Archive for the ‘Syria’ Category
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.
The Thinking Muslim
I was very happy to be interviewed about Syria by Muhammad Jalal for his Thinking Muslim podcast.
Free Syria’s First Days: Good, Bad and Ugly
This was published at the New Arab (link here)
We feared the regime’s end would be accompanied by a bloodbath. Thank God, that hasn’t happened. In the end the regime collapsed without a fight, even in its supposed heartland on the coast.
There has been some looting in Damascus, which has been somewhat more chaotic than the northern cities, perhaps because there has been a smaller rebel presence. Otherwise, the news coming from liberated Syria has been surprisingly good.
On the social level, Syrians are talking the language of reconciliation. One typical video shows a bearded rebel admonishing surrendered regime fighters for standing with the side that slaughtered women and children. Then he tells them, “Go! You are free!” The rebels have issued a general amnesty for military personnel. This does not extend to those guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The intention is to hold those people to account.
Meanwhile, Muhammad al-Bashir, who was the prime minister in Idlib’s Salvation Government, has been appointed to form a Transitional Government in Damascus. The Salvation Government ruled in HTS territory, but was civilian, largely technocratic, and fairly independent. It looks as if a similar logic is going to apply to the Transitional Government.
Having shed his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani is now known by his real name, Ahmad al-Sharaa. Instead of ‘leader of HTS’, he has been rebranded as ‘commander of military operations’. He wants to be seen as a national figure rather than a Sunni jihadist. Some fear that he will change direction as soon as western states stop branding him a terrorist, but for now at least his direction is tolerant and democratic. Rebels have been told not to interfere in women’s clothing choices, for instance. And prominent opposition figures say that UN Resolution 2254 will be implemented. This will involve drafting a new constitution and holding free and fair elections under UN supervision.
So far so good. All of it inspires confidence in Syrians at home as well as the millions who were driven from their homes. Huge streams of people are leaving the tented camps on the country’s borders, and returning from Turkey and Lebanon, where so often they were subjected to racist abuse and violence. The result is thousands of emotional reunions between siblings, or between parents and children, who in many cases haven’t seen each other in over a decade. This is a blessing that nobody expected a fortnight ago, and it culminates a drama that has lasted almost 14 years. In 2011, millions of Syrians screamed Irhal! – Get out! – at Assad. His response was to drive them out instead. But today, at last, the Assad family are the refugees.
It’s also very good that tens of thousands of prisoners have been liberated from Assad’s dungeons. But it’s bad – profoundly depressing, in fact – that so many are in such a bad state. Lots of women and children have been found behind bars. The children were either arrested by the regime along with their parents, or were born in these dungeons to mothers who had been raped.
Read the rest of this entry »Liberation
The Syrian Revolution: the most thoroughgoing, diverse, persistent and resilient revolution in all human history.
The revolutionary Syrian people: a people that risked everything, lost everything, and then won. A people that was helped only by God.
I remember Syrians chanting “Ya Allah, Malna Ghairak Ya Allah” – O God, We Have Nobody but You, O God – and this was largely true. Syrians were slaughtered by Iranians and their Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani militias; and by imperialist Russia’s air force; and by the Baathist-al-Qaida amalgam ISIS. The US, and the Turkish-Kurdish PKK, and Zionists worked against them. The Egyptian dictator, the Saud family, and in particular the filthy UAE regime conspired to keep them in chains. Syrians were slandered by conspiracy theorists, authoritarian campist ‘leftists’ and pro-PKK ‘anarchists’. The media saw them only as a security problem. In Turkey and Lebanon refugees were attacked by racist mobs. The EU’s border guards shot at them. The EU did what it could to normalise Assad and to send refugees back to be murdered.
The revolution’s three greatest military enemies – once it had broken the back of the fascist regime – were ISIS, Iran, and Russia. Though at first Assad, Iran, Turkey and other allowed it to grow, ISIS was in the end defeated by America, and many other actors, at the cost of the destruction of several cities. Iran’s militia system had its bluff called, and was smashed (for other reasons) by Israel. Russia has exhausted itself with its criminal invasion of Ukraine. But the key factor in this blessed ten days of revolutionary culmination has been the maturity, courage, and intelligence of Syrian revolutionaries, and first amongst them HTS under the leadership of Ahmad al-Sharaa, or Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.
Aleppo was crucial. Inhabitants of the west of the city – which had never before slipped regime control – and in particular members of religious minorities, were very frightened on the first day of the takeover. But their fear was quickly dissipated. One rebel hick pushed over a Christmas tree, and was arrested and disciplined, and the tree restored. The people of Aleppo were assured that they could worship as they wished and wear what they liked. Even better, Jolani announced: “The city of Aleppo will be managed by a local authority, and all military forces, including those of HTS, will fully withdraw from the city in the coming weeks.” The military coalition of which HTS is the largest actor has forbidden any fighter from entering any home without permission from the leadership, and has forbidden setting up military bases in civilian neighbourhoods.
Public buildings are under guard. There has been no looting so far, nor any revenge attacks. More impressive than the treatment of Aleppo’s Christians has been the treatment of Shia civilians – a community which, like the Alawis, has been closely associated with the criminal regime and its criminal foreign (Iranian) backers. But there has been no looting or revenge attacks by the rebels on Nubl and Zahra, Shia towns in Aleppo province which hosted murderous sectarian militias. The militias ran away and left the civilians to their fate – and their fate has been to be reassured, and to have food and water distributed to them. The rebel discipline, tolerance and magnanimity here is an enormously positive sign.
Read the rest of this entry »Assad’s Prison State
Much of the media is reporting the collapse of the Assad regime as ‘scary jihadis’ rather than as the liberation – the huge advance in human freedom – it actually is. I’ve written this text for the ISIS Prisons Museum (where I am chief English editor) giving background on Assad’s detention and torture state, and the history of the regime’s massacres against the Syrian people, to show what’s at stake for Syrians. Please read, and share. And please pay attention to the IPM website and project. We’re planning to document and reconstruct crime scenes from Assad prisons as we have from ISIS prisons.
Quotes from the text:
“The prominent dissident Michel Kilo described meeting a young child in prison. The child’s mother had been raped in prison. Her child was born in prison nine months later. When Kilo met the boy he told him a story about a bird…”
“This was not the first time the Syrian regime had directed large scale violence against the population in the streets … It had sent the army to suppress urban uprisings in 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1973, and 1980. But the 1982 Hama massacre was on a totally new scale…”
“The purpose of such abuse is not to extract information from prisoners – otherwise, why would it continue for months and years after arrest, when any information a prisoner may have had would have become obsolete. Instead it is designed to demonstrate the regime’s absolute power, and to project terror onto the society beyond the prison, to paralyze society from action.”
Anti-Campist Anger
I was on Luton’s Inspire FM trying to summarise the dramatic and blessed events in Syria. I’m really trying not to deal with the idiotic and inhumane campist propaganda that ignores the agency of the Syrian people in favour of ridiculous and ignorant grand geo-political narratives. There’s so much more important stuff going on than that chattering…. but here some was thrown at me, and I responded. Watch/ listen here.
History Made on the Ground
You know the multiverse theory, that there are many parallel universes, and that they may contain alternate versions of ourselves and our conditions in this universe…. Well, the last couple of days feel like we’ve jumped from one existence into a parallel universe, one in which a lot more is possible. This universe is a flexible, more cheerful place, in which the Syrian Revolution may even be resolved. (As it happens, we went the day before yesterday on a trip to Edinburgh to see my son. He bought us tickets to the Museum of Illusions. We walked through an arrangement of swirling lights called The Vortex, and we lost our balance. Was that when it happened? When we got home we heard the news that Aleppo city had been liberated.)
The rebels advanced out of the narrow strip of Idlib in which they and millions of Syrians from around the country had been crammed for over four years. ‘The rebels’ here means a military alliance under the umbrella of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – the greatly moderated and better organised reincarnation of Jabhat al-Nusra. It’s still an authoritarian Islamist militia, but it’s not at all ‘like ISIS’ as the uninformed are saying. It broke definitively from the ISIS stream in 2014. It has a much more positive policy towards sectarian and ethnic minorities than ISIS. It allows far greater space for pluralism, disagreement and consultation than ISIS did (though it still arrests and detains some political opponents, and tortures them). Unlike ISIS, it doesn’t field a Hisba Diwan (or morality police) to interfere in people’s daily lives. Its focus is Syrian rather than transnational. It doesn’t threaten the west.
Its ‘Fath al-Mubeen’ military alliance also incorporates lots of members of other less authoritarian groups that were displaced to Idlib and then gobbled up by HTS. HTS has not been popular among people in Idlib – they’ve been demonstrating against it for months – but its offensive is wildly popular, because the people want to be rid of Assad and his foreign backers, and to return to their homes.
I didn’t expect the offensive, at least not on this scale. Nobody did. At first it looked to me like a controlled operation to restore the agreed Astana lines – that is, the division of north west Syria agreed upon at Astana by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Russia had pushed Turkey to normalise and negotiate with Assad, and Turkey had tried hard to do so. Assad had refused to budge from his maximalist positions, the Russians don’t want to alienate Turkey (given their difficult position attacking Ukraine), and Turkey needs more Syrian territory to which to send Syrian refugees. So perhaps the Turks and Russians were scaring Assad into negotiating by taking a few towns in the Aleppo countryside.
But the offensive went much further than that, far beyond the Astana lines. News came, meanwhile, that the Turks had prevented the Syrian National Army – comprised of former Free Army militias now under Turkish control – from moving towards eastern Aleppo. This allowed the PKK-dominated SDF to take areas in Aleppo abandoned by collapsing Assad forces – surely the opposite of what Turkey wanted. Turkey was not, therefore, in control of events. Turkey clearly didn’t know what was going on.
Read the rest of this entry »Selective Outrage
There’s a link here to a two-part podcast of me talking about the genocide in Gaza, the genocide in Syria, and universal anti-fascism. Thanks to Andy Heintz for the opportunity.
Qunfuz 