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June 2025

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Middle East Research and Information Project

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Syria at the Crossroads: Regional Politics and the Movement for Palestine

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May 2025

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Middle East Research and Information Project

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Syria at the Crossroads: popular revolt, counterrevolution, and regional transformation

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2025

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An edited version of this piece was published at UnHerd. I disagree with the headline there – Syria Can’t Escape War – though at present it looks like the cycle of violence will k…

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2025

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The world is worried about the jihadism of Syria's new leaders, but the world may be missing the point.

Currently, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani the jihadist is nowhere to be seen. His alter ego, Ahmed 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 and reassuring minorities that their rights will be protected.

So far, Sharaa's political and communication skills match or even supersede Jolani's military prowess. Some years ago, the man was an al Qaeda-linked jihadist in a turban. Then he lived through a Che Guevara stage, in fatigues. That lasted until his triumphant entry to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus on Dec. 8 last year. Now, discarding the nom de guerre and going by his real name, dressed in suit and tie, he stresses his - that is, Syria's - desire for domestic and regional stability. And lest anyone still regards him as a backward-looking obscurantist, he mocks others for their weird obsessions with the distant past.

On Dec. 22, sitting beside the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, Sharaa referenced Iran's intervention to defend the Bashar al-Assad regime. Iran had organized Shiite militias from as far away as Pakistan to fight in Syria, mobilizing them with stories about power struggles among the immediate successors to the Prophet Muhammad. "Events that happened 1,400 years ago ... what have they got to do with us?" Sharaa asked rhetorically. "What is this mentality? What is this logic?"

It is simultaneously wonderful that Syria has such a skillful leader at this delicate moment and frightening that such a powerful personality overshadows the polity being born. Sharaa's immense abilities and newfound charisma, and the size of his victory (though it's not by any means just his) make it more likely that he will morph again, this time into a national strongman, which is probably not what Syria needs as it emerges from under the corpse of the old dictatorship.

The Syrian political thinker 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, 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 Salafist-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?

The emphasis on civilian rule is a message of equal importance to Syrians and foreign powers. This suggests that the men with guns will stand aside, or at least relinquish their arms. The foreign Muslim fighters who helped fight Assad are to be disarmed and given Syrian citizenship. Society as a whole is demilitarizing. Schoolchildren no longer wear paramilitary uniforms and the school day no longer starts with military salutes. Obligatory national service will end and a professional, volunteer army will be built instead. (This is undoubtedly a good thing. National service under the Assads was designed to intimidate and brutalize young men; it was a means of defeating rather than defending society.) Most importantly, the rebel militias are to be dissolved and the fighters are to operate under the new Ministry of Defense.

In this context, controversy was generated when Syria's new caretaker prime minister, Mohammed al-Bashir, appeared in front of a flag that displayed the shahada - or Islamic profession of faith - calligraphed on a white background, as well as the Free Syrian flag. The shahada flag placed behind a supposedly national figure was sectarian in two ways - because it represented the Islamic religion and because it belonged to a specific militia, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). At al-Bashir's next public appearance, following a storm of criticism, the HTS flag was conspicuously absent.

Those inclined toward Islamist governance point out that it was Muslim rebels, fighters in Islamist militias, who liberated Syria. This is certainly true, but it's a partial truth. The revolution was started in 2011, and in many ways kept alive thereafter, by unarmed citizens demanding freedom, dignity and social justice. Of those who participated in the final offensive in 2024, the fighters who rose up in Daraa and the Homs countryside are not necessarily Islamist, certainly not in the same way as HTS, though they are often socially conservative. The Druze militias that pushed Assad's forces out of Sweida province before advancing on Damascus are not Islamist in any way at all. And even the fighters under the HTS umbrella are not necessarily Salafist-jihadist in either politics or culture. They have often been seen singing songs in the manner of Sufis to celebrate the liberation.

Nevertheless, it's fair to say that the victorious fighters are sons of a generally socially conservative population to whom Islam - as opposed to any specific Islamist program - has a tremendous appeal. It's also fair to say - though it's almost never said outside Syria - that Syria's Sunni Muslims have been oppressed in part on the basis of their religious identity. Assad regime security documents show that attending dawn prayers in the local mosque was enough to mark a Syrian for surveillance and potential detention. And the repression of Sunni communities was always disproportionately fierce. From the start of the revolution, protesters in Alawite, Christian or mixed neighborhoods were individually pursued by the authorities and, when captured, tortured or killed. When Sunni neighborhoods protested, however, extreme violence was perpetrated against the entire community, not only the protesters. Practicing what the anthropologist Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto calls a "selective distribution of violence" along sectarian lines, the Assad regime also organized a series of massacres of Sunni women and children in the central part of the country, between Homs and Hama, especially in 2012.

Not just the fighters, therefore, but large sections of society may feel that the time is ripe to implement some form of "Islamic rule." After all, the first free elections in Tunisia and Egypt brought Islamist parties to power, and those countries hadn't suffered years of sectarianized war like Syria, nor the trauma associated with war that tends to bring people closer to their religion.

In this context, the turn to religious politics is neither surprising nor, in itself, problematic. It is natural and logical that a largely devout, largely Muslim society would wish to explore ideas of political organization and statecraft through the prism of its own religion and culture. (Democracy in the Arab and Muslim worlds will inevitably be different from the Western versions, which anyway come with their own enormous problems.)

But Syrian society is not only devout, or only Muslim, and many devout Muslims are also firm believers in the necessity of a civil rather than a religious state. The key question now is whether disputes between segments of society are played out through respectful debate or violence.

An early test came on Dec. 19, when hundreds gathered in central Damascus to demonstrate for "secularism" and a civil state. The Military Operations Administration - the de facto new rulers - sent an officer to address the crowd. When he said "No to sectarianism!" the crowd applauded; when he explained that Islam is against sectarianism, the crowd drowned him out with chants of "No to religious rule!"

One could detect seeds of hope in this scene, and of despair too. Hope because people were expressing contrary views in public and nobody was arrested or shot. Here at last was real politics, in a country where the penalty for politics two weeks earlier had been death by torture. But also despair, because the officer and the crowd were speaking entirely different political languages and seemed unable to understand each other.

As videos of the demonstration were shared on social media, it was soon pointed out that many of those participating had two weeks earlier been outspoken supporters of Assad's war against "terrorists." Seen in this light, the demonstration was more a protest against the new order by proponents of the old ruling class than an expression of the commitment to universal freedoms that "secularism" usually denotes in Western environments. It was a reminder that conflicts of class are sometimes hidden behind the Islamist-secular binary, and that "secularism" has often been an antidemocratic force in the Muslim world. "Secularism" was one of the slogans used against the democratically elected government of President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, exploited to reinstate military rule under Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. There's no chance that the Assad regime can be restored in the same way - it has completely collapsed - but pro-revolution secularists will still find it very difficult to work with secularists who were recently proud Assadists.

There are legitimate fears of a looming loss of personal freedoms, but currently they are not grounded in actual events. Not only are bars open in Damascus (to use one highly contested and sometimes trite measure of freedom), they are actually protected by the Islamist authorities. On Dec. 18, a man claiming to be from HTS entered a bar in Damascus railing against alcohol. When the patrons called the actual authorities, they arrested the shouting man. The authorities have also told their cadres not to interfere with women's dress choices. It is notable that HTS has not fielded a "hisba diwan," or religious police, in the northwestern province of Idlib, which it controlled, for several years - and that it has approved Syria's first-ever female provincial governor, Muhsina al-Mahithawi, in Sweida province.

Pragmatism and flexibility seem to be the order of the day. The legal code adhered to by Idlib's erstwhile HTS-aligned Salvation Government has been applied throughout Syria for this caretaking stage, but with adjustments made according to the social norms of each province. In Tartous, for example, where the mixed population includes many Alawites and Christians, there are no regulations concerning alcohol or the hijab.

In some respects, the current HTS vision seems to echo Ottoman decentralization, in which different sectarian (or tribal) communities (known as "millets") followed their own rules. The premodern Ottoman system preserved communal rights and a good measure of communal autonomy. What it didn't do was protect individual rights. A Sunni Muslim had to abide by Islamic law, and an Orthodox Christian by church law, whether they liked it or not. Adapting law according to geography rather than simply to sect, as in the Tartous case, may offer a compromise. If someone in Idlib wants to live a "secular" lifestyle, they could move to Tartous, or at least spend the weekend there; if a resident of Tartous wants to live in a more Islamic environment, they could move to Idlib.

Decentralization happened naturally during the revolutionary years and was closely intertwined with grassroots Syrian experiments in self-governance. At one point - before authoritarian forces, including HTS, squashed them - there were over 800 quasi-democratic local councils running affairs in the liberated areas, each applying a model decided on by locals. The principle of local self-organization is a valuable one, and its application could prevent Syria from falling under another overbearing, centralized tyranny. Syrians are rightly worried that federalism could lead to regional divisions that might be exploited by hostile foreign states - Israel and Iran in particular. While federalism gives permanent and irreversible powers to the provinces, weakening the central government, the powers granted to provincial authorities under decentralization can easily be withdrawn if they lead to conflict. The powers I suggest for decentralization would in any case cover social and cultural issues, not military or security matters. A mechanism allowing social difference could in fact contribute to national unity and strengthen the nation against foreign threats.

The criterion for judging freedom should not be how secular or Islamist the polity is, but how authoritarian it is. "Secularism" is often assumed in the West to be synonymous with liberty, but the versions practiced in the Muslim world have often been tyrannical. Assad's secularism, while it allowed people to drink alcohol and wear miniskirts, was both authoritarian and sectarian. Kemalist secularism in Turkey, like the form practiced in Tunisia until 2011, was anti-religious and actively excluded women who wore the hijab, for instance, from certain public spaces.

"Islamism," on the other hand, has, in some - admittedly rare - cases, accommodated civil and human rights. The main revolutionary militia in the Damascus suburb of Daraya was called Shuhada al-Islam (or Martyrs of Islam). Like the rest of the Daraya community, its fighters were influenced by the "liberal Islamist" Sheikh Jawdat Said, who emphasized the importance of popular participation in governance, and women's and minority rights. Shuhada al-Islam was perhaps the only militia in all of Syria that operated under civilian control.

Antisecularist discourse in Muslim countries has usually been reactive to tyrannical or aggressively Westernising forms of secularism. Islamism, likewise, has in practice generally been a form of Muslim nationalism, one that often rejects the boundaries of the states set up in the Muslim world by Westerners, or on Western models, while implicitly working within that reality. It has been obsessed with capturing the omnipotent postcolonial state and using it to implement its ideological program, and it has often grabbed onto symbols of Islamic rule - like the "hudood" punishments, including amputation and stoning - precisely because these are the aspects of Islamic law that most upset Westerners. But as well as strict penalties, Islam requires social justice. Indeed - following the example of the Caliph Umar, who suspended the punishment for theft during a famine - a functioning economy and a measure of economic justice are considered necessary before hudood punishments can be implemented.

Pre-modern Islamic polities were not omnipotent states in the contemporary sense, and didn't generally police people's behavior. In contemporary Syria, too, the people should be left to govern themselves in social and ideological matters. Top-down coercion would be resisted, and not only by the sectarian minorities. Another of Yassin al-Haj Saleh's insights is that there is no "Sunni majority" in Syria, though the majority of Syrians are Sunnis, because members of the Sunni category are divided by class and regional origin, as well as various levels and types of belief and belonging.

Instead of seeking to force the populace into any ideological mold, Syria's new order would do better to strive toward an Islamic vision of a just society in the way that the Justice and Development Party attempted in Turkey, or, better still, in the way of Tunisia's "post-Islamist" Rached Ghannouchi, who sees the freedom to choose to be observant (rather than being forced) as religiously valuable, and likewise, the freedom from an overbearing state, whether secular or religious, to be religiously as well as politically desirable. (Ghannouchi co-founded the Ennahda Party, which governed Tunisia after the 2011 revolution, but is presently imprisoned by the overbearing state under the resurgent dictatorship of President Kais Saied.)

For Syria, after decades of tyranny and long years of war, the less ideological grandstanding, the more practical work, the better. The positive spirit of religion in action is called for, rather than a performative imposition of symbols.

Sheikh Ahmad Sayasneh, the revolutionary cleric exiled from Daraa and now returned, says this: "Whether the government elected by the people ends up being a religious one or not, the most important thing is that it must govern Syria democratically. The terrorizing or domination of Syria's citizens must not be a part of the new government."

And that's the point. Whether the state is religious or secular, Syria needs a strong society, not a strongman.

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Syria Needs a Strong Society, Not a Strongman

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The Islamism vs. secularism debate misses the point - the real struggle for the post-Assad state is democracy vs. authoritarianism

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What's Happening in Syria? Hope, Homecoming and Resistance to Imperialism

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2024

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12.18.24 Syria Teach In Facilitator Questions Recording.m4a

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2024

Syrians have overthrown Bashar al-Assad's brutal dictatorship, liberated cities, freed political prisoners, and opened space to struggle for an inclusive, democratic, egalitarian country. But imperial, regional, and internal forces are angling to contain the revolution.

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After the Fall of Assad: The Struggle for a Free Syria

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2024

This article by Syrian writer Jwana Aziz reflects on the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Jwana examines the conditions that precipitated the 2011 uprising, the years of civil war, and the difficulties that now lay ahead for the Syrian people, while also holding open the possibility for a truly liberated future.

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Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation

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We Are Not Pawns, We Are the People Who Rose Against the Regime

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This article by Syrian writer Jwana Aziz reflects on the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Jwana examines the conditions that precipitated the 2011 uprising, the years of civil war, and the difficulties that now lay ahead for the Syrian people, while also holding open the possibility for a truly liberated future. Jwana is the daughter […]

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2024

The fight for justice for civilians allegedly killed by the Syrian government starts in court, using the ‘Caesar files’.

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The fight for justice for civilians allegedly killed by the Syrian government starts in court, using the 'Caesar files'.

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2020

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Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resistance, this book demands we rethink the revolution.

Having lived in Syria for over fifteen years, Yasser Munif is expert in exploring the micropolitics of revolutionary forces. He uncovers how cities are managed, how precious food is distributed and how underground resistance thrives in regions controlled by regime forces. In contrast, the macropolitics of the elite Syrian regime are undemocratic, destructive and counter-revolutionary. Regional powers, Western elites, as well as international institutions choose this macropolitical lens to apprehend the Syrian conflict. By doing so, they also choose to ignore the revolutionaries' struggles.

By looking at the interplay between the two sides, case studies of Aleppo and Manbij and numerous firsthand interviews, Yasser Munif shows us that this macro and geopolitical authoritarianism only brings death, and that by looking at the smaller picture - the local, the grassroots, the revolutionaries - we can see the politics of life emerge.

Yasser Munif is a Sociology Assistant Professor in the institute for Liberal Arts at Emerson College. He is the co-founder of the Global Campaign for Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution.

- Democratic Left

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Necropolitics: The Taxonomies of Death in Syria
2. The Geography of Death in Aleppo
3. Nation Against State: Popular Nationalism and the Syrian Uprising
4. The Politics of Bread and Micropolitical Resistance
5. Participatory Democracy and Micropolitics in Manbij: An Unthinkable Revolution
Conclusion
Notes
Index

Published by Pluto Press in Jan 2020

Paperback ISBN: 9780745340722
eBook ISBN: 9781786805812

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Understanding the Syrian revolution is unthinkable without an in-depth analysis from below. Paying attention to the complex activities of the grassroots resi...

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2022

From war-torn Syria to the 2016 Rio Olympics, two young sisters embark on a risky voyage, putting their hearts and their swimming skills to heroic use.

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The Swimmers | Official Trailer | Netflix

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2024

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As Assad Regime Falls, Syrians Celebrate — and Brace for an Uncertain Future

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As more than five decades of Assad family rule come to an end, Syrians are cautiously paving a way forward.

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Investing in Syrian Refugees - Homepage - Karam Foundation

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Karam is a global nonprofit that invests in the futures of Syrian refugees through innovative education and community-led programs.

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2024

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Prior to the toppling of Bashar al Assad's regime in Syria over the weekend, divisions within the international Palestinian solidarity movement had started to form when news hit that Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the pro-Turkey "Syrian National Army" (SNA) had captured Aleppo and other territories. Some argued that this military offensive led by "Al-Qaida and other terrorists" was a Western-imperialist plot against the Syrian regime, in order to weaken the so-called "Axis of Resistance" led by Iran and Hezbollah.

These states, they claimed, were allies of the Palestinians, and undermining them meant weakening the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. And, that the military offensive by HTS and SNA took place only one day after the conclusion of a ceasefire between Lebanon and Israel, was deemed suspicious.

However, this entire description of the context has many shortcomings, and if anything, it shows a lack of understanding of Syrian and regional dynamics.
The real context
The military offensive led by HTS and SNA took place at a time when the main allies of the Syrian regime were weakened. The Russian military forces had been focusing on their imperialist war against Ukraine, while Iran and Hezbollah had taken a blow following Israel's war in Lebanon. This all reflected the overall structural weakness of the Syrian regime militarily, economically and politically, hence why it collapsed like a house of cards.

The Turkish government most likely assisted the military offensive against the regime in one way or another. Certainly, Ankara's initial objective was to improve its position in future negotiations with the Syrian regime, and with Iran and Russia in particular. However, with the fall of the regime it stood to play an even bigger role. Through the territories conquered by the SNA it also sought to weaken the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) which are dominated by the armed wing of the Kurdish party PYD (the sister organization of the PKK).

After the SNA captured the Tal Rifaat and Shahba areas in Northern Aleppo and of the city of Minbej - previously under the governance of the SDF - this led to over 150,000 civilians being displaced and many violations of human rights against Kurds, including assassinations.

In the lead up to Assad's toppling, HTS had relative autonomy vis-à-vis Turkey. The successful seizure of Aleppo showed its evolution into a more disciplined and structured organization that has brought together a number of military groups under its wing over the years. Whilst it was considered a terrorist organization by the UN, US, Turkey and other countries, since its rupture with al-Qaeda in 2016, it was attempting to project a more moderate image as a rational and responsible actor.

However, it remains an authoritarian organization with an Islamic fundamentalist ideological orientation and foreign fighters within its ranks. Many demonstrations took place in Idlib denouncing HTS' rule and its violations of political freedoms and human rights. Both SNA and HTS are threats for a democratic Syria.

Neither the US nor Israel had a hand in these events, in fact, they were worried about the events leading up to now. Israeli officials, for example, declared that the 'collapse of the Assad regime would likely create chaos in which military threats against Israel would develop.' Moreover, since 2011, Israel has never really been in favour of the Syrian regime being overthrown.

In July 2018 Netanyahu had no objection to Assad taking back control of the country and stabilising his power. He said Israel would only act against perceived threats, such as Iran and Hezbollah's forces/influence, explaining, "We haven't had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights".

As this stable actor is no more, Israel took matters into its own hands. Indeed in the days following the fall of the Syrian regime, the Israeli occupation army invaded the Syrian part of Mount Hermon, in the Golan Heights. It sought to prevent the rebels from seizing the area, and carried out over 350 strikes on anti-aircraft batteries, military airfields, weapons production sites, combat aircraft and missiles. Missile vessels struck the Syrian naval facilities of Al-Bayda port and Latakia port where 15 Syrian naval vessels were docked.

These raids aim to destroy Syria's military capabilities to prevent them being used against Israel. It is also seeding the message that the Israeli occupation army can cause political instability at any time, should the future government adopt a hostile position that doesn't serve Israel's interests.
"Axis of Resistance" versus struggle from below
Alongside ignoring the agency of local Syrian actors, the main issue with the argument promoted by the supporters of the so-called "Axis of Resistance" within the Palestinian solidarity movement, is that it suggests liberation of Palestine will come from above. These states, despite their reactionary and authoritarian nature, and neoliberal economic orientation, will somehow deliver freedom.

This ignores that their foreign policies are shaped by the need to protect their own political interests, and that regional authoritarian states have repeatedly betrayed and repressed the Palestinians.

While rhetorically supporting the Palestinian cause and funding Hamas, since 7 October 2023, Iran has sought, to improve its standing in the region in order to be in the best position for future negotiations with the US. It is therefore keen to avoid any direct war with Israel. Its main geopolitical objective in relation to the Palestinians is therefore to use them as leverage.

Similarly, Iran's passivity towards Israel's attacks on Lebanon - which was particularly visible following the assassination of key Hezbollah cadres - has demonstrated its first priority is protecting its own geopolitical interests. Not to mention, Iran didn't hesitate to reduce its funding to Hamas in the past when their interests did not match: like when uprisings erupted in Syria in 2011 and the Palestinian movement refused to support the Assad regime's murderous repression of protesters.

Similarly, the Syrian regime didn't respond to Israel's war on Gaza, despite also facing attacks. Indeed, it has been avoiding any direct confrontation with Israel since 1974.

The regime has actually historically repressed Palestinians in Syria, and killed many since 2011. It also destroyed Yarmouk camp in Damascus which was home to a considerable Palestinian refugee population.

In the last few days, 630 Palestinian political prisoners were released from Sednaya prison alone.

The regime also attacked the Palestinian national movement.

Furthermore, in 1976 Hafez al-Assad's regime intervened against Palestinian national movement and Lebanese left wing organisations to support far-right political parties in Lebanon. It also carried out military operations against Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in 1985 and 1986. In 1990 approximately 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners were detained in Syrian prisons.

Supporters of the "Axis of resistance" are also ignoring or refusing to accept the statement by Hamas that congratulates the Syrian people for achieving their "aspirations for freedom and justice" after toppling Bashar al-Assad.
Liberation for all
The list of historical crimes against Palestinians by the Assad regime do not, of course, undermine the fact that US imperialism remains exceptionally destructive and deadly. However, supporting authoritarian and despotic regimes undermines the objective liberating of Palestine. It is accepting that oppression will continue in other parts of the region in the name of freeing one people, which is neither what the Palestinian struggle calls for, nor could it actually deliver the goal.

What happens in the region is ultimately directly linked to the future of Palestine.

A considerable majority of the MENA region's popular classes identify with the Palestinian struggle and see it as linked to their own local battles for democracy and equality. It is important that those organising in solidarity with Palestine understand that Palestinian and regional popular classes are central social forces capable of creating the conditions required to achieve liberation, with their support.

When Palestinians fight, this triggers a regional liberation movement, and the regional movement in turn fuels that of occupied Palestine.

Far-right minister Avigdor Lieberman recognised the danger that popular uprisings in the MENA posed to Israel back in 2011, when he said the Egyptian revolution that toppled Hosni Mubarak was a greater threat to Israel than Iran.

This is not to deny the right of resistance of Palestinians and Lebanese against Israel, but to explain that the united revolt of popular classes has the power to transform the entire region, topple authoritarian regimes and expel the US and other imperialist powers.

The main task of the international solidarity movement for Palestine, particularly in the West, is to denounce the complicit role of our ruling classes in supporting the racist settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel. We must pressure them to break off any political, economic, and military relations with Tel Aviv. This is the only way that Israel weakened, and in turn the path to the liberation of Palestine and the region more widely, can be paved.

As a Syrian revolutionary wrote from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights in the summer of 2014: "freedom-a common destiny for Gaza, Yarmouk and the Golan." This slogan holds out the hope of regional revolutionary transformation, the only realistic strategy for liberation.
Joseph Daher teaches at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is the author of Syria after the Uprisings, The Political Economy of State Resilience ; Hezbollah: the Political Economy of Lebanon's Party of God; Marxism and Palestine. Follow him on Twitter: @JosephDaher19 Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

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From Syria to Palestine, liberation comes from below

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Joseph Daher explains why the Assad regime's toppling in Syria is important to liberation efforts across the region, especially for the Palestinian struggle.

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Independent analysis, commentary, and reporting on #Syria and beyond.

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Tweets by aljumhuriya_eng

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2024

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‘To cough was to risk death’: the artist who mapped Syria’s Sednaya prison with testimonies from its survivors

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As an artist and audio investigator, I interviewed people who had been imprisoned in a building where sound and vision were weaponised. So what should happen to this monstrous place now it has been liberated?

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2024

The Syrian Revolution

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Lizartistry Graphics on Instagram: "“…people created these autonomous zones in different locations very much like in Cairo and Alexandria in 2011 and Occupied Wall Street in 2011 and 2012 and Seattle [in 2020] with the creation of an autonomous zone - with the obvious difference that people are not the target of snipers and bombs and chemical weapons. And you can see how creative people are when they are able to manage and control their own lives and create alternative institutions, and the violence of the state in those zones. This is really important for us to begin to unpack the importance of the Syrian revolution.” -Yasser Munif

Making notes while learning more about the Syrian Revolution, mostly from the webinar series “The Syrian Revolution: A History from Below,” which can be found at syriarevolt.org.

Catch up to today with a panel at 3pm Eastern time on the @haymarketbooks  YouTube channel with Yasser Munif (quoted above), @shireenajla  @joe.daher84  and Leila al-Shami

Edit: reposting to remove the term “civil war” from the title of this image term, which erases the dynamics of the Syrian revolution rising up against Assad’s dictatorship and his genocidal response.

For more on the Syrian Revolution, check out “Episode 1 - Syria: Erasing and Inconvenient Revolution” of the “Revolution on Every Country” by @bizri.6 at unicornriot.ninja, along with their other episodes on Sudan and Lebanon."

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36 likes, 2 comments - lizar_tistry on December 18, 2024: "“…people created these autonomous zones in different locations very much like in Cairo and Alexandria in 2011 and Occupied Wall Street in 2011 and 2012 and Seattle [in 2020] with the creation of an autonomous zone - with the obvious difference that people are not the target of snipers and bombs and chemical weapons. And you can see how creative people are when they are able to manage and control their own lives and create alternative institutions, and the violence of the state in those zones. This is really important for us to begin to unpack the importance of the Syrian revolution.” -Yasser Munif

Making notes while learning more about the Syrian Revolution, mostly from the webinar series “The Syrian Revolution: A History from Below,” which can be found at syriarevolt.org.

Catch up to today with a panel at 3pm Eastern time on the @haymarketbooks  YouTube channel with Yasser Munif (quoted above), @shireenajla  @joe.daher84  and Leila al-Shami

Edit: reposting to remove the term “civil war” from the title of this image term, which erases the dynamics of the Syrian revolution rising up against Assad’s dictatorship and his genocidal response.

For more on the Syrian Revolution, check out “Episode 1 - Syria: Erasing and Inconvenient Revolution” of the “Revolution on Every Country” by @bizri.6 at unicornriot.ninja, along with their other episodes on Sudan and Lebanon.". 

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A post shared by Lizartistry Graphics (@lizar_tistry)

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Enab Baladi was established in 2011 by a group of citizen journalists and activists from Daraya, a Syrian town in Damascus suburbs. The name “Enab Baladi” means “The Grapes of My Country” and the name was chosen as a symbol of Daraya which is well known for producing the best grapes in Syria.

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is a Syrian nonprofit media organization established in Daraya Damascus suburbs in 2011 upon the outbreak of the Syrian uprising.

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2024

On June 27, 1980, in under an hour, the Assad regime killed some 1,000 political prisoners at the infamous desert prison. We are still waiting for accountability.

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Remembering Syria’s Tadmur Prison Massacre, 44 years on | Opinions | Al Jazeera

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We use cookies and other tracking technologies to deliver and personalize content and ads, enable features, measure site performance, and enable social media sharing. You can choose to customize your preferences.Learn more about our Cookie Policy.

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2019

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About the Author

Sam Dagher has reported in the Middle East for more than twelve years. He was the only Western reporter based in Damascus from 2012 to 2014, until being detained by Assad's henchmen in an underground prison and expelled for reporting deemed unfavorable to the regime. He has worked for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Agence France Presse, and has covered the conflict in Iraq, the Arab Spring uprisings, and Libya. The Wall Street Journal nominated Dagher's work from Syria for the Pulitzer Prize and other journalism awards.
Learn more about this author

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Hachette Book Group is a leading book publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the third-largest publisher in the world.

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2023

The support of the US and other Western states for the Israeli state's genocidal violence against Gaza is leading more people to learn about imperialism. There's more than one kind of anti imperialist politics, though.

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2018

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*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017*

In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria has become a war zone where foreign journalists find it almost impossible to report on life in this devastated land.

Burning Country explores the horrific and complicated reality of life in present-day Syria with unprecedented detail and sophistication, drawing on new first hand testimonies from opposition fighters, exiles lost in an archipelago of refugee camps, and courageous human rights activists among many others. These stories are expertly interwoven with a trenchant analysis of the brutalisation of the conflict and the militarisation of the uprising, of the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of governments in Syria and elsewhere in exacerbating those violent processes.

With chapters focusing on ISIS and Islamism, regional geopolitics, the new grassroots revolutionary organisations, and the worst refugee crisis since World War Two, Burning Country is a vivid and groundbreaking look at a modern-day political and humanitarian nightmare.

Robin Yassin-Kassab is a regular media commentator on Syria and the Middle East. He is the co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto, 2016, 2018) and author of the novel The Road from Damascus (Penguin, 2009) and contributor to Syria Speaks (Saqi, 2014).

Leila Al-Shami has worked with the human rights movement in Syria and across in the Middle East. She is the co-author of Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War (Pluto, 2016, 2018) and a founding member of Tahrir-ICN, a network that aimed to connect anti-authoritarian struggles across the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

'The most succinct and convincing insider's narrative of the uprising' - Richard Spencer, Daily Telegraph

'Full of fascinating details' - Robyn Cresswell - The New York Review of Books

'Extraordinary ... the book on Syria I was waiting for' - Molly Crabapple, artist, author, journalist

'Gripping ... Cutting through the fog of geopolitics, Burning Country refocuses the conflict with the people at its centre' - Brian Whitaker, Newsweek

'A detailed history of Syria's moderate opposition and a meticulous analysis of the origins of today's violent dynamics' - New Statesman

'Explores how Syria's peaceful uprising gave way to armed insurgency and sectarian jihad... This is an important, honest and insightful book, well worth anyone's time' - Marc Lynch, Washington Post

'Avoids the easy indulgence of indignation; instead, it elicits the voices of many different Syrians involved in the uprising, acknowledging their suffering as well as their courage, intelligence, and humanity, while explaining the terrible choices that have been forced on them' - Ursula Lindsey, The Nation

'Vital' - Peter Geoghegan - the Herald Scotland

'For decades Syrians have been forbidden from telling their own stories and the story of their country, but here Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila al-Shami tell the Syrian story' - Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Syrian writer, intellectual, and former political prisoner

'By far the best account of the Syrian uprising yet' - Dr. Yasser Munif, Professor of sociology at Emerson College, co-founder of the Global Campaign of Solidarity with the Syrian Revolution

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Maps
1. Revolution From Above
2. Bashaar's First Decade
3. Revolution From Below
4. The Grassroots
5. Militarisation and Liberation
6. Scorched Earth: The Rise of the Islamisms
7. Dispossession and Exile
8. Culture Revolutionised
9. The Failure of the Elites
10. The Start of Solidarity
11. Syria Dismantled
Further Reading
Notes
Index

Published by Pluto Press in Feb 2018

Paperback ISBN: 9780745337821
Hardcover ISBN: 9780745337845
eBook ISBN: 9781786802798

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Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017* In 2011, many Syrians took to the streets of Damascus to demand the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Today, much of Syria has become a war zone where foreign journalists find it almost impossible to report on life in this devastated land.

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2018

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Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America’s Cornelius Ryan Award
Finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize

“Rania Abouzeid has produced a work of stunning reportage from the very heart of the conflict, daring to go to the most dangerous places in order to get the story.” —Dexter Filkins, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Forever War, No Turning Back, Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria, Rania Abouzeid, 9780393356786

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2018

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Brothers of the Gun by Marwan Hisham, Molly Crabapple: 9780399590627 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

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A bracingly immediate memoir by a young man coming of age during the Syrian war, an intimate lens on the century’s bloodiest conflict, and a profound meditation on kinship, home, and freedom.…

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2017

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About the Author

Alia Malek is an award-winning journalist and civil rights lawyer. She is the author of A Country Called Amreeka and editor of Patriot Acts and EUROPA. Her reporting has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, Nation, and Christian Science Monitor, among others.
Learn more about this author

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At the Arab Spring's hopeful start, Alia Malek returned to Damascus to reclaim her grandmother's apartment, which had been lost to her family since Hafez al-...

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2017

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LONG-LISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL Reminiscent of the work of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, an astonishing collection of intimate wartime testimonies and poetic fragments from a cross-section of Syrians whose lives have been transformed by revolution, war, and flight. Against the backdro

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2016

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Palestinians in Syria | Columbia University Press

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One hundred thousand Palestinians fled to Syria after being expelled from Palestine upon the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Integrating into S... | CUP

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2014

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About the Book

In Syria, culture has become a critical line of defence against tyranny.

Syria Speaks is a celebration of a people determined to reclaim their dignity, freedom and self-expression. It showcases the work of over fifty artists and writers who are challenging the culture of violence in Syria. Their literature, poems and songs, cartoons, political posters and photographs document and interpret the momentous changes that have shifted the frame of reality so drastically in Syria.

Moving and inspiring, Syria Speaks is testament to the courage, creativity and imagination of the Syrian people.

Cover image: Poster by Alshaab alsori aref tarekh showing a character by Mohamed Tayeb. Zaytoun, the Little Refugee, from the Yarmouk Palestinian camp in Damascus, is a political, artistic and educational project, which contests the monopoly of power to write history.

About the Contributors

Malu Halasa is the editor of eight anthologies on Middle Eastern art and culture. Her edited volumes include the critically acclaimed Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, Woman Life Freedom: Voices and Art from the Women's Protests in Iran and The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design. Halasa has written for The Guardian, Financial Times and Times Literary Supplement. She was previously an editor at the Prince Claus Fund in Amsterdam, Editor-at-Large for Portal 9 in Beirut, Lebanon, and a founding editor of Tank Magazine in London. She is currently the literary editor at Middle Eastern arts magazine The Markaz Review.

Nawara Mahfoud is a Syrian journalist and documentary producer who has worked for the New York Times. She blogs for the New Yorker, among other publications.

Zaher Omareen is a Syrian writer, who has worked on independent cultural initiatives in Syria and Britain. He is currently completing Tales of the Orontes River, a collection of short stories.

Reviews

'A remarkable achievement and a remarkable book - a wise, courageous, imaginative and beautiful response to all that is ugly in human behaviour. This extraordinary anthology gives a voice to those we may have forgotten, or whom we may classify as simply passive and silent victims. The people shown living, dreaming and speaking here are far more than victims and only silent if we refuse to hear them.' A. L. Kennedy

'An extraordinary collection, revealing a dynamic and exciting culture in painful transition - a culture where artists are really making a difference ... You need to read this book.' Brian Eno

'The impact [the images] have on the page makes one imagine how much the originals unsettled the Syrian government ... Syria Speaks tells us with inspirational force how the Syrians have found the ability to speak out'Times Literary Supplement

'An invaluable and deeply moving testimony to resistance ... this work clamours for liberty and turns its back not only on tyranny but on religious division' Independent

'Essential reading for anyone interested in human rights or a better understanding of the current conflict ... Syria Speaks pays tribute to many extraordinary acts of courage and shines a light on the dark deeds of a brutal regime.'Independent on Sunday

'For an introduction to the ideas and culture of the original Syrian protesters, one can scarcely do better than Syria Speaks'New York Review of Books

Syria Speaks has been supported by the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development; CKU, the Danish Centre for Culture and Development, English PEN Promotes!; Arts Council England, the Arab British Centre and Reel Festivals

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In Syria, culture has become a critical line of defence against tyranny. Syria Speaks is a celebration of a people determined to reclaim their dignity, freedom and self-expression. It showcases the work of over fifty artists and writers who are challenging the culture of violence in Syria.

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2012

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A Woman in the Crossfire by Samar Yazbek - Haus Publishing

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‘A Woman in the Crossfire’ is Samar Yazbek’s haunting account of her experience of the Syrian uprising.

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2021

The Paris Commune is 150 years old and the Syrian revolution against the Assad regime, 10 years old. Leila Al-Shami uses the link made between the two by assassinated Syrian intellectual Omar Aziz to describe the Communes of Syria and to question the lack of solidarity from the Western left.

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Building Alternative Futures in the Present: the Case of Syria’s Communes

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The Paris Commune is 150 years old and the Syrian revolution against the Assad regime, 10 years old. Leila Al-Shami uses the link made between the two by assassinated Syrian intellectual Omar Aziz to…

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2019

In a time of conflict and darkness in her home in Aleppo, Syria, one young woman kept her camera rolling — while falling in love, getting married, having a baby and saying goodbye as her city crumbled.

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Watch the award-winning documentary “For Sama,” which follows one woman’s journey through love, motherhood, war and survival during the Syrian conflict.

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2019

For besieged civilians, hope and safety lie underground inside the subterranean hospital known as the Cave.

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Oscar nominee Feras Fayyad (“Last Men in Aleppo”) delivers an unflinching story of the Syrian war with his powerful new documentary, The Cave. For besieged civilians, hope and safety lie underground inside the subterranean hospital known as the Cave, where pediatrician and managing physician Dr. Amani Ballour and her colleagues Samaher and Dr. Alaa have claimed their right to work as equals alongside their male counterparts, doing their jobs in a way that would be unthinkable in the oppressively patriarchal culture that exists above. Following the women as they contend with daily bombardments, chronic supply shortages and the ever-present threat of chemical attacks, The Cave paints a stirring portrait of courage, resilience and female solidarity.

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2019

A group of young men decide to build a secret library collecting books from their war-torn neighbourhood in Syria.

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A group of young men decide to build a secret library collecting books from their war-torn neighbourhood in Syria.

Three Syrian friends living in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, meet during the 2011 revolution and come up with an idea: to rescue books from the piles of rubble in their neighbourhood and build a secret library.

Amid relentless bomb raids, they film themselves and their peaceful resistance. They assemble bookshelves, hold lectures and make plans for a community newspaper.

The library quickly becomes a safe haven, where residents can read, share ideas and find family in each other.

It also becomes a place of life and celebration when a friend gets engaged and a place of mourning when a friend is lost in the war.

When the residents of Daraya are given an ultimatum - to leave their home within 48 hours or face death - some go separate ways.

Despite being separated by war and exile, the men try to reunite to reminisce on the past and tell the story of their library, one that carries a message of hope and survival.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

FILMMAKER'S VIEW

By Delphine Minoui

I have been reporting on the Middle East for 20 years, but I have never been this deeply moved by a story.

This is the tale of a group of young rebels in Daraya. Daraya was besieged and bombed by Bashar al-Assad 's regime from 2012 to 2016.

During the relentless four-year blockade, these 20-year-old revolutionaries challenged themselves to open a secret library in a Daraya basement, in order to save some 15,000 books that they dug up out of the rubble.

As the months went on, this paper agora gradually turned into a clandestine university. It became an open debate space, where chairs were sometimes pushed aside for dancing, where slogans were invented, newspapers were written, and ideas were born while guns relentlessly fired up above. Life, despite it all. An incredible breath of fresh air amid the Syrian chaos.

I was never able to visit them. Daraya was completely surrounded by the regime's army. But thanks to the internet, and the magic of Skype and WhatsApp, I created a special bond with these incredible book saviours.

Amid bombs and power cuts, I listened to and wrote down their stories. I probed their fears and dreams as I tried to make out their city's skyline.

Whether in the morning or at the dead of night, I listened to them tell me about their everyday life.

So far, so close

I remember what I thought back then, as I spoke to them, seeing the first images they sent over. They were young people who looked just like us, who wear Adidas T-shirts and washed-out trainers. They were funny, curious, and full of life ... They were far off from the "terrorist" label that Bashar al-Assad insisted on giving them.

When night fell, they would watch Amelie on their laptops. They devoured Paolo Coelho's Alchemist. They were fascinated by Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Efficient People, while their city crumbled under the bombs falling from the sky (up to 80 a day).

Refusing to accept isolation, they even sent letters to the United Nations and to Francois Hollande.

They also wrote to me, the day after the November 13 attacks, to express their solidarity to the people of France.

There was Ahmad, the library cofounder.

Shadi, the citizen journalist who documented everything.

Hussam, the flirt.

Omar, the anti-Assad fighter who wouldn't stop reading.

And around 40 or so young people who accompanied them, bringing a fragile and threatened dream to life, day by day.

We see them tending to vegetable gardens to answer to the food shortages. Melting plastic to make fuel. After every lull, they tirelessly lift their heads up high once again.

One day, we see them building a football pitch where shells have fallen the day before. Another day, they are decorating the empty shells of destroyed houses with joyful graffiti. On yet another day, they have fun filming children making cakes out of earth, mocking the absence of flour.

I was struck by their resilience, by the collective solidarity that they never ceased to believe in. For four years, they resisted as a group. They braved explosions, the cold, power cuts, the lack of running water. Humour became their defence mechanism. Dignity became their best shield against barbarity.

A peace ideal

I remember how during my first contacts with them I was touched by their fervent attachment to the democratic values of the early moments of the 2011 revolution ... and to culture, which they defended like a survival instinct.

We could feel their will to stay loyal to the pacifist spirit of one of their friends who was tortured to death by the regime. He had invited protesters in the first demonstrations to respond to the Syrian soldiers' bullets by offering them gifts of roses and bottles of water.

Despite the violence of the bombing, despite the Islamist temptation for some, these young people never ceased to answer to the unfailing barbarity of Damascus with the language of peace. They organised debates in which they promoted dialogue, always favouring discussion and listening over following a definitive plan. The obstination to build a political ideal based on respect and non-violence underlay everything they did.

This ideal was illustrated, for instance, by the peculiar choice to place the different Free Syrian Army battalions (anti-Assad forces) under control of civilians from the Local Council (contrary to other rebel cities, such as Homs or Aleppo).

I was constantly surprised by their ability to never renounce the hope of a better tomorrow. Defying fear and death, they intensified their creativity, embarking on new projects every day.

Daraya, the symbolic cradle of the anti-Assad revolt, was also peculiar in that it woke up well before the 2011 uprising. My informants told me that in Daraya, civic engagement goes back to the 1990s. At the time, a group of dissidents started a number of citizen initiatives on the quiet - anti-corruption campaigns, anti-smoking campaigns, etc - in order to raise awareness among the inhabitants about claiming their rights.

These revolutionary pioneers transmitted a kind of civil disobedience to Ahmad, Shadi, Hussam, Omar and all the young people of the new generation.

Reading as a weapon of mass instruction

Their relationship with books also says a lot about their attachment to democracy and the pluralist ideal. Saving books also meant saving their heritage, preserving a few traces, however minute, of their past and their cultural identity that were getting erased under the daily effect of bombs.

It meant resisting the regime, along with its ideology and propaganda.

One of the principles for their secret library involved writing the owners' name into the first page of each book, in the hope of giving it back once the war was over. Much to my surprise, I discovered that their paper refuge had precise rules: opening hours, return dates to be respected ... They said it was a way to introduce some order into the chaos of their everyday lives.

When all they had left to eat was a daily soup made of nothing but leaves, reading became their spiritual food.

In the library, they read everything they could get their hands on: theology books, political science books, novels, American-style self-help books. As the months and years went by, they became fascinated with the Tunisian 14th-century sociologist Ibn Khaldoun, devoured the poems of Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, took interest in Mustafa Khalifa's Shell, discovered Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, as well as Shakespeare's plays.

Surrounded by tanks, with no escape, they took refuge in their books. When the bombs went quiet, their fighter friends would sneak away from the front lines to come and read with them. They read to stay human, to not succumb to madness. They read to escape. To keep a door open onto the world. To continue learning. Reading was their weapon of mass instruction.

Birth of a film

Towards the end of August 2016, the small group of friends was forced to evacuate Daraya within 24 hours, along with its 7,000 last resistors (the city originally numbered 250,000 inhabitants). They fled after having been through hell: hunger, explosives, chemical weapons, and, towards the end, a series of Napalm attacks that set fire to the city's only hospital.

Delocalised to the Syrian province of Idlib, on the border with Turkey, 300km north of Daraya, they had to abandon their cavern of books, their graffiti and their broken dreams, against their will. When they left, the regimes' soldiers quickly plundered their collection.

After a few months, some of them decided to cross the border. Shadi wanted to get medical treatment for his injured hand in Istanbul. Hussam went to join an NGO that was operating from Gaziantep.

Of course, we met up. It strangely felt like we had just seen each other yesterday. But direct contact added an extra dimension to their story. I remember sitting with Chasi in a cafe, watching him unwrap a plastic bag filled with dozens of hard discs full of last-minute images of Daraya ... I can still picture Hussam telling me that he was renouncing his pseudonym to take back his old name, Jihad. After four years of forced confinement, he was planning to get married, to travel, to go elsewhere.

That's when I understood that this story, their story, was not over. It continued through the images, through all of the unedited videos of the blockade reported by Shadi to Istanbul, that I watched in great detail. It lived on through the burning desire that they felt to reunite. To consolidate a friendship that had been forged under the bombs.

Mainly, it continued through their wish to keep the Daraya flame and the library dream going. Ahmad recently inaugurated a library bus in Idlib in Syria, where he chose to stay, a bus that continues to deliver books to women and children on site to this day.

Beyond my book, I suddenly envisioned a film. A film about them reuniting. A film born of the will to immortalise the memory of Daraya, to show what they lived, but also to relive this unique experience at the heart of the war in Syria.

This film, just like Nous Nous Sommes Tant Aimes by Ettore Scola (Or like Amin Maalouf's beautiful book Les Desorientes), is characterised by writing that is woven by confronting the reality of the present with the sacrificed utopia of the past.

Separated after the fall of the city, some of them refugees in Turkey, they try to reunite by all means, to talk, to reminisce over their incredible adventure. And they wonder about life, about their desires, about the future.

What happens to a siege once it is broken? Is the dream consumed? Is it buried forever? Or does it continue through the wish to transmit the story to new generations?

Along with all of this, personal preoccupations start to win over collective ones. Each of them builds their own life, through marriage, studies, personal projects.

How can they cultivate this friendship, that is at once unbreakable but also made fragile when everyone takes their own path? These universal questions asked after the Daraya blockade had been asked before, after Sarajevo, Beirut or Ramallah.

Beyond these questions is a film where past, present and future meet and sometimes collide, aiming to bring to light that which al-Assad had wanted to erase forever: the living memory of Daraya.

It answers to the will to not be forgotten, to remember these four years of hope and hell through what remains of them: a group of friends, that share a common dream, that of a better world which was stolen away from them. This film is the secret diary of their revolution.

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A group of young men decide to build a secret library collecting books from their war-torn neighbourhood in Syria.

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2017

This documentary tells the hidden story of tens of thousands of men, women and children disappeared by the regime of President Bashar al Assad into a network of clandestine detention centres.

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A documentary about the Syrian regime’s detention centres. Produced by Afshar Films.

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2013

The movie is about the Syrian citizen who challenged everything and everyone to demand freedom. It’s a movie about war and the pressure of being in a battlefield.

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The official site of the Sundance winning documentary ’Return to Homs”

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2018

In March 2011 The Syrians raised up and asked Freedom, justice, and Degnity. And after these years some people still ask: Why not to shake hands with the devil?

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2021

Ali Mustafa dreamed of seeing his beloved Syria freed from Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Then in 2013 he vanished, and his daughter has been searching for him ever since.

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Wafa Mustafa: the woman fighting to find her father – and all of Syria’s disappeared

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Ali Mustafa dreamed of seeing his beloved Syria freed from Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Then in 2013 he vanished, and his daughter has been searching for him ever since

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2018

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The ‘anti-imperialism’ of idiots - Leila Al-Shami

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Once more the western ‘anti-war’ movement has awoken to mobilise around Syria. This is the third time since 2011.

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Welcome back to Instagram. Sign in to check out what your friends, family & interests have been capturing & sharing around the world.

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Syrian Network for Human Rights | (No Justice without Accountability)

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The Syrian Network for Human Rights aims to enrich the human rights culture in Syria, spread awareness among citizens regarding their civil and political rights, and train dozens of Syrians in various fields of human rights. SNHR wishes that Syrian citizens would enjoy their full legal and constitutional rights.

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Home - VDC - Violations Documentation Center - مركز توثيق الإنتهاكات

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Violations Documentation Center - Documenting All violations in Syria. Reporting and collecting Data from Syria’s Violations including social reports and testimonies

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UN Security Council: Act now for Syria’s disappeared!

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Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution

Khuzama and Cedric from the Interstices-Fajawat grassroots initiative return to STIR to talk to Leila about the July unrest in Sweida province, which included massacres against members of the Druze community. Our guests were in Sweida during the unrest, so share their moving first-hand testimony as well as provide analysis on implications for the future of Syria as a whole.

STIR is part of the From The Periphery Media Collective. To support all of our projects please head out to⁠Patreon.com/fromtheperiphery⁠

STIR is also on ⁠Bluesky⁠!

Credits and More:

Date of recording: 5 September 2025

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Accounts on Twitter.

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2018

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Syria is not exceptional: interview with Joseph Daher | Part 1

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rs21 - revolutionary socialism in the 21st century

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2024

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My Double Exile From Syria and Palestine

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2023

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Statement of Free Syrians in solidarity with the Palestinian people

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We, Syrians united in the revolutionary struggle against the Assad regime and its imperialist sponsors, stand firmly and unequivocally with the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank and across …

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From Yarmouk to the World: On Syria, Palestine and Lebanon w/ Nidal Betare

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2022

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112/ From Yarmouk to the World: On Syria, Palestine and Lebanon w/ Nidal Betare

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The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) Foundation is a global medical relief organization that is working on the front lines of crisis relief in Syria, in neighboring countries, and beyond to save lives and alleviate suffering. 

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The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS) Foundation is a global medical relief organization that is working on the front lines of crisis relief in Syria, in neighboring countries, and beyond to save lives and alleviate suffering. SAMS proudly provides medical care and treatment to every patient in need.

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2017

On Rojava’s new international LGBTQI brigade, the “war on terror” and the Western left’s erasure of local struggles.

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Decolonising Syria’s so-called ‘queer liberation’ | LGBTQ | Al Jazeera

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We use cookies and other tracking technologies to deliver and personalize content and ads, enable features, measure site performance, and enable social media sharing. You can choose to customize your preferences.Learn more about our Cookie Policy.

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2021

After the Syrian Revolution, Al-Assad's regime besieges Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world.

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Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege - Cinema Politica

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Little Palestine, Diary of a Siege depicts life in Yarmouk, the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, amid the Syrian revolution.

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2014

On the Syrian Revolution and the Kurdish Issue – an interview with Syrian-Kurdish activist and journalist Shiar Nayo

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2016

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Palestine Must Stand in Solidarity with the Syrians

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The mainstream Palestinian stance on the Syrian war is hypocritical, writes journalist Mariam Barghouti. By choosing political pragmatism over the right to self-determination – a right central to the Palestinian cause – Palestinians are asking Syrians to do what they have refused for more than 60 years.

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2014

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In Kafranbel, a Struggle to Survive and Keep Protests Alive

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Raed Fares, a Syrian activist from the northern city of Kafranbel in the Idlib countryside, speaks to Syria Deeply about the state of revolutionary fervor in his town.

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Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, founded in 2013, is a digital platform that is constantly evolving, aimed at archiving free expression, art, and culture during times of revolution and war in Syria.

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Creative Memory - Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution

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Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution

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Some notes for those incapacitated with the understanding holding space and nuance, and those attempting to tone police. Especially those absent from the Syria scene and have decided to pipe up now. 🧵

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Some notes for those incapacitated with the understanding holding space and nuance, and those attempting to tone police. Especially those absent from the Syria scene and have decided to pipe up now. 🧵

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Some notes for those incapacitated with the understanding holding space and nuance, and those attempting to tone police. Especially those absent from the Syria scene and have decided to pipe up now. 🧵
— Razan Saffour (@RazanSpeaks) December 2, 2024

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Some notes for those incapacitated with the understanding holding space and nuance, and those attempting to tone police. Especially those absent from the Syria scene and have decided to pipe up now. 🧵

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Some notes for those incapacitated with the understanding holding space and nuance, and those attempting to tone police. Especially those absent from the Syria scene and have decided to pipe up now. 🧵

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Some notes for those incapacitated with the understanding holding space and nuance, and those attempting to tone police. Especially those absent from the Syria scene and have decided to pipe up now. 🧵

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For over a decade, the White Helmets have been a lifeline for Syrians, saving lives and supporting communities through unimaginable suffering. Now, at this historic moment of rebuilding, we are urgently scaling our efforts to provide emergency medical care, repair critical infrastructure, and help millions of families return home safely-while building a resilient civil defense system for all of Syria. This is a pivotal moment of hope and action, but we urgently need your help to make it possible. Give what you can.

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For over a decade, the White Helmets have been a lifeline for Syrians, saving lives and supporting communities through unimaginable suffering. Now, at this historic moment of rebuilding, we are urgently scaling our efforts to provide emergency medical care, repair critical infrastructure, and help millions of families return home safely-while building a resilient civil defense system for all of Syria.

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2025

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An edited version of this piece was published at UnHerd. I disagree with the headline there – Syria Can’t Escape War – though at present it looks like the cycle of violence will k…

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