In the fall of 1997, I took part in my first protest—a student demonstration in Beirut. At the time, Lebanon was controlled by the late Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, father of the recently ousted Bashar al-Assad. Like other students, I was appalled by the ruthlessness of his rule. During its nearly three decades of occupation (1976–2005), the Syrian regime assaulted, kidnapped, tortured, and killed those who opposed its diktat, including journalists, intellectuals, artists, and politicians. It also censored every aspect of our lives. Books were banned; films were censored; public talks were prohibited, and independent broadcasting was either heavily monitored or outright forbidden.
The protest I attended was held at the Université Saint-Joseph, founded by French Jesuits in 1875 and run in the 1990s by a Lebanese Jesuit. I remember that day vividly. The Faculty of Law and Political Science’s entrance on rue Huvelin was surrounded by hundreds of security officers, mukhabarat (the dreaded intelligence services), and other armed henchmen. The only thing that separated us from them was the gate of the university and the black soutane of the Jesuit rector, who was trying to talk the men out of entering the campus and arresting us. I don’t remember how the protest ended, but in retrospect, I think the Jesuit father was trying to buy us time. I managed to escape with other students through a back exit.
Today I write from Beirut, not far from that gate of the university. This time, however, I find myself witness to a transformative moment in Syria’s history and perhaps even the region. On December 8, thirteen years after peaceful pro-democracy protests gave way to a devastating civil war that consolidated Assad’s brutal regime, the Syrian opposition, led by Abu Mohammed al-Jolani and the rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), entered the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, bringing an end to the Assad family’s five-decade rule.
It is no coincidence that al-Jolani—now known by his real name, Ahmed al-Sharaa—chose this mosque to declare the triumph of the Syrian revolution. The first Muslim dynasty to establish a vast empire, the Umayyads began building their mosque in 705 to rival the grandeur of Roman and Byzantine religious monuments, reflecting the caliphate’s ambitions and legitimacy as a new empire. Their rule marked a major transition to a new regime—a bridge between the early Islamic period and the later caliphates—and institutionalized many aspects of governance and administration that became hallmarks of Islamic empires. The mosque also houses relics of John the Baptist, or Prophet Yahya, as he is known in Islam. It is built on the site of a Byzantine church, itself constructed on a temple dedicated to Baal Hadad, the Semitic god of storms, thunder, and rain. It stands as a living symbol of the layers of history, culture, and religious diversity in the Middle East.
The site is meaningful in another sense, as well. It was sheer force and an Islamist ideology, not the secular and peaceful opposition movement that had launched a revolution in 2011, that successfully liberated Syria from the Assad regime. And, yet, like the Umayyads, Al-Sharaa now speaks of the “transition” to a “new Syria.” Claiming that HTS has moved on from its jihadist past, he has vowed to govern with inclusivity and respect for Syria’s diverse society.
Many are skeptical. Some members of the transitional government have already sparked outrage over their views on women. Meanwhile, rebel groups have fragmented, with different factions governing different parts of the country, variously influenced by other powers—Iran, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and the United States among them. Then there is the question of free elections. In late December Al-Sharaa emphasized the importance of establishing security and stability and the need for a “comprehensive population census” before holding them. While he acknowledged what previous movements overlooked—that drafting a new constitution requires time and a clear vision for a new social pact—others view this delay with distrust. It remains to be seen how the transitional authorities will govern a country devastated by war, sanctions, corruption, and an economy in ruins.
Despite the anxieties and uncertainties about the path ahead, one thing is clear: HTS’s victory has starkly exposed the murderous, paranoid, and barbaric nature of the Assad regime. The task of rebuilding a just and inclusive society in the aftermath of such unfathomable state violence may prove to be its greatest challenge.
One of the first acts of the Syrian rebels was to liberate prisons across the country, allowing the world to bear witness to Assad’s crimes. The first wave of emotions—joy and anger mingled with horror—emerged from the liberated Saydnaya prison, notorious for housing political and military prisoners and often described as a “human slaughterhouse.”
Videos posted to social media show thousands of prisoners being freed from medieval-like cells, including children and women. Thousands had been confined, deprived of light for decades. Haunting images of the liberated—emaciated and broken—draw chilling parallels to the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Gaunt figures, lost and disoriented, unable to recall even their own names, spill out. Osama al-Batayneh, a Jordanian who spent thirty-eight years in Saydnaya, had completely lost his memory. Other tortured bodies were discovered in the morgue, some so severely tortured that they were unrecognizable by their relatives. Thousands were still unaccounted for—many likely cremated in a nearby crematorium. The White Helmets, a humanitarian group that assisted in the rescue efforts of the detainees, observed “bodies in ovens” and reported that daily executions took place within the complex. Piled bodies showing signs of unimaginable torture from Saydnaya were dumped in other hospital morgues, including the Harasta military hospital in Damascus’s countryside.
The numbers of released prisoners and bodies discovered pale in comparison to the more than 130,000 people who had been imprisoned across Syria, according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights. On December 9, the director of this independent human rights organization, founded in 2011 to document the atrocities of the regime, broke down live on television after announcing that most of the forcibly disappeared should be presumed dead.
As prisons were liberated, mountains of files were uncovered—in one instance, stacked high at the politburo in the city of Suwayda, where it seemed that every family in the city had a dossier. There are likely many other such bureaucratic warehouses throughout the country, as if lifted straight from Kafka. Unlike in The Castle, however—and pace the new de facto governor of Damascus—Syrian bureaucracy has had direr consequences than inefficiency, alienation, and corruption. It was a tool of repression, a mechanism for consolidating authoritarian power, and the glue that kept this ruthless regime in place.
Paradoxically, state bureaucracies have often documented their own crimes. In Nazi Germany, the Shoah was meticulously documented, from train schedules for deportations to records of executions. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge kept detailed documentation on prisoners, including photographs and confessions, at facilities like Tuol Sleng, today the site of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In Latin America, despite government efforts to conceal methods of repressing those labeled as “subversive” during the so-called “dirty wars,” dictatorial regimes left behind troves of archival traces, even as significant gaps and silences persist. Over the last decade, detailed records of detainees, torture, and executions have been leaked from Syria, too. In 2013 alone a former Syrian military forensic photographer, using the pseudonym “Caesar,” smuggled thousands of photographs out of Syria—images from the state’s own intelligence and security agencies that document the deaths of more than 11,000 detainees between 2011 and 2013.
After being entrusted with the Caesar files, Human Rights Watch published a damning report in 2015 entitled If the Dead Could Speak. Three years later, Amnesty International reported evidence of widespread torture, starvation, beatings, mass hangings, and disease in Saydnaya as well as other Syrian government detention facilities. The United Nations Special Envoy for Syria, Geir Pedersen, who visited the liberated prison in Saydnaya last month, was met with angry relatives of prisoners outraged by the UN’s inability to secure access to the prison or demand accountability—despite several reports and statements by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic over the past decade.
Since December 8, numerous mass graves have been uncovered in Syria, confirming Caesar’s crucial assertion that his forensic documentation represented “only a snapshot in time, geography, and place.” The International Commission on Missing Persons in The Hague said that there may be as many as sixty-six mass graves of political prisoners throughout the country. In al-Qutayfah, 40 kilometers north of Damascus, as many as 100,000 bodies have been discovered. According to various accounts from locals, everyone had known for years what was happening there, yet the fear of repercussions kept them silent—except perhaps for the town’s former mayor, who was detained after refusing orders to construct a mass grave.
“We really haven’t seen anything quite like this since the Nazis,” said Stephen Rapp, former Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues and head of the Office of Global Criminal Justice at the U.S. State Department, on a visit to al-Qutayfah last month. Having previously led prosecutions at the Rwanda and Sierra Leone war crimes tribunals, Rapp is now collaborating with Syrian civil society to document evidence of war crimes and assist in preparations for potential future trials.
The Nazi reference should not be taken lightly. In an interview in December, historian Uğur Ümit Üngör, coauthor of Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System (2023), observed that some of the methods of torture used in Saydnaya, such as the falaka (striking soles with a stick), were adopted from the Ottomans, while others, like electrocution, were borrowed from the French in Algeria. But still others appear to draw direct inspiration from Nazi practices. A major exposé published in 2017 in the French quarterly Revue XXI highlighted the crucial role played by Alois Brunner, the “Nazi of Damascus,” as the two journalists who broke the story, Mathieu Palain and Hédi Aouidj, called him. Eichmann’s right-hand man, Brunner was responsible for killing 130,000 Jews and eluded capture after World War II. He died in Damascus in 2001 and was reportedly instrumental in advising the Syrian regime on torture, interrogation, and extermination methods.
The similarities with the Nazi methods are indeed uncanny. One common mode of torture used an iron press that literally crushed people to death. Another notorious method, known as bisat ar-reeh (“flying carpet”), involves strapping detainees to a wooden slab that is then folded until their spine cracks. (Moaz Mor’eb, a reporter who covered the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and who was arrested upon returning to Syra and imprisoned for eighteen years, described enduring various torture methods including the dreadful bisat ar-reeh, which he said was designed to break a person completely, both physically and morally.) Most harrowing are the cells where torturers could release a type of gas to kill prisoners.
Nevertheless, the liberation of Saydnaya has revealed something more perverse and complex than the “banality of evil,” as Hannah Arendt described the way Nazis carried out their crimes with the diligence of mindless bureaucrats. Blending Stasi-like practices with Soviet-style repressive methods, the Syrian bureaucracy did not merely monitor dissenting behavior to enforce accountability and obedience. It deployed “barbaric” means of extreme violence and fear as tools of governance, as Michel Seurat argued in his important work, Syrie: L’État de barbarie (1989). (The book was published a year after he died in captivity at the hands of the Islamic Jihad Organization, the precursor to Hezbollah, during the Lebanese civil war.) Moreover, many of these bureaucrats sustained authoritarianism through ties of blood, sect or ethnicity making resistance all the more difficult. The state security apparatus was so pervasive and perverted that it coerced family members into informing on one another, turning neighbors against neighbors and families against their own.
Some political prisoners freed in early December spoke of unimaginable horrors. Other stories were simply miraculous. Many faced arbitrary arrest—among them Amjad Baiazy, a friend I know from our time studying in London. He disappeared for three months at the start of the 2011 revolution, swept up in the regime’s widespread crackdown, and was detained in one of the security prisons notorious for torture. According to a message he sent me in December, he was charged with defaming the regime and “weakening national sentiment.”
Raghid al-Tatari was a twenty-seven-year-old pilot when he was imprisoned in the early 1980s. His crime: refusing to bomb Hama where Assad père brutally repressed an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood, killing tens of thousands of people. Suhail Hamwi, a Lebanese citizen (one among 9,000 Lebanese believed to have been forcibly disappeared in Syria), spent thirty-three years in various prisons, including Saydnaya. His crime: “collaborating with the Lebanese Forces” (a Christian political party critical of the Syrian regime), as he stated in an interview. Taken from his home, he left behind his eleven-month-old son and only last month returned to see his grandchildren. In an interview following his liberation, he stated that one should not ask about suffering, because, “Everything there is suffering—the air you breathe carries the taste of it, and even your dreams, the last private and free space left to you, are consumed by despair and suffering.” His words remind me of what Frantz Fanon called “atmospheric violence, this violence rippling under the skin.” And these are only a few stories among thousand other political prisoners who were freed that day—to their disbelief.
Prominent activist Mazen al-Hamada, one the faces and voices of the revolution and the living archive of Assad’s torture machine, was hanged days before the liberation of Saydnaya. His body was found in the morgue of the prison with signs of torture. In a powerful documentary released last year, Syria’s Disappeared, you can see him, while living in political asylum in the Netherlands, breaking down in tears on camera, saying soberly, “The law will hold them accountable. I won’t rest until I bring them to court and achieve justice.” Remarkably, he decided to return to Syria in 2020—a move that underscores the weight of his convictions and the risks he was willing to take. But like the historian Marc Bloch and countless others who were executed by the Nazis just before the liberation of death camps, he did not live to see the collapse of “Assadism,” as Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh prefers to call the Baathist regime. French president Emmanuel Macron recently announced that Bloch will be interred at the Panthéon. Will Syria ever have a Panthéon to honor its intellectuals, artists, activists, and ordinary citizens with a conscience—those who were so coldly and horribly executed?
This brutal context explains why many feared that the Syrian revolution that began in 2011 could not possibly succeed. Among them was al-Haj Saleh himself, who spent sixteen years in Assad’s prisons after being arrested while studying medicine in Aleppo and whose wife Samira Al-Khalil was forcibly disappeared by an extremist Islamist armed faction in 2013. In his poignant book The Impossible Revolution (2017), he describes the Syrian uprising as both an extraordinary act of defiance and an insurmountable struggle against a deeply entrenched system of power, corruption, and violence. While he embraced the revolution’s ideals, he believed their realization would be elusive.
As Pankaj Mishra has noted, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, saw Holocaust survivors as poor material for the new Jewish state, calling them “human debris.” “Everything they had endured,” he thought, “purged their souls of all good.” To Ben-Gurion these wounded and deeply broken individuals were obstacles to his vision of the land of milk and honey.
Yet, Shoah survivors endured—though some, overwhelmed by guilt of surviving and the weight of living in a world that had largely abandoned them, chose suicide. Their suffering spurred the emergence of trauma studies and brought greater understanding to the deep intergenerational effects of state violence, oppression, discrimination, racism, and genocide.
Witnessing today the overwhelming destruction of all institutions that sustain life in Gaza, the systemic oppression by Israel through the imprisonment and torture of thousands of Palestinians (most notoriously in Sde Teiman and Ofer), the destruction of lives and livelihoods in south Lebanon, and now this grotesque naked state violence in Syria, I cannot help but wonder how these “brutalized” and traumatized societies will ever heal. Are they the “human debris” Ben-Gurion condemned, or can we, even amid so much ruin, devastation, and abysmal moral decay, imagine seeds of hope and positive change? Are we doomed to repeat the traumas of the past? Will trauma beget more traumas? What kind of reconciliation can Syrians pursue while embracing the imperative of Holocaust survivors to “forgive but not forget,” making remembrance a moral and historical duty?
Historical traumas are deeply interwoven, with far-reaching legacies. As the Sunni majority now turns against the Alawi minority that has ruled Syria for decades, many observers have warned the country will go the way of Libya or Iraq and face civil war. Must these historical patterns be our destiny? We should ask how a society fractured by violence and oppression can heal, confront its painful past, and address a litany of unresolved traumas: from the Hama massacre in 1982 (10,000–40,000 killed) and the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack (over 1,400 killed, including many children) to the more than 100,000 forcibly disappeared and thousands executed in Saydnaya prison, to say nothing of the Syrian regime’s brutal occupation of Lebanon. Al-Sharaa has been notably cautious in recent weeks, acknowledging Assad’s role in assassinating Lebanese opposition figures but framing it as a matter of the past. And while asserting that the new Syria would refrain from “negative interference” in Lebanon, he also signaled the need to address the lingering issue of Islamists in Lebanese prisons.
As the prominent (and dearly missed) Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm once argued, the war in Syria has been primarily waged by a murderous state against its own people, whom it regards “as no more than rabble—ignorant, backward, unprepared for democracy, and undeserving of liberty of any sort.” To the Syrian regime, the people were brutes to be silenced at any cost. The rationale was one of extermination, in line with the genocidal logic of settler-colonial empires, so powerfully described in Sven Lindqvist’s book, “Exterminate all the Brutes.” After all, the regime’s infamous slogan, “Al-Assad or we burn the country,” mirrors another, “après moi, le déluge” (after me, the flood), attributed to King Louis XV of France. Both prioritize the ruler’s self-preservation and threaten inevitable chaos in their absence; they serve simultaneously as an ex ante means to terrorize opposition and an ex post self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is no exaggeration to say that Syria’s path forward could shape the future of the entire region. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq—under the direct interference of the United States—opted for a “de-Baathification” campaign to purge the administration, police, and security forces of people formerly affiliated to the Baath party. The policy had disastrous consequences, fueling violence, sectarianism, governance failures, and the alienation of a significant portion of the population. Meanwhile, merely two years after the killing of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the General National Congress in Libya voted for a “Political Isolation Law” banning all officials who ever worked with him. This too had dramatic consequences on the democratic transition, deepening the divisions in Libyan society.
Perhaps learning from these catastrophic results in Iraq and Libya, HTS has granted a general amnesty for low-ranking officials and all military personnel who had been conscripted under the Assad regime while pledging to create special tribunals for high-ranking officials and others who have “committed crimes against Syrians.” The UN has called for “the humane treatment of ex-combatants,” and the preservation of all evidence and crime scenes, including mass grave sites, to ensure that justice can be served. In the past few weeks, it has swiftly intensified its commissions and documentation of atrocities, already compiling a list of 4,000 perpetrators of human rights violations in the hope of securing accountability at the highest levels.
The Syrian “transition” has so far been relatively bloodless, with only a few isolated incidents of revenge killings and attacks. But will this be enough to forge a new social pact, the “rebirth of the republic” that al-Azm hoped for in a 2014 essay in these pages, two years before his passing? How will the Syrian people, who have endured so much suffering, find a path to healing? How do we think about the deep traumas inflicted on populations where violence and fear serve as the currency of the ruling political class and its security apparatus? What of those who were raped, humiliated, tortured to death, and mutilated—and of those who inflicted these unimaginable acts of violence and terror on their fellow citizens?
Although imperfect and challenging, there are models available as Syria’s new rulers take on the enormous task of uniting the polity. In A Human Being Died That Night (2003), South African psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, who served on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), concludes that the only way to overcome the inevitable tension between the need for justice and the need to move on is through forgiveness—not as an act of grace, but as a means to reclaim agency and break the cycle of violence. Of course, the goal of such reconciliation efforts is not simply individual healing, though many former victims have testified to its efficacy in this regard. Rather, such efforts must be coupled with far-reaching structural, institutional, and economic reforms to achieve a truly inclusive and sustainable future. It is important to remember that while the TRC was instrumental in preventing mass violence and fostering a sense of accountability for past atrocities, it fell short of addressing the entrenched inequalities and toxic political economy that have defined post-apartheid South Africa.
In other cases, tribalism and violence have persisted. Following the 2011 Tunisian revolution that ousted President Ben Ali, a Truth and Dignity Commission was meant to address past human rights abuses, corruption, and political repression under the country’s post-independence authoritarian regimes ultimately fell short of achieving meaningful accountability—partly due to its rejection by political elites, many of whom were tied to the former regime or had benefited from its corruption. And in Algeria, the lack of a truth and reconciliation commission reflects a deliberate choice to avoid addressing its complex and painful history. Psychoanalyst Karima Lazali has argued that the failure to address colonial and post-independence trauma—so powerfully documented by Fanon—is eventually mirrored in the fragmentation of the polity.
In the end, Syria’s victims of unthinkable brutality are neither “human debris” nor “natural” prophets of hope and radical change. Whether Syria can become a model of inclusion in a region plagued by sectarian tensions, what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah (or tribalism), and the ever-present specter of neo-imperial rivalries, will depend on its commitment to justice, its ability to foster genuine reconciliation, and the establishment of participatory governance that addresses deep-rooted social and political wounds.
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