Qunfuz

My new book, The Blood Between Us: Syria After the Fall of Assad, will be available on 4 June.

Unfortunately, I have to report an error. It has been pointed out to me that I have failed to footnote a reference in Chapter 9, a chapter about identity politics.

I wrote: “In February, the pro-government media personality Musa al-Omar posted a video of al-Sharaa riding a horse against a background track with the lyrics: ‘The Umayyads are of golden lineage / their name struck fear in Persian kings / books cannot praise them enough.’ When al-Sharaa visited Jordan’s King Abdullah II on 26 February, the headline on HTS-aligned social media was ‘The Umayyads meet the Hashemites.’ And in April, Hasan al-Dughaim, chairman of the National Dialogue Preparatory Committee, told Christian leaders that the new state would treat them fairly ‘just as the Umayyads did.“

This comes from an article by (the highly recommended analyst) Malik al-Abdeh in Al-Majalla, where he writes: “Pro-government media personality Musa al-Omar (685,000 followers on X) posted on his socials on 19 February a video of Sharaa riding a horse to a song whose opening line was: “The Umayyads are of golden lineage / their name sent fear in Persian kings / books cannot praise them enough.” When Sharaa visited King Abdullah II in Jordan on 26 February, “The Umayyads meet the Hashemites” was the main tag line of HTS-run social media accounts. Pro-government cleric and chairman of the national dialogue preparatory committee, Hasan al-Dughaim, proclaimed to a group of Christian leaders on 21 April that the new state would treat them fairly “just as the Umayyads did.”“

The similarity in language as well as information tells me that I wrote this in note form and then forgot where I got it from, and assumed the wording was my own. I recognised the article as the source as soon as it was sent to me yesterday. So I stand corrected, and hereby correct the reference. It will be footnoted in the book itself if there are any more editions.