024 liberation, is described as restoring “the authentic Arab face of Syria” (12th grade, 2025, pp. 56). One could say that the new material in certain ways competes with the older versions over being more Arab. Cultural Arabism is thus still presented as a normative ideal in the new books.

Geo-political, regional and internal concerns at the heart of revisions of schoolbooks

The most sweeping changes to Syrian schoolbooks concern the war between Syria and Egypt on one side and Israel on the other. The term Tishreen is among those banned and has been systematically removed from textbooks and public discourse. Through my comparative reading of history textbooks, I only found a single use of this term (in a chapter on Russian history, referring to Soviet support for the Tishreen Liberation War) that has somehow escaped the editors´ attention. In the new textbooks, the 1973 war is mentioned only briefly, in connection with Hafez al-Assad’s rise to power in 1970. Here, the war is characterized as a “show war,” with “illusory victories” intended “to legitimize his rule” and “consolidate his power” (9th grade, 2025, pp. 111).

Nevertheless, the texts introduce a degree of ambiguity and, at times, seem internally inconsistent in their attempt at undermining the victory claims of the Assad-regime while criticizing Israeli behavior. For instance, the short paragraph in the 12th-grade book on the war has only been slightly revised from “The Tishreen liberation war in 1973 embodies Arabic Solidarity” (12th -grade, 2013 pp. 56) to “the 1973 war embodies solidarity” (12th grade, 2025, pp. 54). Even though the book argues that the war was a “propaganda war” with the aim of” conferring legitimacy to [Hafez Al-Assad’s] rule” the paragraph also mentions the military contributions of several other Arab states. The regional backing during and after the war is preserved again in an information box on the oil crisis that notes Saudi Arabia’s support for Syria and Egypt, which, according to both versions, “restored the Arab umma’s agency and prestige.” (8th-grade, 2025, pp. 111). The new materials thus seek to balance recognition of Syria’s regional backing as a “frontline state” with the portrayal of Israel as a genuine geostrategic threat while avoiding unnecessary provocation of Israel.

Since December 8, Israel has bombed both military and civilian infrastructure and occupied territory beyond the demilitarized zone established between Syria and Israel in 1974 (Chughtai & Haddad, 2025). A recent example of the consequences of heightened rhetoric occurred in October 2025, when the Ministry of Culture in Aleppo planned an event commemorating October 7, which was subsequently raised in the UN Security Council by the Israeli representative. Similar scrutiny will likely be directed at the new educational materials, as has already been observed regarding Saudi Arabia (Gold & Al Lawati, 2023) and the Palestinian Authority (Moughrabi, 2001) where comparable trends toward normalization of relations with Israel and gradual de-escalation of anti-Israel rhetoric have emerged.

It is too early to predict how the Syrian-Israeli relationship will evolve. Yet, the textbook revisions make one point clear: the al-Shara regime cannot entirely escape the legacy of Syrian-Israeli relations and the historic enmity between the two states. Hence, the revised versions of the history books to some extent retain older framings. Several factors will shape this trajectory, including whether the ongoing rounds of negotiations between Israel and the new leadership in Damascus result in a security agreement or even some degree of normalization. What is certain, however, is that the era of hostile rhetoric against Israel and the instrumentalization of the Palestinian cause as a pillar of regime legitimacy has ended. Ahmad al-Shara can tap into alternative and way more potent claims of revolutionary legitimacy, as well as the promise to bring back the state and the country to its people and bring Syria out of its political and economic isolation.

Kræn Kielsgaard. I am a Phd fellow at the Institute of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, where I study how Syria´s ongoing nation- and state- building efforts since December 8, 2024, take shape through education reform. I first visited Syria in 2007 and moved to live there between 2009 and 2011 as part of my Arabic studies at the University of Aarhus. I have worked with translation, interpretation and teaching Arabic at the University of Copenhagen before starting my doctoral research in September 2025.

References

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Chughtai, A., & Haddad, M. (2025, December 9). Israel attacked Syria more than 600 times over the past year. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/9/israel-attacked-syria-more-than-600-times-over-the-past-year

Danin, R. (2012, February 29). Hamas breaks from Syria. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/blog/hamas-breaks-syria

Fukuoka, K. (2023). History Education in M. Mälksoo (Ed.), Handbook on the Politics of Memory (1st ed., pp. 285–302). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Gold, H., & Al Lawati, A. (2023, June 19). Saudi Arabia is quietly changing its textbooks. Could that lead to acceptance of Israel? CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/19/middleeast/saudi-textbooks-israel-mime-intl/index.html

Greene, A. L. (2017). Creating a Nation Without a Past. SensePublishers EBooks, 101–125

Khalidi, R. (2021). Sabra and Shatila massacre: Evidence from the Kahan Papers. Institute for Palestine Studies. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/232060

Mortensen, R. L. (2025, February 11). Den syriske stat har altid brugt skolebøger til politisk indoktrinering og positionering. Information. https://www.information.dk/debat/2025/02/syriske-stat-altid-brugt-skoleboeger-politisk-indoktrinering-positionering

Mortensen, R. L. (2026). Syriske skolebøger i historiefaget. Babylon Nordisk Tidsskrift for Midtøstenstudier, 23(1), 6–17. https://doi.org/10.5617/ba.13126

Moughrabi, F. (2001). The politics of Palestinian textbooks. Journal of Palestine Studies, 31(1), 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2001.31.1.5

Syrian Ministry of Education – Syria. (2025). General. http://www.moed.gov.sy/general

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2025, January 2). [Facebook page]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064316544313

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2013). History, 8th grade, language track. Syrian Ministry of Education.

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2025). History, 8th grade, language track. Syrian Ministry of Education.

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2013). History, 9th grade, language track. Syrian Ministry of Education.

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2025). History, 9th grade, language track. Syrian Ministry of Education.

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2025). History, 12th-grade (3rd level), language track. Syrian Ministry of Education.

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2013). History, 12th-grade (3rd level), language track. Syrian Ministry of Education

Syrian Ministry of Education. (2025). Social Studies, 5th grade. Syrian Ministry of Education.

Syrian Ministry of Interior, (2020, October 6). ذكرى حرب تشرين التحريرية (السادس من تشرين الأول) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8H6QstK9EcI

Souriaalghad. (2025, 24. oktober). تغيير المناهج التعليمية في سوريا: إعادة كتابة الذاكرة الوطنية أم إصلاح تربوي حقيقي؟. سوريا الغد. https://www.souriaalghad.com/syrian-curriculum-reform-memory-vs-education/

Wertsch, J. V. (2002). Voices of collective remembering. In Cambridge University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511613715

i The curriculum is divided into Islamic Education for Muslims and Christian education for Christian.

ii The corrective movement in Baath parlance signifies Hafez al-Assad´s coup in 1970 against his former Baathist companions from the military.

Cite as: Kielsgaard, K. 2025. “Rewriting Syria´s history – the case of Israel in Syrian schoolbooks after December 8, 2024” Focaalblog, March 20. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/20/kraen-kielsgaard-rewriting-syrias-history-the-case-of-israel-in-syrian-schoolbooks-after-december-8-2024/

Features, Syria After The Assads

Birgitte S. Holst: Introduction: Uses of the past in the post-Assad political transition in Syria


Image1: In what remains of a public building in Darayya, Damascus, a wall painting of Hafez and Basel Al-Assad (Bashar Al-Assad’s late father and brother) is scratched as the building stands empty, April 2025. © Birgitte Holst

Since Bashar Al-Assad was overthrown as President of Syria in early December 2024, the political situation in the country has been volatile. Although a new group of powerholders have taken over, their grip on power is far from complete just as some Syrians are unsure or worried about what such a complete grip on power might entail. As Syrians have endeavoured to navigate this volatile period, the past has emerged as significant in several ways. Understood as both specific renditions of historical events and as particular experiences of life in Syria under first Hafez and then Bashar Al-Assad but also before, the past has been a point of contestation in itself, it has been invoked as a justification for various political claims and projects, and it has been employed as a framework through which to interpret unfolding events.

This has taken various forms. For instance, in the first months after the toppling of the Assad-regime it took the form of contestations over how the very distant past of the pre-Islamic history of the area we today know as Syria should be presented to Syrian school children as somehow formative of the Syria they now live in (see Kielsgaard this feature). There have also been frequent references to the atrocities committed under Assad rule with various groups and individuals making demands about how to enact justice for that (see Al-Khalili, Masoud – both in this feature). Moreover, many Syrians (professional analysts and non-analysts alike) have invoked examples of how Ahmad Al-Sharaa and his group HTS (Hay’a Tahrir Al-Sham) have ruled in Idleb (where the group held control for several years) to assess/predict how the group was likely to rule from Damascus (e.g., Kalam 2024).

Hence, from very early on in the post-Assad period in Syria, the past featured prominently in Syrians’ attempts to navigate the political transition, including formulating political claims and visions for the future of Syria as a nation/homeland/state. The contributions to this feature examine these diverse uses of the past by various groups of Syrians with the purpose of unravelling some of the complexities of the ways in which the past is shaping the present in Syria but is also shaped by the present. Accordingly, while much attention is presently devoted to questions of how Syria’s new rulers herald continuations or discontinuations of the geopolitical, economic and religious landscape as it looked before the overthrow of the Assad-regime (e.g., Tuğal 2025), this feature rather dives into the question of how various groups of Syrians (including the government) invoke the Assad-years and other pasts to navigate the present.

The past, political identities and political turmoil

On the one hand, the past arguably figures prominently in many processes of identity formation and constructions of political projects. Charles Taylor (1989) argued that to know who we are, we must know how we have become and where we are going. Similarly, scholars of nationalism have suggested that nationalists often point to a specific rendition of the past that allows them to argue that the nation is a continuation of previous groups in a different form. This claim regarding the nation in turn allows nationalists to make political demands on behalf of one such earlier group, which they portray as central to national becoming (e.g. Hobsbawm 1983; Smith 1971). Ideas akin to Taylor’s have also been used in various analyses of how political parties claim a coherent group identity through reference to the past and through their agendas for the future (e.g., Bryan 2000).

On the other hand, the context of political transition in the aftermath of a radical break with a previous political order often appears to intensify such processes. In the wake of the collapse of a regime that prohibited or heavily circumscribed contestation of the officially prescribed line of historical rendition, we often see a profusion of engagements with the past. These engagements pertain to questions of who was a victim of what, but also to questions of what events are significant, how they should be interpreted and especially what this means for who “we” are (Krawatzek and Soroka 2021). Moreover, when a political order is upended, uncertainty about the future often follows and as events in the present evolve in unforeseen directions, new perspectives on the past might emerge (Thomassen and Forlenza 2017). This impacts the construction of identities and also of political projects that are caught up in ongoing redefinitions of past, present and future.

In Syria, we have, for instance, seen that past grievances have led to renewed violence which in turn led to new claims about victimhood as well as new political agendas. Hence, while the current Syrian government seems to be heading towards institutionalising their particular version of the connections between past, present and future for Syria, the present moment offers a unique opportunity to grasp the multifaceted ways in which various Syrians are coming to understand these connections and use them to navigate the current political situation. This feature unravels some central aspects of these processes.

Key developments during the first post-Assad year

Overall, the contributions to this feature make clear that while the new government is institutionalising its multidimensional vision of Syria’s past, present and future, this happens in a context of numerous counter stories.

One way in which the past is invoked is to formulate a national identity or a state identity. The new government has taken several steps to designate a direction. As discussed by Kræn Kielsgaard in his contribution, changes to school curricula were one of the first items on the agenda and was initiated already in December 2024. So far, this work has mainly been about editing out any improper references to the Assads while remodelling religious education to the standards of the new Islamist rulers. In addition to amending schoolbooks, in early autumn 2025 the government proclaimed that several national holidays would be scrapped in favour of new ones. Among the cancelled holidays were Martyrs Day and Tishreen Independence Day. Martyrs Day refers to 16 Arab Nationalist Syrians hung by the Ottomans in 1916. Cancelling it may indicate a distancing from Arab Nationalism and a simultaneous toning down of any criticism of the Ottomans (who were Sunni). Tishreen Independence Day marks a victory in the October war in 1973 (against Israel). Cancelling it indicates that no achievement under the Assads should be celebrated. Instead, 8th December, the date when Bashar Al-Assad was toppled in 2024, and 18th March, the date when the revolution began in 2011, are new holidays celebrating achievements of the new government.

While such changes institutionalise a specific national memory (cf. Connerton 2010) that aligns with the religious and political agendas of the new rulers, the government also appears to support (or at least not be against) less institutionalised forms of memory production. Government supporters have, from the early days of the post-Assad period, been saying that the overthrow of Assad rule by a coalition of Arab Sunni Islamist groups (headed by HTS) amounts to a return of the Umayyads. The Umayyad Caliphate was one of the first Sunni Islamic Caliphates and was led from Damascus. Invoking a reference to it underlines the Sunni character of the new rulers. It, moreover, connects Ahmad Al-Sharaa and his government not only with a glorious Sunni past but also with the successful eviction from Damascus of what many Sunnis perceived to be Shia occupiers. During the civil war, the Assad-regime received support from Iran and Shia militias (often of Iraqi origin) were stationed in Damascus. This was a source of much distress among many Sunnis (especially Islamists). They now invoke the reference to the Umayyads also as a way of marking the overthrow of this perceived occupation.

Against this very Sunni vision of the new Syrian state, leading minority figures and also secular intellectuals (Sunni or otherwise) posit that Syria is historically an ethnic and religious mosaic. They hope that this vision can take a prominent place in the definition of the Syrian nation and state in the coming years (e.g., Haj Saleh 2025). That suggestion finds a perhaps surprising resonance with the new government’s continued emphasis on the rich cultural heritage of Syria. As discussed by Christine Crone in her contribution to this feature, the state-controlled news site SANA (Syrian Arab News Agency) continues to produce content that celebrates the diverse parts of Syria’s past. As such, although Syria’s new rulers appear to want to emphasise that the state is now led by Sunnis and that their claim to power is justified by the revolution, they also leave space for claims-making based on the multifaceted history of the area.

In addition to invocations of the past that impart particular messages about the character of the new Syrian nation and state, the past is also invoked by various groups of Syrians in ways that indicate the specific political agendas or models of rule they believe the new government should implement. One issue at the forefront of many Syrians’ concerns is the question of how to rectify the violations committed by the Assad-regime. As Charlotte Al-Khalili shows in her contribution, different Syrians have diverging wishes for how justice should be served in response to these crimes. While some hope for justice through legal routes, others argue that access to knowledge or socio-economic reconstruction of Syria would be more just approaches. Zoya Masoud moreover discusses how the crimes committed under the Assads form the grounds of claims of exclusive victimhood that in turn reignite rifts between Syrians as they lead to a lack of recognition of crimes committed after Assad.

Some groups of Syrians are, however, also invoking slightly more distant pasts as models to think with regarding the question of what kind of new political structure to erect in Syria. As Thomas Pierret analyses in his contribution, the Sunni Ulama (that is, the leading Sunni clerics in Syria) are invoking mainly the 1950s and 1960s, when Syria was newly independent, as a model for rule. Although one might expect the Ulama to highlight instead past periods of Islamic rule, Pierret suggests that they prefer the 1950s and 1960s because this was a time when the Ulama was listened to by politicians and given a freer hand.

Besides the Ulama, some parts of another group of Syrians (that this feature does not discuss in detail) are also invoking the 1950s as a model for rule. This regards what one could call the secular intellectuals who are at present attempting to find their feet in a new reality where the Assad-regime that many of them opposed has been overthrown by religious Sunnis rather than secular Syrians. This group is not unified, and they do not have a coherent position on the new rulers. Some individuals do, however, attempt to impact decisions by the new government. One such attempt emerged already in December 2024 when Syrian filmmaker Ali Atassi (2024) argued that Syria’s interim government should temporarily reinstate the 1950 constitution. This constitution, he suggested, would allow for free elections. After elections, the work to draft a new constitution could start as this work would then be undertaken by democratically elected officials. He pointed out that this exact model has been used before, in 1954 and 1961 respectively, and that there was no reason to do things differently now.

The near and the slightly more distant past is thus invoked in diverse and conflicting ways by different Syrians to make specific political claims about the kinds of actions a new government must take.

Lastly, the past is also used by Syrians to navigate the present volatility. In that regard, Syrians’ responses to the massacres of Alawis in March 2025 and then Druze in July 2025, both at the hands of government affiliated militias, must be highlighted.

Although the massacres had particular political motivations and therefore arguably did not amount to a threat to all minorities, all minorities were affected by them in the sense that the violence roused fears of further attacks on others. Christians are a case in point. When I visited Damascus in February 2025, the Christians I talked to were wary about the prospects of Sunni Islamist rule but also referred to the ways in which minorities had been promised some self-governance in their villages and towns as the Islamist coalition came and left during the “Deterrence of the Aggression” advance (when Bashar Al-Assad was overthrown). Citing these acts of the new government to allow minorities self-determination, the Christians I talked to expressed hope for the future. When I returned to Damascus in April 2025, the massacres on Alawis along the coast had shifted perspectives. People now talked about renewed persecution at the hands of Sunnis. Many invoked examples of sectarian violence unleashed by Islamist militias during the war and some even referred back to 1860 when around 5000 Christians were killed by (predominantly) Sunnis in Damascus. In June 2025, after the bombing of the Mar Elias Church in Damascus, the Patriarch of Antioch and all the East for the Greek Orthodox Church, John 10 Yazigi, made this reference as well. The fear among the Christians I talked to in April was that this historical persecution would continue in the future.

What I want to highlight about this is that while previous persecution of minorities was most likely always in the back of the minds of my Christian interlocutors, the massacres along the coast made them invoke this history actively as a lens through which the present could be understood and the future predicted. As discussed by Salam Said and Maria Kastrinou in their contribution, the Syrian Druze after the massacres committed against them in Suwayda are invoking the past in another way. On the one hand, they are attempting to comprehend how the past of (overall) inter-sectarian conviviality could be shattered so profoundly in the space of a few days. On the other hand, some are invoking historical references to understand what kinds of destruction of the national fabric is unfolding at present. Hence, in divergent ways Christians and Druze are relying on the past as a compass with which to navigate uncertainty, but this does not relieve that uncertainty.

While the massacres are crucial, Katharina Lange (in the final contribution) points to the significant issue that the toppling of Bashar Al-Assad has not entailed significant changes for everyone. She describes how Syrians in some parts of Syria that were neglected by Assad and are also neglected by the new government have invoked the past of tribal political leadership customs to fill the void of an absent state and position themselves in relation to competing powerholders. Hence, Lange’s post demonstrates that the past is not only a navigational tool for those who are caught up in the current changes in the country but also for Syrians who experience the present time as very similar to the recent past.

The significance of the past in the political present

While not exhaustive, the developments unfolded above are some of the key examples of the uses the past is put to by Syrians in the present period. Interrogating these uses, as the posts in this feature do, is significant because the new government, various political actors and divergent groups and communities in Syria have not yet solidified their approach. There is a space to make changing claims. While they may not be listened to, they show us how divergent Syrians are coming to see themselves in relation to Syria past, present and future.

References

Atassi, Ali. 2024. “تفعيل دستور 1950 كمظلة للمرحلة الانتقالية في سورية”. Al Jumhuriya. https://aljumhuriya.net/ar/2024/12/18/%d8%aa%d9%81%d8%b9%d9%8a%d9%84-%d8%af%d8%b3%d8%aa%d9%88%d8%b1-1950/

Bryan, Dominic. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. Pluto Press.

Connerton, Paul. 2010. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haj Saleh, Yassin. 2025. ”الوطنية السورية وبدائلها”. Al Jumhuriya. https://aljumhuriya.net/ar/2025/09/02/%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%88%d8%b7%d9%86%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b3%d9%88%d8%b1%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d9%88%d8%a8%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%a6%d9%84%d9%87%d8%a7/

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. “Introduction: Inventing Traditions”. In Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.) The Invention of Tradition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Kalam. 2024. “Who are HTS? The New Rulers of Syria – with Orwa Ajjoub.” Kalam podcast. December 2024. https://open.spotify.com/episode/6p8VU2HL3fdcbXReN9XvuC

Krawatzek, Félix and George Soroka. 2021. “Circulation, Conditions, Claims: Examining the Politics of Historical Memory in Eastern Europe”. East European Politics and Societies and Cultures 36(1): 198–224

Smith, Anthony. 1971. Theories of Nationalism. London: Duckworth.

Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Thomassen, Bjørn and Rosario Forlenza. 2017 (2013). “The Pasts of the Present: World War II Memories and the Construction of Political Legitimacy in Post–Cold War Italy”. In Christian Karner (ed.) The Use and Abuse of Memory. New York: Routledge.

Tuğal, Cihan. 2025. “The Evolution of Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham and Syria’s Future.” Spectre Journal. https://spectrejournal.com/the-evolution-of-hayat-tahrir-al-sham-and-syrias-future/

Birgitte S. Holst is an associated researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin (ZMO). She is an anthropologist focusing on processes of political and social change with a special emphasis on Syria. Her first monograph Authoritarianism, Displacement and Syrian Family Life: Reckoning with the State (Berghahn Books) will be published in 2026.

Cite as: Holst, B. 2026. “Introduction: Uses of the past in the post-Assad political transition in Syria” Focaalblog March 20. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/20/birgitte-s-holst-introduction-uses-of-the-past-in-the-post-assad-political-transition-in-syria/

Art and Visual Anthropology, AVA General Posts, Blog

Görkem Akgöz: “The Sad Truth” Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy

This text was originally published in Swedish in Arbetar Historia (No.191-192, 2024). Special thanks to the editors for granting permission to republish.

In 2015, during the peak of what became known as the “refugee crisis,” global attention turned towards an unexpected actor: Denmark. Long regarded as a liberal refuge and one of the first signatories of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, Denmark experienced a significant policy shift under the ruling Social Democrats. i The country implemented some of the world’s strictest refugee policies, becoming the first nation to mandate that even resettled refugees must eventually return to their home countries.

Sjælsmark and Kærshovedgård, two semi-open “departure centres” established in 2013 to process rejected asylum-seekers, paradoxically became temporary residences for refugees who had already been granted permission to remain in Denmark. These deportation centres, which subject non-deported individuals to indefinite waits under conditions that verge on de facto incarceration, have become pivotal sites in Denmark’s deportation-focused asylum policy.

Danish migration scholar and documentary director Helle Stenum’s latest documentary, The Sad Truth (2023), takes viewers through the gates of these camps while situating them within Denmark’s broader historical context. The film focuses on young Syrian women confined to these camps, grappling with a harsh ultimatum: return to their war-torn homeland or remain indefinitely in a state of uncertainty. By interweaving their struggles with historical accounts of Danish deportation practices—such as the expulsion of Jews in the 1930s and the treatment of German war refugees between 1945-47—Stenum raises profound questions about historical memory: who gets to tell these stories, who is remembered, and who is forgotten? At its heart, the documentary interrogates the concept of agency, connecting past and present experiences.

Image 1: Screenshot from the Vimeo website for “The Sad Truth”; where the movie can be rented for viewing (see: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thesadtruth)

This interrogation of agency plays out in several layers throughout the film, both in the personal experiences of the refugees and the broader political discourse. At the highest political levels, Danish prime ministers invoke refugee issues in their New Year messages, reducing complex human experiences to numbers in debates about national challenges. Next, these numbers gain a face. We meet the young refugee women awaiting their fate in prison-like deportation camps, their circumstances shaped by constraints that limit their agency. Yet, through their stories of resilience and hope, we see the enduring power of personal narratives to illuminate the human cost of political decisions. White Danish activists represent another form of agency, using their privilege to amplify marginalized voices and challenge dominant narratives. Among the refugees, Rahima Abdullah’s journey reflects a dynamic and evolving agency. Initially impressed by Denmark’s commitment to the rule of law, her disillusionment grows as she witnesses its violations first-hand.

Finally, the film highlights the agency of two older female historians, Kirsten Lylloff and Lone Rünitz, who wrestle with the challenges of confronting uncomfortable historical truths.ii One of them poignantly reflects on the backlash that arises when challenging a nation’s self-image, saying, “A bird does not shit in its own nest.” This sentiment about the difficulty of critiquing one’s own country echoes a broader public discomfort with such discussions. A recent Washington Post opinion piece captures this shift in Danish politics, titled “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.”iii The article chronicles Denmark’s dramatic turn in refugee politics, noting, “Denmark was not always like this. Thirty years ago, the country was relatively open and welcoming, with strong protections for asylum seekers and refugees. But that started to change in the 1990s, as the anti-immigrant rhetoric of the far-right Danish People’s Party proved politically potent.”

To this, our two historians might reply in present-day social media jargon: “Hold my beer! We need to go much further back than that to understand what’s happening now!” This is where the film’s second storyline comes in—the research of Lylloff and Rünitz on Denmark’s treatment of Jews in the 1930s and German war refugees between 1945-47, which provides crucial historical context to the contemporary refugee debate.

When the historians speak in the documentary, their presence closely aligns with what is often called the expository documentary format.iv This style typically features an authoritative voice-over or a historian presenting directly to the camera, acting as both narrator and objective assessor of evidence. However, Lylloff and Rünitz offer more than just authoritative voices. Their involvement goes beyond simply providing historical facts; they bring personal and professional insights into the conversation, adding depth and complexity to the film’s exploration of Denmark’s current refugee policies.

We first see these two women casually sitting on a bench, engaged in conversation with each other, sharing the personal and professional costs of their academic research. This intimate exchange adds a layer of depth to their authoritative roles, making them more relatable and humanized. In addition, another historian makes her presence felt in the film, though her face remains unseen—Helle Stenum herself. Through her academic writing and documentaries, including those that address the legacies of Danish colonialism, Stenum exposes her country’s troubling historical and contemporary record.v

In “The Sad Truth,” Stenum undertakes a challenging task—a diachronic historical comparison—that many historians are usually hesitant to pursue given the clear and significant structural and contextual differences between the late 1930s and the mid-2010s. Academically, the contemporary European (so-called) refugee crisis has not received sufficient historical contextualization. Historical analyses have been slow to integrate into refugee studies, a relatively new field dominated by social scientists with largely presentist concerns.vi However, outside academia, such comparisons have been made in public and political debates. 

A notable example comes from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who, in the autumn of 2015, during the height of the so-called refugee crisis, warned of the dangers of “amnesia.” In an interview with The Guardian, Al Hussein argued that contemporary public rhetoric about refugees echoed that used by Western leaders in the late 1930s.vii It is this amnesia that the two Danish historians are trying to confront by telling the stories of Jewish and German war refugees. “Both politicians and ordinary Danes have incredibly short-term memories,” says one of them. As I watched, I found myself answering back, “Well, which nation doesn’t?” But it is not only public forgetting or historical amnesia at stake here. A Danish retiree affiliated with Grandparents for Asylum, a coalition of activists who support refugees, offers another perspective. She notes that many Danes she encounters remain unaware—or unwilling to acknowledge—what is happening. “When I tell them what we are doing, people don’t believe me,” she says. “They say, ‘But we Danes don’t treat people like that.’” viii So, what we’re dealing with is not just public forgetting of the past, but also a wilful ignorance of the present.

But where lies the distinction between the two? How do these two forces intertwine in the everyday lives of those affected by them? The documentary poignantly links two refugees from different time periods through a powerful scene: Syrian refugee Rahima touching the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stone marking the home of German Jew Ruth Niedrig, who was handed over to the Gestapo by Danish authorities. This gesture made me wonder: Did Stenum have the chance to show this scene to Rahima and other Syrian refugees? If so, how did they react? What was Rahima’s understanding of this history? Given her initial view of Denmark as a bastion of the rule of law, how did she respond to the historical context unfolding before her?

Though both Ruth and Rahima have grappled with profound uncertainties during their time in Denmark—navigating what can be described as the Danish limbo—their experiences are rooted in vastly different historical contexts, both politically and economically. In 1930s Denmark, amid post-Depression economic hardship and widespread unemployment, concerns about refugees draining social policy resources were widespread. By contrast, Rahima and her fellow Syrian refugees arrived during a period of economic prosperity, within the context of a strong welfare state. Yet, how did a country with a tradition of social solidarity gradually adopt an anti-refugee stance? How did this tradition evolve into a protectionist and xenophobic form of welfare-state patriotism? The film starkly illustrates this shift, particularly when the Danish Minister of Migration proudly references the Danish welfare state tradition in defence of the new refugee policy at the European Parliament.

The discourse of welfare-state patriotism transcends racial, religious, and cultural boundaries, feeding into broader debates about immigrant integration into Danish society. Central to these discussions are concerns about immigrants’ socioeconomic status, their employment in low-pay jobs, and their reliance on social benefits. Refugees are often depicted within this narrative as a burden—requiring substantial long-term investment from the state, while struggling to enter the labour market effectively. As such, the aim of the current Danish refugee and asylum policyseems twofold: to pressure those already in the country into accepting voluntary return, while simultaneously sending a loud and clear message: “Don’t think about coming to Denmark.” But, then, who is this message truly directed at?

The influx of largely extra-European refugees raised concerns about the potential long-term impact of mostly young Middle Eastern males on the social stability of European democracies. In 2012, sociologist Sara Farris coined the term “femonationalism” to describe the alignment between nationalist ideologies and certain feminist ideas, particularly when driven by xenophobic motivations.ix Farris documents how some European right-wing parties and self-identified feminists exploit women’s rights and gender equality principles to justify discriminatory practices against Muslim and non-Western immigrants.

I raise this concept here for two reasons. First, femonationalism is particularly relevant to Stenum’s documentary, which selectively portrays only female refugees, despite Denmark’s ostensibly non-gender-discriminatory refugee policy. This selective portrayal invites an exploration of its implications within the context of femonationalism and the institutionalization of gendered integration policies. Second, in 2019, the Danish prime minister declared a goal of “zero asylum seekers.” However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Denmark accepted Ukrainian refugees. Danish authorities and NGOs actively assisted these refugees, ensuring their integration into Danish society. What does this shift reveal about the political and societal consequences of categorizing, labelling, and stereotyping refugees?

As we continue to witness devastating acts of state-induced violence, most recently in Palestine, which flagrantly breach international law, the questions raised by Stenum’s documentary take on even greater urgency. Her work forces us to reckon not only with the memory of historical injustices but also with the present moment—where the way we treat refugees is inextricably tied to political ideologies, societal perceptions, and economic realities. This film serves as both a reminder and a challenge, asking us to confront the uncomfortable truths about how we view those who seek refuge, particularly when their needs clash with the dominant narratives of national identity and security. As Walter Benjamin wrote, “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.” x Stenum’s documentary pushes us to recognize these images, to reckon with the past, and to engage with the present in ways that are both reflective and responsive to the demands of justice and humanity.

i During the Nazi occupation of Denmark, many Danish people played a crucial role in one of the largest and most exceptional rescue operations of the Holocaust, famously saving the lives of the vast majority of Jews living in Denmark, including several hundred German and “stateless Jews,” by helping them escape to Sweden. Levine, Paul A. 2011. “Sweden’s Complicated Neutrality and the Rescue of Danish Jewry.” In The Routledge History of the Holocaust, edited by Jonathan C. Friedman, 305-314. New York: Routledge.

ii See, for example, Lylloff, Kirsten. “Dødsårsager for tyske flygtningebørn i 1945 [Causes of death of German refugee children in 1945].” Ugeskr Laeger, vol. 162, no. 9, 2000; Rünitz, Lone. “Denmark’s Response to the Nazi Expulsion Policy, 1938-39.” Holocaust Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 2005.

iii Rauhala, Emily. “How Progressive Denmark Became the Face of the Anti-Migration Left.” Washington Post, April 6, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/06/denmark-zero-asylum-refugees/. Accessed June 20, 2024. It is important to note that in this context, “the left” specifically refers to the Social Democratic Party. However, two parties to the left of the Social Democrats, which currently hold 24 out of 179 seats in parliament, are highly critical of the Social Democrats’ position on this issue. These parties advocate for a more “humanistic” approach to refugee policy and are poised to gain significant support, according to recent polls. Special thanks to Lars Kjølhede Christensen for bringing this point to my attention.

iv Bell, Desmond. “Documentary Film and the Poetics of History.” Journal of Media Practice, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, p. 9.

v Stenum’s award-winning documentary “We Carry It Within Us” (2017) examines Denmark’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and explores how the colonial past continues to shape contemporary media, art, museums, education, and wealth distribution, alongside various practices of remembering and forgetting.

vi Ahonen, Pertti. “Europe and Refugees: 1938 and 2015-16.” Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 52, no. 2-3, 2018, p. 137.

vii Jones, Sam. “Refugee Rhetoric Echoes 1938 Summit Before Holocaust, UN Official Warns.” The Guardian, October 14, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/oct/14/refugee-rhetoric-echoes-1938-summit-before-holocaust-un-official-warns. Accessed June 20, 2024.

viii Rauhala, “How Progressive Denmark.”

ix Farris, Sara. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Duke University Press, 2017.

x Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, 2003, p. 391.

Görkem Akgöz is a research fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her main research interests are global labour history, political economy, and women and gender history. She is the author of In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialisation, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey(Brill, 2024). She is the co-chair of the Labour Network of the European Social Science History Conference, the co-coordinator of the Workplaces: Pasts and Presents working group of the European Labour History Network, and a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Review of Social History. More information can be found at www.gorkemakgoz.com.

Cite as: Akgöz, Görkem 2025. “’The Sad Truth’ Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy” Focaalblog 8 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/01/08/gorkem-akgoz-the-sad-truth-then-and-now-pasts-and-presents-of-danish-refugee-policy/

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Axel Rudi: Independence from Whom? The Aftermath of the Kurdish Referendum

 In the future, people will say, “On the 16th of October, it happened again.” The Kurds were once again betrayed by the international community. Afraid of losing their territory to the Kurdish self-governance authorities after the independence referendum, the Iraqi state responded with overwhelming military force, compelling the Peshmerga to lay down their arms. In the following days, the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) lost approximately 40 percent of their territory and withdrew into the pre-ISIS 2003 borders at the behest of the regional powers. The hopes and dreams for Kurdish independence were dashed again, and “the Kurds’ only friends are the mountains.” Shock and disbelief at these recent developments, however, belie a certain naïveté.

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2017 UK Elections, Features

John Gledhill: It’s Corbyn’s critics who need the history lesson

This post is part of a feature on the 2017 UK elections, moderated and edited by Patrick Neveling (SOAS, University of London).

In his very carefully argued speech of 26 May 2017 on the relationship between contemporary terrorism and foreign policy, Leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn observed: “Many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism here at home.” Conservative and Liberal Democrat politicians immediately accused him of bad timing and muddled and dangerous thinking. Some critics, exemplified by Conservative Security Minister Ben Wallace, argued that Corbyn needed a history lesson, since it was obvious that the roots of “Islamic” terrorism predated 9/11 and then US President George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan. “These people hate our values, not our foreign policy,” Wallace insisted in a radio interview that I listened to this morning.

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