Archive for the ‘Syria’ Category
Discussing the Missing in Damascus
It was a great honour to speak in the presence of the mothers and fathers of some of the hundreds of thousands of forcibly disappeared people in Syria. We were at the National Museum in Damascus, and I was presenting the Syria Prisons Museum’s research into Branch 215 of Assad’s Military Intelligence. Agnes Callamard, the head of Amnesty International, was speaking too, as was Zeina Shahla of the National Commission for the Missing; Wassil Hamada, who has worked on Sednaya and other prisons; and Reham Hassan, who lost two brothers to ISIS.
Al-Jumhuriya did this report on the event:
I urge everyone to visit the Branch 215 investigation on the website, where there is a virtual 3D tour of the two buildings in Kafr Souseh where the branch was located. Thousands of people were murdered at these locations. The Caesar photographs were taken here. The website also has riveting witness testimony. And everyone should read the investigation by Amer Matar called Branch 215: the Bureaucracy of Murder. It provides a detailed illustration of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.
The Power Shifts Changing the Middle East
I was pleased to be invited again to speak with Faisal al-Yafai on The Lede podcast, connected to the excellent New Lines Magazine. We spoke about Ahmad al-Sharaa’s visits to both Moscow and Washington DC, the role of ideology in today’s Middle East, and even Scottish independence! Raya Jalabi of the Financial Times tals first about the Iraqi militias and the regional changes since & October 2023.
Ahmad al-Sharaa in the White House
This article was first published at Time magazine.
On November 10, President Donald Trump met Syria’s transitional president Ahmad al-Sharaa at the White House. The meeting was remarkable in many ways. It was the first time that a Syrian president had ever been hosted in the White House. Trump and al-Sharaa had briefly met before, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on May 14. That date was almost as remarkable as the meeting itself, because it was the twentieth anniversary to the day of Ahmad al-Sharaa’s arrest by American troops for membership of al-Qaeda in Iraq. When al-Sharaa later started fighting in Syria, the US not only declared him a terrorist, it put a $10 million bounty on his head.
The White House welcome looks like a new dawn for Syrian-American relations, given that the US has sanctioned Syria as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’ since 1979 – and that further sanctions were added by the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations.
And it’s certainly quite a turnaround for a former jihadist – though perhaps not as much as it first seems. Al-Sharaa was in prison for most of the Iraqi civil war, so he didn’t participate in attacks on Shia civilians. Released just as the Syrian Revolution was beginning in March 2011, he returned to Syria to establish a militia called Jabhat al-Nusra, which later transformed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). These organizations focused on fighting Assad and the Iranian militias that supported him. They never attacked the West, and they steered clear of the mass civilian casualty operations favoured by Iraqi jihadists.
Al-Sharaa broke definitively with ISIS in 2013, and has fought it continuously since 2014. In power, he aims for good relations with the world rather than apocalyptic war. And where ISIS fielded a morality police to impose a dress code, in al-Sharaa’s Damascus, women wear what they like.
The US had conducted multiple anti-ISIS operations in HTS-ruled Idlib, including the one that killed ISIS ‘caliph’ Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Though there was no direct coordination, HTS fighters did not attack the US special forces. Indirect understandings intensified into direct cooperation when al-Sharaa assumed power on December 8 last year, leading to at least eight joint operations. Now, after the meeting in the White House, Syria has announced its formal integration into the Global Coalition against ISIS. This will lead to still more joint action. Even more significantly, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – the Kurdish-led militia that controls large parts of northeastern Syria – can no longer claim to be the Coalition’s boots on the ground. This is a step towards Syria’s reunification under central authority.
Read the rest of this entry »Documenting the Means of Murder
The Syria Prisons Museum has now launched with an event in the National Museum in Damascus, and as a website here. The first in-depth investigation, complete with 3D virtual tour, witness testimonies, and more, is on Sednaya Prison.
I wrote the following article for Time magazine about the purpose and methodology of the Syria Prisons Museum, and some of its findings.
In Sednaya Prison, the names of those sentenced to death were called once a week. These men were removed from the group cells and chained together. They were usually held in designated cells for their last three days of life, during which time they were deprived of food and water. Apparently this made them die more easily, less messily. The killing itself was done on the ground floor, in the reception hall, using a gallows constructed of metal pipes which was large enough to dispatch several victims at once.
The victims were not criminals but political prisoners arrested for protesting, organizing or fighting against Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime, which finally collapsed last December after 14 years of revolution and counter-revolutionary war. Sednaya Prison – otherwise known as ‘the human slaughterhouse’ – was the most notorious of the dozens of prisons run by the regime. Prisons had always been central to Assadist rule. From 1970 – when Bashar al-Assad’s father Hafez seized power in a military coup – a comprehensive system of surveillance, detention and torture terrified Syrians and turned the country into a “kingdom of silence”.
Syrians found their voices in 2011 when, in the context of the regional ‘Arab Spring’, they rose up against the regime. But they paid an enormous price. Assad responded by declaring war on the people. Iran and Russia sent troops and war planes to help him, while Turkey and Gulf states backed rebel militias. And as the cities burned, the prisons were transformed into death camps. The Syrian Network for Human Rights reported in August that at least 160,000 men and women remain unaccounted for after being forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime. Many of their corpses fill the mass graves which are still being uncovered today.
The result is the mass traumatisation of Syrian society. Recovery from such terrible crimes requires transparency, understanding, and at least a degree of justice. And the first step towards these aims is to clearly establish the facts of what happened. A Syrian-led organisation called the Prisons Museum is at the forefront of this effort. It brings together investigative journalism, human rights advocacy and cutting-edge technology to shed light on horrors which the perpetrators would prefer remain hidden. (I am the Museum’s English-language editor.)
The surviving prisoners in Sednaya Prison were liberated by rebel fighters and local civilians in the early hours of December 8 last year, as Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow. A few days later, a Prisons Museum team entered the facility and began to document every room and object.
Read the rest of this entry »The ISIS Legacy in Syria
This was a great discussion the Prisons Museum conducted with Shiraz Maher, author of Salafi-Jihadism: the History of an Idea. On behalf of the Prisons Museum there’s me and Dagmar Hovestadt, our communications manager. Here we discuss whether ISIS has a future, and what the transitional government tells us about jihadism, or post-jihadism, in the 21st Century.
Constructive Criticism
Here I am on the Eon podcast with some post-Suwayda constructive criticism for the Syrian transitional authorities.
The Syrian Centenary Initiative
On 23 July, something called The Syrian Centenary Initiative appeared on Facebook. This was the first sign I’d seen of organized opposition other than by militia. The Initiative’s declaration explained that it had been formed in response to the massacres in Suwayda and the urgent threats to Syrian unity posed by internal violence and external actors like Israel. It pointed out the essential fact that the “logic of mobilization” – that is, the current government’s repeated mobilization of one sector of society against another – contradicts the “mentality of state [building].” It called on the “temporary authority” to engage in “shared national emergency efforts” to solve the crisis.
The Initiative had ten demands. Here they are, in brief summary (and this is based on my translation from the Arabic scribbled during a train ride. If you think I’ve got the emphasis of anything wrong, or missed out anything essential, please let me know):
1. A complete ceasefire in Suwayda.
2. Guarantees that the violence will not be repeated.
3. An immediate stop to population transfers and demographic change.
4. For all sides in Syria to accept the principle that no weapons should be held by any party other than the state.
5. The formation of an independent investigative committee into the Suwayda violence consisting of Syrian, Arab and international legal and human rights experts.
6. Rapid modifications to the Constitutional Declaration, including a law to allow the formation of political parties and civil society organizations, and changes to the way the parliament is formed.
Read the rest of this entry »Syria after Sweida on the Lede
I and then Zaina Erhaim talk about Syria with Faysal Yafai for The Lede, the podcast run by New Lines magazine. Follow this link to listen.
The Wounds of the Past, and Transitional Justice
This essay was first published at New Lines Magazine.
In dry hills half an hour’s drive outside Damascus, Sednaya Prison comes into view. A squat three stories covering a good deal of land, it imposes on the vision as we approach from below. Repeated rings of barbed wire and mine fields surround the main building. The Assad regime’s organized graffiti praising the leader and describing the (non-existent) struggle against Israeli occupation still covers the outer buildings which housed the guards and their workshops until the regime collapsed on December 8 2024.
The whirlwind of revolutionary change has hit the place. Rubble and rubbish litter the entrance. I and the photographers climb a few steps into the reception room where prisoners were previously pushed into narrow caged corridors and stripped of their clothes. It isn’t hard to imagine the screams and thuds as new arrivals received their ‘reception party’ beatings. Although on second thoughts, my imagination may be overdoing it. Absolute silence was often enforced on the victims, even during torture.
Amongst the detritus here on the filthy tiled floor, a couple of artificial legs lie marooned. They are made of very basic plastic, one to fit beneath a knee, one to replace an entire limb from the hip down. I can’t understand why they’re still here. Surely their owners didn’t discard them when they fled? Later, however, I read the transcript of an interview with a survivor of the prison. He described the reception room process: “If you have a prosthetic leg, they throw it away. If you have glasses, they get rid of them.”
At the center of the prison is a spiral staircase made of metal and surrounded by metal bars. This connects (or for the prisoners, separated) the three stories and the three wings fanning out from the center. Nine cells recede down each corridor. These are the group cells, in which dozens of men were crammed. Very thin, dark brown blankets cover the floor. There is a bad odour or the memory of one, a discomforting sweet staleness.
Down the stairs are the solitary cells, so-called because they aren’t big enough to fit more than one man, though in fact three, four or five men were often forced inside. Each cell contains a dirty squat toilet, from which the men also had to drink. Food was delivered through a slot at the bottom of the heavy metal door. There is no light inside. The prisoners existed in absolute darkness. Sightlessness as well as soundlessness contributed to the deprivation. There is writing on some of the walls nevertheless, apparently etched by fingernails. A name of a man and his city, Tartous. A date in 2014. A count of days, though in the dark the days could only have been guessed at.
The smell is stronger here. One of the photographers explains that in the first days after the liberation streams of human waste flowed from the cells into the hallway. We’re stepping now on blankets put down to absorb the filth. They have hardened in the dry air in the months since, but the smell persists. This is despite the thick clouds of incense currently being burnt upstairs, where the group cells are. That sweetness covers but doesn’t hide the deeper, more disturbing sweetness of persistent degradation.
If this works as a symbol – and we are in need of symbols, of any tools we come across to help us comprehend – it serves to embody the need for a deep cleaning of Syrian society. Superficial treatment won’t do, for the crimes committed in the Assad prisons system can be rightly described as radically evil. Of the at least 130,000 people missing in Assad’s dungeons, only about 30,000 were released in the hours following the fall of the regime. That means at least 100,000 victims were murdered in Sednaya and other prisons, by torture or starvation or medical neglect. Their corpses pack the mass graves found at Qutayfa and many other sites. The victims were not criminals, but people who had spoken, protested, organized, or in some cases fought against the regime.
Read the rest of this entry »The Tragic Arc of Baathism
An edited version of this essay was published by Unherd.
As well as the most persistent, the Syrian Revolution has been the most total of revolutions. Starting in early 2011 and culminating unexpectedly in December of 2024, it – or rather, the Syrian people – managed to oust not only Bashar al-Assad, but also his army, police and security services, his prisons and surveillance system, and his allied warlords, as well as the imperialist states which had kept him in place. The revolutionary victory marked the end of a dictatorship which had lasted 54 years (under Bashar and his father, Hafez), and also the final, belated death of the 77-year-old Baath Party, once the largest institution in both Syria and Iraq.
Founded in Damascus in April 1947, the Arab Socialist Baath Party went through three major stages, each closely related to the vexed political history of the Arab region. The first stage was one of abstract and unrealistic ideals. Baathism was the most enthusiastic iteration of Arab nationalism. Whereas Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser understood the Arab world as a strategic depth for Egypt and a field in which he could exert his own influence, the Baathists had an almost mystical apprehension of the Arabs as a nation transcending historical forces, one which had a “natural right to live in a single state.”
The founding figures were Syrians who had immersed themselves in European philosophy (Bergson, Nietzsche and Marx) while studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Two of the three founders were members of minority communities, and it’s useful to think of Baathism as a means of constructing an alternative identity to Islam. While Salah al-Din Bitar was a Sunni Muslim, Michel Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian and Zaki Arsuzi was an Alawi who later adopted atheism. The three mixed enlightenment modernism with romantic nationalism. Arsuzi, for instance, believed Arabic, unlike other languages, to be “intuitive” and “natural”. And Aflaq turned the usual understanding of history on its head. He considered Islam to be a manifestation of “Arab genius”, and deemed the ancient pre-Islamic civilizations of the fertile crescent – the Assyrians, Phoenicians, and so on – to be Arab too, though they hadn’t spoken Arabic.
Like other grand political narratives of the 20th Century, Baathism was an attempt to repurpose religious energies for secular ends. The word Baath means “resurrection”. The party slogan was umma arabiya wahida zat risala khalida, or “One Arab Nation Bearing an Eternal Message”, which sounds strangely grandiose even before the realization that umma is the word formerly used to describe the global Islamic community, and that risala is used to refer to the message delivered by the Prophet Muhammad.
The party’s motto – “Unity, Freedom, Socialism” – referred to the desire for a single, unified Arab state from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Gulf in the east, and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. The Arab state should be free of foreign control, and should construct a socialist economic system.
This dream was spread by countryside doctors and itinerant intellectuals. In those early days, the leadership consisted disproportionately of schoolteachers and the membership of schoolboys. In 1953, however, the party merged with Akram Hawrani’s peasant-based Arab Socialist Party. This brought it a mass membership for the first time, and it came second in Syria’s 1954 election.
By then, episodes of democracy were becoming more and more rare. Since Colonel Husni al-Zaim’s March 1949 coup – the first in Syria and anywhere in the Arab world – politics was increasingly being determined by men in uniform. The most significant of these soldiers was Nasser, who seized power in Cairo in 1952, then became a pan-Arab hero when he confronted the UK, France and Israel over the Suez canal in 1956.
Read the rest of this entry »A Background of Blood
The ISIS Prisons Museum has produced the most comprehensive study yet of the 2014 Shaitat Massacre, the worst ISIS atrocity in Syria. The focus on the massacre includes witness testimonies, 3D prison tours, investigations into some of the dozens of prisons established in the Shaitat areas, and a detailed report on the killing and mass displacement of the clan and the looting and destruction of its property. The report is by far the most serious treatment yet of the events. It’s written by Sasha and Ayman al-Alo, and can be read here.
ISIS violence didn’t drop from the skies. It emerged from a context of massacres in Syria and Iraq perpetrated by the Assad regime, the Saddam Hussein regime, and various actors in the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, including US troops and sectarian Shia militias. I have written a text to give this context. It’s called A Background of Blood, and can be read here.
Neither Secularism Nor Islamism…
I’m really happy to have published this with New Lines Magazine, an excellent initiative in long-form journalism organized by some of the very best people in the field.
The world is worried about the jihadism of Syria’s new leaders, but the world may be missing the point.
Currently, Abu Muhammad al-Jowlani the jihadist is nowhere to be seen. His alter-ego Ahmad al-Sharaa the politician, however, is on television, and in the presidential palace. He has smoothly assumed the role of head of state, meeting foreign dignitaries, issuing wise advice to the nation, reassuring minorities that their rights will be protected.
So far, al-Sharaa’s political and communication skills match or even supersede al-Jowlani’s military prowess. Some years ago the man was an al-Qaida-linked jihadi, in turban. Then he lived through a Che Guevara stage, in fatigues. That lasted until his triumphant entry to the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus on December 8 last year. Now, going by his real name and no longer a nom de guerre, dressed in tie and suit, he stresses his – that is, Syria’s – desire for domestic and regional stability. And lest anyone still thinks he’s a backward-looking obscurantist, he mocks others for their weird obsessions with the distant past.
On December 22, sitting beside Lebanese Druze leader Walid Junblatt, al-Sharaa referenced Iran’s intervention to defend the Assad regime. Iran had organized Shia militias from as far away as Pakistan to fight in Syria, and had mobilized them with stories about power struggles amongst the immediate successors to the Prophet Muhammad. “Events that happened 1400 years ago… what have they got to do with us?” al-Sharaa asked rhetorically. “What is this mentality? What is this logic?”
It is simultaneously wonderful that Syria has such a skilful leader at this delicate moment and frightening that such a powerful personality overshadows the polity being born. Al-Sharaa’s immense abilities and newfound charisma, and the size of his victory (though it’s not by any means just his) makes it more likely that he will morph again, this time into a national strongman, and that’s probably not what Syria needs as it emerges from under the corpse of the old dictatorship.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh has written of necktie fascists and bearded fascists. It’s not the dress sense that’s the issue here, but the fascism. Thus far, al-Sharaa is doing what the people (presumably) want, and steering away from fascism. He says there will be elections, and that civilians will rule. Of course, what he means by elections remains to be seen. The Salafi-Jihadist current from which he emerges generally considers democracy un-Islamic. So has he genuinely changed his mind on this matter? Will the men under his command accept this change of mind? Will he, and they, henceforth seek to persuade society of their point of view, as would an ordinary political party?
Read the rest of this entry »The End of Eternity
A slightly edited version of this text was published at the Guardian.
The liberation of Syria was long hoped for, but unexpected. Over the last weeks, Syrians have experienced the full range of human emotions, with the exception of boredom.
On the first two Assad-free Fridays, millions of celebrants swelled the streets to chant and sing and speak formerly forbidden truths. There was a huge presence of women, who had been less visible in the years of war. Relatives are meeting again and assuaging their pain as hundreds of thousands return from the camps of exile. At the same time, millions are having to accept at last that their loved ones have been tortured to death. It now appears that most of the 130,000 lost in Assad’s prisons (a bare minimum figure) are dead. Dozens of mass graves have already been discovered.
Working hard to crawl out from under the corpse of one of the worst torture states in history, Syrians are now looking to the future.
A key factor in the final fall of the regime was the remarkable discipline and social intelligence shown by the HTS-led rebel coalition. When it became clear that neither Christians nor unveiled women were being harassed in liberated Aleppo, that there was no looting, and that Shia towns which had hosted murderous foreign militias were not subjected to revenge attacks, then tens of thousands of Assad soldiers felt safe enough to defect or desert.
But some still harbour deep suspicions of HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa, previously known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. He also has enormous charisma, which might ease the path to a new dictatorship. So far, however, the signs are more hopeful than that. Al-Sharaa is popular precisely for his non-dictatorial qualities.
Read the rest of this entry »Discussing Syria on Eon
I was pleased to discuss events unfolding in Syria and the region on the Pakistan-based Eon podcast.
The ISIS Prisons Museum on MEMO
I was interviewed at length on the Middle East Monitor podcast about the ISIS Prisons Museum. I’m really pleased to work with this highly-professional, grassroots Syrian and Iraqi project, which brings together human rights, investigative journalism and cutting-edge technology. I gave the interview before the fall of the Assad regime, so I need to update my words by saying that the IPM is currently hard at work documenting the Assad prisons which have just been liberated. It is also publishing reports on Assad security prisons, and witness accounts of detention under Assad. The IPM will continue to display investigations and reconstructions of ISIS crimes alongside work on Assad prisons.
Qunfuz 