“We have fasted from joy for ages,

and now we break our fast upon the plate of dignity.

Record, O time of victory, record,

Damascus is ours until the Day of Resurrection.”

He quickly added a clarification, as if aware of the exclusion already implied:

“When we say ours, we mean everyone of every race, faith, and from every origin to every horizon.”

Yet the contradiction is already inscribed in the moment itself. Even in its gesture toward inclusivity, the speech evoked a purified, exalted Damascus, a vision of triumph rooted in a timeless Arab-Sunni imaginary rather than in the fractured present.

Capital of the Umayyads

Within hours, the clip circulated widely across social media. The verses became a digital anthem for the “new Syria”, often paired with a single, gleaming phrase that seemed to hold the promise of rebirth: “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads.”

The Umayyad Caliphate or Umayyad Empire (661–750 CE) was the second caliphate in Islamic history and, at its height, one of the largest states of the medieval world. Its territories stretched from the western frontiers of China to southern France, encompassing North Africa, the Maghreb, al-Andalus, the Sind, and Transoxiana. 

Centered in Damascus and marked by the Arabization of state administration under ʿAbd al-Malik, the Umayyads left a lasting political and cultural legacy that continues to be invoked and romanticized in contemporary Syrian and Arab imaginaries.

The expression itself was not new. Bashar al-Assad had used the same words years earlier to court the nostalgic imagination, portraying the city as “the beacon of the Umayyads and the cradle of Arab civilization.” Yet in the post-Assad imaginary, the phrase acquired a different resonance. It became both nostalgic and redemptive, a dream of authenticity after decades of humiliation and dictatorship.

In this evolving rhetoric, “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads” is more than a slogan. It is an affective myth: a promise of purity and resurrection projected by an Arab-Sunni imaginary trying to restore coherence amid collapse.

The Umayyad dream no longer belongs to power or opposition alone; it is deeply embedded in the moral and spiritual imagination through which many Syrians – particularly from the Arab-Sunni community – envision their place in history. Far from being a passing rhetoric tied to the fall of Assad or argumentatively the ascent of ”the majority” again’, it has become a framework for self-recognition, a way of reconstituting “the nation” as a moral community destined for restoration.

Orientalism from within

In this imagination, victory and virtue are inseparable. The nation’s rebirth is conceived not only as a political project but as an act of moral purification, a return to an untainted origin where faith, masculinity, and honour align. 

This is the same grammar that once structured cultural myths like Bab al-Hara  (the gate of the neighbourhood), a hugely popular Syrian TV drama series, first aired in 2006, that nostalgically imagines a 1930s Damascus neighbourhood as a tightly knit, patriarchal community of “honourable” men defending “tradition” and the homeland, and has been broadcast across the Arabic speaking region for 13 seasons. The yearning for an immaculate past, the masculine guardianship of a virtuous community, and the exclusion of difference as the condition of purity.

Here, Orientalism no longer arrives from the West. It emerges from within, through the desire to idealize the self by imagining it as both sacred and victimized, timeless and threatened. The Umayyad dream, in this sense, is a form of self-Orientalism: an internalized gaze that seeks redemption not through transformation, but through resemblance to an imagined essence of the Orient itself.

If the Umayyad dream shaped the ideological vocabulary of the new political order, it also found powerful expression in the media and digital public sphere. Figures in pro-government media and among online influencers began invoking “Banu Umayya” (Umayyad people) not merely as a historical dynasty but as a moral lineage, a metaphor for honor, continuity, and faith.

One striking example came from Qutaiba Yaseen, a widely followed influencer aligned with regime narratives, who shared a video titled “Men of Dignity from Sweida stand alongside the sons of Banu Umayya in Damascus.” The clip showed a group of Druze men celebrating what he called “the liberation of the land of the Umayyads.” While his caption emphasized unity and brotherhood, the very choice of imagery – where belonging is validated through the Umayyad idiom – reveals how deeply this moral geography structures the imagination of “the new Syria.”

Visual grammar

Across social media, dozens of Facebook groups and pages now carry names such as “Syria al-Umayyah” or “Banu Umayya.” Their posts blend patriotic iconography with religious overtones, producing a digital landscape where history is both sanctified and aestheticized.

Even episodes of misunderstanding highlight how emotionally charged this symbolism has become. During the July 2025 sectarian violence in Sweida, a predominantly Druze city, in which hundreds of people were killed and members of Syria’s defence and interior ministries were later detained on suspicion of abuses against civilians, a banner reading “Sweida without ummiyyah” (illiteracy) was mistaken for “Sweida without Umayyads,” triggering outrage among armed groups and their supporters. 

The intensity of the reaction spoke not to confusion alone, but to the extent to which Umayyah now functions as a sacred signifier, an emblem that fuses history, faith, and national legitimacy.

The romanticization of the Umayyad dream unfolds through gendered imagery that fuses purity, heroism, and faith into a single visual grammar. Viral videos set to the song “Banu Umayya, their origins are gold” portray men as guardians of a sacred lineage. 

One shows Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the transitional government, riding a horse in a slow, cinematic sequence, a tableau of masculine virtue and divine favor. Another, filmed in Damascus’ Umayyad Square, features a masked horseman carrying the tawheed flag, a black flag bearing the Islamic declaration of faith (the shahada) in white, echoing the same melody of glory and moral renewal.

While variants of such flags have existed historically as religious symbols, in contemporary Syria and the wider region this specific black shahada flag has become strongly associated with jihadist and Salafi-jihadi groups, and therefore carries militant and sectarian connotations rather than being a neutral religious emblem.

These scenes are not merely political symbols; they reveal how moral imagination is gendered, sanctified, and aestheticized. The horse, the flag, the disciplined body, all perform a yearning for order through the image of the righteous man. This visual culture does not imitate anyone’s gaze; rather, it springs from within, from a longing to see the self as pure, elevated, and whole.

Such imagery invites a question rather than an accusation:

What does it mean when a society envisions its rebirth through these codes of purity and virility?

Perhaps the “Umayyad dream” is less about reclaiming power than about reimagining the self, a collective effort to restore coherence through an idealized reflection of what it believes it once was.

The fiction of the moral past

In this expanding media ecosystem, the Umayyad dream operates less as nostalgia for empire than as a mode of moral self-fashioning. It provides an affective grammar through which the Arab-Sunni imaginary reclaims virtue and coherence amid collapse, a language of sanctified belonging that transforms loss into purity.

But the Umayyad dream is not the only vessel of nostalgia or self-Orientalism.

Years before the revolution – and still today – the TV series Bab al-Hara built another dream: one that turned “Old Damascus” into a mythical homeland for an entire Arab imaginary. 

As noted once in The Guardian, the series “has been an extraordinary phenomenon from the moment it was launched,” watched “from Morocco to Kuwait” and becoming a shared ritual of Ramadan evenings. Beyond entertainment, it crystallized a collective fantasy of what “authentic Arab life” once looked like, a Damascus of honour, piety, and masculine solidarity.

What distinguishes Bab al-Hara from other television dramas is not only its popularity but its power to shape collective memory. It became a reference point for how millions imagined Syrian – and by extension, Arab- identity. Danny Makki observed once that the series “misconstrues the history of what Syria was during the mandate era,” yet paradoxically defines how that history feels. 

For viewers across the Arab world, the Hara (the neighbourhood) became shorthand for virtue, resistance, and rootedness, an imagined moral homeland that transcended geography and class.

In this sense, Bab al-Hara did not just represent nostalgia; it manufactured it. It offered Arabs from Rabat to Riyadh a mirror in which to see a purified version of themselves, turning Damascus – remote, complex, and plural – into a moral epicenter of the Arab world.

In Bab al-Hara, purity is not only spiritual but domestic. The home becomes a miniature nation, ruled by paternal wisdom and feminine modesty. The neighborhood is a moral microcosm where every deviation – a woman’s defiance, a man’s betrayal – threatens the order of the whole. Through its melodrama of virtue and shame, the series transforms social hierarchy into moral truth.

A ritual of belonging

This is not merely nostalgia for a simpler past; it is an aesthetic theology of purity.

The men of Bab al-Hara embody the same disciplined masculinity seen later in the post-2011 Umayyad revival, vigilant, protective, and righteous. The show taught generations to feel authenticity as something lost and endangered, and to imagine moral restoration through obedience and gendered order.

Bab al-Hara does not simply reproduce Orientalist clichés of the “Arab patriarchal society.” It performs them from within, as a cultural desire. The Damascus it imagines – pure, communal, and morally intact – is a mirror of how the self wishes to see itself: uncorrupted by modernity, yet triumphant in its own virtue.

The Umayyad dream and Bab al-Hara reveal two distinct yet converging temporal imaginations through which the Arab-Sunni self performs its own “purity.” Both rely on what Ghassan Moussawi calls fractal Orientalism, a process through which societies reproduce the same binaries of progress and backwardness, purity and corruption, not between East and West but within themselves. 

Rather than a Western gaze imposed from outside, this is a local hierarchy of virtue: a self-sustaining taxonomy that distinguishes the “authentic” from the “deviant,” the “moral” from the “fallen.” It is constantly rehearsed through media, memory, and ritual performance, allowing communities to define themselves by continually reasserting who belongs and who does not.

In the Umayyad imaginary, history is compressed into a single, sanctified century. The Umayyad Caliphate – just one among many civilizations that flourished in the region – becomes reimagined as the timeless essence of Syria’s identity. What came before and after – Aramaic, Byzantine, Abbasid, Ottoman, and modern plural histories – fades from collective memory. 

The brevity of the Umayyad period paradoxically strengthens its symbolic power: its scarcity becomes proof of purity. This moralized temporality underpins contemporary political and religious discourse, where the call to restore “the Damascus of the Umayyads” becomes not an historical project but a ritual of belonging.

Historical fabrication

Bab al-Hara performs a similar manipulation of time, but within the domestic and social sphere. The series constructs a Damascus that never existed, erasing the city’s real modernity during the early 20th century. The show’s central motif of “gated neighborhoods” is a historical fabrication: “It was never the case that Damascus neighborhoods had gates. 

Damascus has seven main gates, known to this day. The character of the Aqid – the paternal leader who rules the neighborhood – is likewise an invented tradition, unknown to actual Damascene social structures. Historian Sami Moubayed noted that Bab al-Hara’s Damascus erases the city’s modernity: its tramways, newspapers, intellectual clubs, theaters, and publishing houses vanish, replaced by the simplified archetypes of the “Shamian setting” established in earlier dramas: barber, baker, vegetable seller, policeman.

In both imaginaries, the past is not remembered but rebuilt; time is aestheticized and moralized. The Umayyad past is purified into faith and conquest, while the Bab al-Hara past is purified into patriarchal virtue and social order. Each constructs a closed moral chronology that excludes historical complexity: one through divine authority, the other through domestic hierarchy. 

Together, they illustrate how some Syrians and Arabs perform self-Orientalism not by imitating the West, but by staging its own ideal self, the pure, disciplined, and timeless Orient it longs to inhabit.

If temporality in both Bab al-Hara and the Umayyad dream collapses history into a purified origin, their social and political dimensions translate that origin into hierarchy. Both imaginaries depend on the repeated performativity of authority – patriarchal in one case, and theocratic in the other – as the guarantor of purity.

In Bab al-Hara, patriarchy is not only a narrative structure but the moral axis of the world itself. As mentioned earlier, the Aqid as well as the Abadayat (strong men), stand as embodiments of collective virtue: decisive, self-sacrificing, and untainted by doubt. The stability of the neighbourhood depends on their ability to preserve honor through control, to punish deviation through violence, and to restore moral equilibrium through obedience. 

Female characters, in turn, serve as moral signifiers, either preserving communal dignity through modesty or threatening it through disobedience. Violence, far from being chaotic, is ritualized; it performs justice as purification. The show’s moral universe thus reduces social complexity to a binary between discipline and decay, mirroring “a theater of virtue.”

The Umayyad imaginary scales this logic upward. The masculine ethos of the neighbourhood – the man who protects his neighborhood and restores its honor- becomes the figure of the righteous man of the nation. What Bab al-Hara staged as domestic virtue now returns as public theology: a call for moral guardianship at the scale of the state.

This transformation is not merely rhetorical; it is enacted. Across social media and public gatherings, performances of faith and virility merge into a shared script of revival. The “pure man” of the neighborhood becomes the “defender of the Ummah,” the guardian of a faith imagined as both wounded and sovereign. Within this discourse, reclaiming moral order also implies reclaiming political legitimacy for the idea that the nation’s rightful rule, historically associated with Arab Sunnis, was “lost” under ”the non-Sunni Assad authority” and must be restored.

These notions have taken performative and embodied forms. Ahead of the coastal clashes in March 2025, Damascus authority-aligned preachers and local figures called for al-nafir (mobilisation) – a term rooted in jihadist lexicon – framing mobilization as a sacred duty of protection and purification. Ending up with massacres against the Alawite community there. 

With the July assault on the Druze in Sweida, tribal networks in Syria invoked al-faz‘a – traditionally a communal call for mutual aid – but here transformed into a performative act of aggression. In both cases, the vocabulary of purity and defense migrated from the household to the battlefield; the moral economy of the Hara became the national grammar of mobilization.

Performing the past: From the Baath to the Ummah

It is important to note, however, that the Baathist regime itself was an early architect of this self-Orientalizing grammar. As researcher Husam Itani observes, “the Umayyad revival draws from the same well as Baathist ideology, which turned the past- too- into a dream meant to guide the future.” The continuity is not merely symbolic: both frameworks reimagined moral order through the disciplined masculine body and the myth of civilizational resurrection.

Rahaf Doghli also demonstrates in her book Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria, Baathist rhetoric recentered the figure of the man as soldier-citizen, the disciplined, sacrificial masculine body whose loyalty, obedience, and willingness to wield ‘legitimate violence’ constitute the very essence of belonging. 

This legacy of moralized masculinity survives today in both the rhetoric of Islamist governance and the popular culture that preceded it. The Umayyad imaginary does not replace the Baathist one; it inherits and re-performs it, translating the soldier-citizen into the believer-warrior, and loyalty to the leader into devotion to God.

In this sense, social and political self-Orientalism in Syria is not a passive inheritance but an active practice. It is sustained through gendered performance and emotional investment, through rituals of loyalty and moral speech. Authority here is not imposed from above, it is lived, rehearsed, and believed in.

Across this imagined spectrum – from the Hara to the “Umayyad capital” – the yearning for origin reveals itself not as a national sentiment shared by all Syrians, but as a project rooted in the Arab-Sunni imaginary of moral restoration. It envisions not a plural Syria but a purified ummah, a spiritual polity redeemed through discipline and faith. 

Today, this imaginary finds its most visible expression in the rhetoric and performance of Islamist factions such as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose call to moral and territorial “liberation” extends the same logic that once governed the Hara: the defense of community purity through masculine virtue and divine order.

In this vision, the past is not recovered, it is rehearsed. The Umayyad century, brief and distant, becomes the horizon of eternity; the Damascus of Bab al-Hara, fictional and domesticated, becomes its emotional blueprint. Both transform history into a theater of redemption where belonging depends on the exclusion of difference.

Too often, Orientalism has become a convenient scapegoat, a totalizing explanation that attributes all the region’s distortions to Western power, leaving little room to interrogate the failures within. By locating domination exclusively outside the self, this reading absolves the internal hierarchies, mythologies, and desires that sustain oppression from within. 

Here, the notion of internal/self Orientalism becomes more revealing: it exposes how communities construct their own “Others,” reenacting the same logics of exclusion and moral superiority once ascribed to the West. In this sense, what is performed today is not merely resistance to Orientalism, but its domestication, the reproduction of its gaze in the mirror of the self.

The post From Bab al-Hara to the Umayyad Dream: How Nostalgia Shapes Syria’s New Moral Order appeared first on Untold.

Croatian oil and gas company INA, who stopped work in 2012 following European Union and U.S. sanctions against Bashar al Assad’s regime, are one of several international players that may be eager to capitalize on the renewed economic potential within the West Asian state.

Since Assad’s fall, the international community has been gradually integrating the new president of the country’s transitional government, Ahmed al-Sharaa. He’s received condemnation for his past association with the al-Qaeda affiliate and Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

Despite concern over his previous ties, he’s managed several successful foreign engagements, beginning with when he was received in France by President Emmanuel Macron and shortly thereafter when he met U.S. President Donald Trump in Riyadh, with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman also attending.

Following the diplomatic engagements, both the EU and the U.S. lifted sanctions on Syria, a continuation of a policy that has seen Western leaders eager to begin a process of economic rehabilitation. A White House statement highlighted the importance of “giving Syria a chance to succeed … but not at the expense of U.S. interests.”

The easing of sanctions has quickly realized a new capital injection, including multi-billion dollar energy and infrastructure investment deals with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

On the 10th of September, Croatia’s Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, Goran Grlić-Radman, met with his Syrian counterpart, Asaad Al-Shaibani, to discuss the reestablishment of bilateral relations as well as areas of cooperation, including the economy, energy, post-war reconstruction and knowledge sharing. “We see Croatia as a key partner in the reconstruction of our homeland” said Al-Shaibani, while Grlić-Radman expressed Croatia’s readiness to open an embassy in Damascus. Joining Croatia’s delegation were representatives from INA and the Croatian Hydrocarbon Agency (AZU).

Although unable to match the financial power of its competitors, INA’s presence in Syria dates back to 1965, when the then Yugoslav state-owned company provided technical training to local staff on deep drilling. From this began the start of a unique business relationship that is almost unheard of in the modern oil trade.

Under an independent Croatia, the company began operations in Syria in 1998 and gained attention for their exploration and development activities in the Hayan Block, which lies west of Homs. They made key discoveries, including the Al Muhr, Jazar, Jihar, and Palmyra fields.

Exploration was handled by an INA branch office, while production was the responsibility of the Hayan Petroleum Company, a joint venture involving INA and the government-owned Syrian Petroleum Company (now GPC). By the early 2010s, INA had invested almost 1.7 billion USD, and Syrian energy made up a significant portion of their yearly profit.

At the height of operations, INA was extracting around 350,000 barrels per day. Today, because of conflict-affected infrastructure or general neglect, Syria’s total crude production sits somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000. Gas was equally lucrative, with the Jihar field producing 3,000,000 cubic meters per day. ISIS later destroyed the infrastructure at Jihar, claiming it was being used to finance the government.

Syria was a substantial investment vehicle for a company that, as part of a relatively new diplomatic entity in Croatia, was competing to establish itself among bigger industry names like Shell, Suncor, and TotalEnergies.

In 2011, they had begun exploration in the Aphamia Block before withdrawing the next year under political pressure due to Croatia’s upcoming EU accession. The decision was part of a larger policy of aligning strategic goals with the rest of the EU member states that had imposed sanctions on Assad following the horrific violence he unleashed on his own people.

The deterioration of infrastructure is believed to be a key factor in the reluctance of foreign investors to devote capital to a country, as they often expect a relatively quick return on their investment.

In the years that followed the withdrawal of INA and other major energy companies, the vacuum of uncertainty has raised ongoing suggestions from both the former Syrian government and private enterprise that the relationships could be rekindled upon stabilizing the situation on the ground. A press release in early 2016, which outlined the previous year’s fiscal achievements and challenges revealed that “[INA] has kept a smaller part of its assets in case geopolitical circumstances change and enable a return to Syria.”

Today, INA’s operations remain chiefly situated in Croatia with projects also underway in Angola and Egypt. While the ownership of the energy facilities in Syria is uncertain, the situation is changing rapidly day-to-day, and clarification would be expected by year’s end.

Dirty Energy Is Not Connected to Climate Change

The history behind INA’s ownership could be described as slightly convoluted. The words ‘It’s complicated’ can only function to open a Pandora’s box of history that muddles diplomacy and the inextricably linked public and private sectors.

Technically, INA is jointly-owned with the Hungarian oil giant MOL Group, controlling 49%, the Croatian government around 45% and the rest split between private investors and institutions. During the Yugoslav period, the company built up a robust profile – becoming the nation’s market leader and constituting around 10% of Croatia’s economy. This status enabled them to make investments and discoveries in Syria before MOL entered the picture.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia, INA needed to remain competitive and sought to move towards privatization, a position shared by many former state-owned companies within post-communist societies. They went private in 2003 after selling a 25% stake to MOL for 505 million euros (811 when adjusted for inflation). MOL continued to gradually increase their stake in INA until it reached 47.16% in 2008.

The following year, an amendment was made to INA’s shareholder agreement, which gave management control to MOL. This decision was a major component of the arrest of Ivo Sanader, who was Croatia’s Prime Minister at the time of the investment and shareholder amendment.

Sanader was accused of accepting a bribe of 10 million euros from MOL’s chairman Zsolt Hernádi in exchange for giving up control of INA. A near decade-long legal drama ensued where Sanader saw his conviction quashed, upheld by the Supreme Court, quashed again by the Constitutional Court before, ultimately in 2019, receiving six years for his role in the bribery case. Hernádi was tried in absentia and received two years, whereas his prosecution in Hungary found him innocent. Since the beginning of the scandal, Hernádi and MOL Group have denied any wrongdoing and rejected efforts to cooperate in the prosecution from the Croatian Government.

After a refusal to comply with a European arrest warrant, Interpol reissued a Red Notice for Hernádi. The dispute between MOL and the Croatian Government has led to several arbitration processes, with all finding in favour of MOL. The most recent was at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a World Bank Court, where MOL was awarded $235 million.

Today, MOL’s ownership of INA still stands at 49.08%. The dispute and its subsequent arbitration are viewed as deeply interesting sagas among legal process analysts. On July 31st, Ivo Sanader was controversially released from prison eight years sooner than expected. His total sentence of 18 years for bribery and running a slush fund, among other crimes, was expected to keep him in prison until at least 2033. The presiding judge claimed he “fulfilled the requirements for an early release.”

What does International Law say?

Despite the business relationship between INA and the Syrian government, there is yet to be clarification on how ownership of the wells and infrastructure will be resolved. INA retains a strong degree of credibility not only due to their discoveries, but also the confidence they had in Syria’s energy potential. In the 1990s, as many foreign investors abandoned their business interests because of increasing costs and dry wells, INA persisted and made breakthroughs, which resulted in a net benefit for all stakeholders.

Due to sanctions compliance, INA invoked the force majeure clause in their contract, which stipulates that they were ‘unable to fulfill their contract due to unforeseen circumstances’. They later maintained that ownership of the oil and gas rights should remain theirs.

Analysts including Davor Štern, who was formerly the Chairman and CEO of INA, advised Croatian leadership to use diplomatic means to prevent the conflict between Israel and Syria from spilling over and inadvertently damaging INA’s remaining assets. “It would be good for Croatian diplomacy [to warn Israel to spare any sites designated as targets] as [INA] intends to exploit their previous investments.” Israel said its latest strikes were in defence of the Druze, a small religious community who lives primarily in rural regions and faced persecution in Syria.

Dr. Jamal Assad, a physician and representative of the Syrian National Coalition – who’ve now declared allegiance to President al-Sharaa, has lived and worked in Zagreb for many years. Regarding ownership he said: “everyone who has a right must get their right; there are others too [friendly and hostile countries], especially Croatia. When it was needed most, Croatia helped.”

The question over whether the previous oil rights contracts remain valid has yet to be resolved. Christina Abi, an energy consultant and attorney, suggested, “The terms of the contract have [by default] changed because they don’t apply to the situation anymore.”  She suggested that returning the sites to an operational status would be costly but that the force majeure clause could spark attempts to tie up loose ends in the current agreement.

Other foreign energy companies have shown an impetus to address the new political situation in Syria. U.K.-based Gulfsands Petroleum PLC, who, with their Chinese partner Sinochem, jointly controls Block 26 in the country’s northeast, said in a comment to Syria Report that “there are no material restrictions that would prevent our return to operations.” Gulfsands representative also iterated that they are “working with the Syrian government [to resolve remaining issues related to ‘force majeure’].”

Oil Rights and Human Rights

Hopes that large-scale sectarian violence would end under the transitional leadership were degraded by the mass killing of over 1,500 Alawites in March by government militias.

The ethnoreligious group was supposedly targeted because Bashar al-Assad is a member, and as revenge for ambush attacks carried out by armed groups loyal to the former president. When asked for a response to acts of violence, President al-Sharaa responded, saying: “We won’t accept that any blood be shed unjustly … even among those closest to us.”

Outside the communities themselves, many local and foreign observers are worried the fragile situation could delve even further into agonizing acts of depraved indifference to human suffering and casualty. Especially after similar attacks on Druze communities in the southern city of Suweida in July and August which left thousands dead and extended to clashes between the Druze and Bedouins aligned with the transitional government. 

UN Syria Envoy Geir Pedersen explained his office had received reports detailing abuses of women, arbitrary killings, kidnappings and summary executions. His statements occurred shortly after a briefing he gave to the Security Council explaining the volatility with which the July 19 ceasefire was holding. The briefing later describes humanitarian needs as ‘acute’ and that, despite the Syrian government “inheriting a landscape ravaged by 14 years of war and decades of misrule,” it must hold itself to a higher standard and “act with discipline, even when under attack.”

Safeguarding Syrian Prosperity

While several governments have released statements advocating for Syria to be able to develop free of interference, few observers expect the plan to be that straightforward. Controversial Parliamentary elections – which will see an appointed electoral committee chosen by the new government, vote for representatives will take place in September and could provide clarity over what kind of Syria we will see, not just regionally but in the wider international community.

Individuals facing daily threats of harm and government policies, which fail to guarantee the safety of minorities, are not conducive to building a Syria that works for all. A May report by the Norwegian Refugee Council, which interviewed refugee returnees and internally displaced Syrians (IDPs) put a spotlight on the perilous situation for citizens. Damaged or ruined infrastructure goes well beyond the energy sector, with 43% of respondents stating their homes were either virtually uninhabitable or completely destroyed.

Such an enormous development task needs to encompass more than rebuilding government and private infrastructure. The aim of providing support to refugees should not be to create a replacement existence within the boundaries of a safe country. It should be to provide support so that one day they may return to their land, their homes, and their lives.

When asked for comment on the content discussed, INA’s response was that the company “is continuously monitoring the situation in Syria,” and that, at this time, they are “unable to share additional information on this topic.” 

The post Who Will Control Syria’s Oil? Croatia’s INA and Other Oil Giants Eye a Return appeared first on Untold.

The first image etched into eleven-year-old Aya’s mind was a dark, powerless room and women screaming over her uncle’s burned body—an airstrike by the U.S. left only a burnt limb the size of a palm. From that moment, she adapted her mind to the image of a shattered, grieving woman in Baghdad. Just like Fida from Palestine, Maya and Diana from Lebanon, Oula from Syria, and Mazda and Zoya from Afghanistan—these women are activists and journalists who spoke about the experiences of women in wartime. Although foreign forces claimed to be ‘liberating’ them, what these women received instead was devastation, occupation, and deep social divisions.

Now, one of the world’s most violent military leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu, is citing Jina Mahsa Amini and the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify his attack on Iran with a cloak of justice, turning “women’s rights” into a weapon to legitimize war and occupation—the same leader responsible for killing thousands of women in Gaza over the past two years. An all-too-familiar pattern of imperialist exploitation repeated across the region.

For Aya and other Iraqi women, the US occupation was never a source of liberation. Women were arrested alongside their children, and husbands were killed in front of their families—often by soldiers who spoke of peace while carrying weapons. What occurred was not a rescue, but another form of devastation. Iraqi women were not freed; they were caught between tyranny and the foreign fire that arrived with empty promises. Today, each of these women activists who have emerged from war and destruction represents not only her personal experience but also a collective voice—the voice of women who have lived through resistance and have refused to be ‘liberated’ by bombs.

From Iraq: Fake liberation, real chains

Aya, an Iraqi journalist and women’s rights activist, once tried counting how many women she had lost over the years—but gave up quickly, fearing her heart might collapse from grief. Her childhood began with the memory of her uncle’s burned limb and the women’s cries in that powerless room. From then on, the image of the broken woman was etched in her mind: a woman forced to bear the burdens of war, execution, disappearances, and discrimination in an oppressive system.

Under Saddam Hussein, young boys might be executed in front of their mothers for having a religious or communist book. After 2003, the scene didn’t change—only the methods did. Men were executed or disappeared; many never returned, not even as bodies. What mothers received was their absence.

Aya says that after the US invasion in 2003, that violent system against women did not collapse—it grew stronger: “Saddam needed to go, but the way he left only deepened the destruction. The US decided how Iraq would ‘change,’ chose new rulers, and imposed priorities with no link to the wishes of the people. Iraq was neither liberated nor secure; it was another form of prison—and remains so.”

Aya believes that the US not only failed to free Iraqi women but handed power to men who hate women: “The laws allow child brides, men kill women in the name of ‘manhood’ and escape punishment. What we have is legalized violence against women, not reform.”

She says the rhetoric of ‘education for women’ and ‘civil society’ during occupation was simply a facade for failure: “On the surface, workshops and seminars happened, but in practice, women remained vulnerable in a patriarchal society. Women activists, translators, and journalists were all labeled as traitors or collaborators. We received neither support nor voice.”

Aya says this pattern of deception is a familiar US tactic: “The slogans remain the same: freedom, human rights, saving women. Yet behind these words always lies a political agenda. Deprived of hope, we sometimes fall into believing them.” She is certain that occupation never leads to liberation: “The only real resistance is refusing to let our suffering be exploited as a weapon. When foreign powers invoke feminist slogans, they strip them of meaning and turn them into war propaganda; this is not rescue—it’s a takeover.”

When Netanyahu speaks of “Woman, Life, Freedom,” Aya says it serves only as a façade for atrocity—the same recurring pattern, the same slogan, the same lie: “They present us as symbols rather than human beings. They showcase us at strategic moments to legitimise  a policy, only to abandon us when we cease to be of use.”

She expresses her unwavering solidarity with women in Iran, Syria, and Afghanistan: “My solidarity is unconditional. I urge the women of Iran: do not let anyone dictate your story. These narratives are our invaluable assets. But today they’re being taken from us; we are being used, without any concern for our lives.” She warns: “When we ask the international community to acknowledge our plight, the response is often ‘it’s an internal matter.’ But if it suits their interests, all of a sudden, our lives matter to them. This selective approach to our suffering is the worst form of exploitation.”

From Gaza: “We know how to resist ourselves”

Fida is a woman forged by war—a gender studies researcher born and raised in Gaza. She has lived through the horrors of war for as long as she can remember, constantly overshadowed by bombs and occupation. However, the devastation of the past two years marks a profound escalation: complete destruction, profound loss of friends and loved ones, and even erasure of her hometown. For her, women suffer the most amidst the rubble. 

When Fida heard Netanyahu invoke “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify attacks on Iran, she was not surprised—“this is what the Israeli regime has always done: instrumentalize the suffering of others to legitimize its own violence. This reflects a colonial, racist mindset that dehumanizes others,” she says.

Fida places Netanyahu alongside politicians like Donald Trump—figures who only acknowledge movements they can co-opt: “Whenever a movement can feed their war machine, economy, or geopolitical interests, they seize it. Saying ‘we bomb to free women’ is nothing new—Afghanistan, Iraq—and now Iran. This discourse is acceptable in the West because Islamophobia, white supremacy, and racism are entrenched.”

In response, she emphasizes a simple but vital truth: “Yes, women in our region are oppressed, but this is our struggle. We know how to resist, organize, and fight. No state responsible for war, occupation, or resource plunder has the moral standing to speak of freedom.”

She warns many progressive movements risk being hijacked by imperial projects, shifting focus from justice and transgression to mere token representation in corrupt institutions: “That is dangerous—because countries like the US, Israel, and Germany use moral slogans to conceal their expansionist agendas.”

Fida argues that a common tactic employed by Western powers is to depict West Asian women solely as passive victims—figures presumed to be awaiting rescue by the so-called “civilized” white man. “This portrayal is not only demeaning,” she explains, “but also strategically useful, as it allows these actors to obscure their own roles in constructing systems of occupation and domination, while shifting responsibility onto ‘culture’ or ‘religion.’”

Fida has never looked to foreign governments for support in achieving liberation, and she contends that such expectations are misplaced. “When these states invoke ‘women’s rights,’ it is often not out of genuine concern or solidarity, but rather to legitimize military interventions.”

Importantly, her critique extends beyond the context of Palestine or Gaza. Fida warns that feminist movements in Iran must likewise be vigilant against the risk of co-optation. In her words, a movement rooted in popular struggle can only retain its authenticity and strength if it is led from within, not by the intervention of foreign powers. “We must have full autonomy over our movements. No state with a legacy of colonialism, violence, and war possesses the ethical authority to dictate the terms of our emancipation.”

From Lebanon: The same old tactic

For years, Lebanese women have borne the burden of violence, crisis, and poverty—women like Maya, who are not just storytellers of war but have lived it. A journalist and feminist who lived the crisis from within, she now speaks with experience and resilience of women who became the pillars of families amid destruction.

Maya describes her home in southern Lebanon—recently bombed again by Israel—where thousands of families lost homes and land. Many cannot return: “In crisis moments, these women cared for those around them. In crowded shelters, with bare hands they built kitchens, made play and learning spaces for children. They prevented families from falling apart.”

By late 2024, more than 50% of Lebanon’s 1.2 million internally displaced were women and children, including some 12,000 pregnant women without access to basic medical services. Economic and financial collapse since 2019, the COVID pandemic, and the Beirut port blast intensified pressure—especially on women in informal, small-scale work.

Lebanon, she notes, is a “country of consecutive crises.” Since the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, five successive generations have endured at least one major security or economic crisis. “Each generation held onto the hope that the next would live in peace,” she reflects, “but we have learned to remain in a constant state of readiness—always anticipating the next blow.” These protracted crises unfold within deeply patriarchal structures and legal frameworks that systematically marginalize women.

She describes a form of latent violence—one that does not destroy the body, but gradually erodes the spirit: “If the bullets don’t kill you, war finds a way to break you from within. Many older women continue to live with psychological trauma and a persistent sense of entrapment in the city. They are unable to return to their homes, lands, and gardens in the South; their sense of belonging has been violently severed. It is as if Israel seeks to erase women’s connection to the land through hostility.”

Maya recounts that until the early 2000s when the Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon was liberated, she was not even permitted to visit her birthplace. Against this backdrop, Netanyahu’s invocation of the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify aggression toward Iran strikes her as yet another iteration of a familiar strategy: “It’s the same old tactic powerful states have used for years—washing women’s rights. They claim to champion freedom, but in reality, they instrumentalize such slogans to legitimize war, intervention, and the expansion of their [geopolitical] influence.”

She cites examples: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, now Iran: “Whenever real decisions need to be made, these governments sideline women- unless they conform to official narratives. This selective use of women shows their real intent: they use women not to liberate them, but to advance military-political goals.”

For Maya, Netanyahu is the epitome of this hypocrisy—a politician directly responsible for killing women and children in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria: “For someone like him, responsible for so many crimes, to invoke the name of Mahsa (Jina) Amini—it’s a moral affront. If anyone still believes that Israel will liberate Iranian women, they need only look at Gaza or post-occupation Afghanistan.”

Her message to Iranian women is clear: “As long as war machines are active and driven by militarized men, women’s suffering will be instrumentalized. We must remain vigilant—liberation cannot begin with bombs.”

Diana, a Lebanese journalist, emphasizes how the layered realities of war have fundamentally reshaped women’s lives in Lebanon. Under what she refers to as “patriarchal peace,” survival has become a multi-generational struggle:: “Grandmothers managing homes amid bombardment, mothers rebuilding after displacement, daughters facing economic collapse and mass migration. Despite everything, women have held society together, yet structural transformation in laws and political representation remains elusive.”

She notes that women’s roles shifted significantly during the civil war and subsequent occupation—taking on responsibilities as caretakers, fighters, smugglers, and negotiators—often under duress. “In the occupied South, women played key roles in sustaining social life and participated in resistance networks, especially secular ones. But war left them vulnerable to violence from ‘the enemy’ and their own communities. As [Lebanese anthropologist] Souad Joseph puts it, war not only creates widows and mothers of martyrs, but deepens patriarchal norms that restrict women even after the weapons fall silent.”

Diana believes Netanyahu’s rhetoric about women in Iran mirrors Lebanon’s experience: powerful actors borrowing feminist language to conceal violence. “As some foreign institutions or politicians have used women’s rights to justify unrelated agendas. When feminism becomes propaganda, it becomes part of the war machine—not a means to peace.”

She argues that such appropriations deplete feminism, reducing struggles for justice to hollow marketing slogans and silencing the voices of real feminists on the frontlines whose language has been co-opted. Her message to women in other crisis zones, such as Iran, is clear: “You are not alone, and you are not merely victims. Your struggle is part of a broader, global movement—but its direction and meaning must be defined by you. Do not allow others to instrumentalize your suffering to justify further violence.”

From Syria: Patriarchy fights on there too

Oula, a Syrian feminist researcher, offers a one-word answer to why foreign armed forces invoke women’s rights during wartime: “Patriarchy.” 

“Whether it’s a regime, militia, or state, they all reproduce the same logic: that they know better than we do what is good for women, what rights we should have, what problems we face, and what our future ought to be.”

As the author of the study Paths of the Feminist Movement after 2011, Oula argues that speaking about women is easy—but truly listening would require relinquishing power, something patriarchy is rarely willing to do. “When Syrians rose up in 2011, they demanded dignity, freedom, and human rights. That was a revolution for dignity—and dignity without full women’s rights is meaningless.”

Despite war, displacement, and repression, feminist organizing in Syria not only persisted but flourished. Women led local initiatives, supported survivors, and created feminist spaces both within Syria and in exile—spaces rooted not in traditional institutions, but in solidarity, care, and everyday resistance.

Yet at the critical turning points, these same women were once again pushed to the margins. Oula, with a critical view of the political process in Syria after the beginning of the transitional period, says: “Despite years of activism and feminist leadership, out of 23 ministries in the transitional government, only one was assigned to a woman. These achievements are real, but fragile. These victories were not the result of the war, but were achieved in spite of it.” According to her, 14 years of war and displacement, while painful for all Syrians, brought specific forms of violence upon women: “From rape and sexual violence in detention centers to forced disappearances, public punishments by extremist groups, and the use of women’s bodies as weapons on the battlefield.” 

Despite this harsh reality, Oula’s account of Syrian women is one of resistance in the heart of the fire. In ISIS-controlled areas, women resisted forced disappearances, taught secretly, built support networks, stood against brainwashing. In areas under foreign or local militia control, documenting abuses, coordinating humanitarian aid, and creating safe spaces—even under bombardment—became everyday acts. To Oula, survival was also rebuilding, envisioning alternatives: “Resistance wasn’t always grand demonstrations—it was keeping society together and asserting women’s presence in shaping the country’s future.”

Asked whether she sees parallels between how women are used in Syria and the global portrayal of Iranian women’s struggles, Oula responds firmly: “Absolutely. War criminals and occupiers have long used our fights for their own goals. From the French in Algeria to the US Americans in Afghanistan, colonialism always posed as ‘saving women’ to legitimize violence. Today the pattern repeats—when Netanyahu uses Iranian women’s protests to justify aggression, it’s a continuation of that violent history.”

Afghanistan: Only the color of chains changed

In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan, promising to “free Afghan women”—a slogan that became the banner of the campaign, casting Afghan women as symbols of “salvation” from Taliban darkness. But the lived experience of women during 20 years of “the republic” tells a bleaker story.

Mazda, an Afghan women’s rights activist, speaks from that experience—from shiny storefronts whose veneer couldn’t mask the stench of obsolescence and violence. She says that freedom in Afghanistan was inflated and hollow, a balloon that popped. Over those 20 years, only a limited group of urban women accessed universities and jobs, but the societal reception remained sexist: “Appearances changed; women were no longer whipped in the street for not wearing the hijab, but abuse continued—verbal harassment, groping, unwanted touching—from street to presidential palace. Laws seemingly protecting women weren’t enforced, and the underpinning structure remained misogynistic.”

As she puts it, the US removed the Taliban’s beard from the streets, but left misogynistic structures intact: “The real voices of Afghan women were never the occupiers’ priority—not in politics, not in reconstruction plans.” Mazda says that the voices of the people—whether women or men—meant nothing to the occupying powers; they only listened to themselves and silenced everyone else with bombs, bullets, and violence: “We protested, we demonstrated, but the response was always the same: violence.”

What distinguishes indigenous feminism from imported versions is agency, Mazda says: “In local feminism, women are subjects, decision-makers—not objects for international institutions and armies to decide for.” The US‑NATO package of “democracy” implemented at Bonn conferences included a definition of women’s rights—but this was symbolic window dressing to legitimize occupation.” she says, with derision: “There was no real liberation—only the color of our chains was changed.”

She speaks about personal and collective experiences of the Afghan woman’s body as a battlefield and symbol of power, where women are blamed even when assaulted: “Society blamed her for her clothing, the law didn’t protect her; the police became perpetrators. In an environment without legal mechanisms to address femicide or sexual assault, any man in the street could act as an enforcer. The republic might have removed official hijab patrols—but patriarchy permeated society, controlling women’s bodies.”

There, Mazda says, women’s bodies became banners for regimes—republicans branded them as democratic symbols, the Taliban used them for “political Islam.” In both cases, women remain symbolic objects for legitimizing regimes. She asks: “Why do states speak so much about women in wars but never listen to them? Because women are seen as ‘honor,’ not humans. Political power always seeks means to reinforce dominance, not autonomous agents who can disrupt the status quo.”

When Netanyahu wields “Woman, Life, Freedom” to justify attacking Iran, Mazda sees a continuation of the same scenario that used Afghan women to justify occupation: “It’s laughable to think bombs bring freedom—amid bodies left in our hands. It’s absurd to consider child-killers as saviors.”

She has lived the experience of “imported freedom”: “Today millions of Afghan women have gained nothing but depression, isolation, and bans from that exported democracy. The danger of exploiting women’s suffering is more than disrespect—it gives excuses to warmongers and normalizes violence against women.”

Mazda’s message to Iranian women and others whose voices may be hijacked: “Be careful not to be used as tools. Peace is born from awareness, not bombs. No country has been liberated by bombing. All that changes is just the color of our chains.”

Zoya, a member of the AfgactivistCollective—a group of first- and second-generation Afghans aligned with the Global South movement—opposes both the US occupation and the Taliban. The collective works to link Afghan struggles with broader regional movements.

Calm yet confident, Zoya speaks of the West’s invasion under the banner of “saving Afghan women,” wryly remarking: “Twenty years of war just to replace Taliban with Taliban.”

For Zoya, the rhetoric of salvation served as a cover for economic and geopolitical interests—not women’s rights, but access to natural resources and Afghanistan’s strategic position. As she puts it, the hypocrisy was plain to see: “Everything happened in front of our eyes.” The Doha Agreement, she says, confirmed that behind the veil of liberation lay nothing but self-interest.

She states: “Our land is full of resources needed for capitalist war machines. Women’s bodies were just propaganda tools.” In her narrative, Afghan women’s resistance arose from within—from houses turned into secret classrooms, hands building progress uncontested by funding or support: “With all the money that flowed into Afghanistan, what was visible was our own effort—not international NGOs.”

She describes corrupt development models that dispossessed farmers, bought homes, forced dependence on processed food—food that created health and pharmaceutical markets for international profit. “Today’s Afghan crisis is the result of this profit logic,” Zoya says.

With the Taliban’s return, new forms of suppression emerged—religiously justified but without real basis: “From closing girls’ schools after sixth grade, banning women’s baths, to even requiring covered kitchen windows—these are all pretexts to distract us from resource extraction.”

She clenches anger at the question: “Who arms the Taliban? How did they gain power during 20 years of ‘struggle’? The same forces preaching freedom also profit from Afghan suffering—through pharmaceuticals, military, electronics industries.”

She doesn’t spare “white feminism,” openly criticizing Germany’s so-called feminist foreign policy: “Afghan women are ignored, Palestinian women are nonexistent, and Iranian women must be saved.” To her, this brand of feminism is colonialism dressed in progressive language: “They offer a false feminism—one that neither dismantles patriarchy nor challenges oppressive structures.” 

Her answer? Amplify grounded, authentic voices. “Only true narratives can withstand purple-washing—the use of feminist slogans to camouflage war and domination.” Her message to Iranian women—and to any women whose movements risk being co-opted—is clear: “We in Afghanistan, Palestine, Iran, Kurdistan, Congo, Somalia, Balochistan—we all share one struggle: against patriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism.”

The narratives of war-affected women across the region may differ in detail, but they speak in unison: liberation does not arrive through occupation or bombs, and slogans like “Woman, Life, Freedom” must not be turned into tools by powers that are themselves among the main violators of all three.

In a world where structural violence and imperialism continue to target societies of the Global South under the mask of “rescue” or “freedom,” it is more urgent than ever to listen to the voices of real women from within these communities.

They do not need saviors.

The post The Women Not Liberated by Bombs appeared first on Untold.

While watching the TV, Al-Zarqawi’s expression changes from  initial disbelief and astonishment to the dawning of a recognition of the huge opportunity Powell had given him by the name-check in New York.

In fact, Al-Zarqawi was not in Iraq until around the time the US invasion started and had spent a good part of 2002 in eastern Syria training his own group of fighters to organise a series of attacks in his native Jordan. This group seems to have been involved in the killing of Laurence Foley, a senior USAID administrator in Amman, in October 2002. 

Four months later, his focus had shifted almost entirely to Iraq where, following a meeting with Al-Qaida military chief Said Adel, he became heavily involved in the smuggling of foreign fighters into Syria to join the armed resistance to the US invasion. It is hard to imagine that this change of focus was not in part brought about by Colin Powell accusing him on the international stage. 

This small story illustrates two big themes about how the US invasion of Iraq impacted Syria that I will explore in this article. 

First, there is the way in which, in their attempts to justify the invasion, the US promoted the false  idea that there was a link between the 9/11 attacks and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The point of Powell raising Al-Zarqawi in the Security Council was to make the case that Al-Qaida was somehow linked to the Baghdad regime. 

The tragic result was to inadvertently ignite Salafi jihadist resistance in Iraq and Syria. The mistake was then compounded by further US mistakes after the invasion that led to the emergence of Frankenstein’s monster of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 

Second, it is significant that when requests were made for the extradition of Al Zarqawi from Syria following the assassination of Foley in Amman, Bashar Al-Assad’s government ignored them. Why was a government that was no historic friend of its fellow Baathists in Iraq and certainly hostile to Islamist terrorism willing to turn a blind eye to the development of terrorist cells within its borders? 

The answer also lies in the development of the US justifications of the invasion of Iraq, including the ‘axis of evil’ speech by President Bush five months after the 9/11 attacks, which started the public pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq.

Development of ISIS

In the autumn of 2015, John Kerry and Sergei Lavrov convened two meetings of foreign ministers from the entire region together with the European Union and China in the Sacher hotel in Vienna. The results of these discussions paved the way for the adoption in December that year of UN Security Council Resolution 2254 laying out a roadmap for the peace process in Syria. 

At one of the meetings, a sharp exchange took place between Iranian minister Jawad Zarif and Saudi minister Adel Al-Jubheir in which the Saudi referred to Iraq 2003 as a possible alternative model to achieve peace in Syria. A visibly angry John Kerry responded from the Chair to snuff out any discussion of Iraq where, in his words, “some idiot” had decided it was a good idea to disband the Iraqi army, destroy the Iraqi state and create the conditions for ISIS. There was an audible intake of breath from the assembled ministers as they watched a US Secretary of State damn the handicraft of his predecessors.

In retrospect, it was the very first decisions of the American rulers of Iraq in 2003 that set in motion the development of resistance to it. Paul Bremer, the US diplomat who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which took over the governance of Iraq after the US invasion, issued on arrival two fateful decrees. 

CPA Order number 1 banned the Ba’ath party and removed all members of the party from government structures. In practice this meant the removal of all Iraqi state officials in any managerial positions since,under Saddam Hussein, being a member of the Party was a de facto prerequisite to be a state employee with any level of responsibility. 

CPA Order number 2 disbanded the 400,000 strong Iraqi army without any provisions for taking back the soldiers’ guns or providing any programme for alternative livelihoods. With two strokes of a pen, Bremer had generated a class of angry unemployed civil servants and soldiers with expertise, knowledge and weapons at their disposal while at the same time weakening to the point of non-existence the capacities available to the future Iraqi government to counter them.

Anyone wanting to develop a handbook for how best to generate a dangerous insurgency could do no worse than look at the CPA model. Disbanding the army, in addition to creating a pool of discontented unemployed and armed soldiers, also left Iraq’s borders defenceless at a time when Zarqawi and others were organising the flow of foreign fighters into the country to form Al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI). 

In addition, US actions brought together secular Baathist military officers and people from AQI in the prisons where several of these officers were reported to have been radicalised. The final element of the mix was the authoritarian and sectarian government of Nouri al-Maliki which alienated Sunni leaders, resulting in them uniting with AQI into a single unified structure. The result was ISIS: “The top leadership of ISIS seems to have been populated by former Iraqi officers who were removed from their positions when the Iraqi army was disbanded in 2003.” 

It was the combination of military expertise and religious zeal that made ISIS so effective and so lethal. But it was the US that had pushed people that should have been mortal enemies into making common cause.

Saddam Hussein’s number two, Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, on whom the US put a $10 million bounty, ran his own resistance movement in Iraq but there were many reports of him coordinating with ISIS, notably in the taking of Tikrit and Mosul in 2014, and he seems to have maintained close ties with a number of senior ISIS officials who had formally served as Iraqi army officers. 

An example here is Samir al-Khlifawi, who, under the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, headed the military council of ISIS and led its successful operations to take over large parts of eastern Syria in 2013 from a house in Tell Rifaat, just north of Aleppo. Al-Khlifawi was formerly an Iraqi army intelligence colonel in the Baathist army. After the US invasion he was held in detention in Camp Bucca alongside many of the men who founded ISIS and reemerged as a key ally of their emir, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

So, going back to Kerry, the idiocy of the preparations for, and the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq led directly to the creation of ISIS, the territory it controlled in Syria during the most violent periods of the civil war, and at least a part of the reason why the challenge today of reuniting the country is so high. 

The civil war parties and their international backers both used ISIS and the areas it controlled tactically to try to damage the other side. Both sides were also involved in different ways in financially maintaining it through purchases of the oil from the territory it controlled. Perhaps the best illustration of all this were the two ISIS operations to take Palmyra in 2015 and 2016. 

Palmyra’s location in the desert meant that any military operation to take it required driving a convoy across the desert, the perfect target for an airstrike. Yet on both occasions, neither the Syrian air force (nor their Russian allies) nor the US led coalition against ISIS targeted the convoy, presumably because it was in both their tactical interests at the time for it to succeed in their operation [1].

 Impact on the genesis of Syria’s civil war

As anyone following the region knows today, among those the Syrians allowed to cross the border into Iraq was its current President, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who had been radicalised first by the second Intifada, then further by 9/11, and crossed the Iraqi border two weeks before the US invasion to be trained by Baathist officers. 

On his second trip to Iraq in 2005, he became part of Al-Qaida in Iraq and was caught and imprisoned, falling in there with the nascent ISIS leadership. Under the nom de guerre Al-Jolani, he was authorised in August 2011 to set up a Syrian branch of Al-Qaida, known as Jabhat Al-Nusra. 

However, when, in 2013, Al-Baghdadi ordered Jolani’s forces to merge into the new structure, Jolani refused. As a result, al-Nusra split with many of the foreign fighters leaving to join ISIS. There were a number of violent clashes between them during the civil war in Syria.

To understand why Bashar Al Assad’s regime in Syria had turned a blind eye to the development of Salafi jihadism in the east of Syria and to the funnelling of foreign fighters into Iraq from Syria following the US invasion, it is necessary to go further back. Syria could logically have become a US ally in both the fight against terrorism and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq for a number of reasons.

First, relations between the two Baathist regimes (Syria and Iraq) were historically awful. Syria had actively supported Iran during the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s, shutting down a key Iraqi oil pipeline, training Iranians in missile technology and even providing them with Scud B missiles. 

Iraq had opposed Syria’s military involvement in the Lebanon war, and even armed Lebanese Christian militia leader Michel Aoun to put more pressure on Syria. Then, in 1991, Syria supported and provided troops to assist the US led coalition to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The fall of Saddam was never going to be mourned by Syrian government circles. 

Second, in 2000, the young and inexperienced Bashar had become President in Syria and there was much talk in the West about possible thawing of relations, particularly following the end of the Lebanese civil war. The opportunity certainly existed for a diplomatic opening and the EU had used the diplomatic space with the new President to accelerate negotiations for an Association Agreement with the country.

Third, Syria’s regime, by its very nature as Baathist pan-Arab, was secular in its approach and no fan of political Islam, with a long history of clamping down on it. Under different circumstances, it could have been enlisted by the US after 9/11 as an ally in the war against terror. 

At the time there were some voices in the Bush administration, notably CIA Director George Tenet, who were seeking a softening of the US traditional positions on Syria. If the opportunity had been grasped, the benefits of a generalised strengthening of relations with the West would have maybe even enabled Bashar to take a different path, bringing Syrian civil society and its moderate internal opposition in from the cold and developing a more pluralist, even possibly democratic, approach to governing the country, as many observers at the time expected. 

These opportunities were all missed, and a good portion of the blame has to be laid at the US’ door because of their rapid pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2001-3. Already as early as late September 2001, Bush was privately asking Donald Rumsfeld, his defence secretary, about Iraq invasion plans. Beyond the operational planning by the military, preparing the ground politically required a twisting of the logic behind the Afghanistan operation. It required convincing public opinion and US allies that a new military operation in a different region was justified as part of the response to 9/11.

A big part of solving this puzzle came in Bush’s State of the Union speech on 29 January 2002. What was expected to be a celebration of the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan is remembered for opening another front, with Bush proposing preemptive military action against a small list of countries (Iraq, Iran and North Korea) that could in his view provide their weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. 

As he put it “States like these, and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world”. Within a week of the speech, three quarters of US Americans believed Saddam Hussein was aiding Al-Qaida and the same number supported military action against Iraq. 

A few months later, the list was expanded to include Syria, Libya and Cuba in a speech by John Bolton. Even though Syrian counter-terrorism cooperation with western secret services continued until several months after the US invasion, it was suspended after it became clear that there would be nothing gained from it by Syria. 

Instead, the defensive links between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah were strengthened, ultimately leading to Syria being a central part of Iran’s proclaimed “axis of resistance”. This was set up to explicitly counter ideologically the impact of President Bush’ axis of evil speech. As with Powell’s references to Al-Zarqawi, a US speech had called into concrete the ghosts that they were mythically attacking.

As a result, when the US invaded Iraq, Syria strongly opposed the invasion and in the early months allowed foreign fighters to flow into Iraq to resist it. While domestically very popular, it resulted in the first moves by the US to isolate and sanction the regime with the adoption of the Syria Accountability Act in December 2003. The opportunity for a thaw in the Syria-US relationship was by now definitively lost. Perhaps, at the root, this was because, while the real reasons for invading Iraq had nothing to do with the war against terror, they certainly included the security threat to Israel of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. While Syria could have been a valuable US ally in countering terrorism, it was never going to be a friend of the US in protecting Israel’s security interests. 

The invasion also created well-founded fears in Damascus that the US would intervene beyond Iraq. Calls for regime change were being made by many of the same neoconservative chorus that had called for the invasion of Iraq. Domestically, this strengthened the hands of the security establishment and conservatives within the regime, killing for good the possibilities of any gradual process of political reform in Syria. 

Where the regime did respond to US pressure, it was in ways that did not respond to popular pressure for reform, such as closing the Palestinian offices in Damascus, withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, and making some tentative steps towards opening the Syrian economy. The path chosen by the new President was in the end one of continuity of the existing regime and this in turn would lead inexorably to the brutal and escalatory response to the 2011 protests in Daraa that sparked the uprising and then the civil war.

[1] As explained to me by UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura in 2016.

The post Unleashing new Demons: How the US Invasion of Iraq Fueled Syria’s Collapse appeared first on Untold.

Today, we opened our archives too.

In full honesty to you, our dear reader, this opening has its origin in a time when this over-consumed cloth was impossible to rip – the only reality we knew and inhabited. In this spirit of acceptance and defeat, however, we believed there was still something meaningful to say about a past, a revolutionary time, that felt closed and sealed forever as a political project.

You can retrace this origin of this collection in the acts of documenting and archiving that, since the revolution, had been powerful tools for recording the realities of war. They also became a form of resistance against oppression and the foundation for demands of justice and accountability in Syria and its diaspora. The preservation of stolen, smuggled, salvaged materials – be it videos, memoirs, images, testimonies, or stories – has been a powerful medium to keep the revolutionary ethos alive, proving to the world that this ‘event’ existed.

A living tapestry 

We envisioned the introduction of this collection on the act of archiving as both a continuation of this trajectory and a departure from it. Our endeavour sought to capture how archiving infiltrates the way we think, speak, and attempt to write about the revolution – what came before and after – as our own thoughts penetrate facts. The constitution of these archives waives the personal and the collective, the lived and the imagined, the past and the present. 

They are fragments that unfold as a living tapestry – a clock, a song, the sea’s infinite waves, a broken TV, the green buses and a bureaucratic site. Each fragment of our archive vibrates with its own resonance, defying the constraints of order and resisting unified narratives. Each word becomes a gesture of defiance, a refusal to let fleeting moments of hope and despair fade unread. 

Before December 8th, 2024, these fragments were all we had to comprehend a history shaped by loss and exile – to make a claim on time through what was archived and written. But when the unimaginable turns into reality, time returns to the present, carrying the possibility of hope and restoration which also infiltrated our own words. The clock of history ticks once more and time starts to flow again. It reminds us that history – and these archives – are not static repository of “what was”, but a living, creative force that shifts and breathes, bearing the weight of what was and the promise of what could be. New light illuminates spaces of grief and melancholia, fear and humiliation we thought we understood, but never fully grasped. What we once treated as eternal had to be reimagined as the cloth and its threads are now ripped apart.

Writing, archiving

This has been true prior to December 8th, 2024 and, even more, in its aftermath. As we wrote down these archival fragments, we noticed their becoming a conduit through which history is continually reimagined and reshaped. These fragmented archives weave together the disconnected threads of history and breathe life into memory. Time collapses and reforms, no longer linear, but circular, offering moments where endings become beginnings, where loss unfolds into the possibility of renewal. Our act of writing became a transformative vessel, a time machine that navigates the fragile boundaries between memory and the present, contributing to the formation of these archives and their constant reconfiguration.

Writing and archiving are not merely intellectual exercises but emotional and political acts – a refusal to surrender memory to silence. Even objects shed their passivity and become subjects—autonomous, breathing entities. The Citadel of Aleppo evokes childhood – a labyrinth of the past, reshaped by the revolution. A bridge is formed between these sites of memory, embodying both shelter and loss. The loss is palpable in the devastation of Aleppo, but also in the silence of the sea, which carries countless untold stories, dreams of survival, and death. A clock, once silent, begins to tick defiantly, reclaiming lost time from the abyss of forgetting. On the dance floor in Berlin, the echoes of Abdul Baset al-Sarout’s voice merge into a new rhythm, intertwining Syria 2011 with the neon-lit nights of 2019, where past revolutions dissolve into pulsating beats and scattered fragments of hope. 

In our attempt to write down our own archive and archiving our own fragments, we pursued meanings in the chaotic and fragmented expanses of memory. In a world where ruptures and losses shape the surface of history, we search for fragments whose stretching towards each other offer insights into the “how” and “why” amidst the “what.” This search for meanings becomes a vibrant and fluid, at times even fugacious, confrontation with the past. Rather than dwelling in simple explanations, we sought meanings in the ambiguity of experience.

In what follows, dear reader, we share the meanings carried by the echoes of lost voices, pieces of revolution, the bitterness of missed opportunities, the taste of unexpected renewals. Yet, meanings, like archives, remain ever elusive – a fleeting shimmer, a thought we believed we’ve grasped, only to see it slip away. In this pursuit, these archives become spaces of metamorphosis – an ongoing process that confronts us with questions we may never fully answer,  propelling us forward today, as they did yesterday.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Eternity Unwoven: Echoes of the Unwritten and Poetics of the Archive appeared first on Untold.

Do you think it will not come, my love?

I watch you with each tick of the clock,

Arriving from afar, my love

Fairouz’s words caught me off guard—her voice piercing the heavy shadows of memory like a sudden shaft of light, perfectly synchronized with a video of Homs’s Clock Tower Square in an Instagram reel. Those brief twenty-one seconds were enough to reshape an entire archive of the last 13 years. Years that began with a revolution shaking the walls of silence, restoring our ability to hope—before it was all veiled in the fog of eternity, and its heartbreaks exploded across every horizon.

Suddenly, the ticking of the clock returned, transcending both time and sound. It pulled us inward, into the depths where we had buried our disappointments, our hopes, and a deep sorrow tinted by the futility of all things—no matter how dazzling on the surface—when measured against our shattered faith in justice, and the specter of ruin clinging to our souls. The voices of our disappeared, silenced in Assad’s slaughterhouses, still echo. Those prisons appeared to us as impenetrable and everlasting, despite everything we had documented, shared, written, screamed, and shown the world. Then came the chimes, gathering the scattered fragments of our souls, flooding them with feeling. It wasn’t just a fleeting glimpse of the past but a rupture, piercing the core of the spirit, dragging it through every station of pain and heartbreak—only to return it to one single moment: the now. To the lingering doubt that perhaps tomorrow has not been completely stolen from us, that the dreams, however shattered and dispersed, might yet find a way to gather and be reborn!

In those few seconds, my heart trembled, and my soul gasped for breath, as if the dream we had nearly forgotten could still return, could once again be our guiding compass—a sudden, magical moment after a long and relentless darkness.

 December 7, 2024

How do I describe the taste of hope returning suddenly after years of forced absence—after we had taught ourselves to live without it, to accept its loss just to survive with what remained of us?

A few fleeting seconds in that reel were enough to stir a feeling I thought had vanished forever. It was more than hope—it was the return of tomorrow as a space for dreaming, for imagining, for waiting.

On this very day, the gates of Adra Prison opened. The same prison where, over years of captivity, my father wove me a beaded bag—bead by bead—as if stitching together a life in a time held captive.

In the realm of the unforeseen,
where prison carves its borders like a blind sculptor,
life takes shape through sound—
an eternal ritual defying time’s barrenness.

But what is time, when it knows no edges?
Our memory, mother, is a hidden prison,
a void that devours the past,
carving hollows of forgetting.

Yet in its wakefulness,
life is reborn—and with it, a quiet rage,
spilling into poems,
into voices that carry us forward.

Mama, you taught me to weave rhyme with my body,
to dance when words abandoned me,
because voice rises from the body—
a typewriter translating pain into motion.

But why do our bodies remain silent now,
when we are more parched than ever for meaning?
No, mother, this silence is not the salt that preserves, as you used to say,
but the silence of a room thick with shadows—
stories trapped in cellars,
a room without light,
where time loses its threads.

Fear, mother, is the shadow of a coiled poem,
spinning without end, searching for a lost horizon.
And yet, beneath it, the voice remains—
a monument of light,
a will that draws us back to the beginning,
again and again.

Yesterday

The opposition factions declared their control over Aleppo and their advance toward other Syrian cities: Hama, Homs. I did not yet realize that tomorrow would be the day when, after decades, the archive of oppression, fear, dreams, and exile would be unearthed. A day when the Assad regime’s legacy of horror and destruction, still too vast to fully reckon with, would be laid bare. It would be a day no Syrian would ever forget.

We didn’t sleep that night. At that moment, the archive of all those years came alive—just like us. We recalled who we had been, before disappointment and the needs of survival overtook us, before our lived reality drifted away from our inner selves—deprived, wounded, and haunted by sorrow.

I have always been drawn to archives. I imagined them as extraordinary time-traveling machines, capable of crossing eras and geographies, gathering infinite worlds where emotions and perceptions converge. But what captivated me most was their relationship to loss: the loss of what was once familiar, cherished, longed for, only to become exiled, deferred, erased, or forbidden. Like a homeland, like my father in prison, like the memory of revolution and the dream itself.

When Assad and the Baath Party seized power in the early 1970s, ushering in what came to be known as Assad’s Eternity, a new phase of political and spatial monopolization began. A culture of submission and repression took hold, as the regime built an ever-expanding archive of fear—etched into our bodies, embedded in our daily lives, woven into our language—recycled and passed down through generations. This archive took many forms: the memory of the Hama Massacre in the 1980s, the prisons and detention centers, the imposed language of obedience, the Baathist indoctrination in schools that sought to shape the Syrian individual in the image of the regime. Then, at the turn of the millennium, a fleeting specter of hope appeared in the form of the Damascus Spring—a moment that quickly revealed itself to be a carefully laid trap, witnessing yet another betrayal of hope.

 The Hour of Dreams and the Making of the Impossible

On March 15, 2011, the Syrian revolution erupted like a sudden flash of lightning, piercing the veil of silence and fear, forging the impossible. Despite the crushing weight of disappointment that later settled over the revolutionary dream, a new archive was born—one that was digital, spoken, and alive in ways unlike anything before it. It carried the faces and voices of the revolution, inscribing a memory that could never be erased. Homs’ Clock Tower Square bore witness to some of the most defining moments of this memory, in a city that carried titles like a mirror reflecting its people: Umm al-Faqir (Mother of the Poor), Umm al-Hijara al-Sawda (Mother of the Black Stones), the capital of humor and wit—until it earned yet another title: The Capital of the Revolution. That square held everything: a peaceful protest that turned into a massacre, then into a funeral and mass arrests, then into a sit-in, only to be followed by yet another massacre. The cycle of blood and siege rewrote tragedy into new scenes, replaying the same horror in different forms.

Clock Tower Square was more than just a place; it became a living symbol of the revolution, a pulse that reached into every rebellious neighborhood in Homs, every town and village that raised the banner of freedom. As A., a friend and activist from Al-Qusayr, recalled:

“After the Clock Tower Massacre, the regime tried to erase its traces from our collective memory. They banned us from gathering there, from demonstrating in its space. So, we said: If we cannot reach the Clock Tower, then let the Clock Tower come to us. And so, symbolic replicas of the square’s clock appeared in every revolutionary neighborhood”, like shattered fragments of Homs’ beating heart, scattered everywhere.

The songs of the revolution—and yours, mother—
carried us like the waves of the Mediterranean once did every summer,
before we arrived in Germany.
Rhythms bore our dreams, and the weight of forty years of silence,
holding us—both within our homeland and in exile.
Hope was a phoenix, a key,
carving waves of meaning into words.
On March 15, thirteen years ago, the clock struck zero,
marking the beginning of a future without end.
The voices of freedom wove the fabric of our being,
and let the voice break through—
in the kingdom of silence.

The Temporality of Siege

Amid the darkness of the siege that engulfed Homs’s opposition neighborhoods between 2011 and 2014, suffering was not the only story. The siege was more than just walls tightening around lives—it became a stage of resilience, a space where human creativity emerged in survival, resistance, and the pursuit of life, even as death loomed from every side.

In the besieged neighborhoods of Baba Amr, Khalidiya, and al-Qusour, life pulsed with scenes of solidarity and innovation. The struggle for survival unfolded in stories that refused to be confined by suffering alone, revealing moments of everyday resistance: a mother teaching the neighborhood children, youth building networks of mutual support, and laughter echoing in defiance of the shellfire.  

 The siege was not merely a tool of destruction—it was a test of the will to endure. As one resident of Homs described: “I don’t want to speak only of our suffering, but of the life we lived. Of our laughter, our solidarity, our attempts to stay alive.” To exist under siege was an act of resistance in itself—one that refused surrender and inscribed a new memory of the revolution, a memory that did not speak only of oppression but of the human spirit’s relentless fight to live.

 The Green Buses… The End

One of the most searing scenes etched into memory was the evacuation of Homs’s residents from the besieged neighborhoods aboard the green buses—a moment pulsing with grief, betrayal, and despair.

As part of a 2014 agreement brokered under UN supervision, these buses carried the last opposition fighters out of Old Homs, sealing the regime’s full control. But the green buses became yet another symbol of a time when dreams were suffocated. Since 2011, the Syrian regime had used them to forcibly displace the people of Homs, after years of siege and relentless bombardment that had drained every last possibility of hope and survival.

The Tomorrow That Came After Eternity

On December 8, 2024, the Assad regime fell, ending 53 years of continuous repression. The impossible—the dream Syrians had carried for so long—had finally become reality. That day marked a turning point—a moment when Syrian history began to be rewritten. The people of Syria began to sketch a new image of hope, one that returned despite disappointment and deep fragility, pulsing once more in their hearts, no matter how far they had been scattered across the exiles of time, geography, and grief.

Today, the clock ticks again—this time as a symbol of freedom, of justice reclaimed, of a homeland being rebuilt. The revolution was never only against a dictatorship; it was also a struggle to reclaim stolen time. Its return was a rupture, a shock that reshaped both our existence and our memory. It was not just a moment in history—it was a bridge between past and future, a long-lost dream finally stepping into the present.

The Syrian Archive: A Guardian of Pain, Fragility, and a Window to the Future

The archive of the revolution is both a child of hope and its creator, brimming with urgency and awakening. Through documenting their revolution and preserving their lived experiences since March 15, 2011, Syrians have defied the temporal void that repression sought to impose. This archive—holding the stories of protests, political activism, detainees, massacre victims, and mothers who lost their children—is not just a record of the past. It was not just a reminder of the past, but a bet on another turn of the future.

The Death of Eternity and the Return of Time

I remember—
but my memory is not a bridge to the past.
It is a window opening onto a distant horizon.

The historian stands at a threshold,
not only to look back,
but to weave time into a tapestry—
a tapestry of hope entwined with sorrow,
fragments and shadows forming a space pulsing with meaning
for those who dare to dive into its depths.

Look at me—
yesterday, I was a prison for a tyrant,
a dusty mass of hollow words,
where the voices of the marginalized faded within my walls,
and their stories disappeared into my cells.

But today, I am the pulse rising from beneath the rubble,
a light tearing through the veil of darkness.
I am a video capturing a city breathing through ash,
an image distilling terror,
a voice gasping: “I am alive… I am here.”

I am a time machine no tyrant can possess,
open for all to see.
But is truth ever fixed,
when it is as fragile as those who speak it—
those who documented their revolution
to defy the abyss of forgetting?

“Why do you document?”
they asked the witnesses and the survivors.
And they answered:
A cry against oblivion.
A testimony before the world.
A mirror reflecting the unimaginable
in the face of the possible.

But documentation was more than a cry—
it was a quiet hope
that pain might one day bear justice,
that what was crushed today
would not vanish into the void of tomorrow.

I am the archive.
I do not merely preserve the past;
I carry a promise—
that the mothers who wrote farewell letters,
the children who painted the sky beneath falling bombs,
the elders who told the stories of Homs
will not disappear into the corners of oblivion.
They will not be swallowed by silence.

I am not a repository of yesterday’s remains—
I am the beginning of what is possible,
a space where the narrative is reclaimed,
where justice is reborn
from the wombs of pain.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Our time is tomorrow appeared first on Untold.

Frau Hoffmann was a tall woman. Short grey curls, bags puffy under her eyes – the nights grew shorter with age. She had a long, lined face and a slightly stooped back, though not because of the pressures of school routine or the attendant stress. Most of the students were small, arrayed before her on their chairs. It was not her habit to talk down to them. Aras must have thanked her a hundred times, and she had asked him to call her by her first name. But it was too soon, and in Aras’s head she was still his German teacher, someone owed respect. ‘Of course, I’m happy to!’ Frau Hoffmann said.

His mother stood next to them, clutching a folder stuffed with papers. Frau Hoffmann turned to Nadia: ‘I don’t know if Aras mentioned this to you, but I’ve actually been to Aleppo. I went on holiday there with my family. A remarkably beautiful city, a gorgeous city.’ Nadia inclined her head and asked, ‘Did you visit the castle?’
‘Citadel,’ corrected Aras.
‘Yes, of course. I heard it was destroyed.’
‘Just the back of it,’ Aras said.
‘Just the back of it,’ Nadia nodded.

As a boy, Aras used to go in and get lost there, the citadel, always on the hunt for a new stage. Once, with one of his cousins, he had gone looking for the hill where Abraham was said to have milked a cow – the reason why the city where they lived was called Halab: white, like the milk. Getting lost in the citadel was a kind of ritual. Inside, time was blurred. There was always something new to find. Once, with another cousin, he discovered the tomb of Salah al-Din’s third son. Another time they clambered down into the dungeons, where people had once poured acid. Their search led them eventually to the throne room, one of two spaces preserved in their original condition, although nobody really believed the interiors were original. Still, the patterns, the geometry – Aras had sat down and tried to count the squares, the triangles, the sequences, but they seemed to never end. The citadel was a vast labyrinth, an adventure playground. In it he would never go astray. Other visitors, used to seeing children without parents, would drop him off at the main entrance, where he would wait with the guards, picturing the battles in which the citadel had never been taken – the moat was simply too deep – until at last his family emerged and he re-joined them. Back then they didn’t know the citadel’s afflictions would persist, or that the increasing damage to the city would come to seem like an inverse prediction of the past, when Aleppo’s nickname al-Shaba’ – the white mingled with the black – had once referred to marble. Now, it meant ash and rubble.

The ground offered its solid, uneven foundation to other people who stood nearby, their eyes glued to wristwatches, to phones. Nervous glances. Cigarettes appeared in the corners of several mouths, while other people chatted with their companions. Only a very few had come alone, and those were the ones who looked around. It would take nerves of steel to be here by yourself, thought Aras, smiling at them. They hadn’t rolled out the appointments system yet, when phones would put each person in a queue, sorted alphabetically.

The doors opened. Anybody standing directly in front of them, the metal doors, was swallowed up. If you wanted to be first through the mill you were first to arrive, because the mill ground slowly. Frau Hoffmann, Aras and Nadia passed through the entryway. Their pace was slow, a pace not rushed, not hasty, not reluctant, not without purpose, but with confidence low. The floor reflected back their steps, tiled; a reception desk was directly opposite the entrance. A corridor on the right led to the Citizens’ Registration Office. Their path took them left, up the stairs. The silicone on the banister was red, worn. The door now facing them was mint green, silver-handled, ring-scuffed. Five people were gathered around it. No obvious order. Aras memorised the faces, hoping that they – and perhaps the door as well – would memorise his own, so that when the sixth face came they’d know whose turn it was.

The last time Aras had taken leave of the place was four years earlier, and he’d believed it really was the last time. A fond farewell. Not that he was a credulous person. But when, verdict by verdict, more dead were added to the chants each Friday; when cities were cut off from electricity, water and all forms of communication, when there followed more and more arrests, more and more disappearances; when the dictator, who described his own people as too ill-educated for reforms, decided to smother the revolution beneath a sky thick with hails of bullets – Assad or we’ll burn the country to the ground, said the walls, Assad for all eternity, they said and said again; when soldiers who didn’t want to fire on their brothers and sisters, on their girlfriends, neighbours and relatives, joined the Free Syrian Army; while Nadia alternately sat in front of the computer screen or stood out on the street, outside embassies, local government buildings or the Reichstag, hoping to hear the one piece of news that would end it all; Aras had realised then that it wouldn’t be long before he saw this building once again, and now, after two years, he had. Goodbyes aren’t forever.

So while the European Union debated on that very day, a day like today, whether to supply the Syrian rebels with weapons – Germany didn’t think it was a good idea, because it would just mean the opposing side would arm themselves still further – the banister opposite the mint-coloured door provided Aras with some small support. The tiles at his feet worried him. They captured his attention. Black, cracked in certain places, split. Somebody had fought against their power, perhaps, tried furiously to bring the place down with their feet, over and over, others following, a pathetic attempt. Were the cracks evidence that the police had made a pact with the floor, offering it different faces, and the floor, in return, had exercised the harshness of state power? Aras’s vision went red.

Nadia and Frau Hoffmann were chatting beside him.
‘Can you translate?’ his mother asked.
‘A man was on trial, and the three judges sentenced him to death,’ Aras translated. ‘He was offered a last wish, as is often the case. Normally, most people ask to see their mother again, or they ask for food, that sort of thing. But this man thought he was clever, so he asked to learn German.’ Nadia was building up towards the punchline. ‘The first judge said, “No, we can’t grant that wish.” The second judge agreed: “It would take far too long. We’ll never get round to carrying out the sentence.”’ Realising he knew the joke already, Aras braced himself for Frau Hoffmann’s reaction. ‘The third judge said, “We should grant him his wish. He’ll carry out the sentence himself.”’ The others by the door, whom Aras had almost forgotten were there, joined in with Frau Hoffmann’s laughter. ‘I’ll have to tell my students that one,’ she chuckled. ‘Priceless.’

[…]

There Were Days (original German title, “Da waren Tage”) is Luna Ali’s debut novel, written and published in German by S. Fischer in 2024. 

Aras, the protagonist, observes the Syrian revolution from a distance. Born in Aleppo but raised in Germany, he was in his first semester of law school in 2011 when the revolution began. As violence in Syria escalates, the conflict increasingly permeates his life in Germany. From lecture halls to immigration offices, during an internship in Jordan, or as a guest on a political talk show, Aras relives the anniversary of the revolution each year as a merging of reality and imagination. Thus, the novel There Were Days asks how the desire for freedom—and the repression of that desire—shapes the life, actions, and language of the protagonist in the diaspora. 

The excerpt is from the third chapter. It addresses the most direct impact of the Syrian revolution’s repression on Aras: his family’s desire to escape the war. The chapter is set in March 15th, 2013, at the Foreigners’ Office (Ausländerbehörde), where Aras, his mother Nadia, and his former German teacher attempt to submit a Verpflichtungserklärung (declaration of commitment) to secure family reunification—the only safe passage between Syria and Germany at the time. To achieve this, they depend on Frau Hoffmann, whose income qualifies her to provide a guarantee (Bürgschaft). The chapter explores the dehumanizing bureaucracy of the Foreigners’ Office, which reduces individuals to subordinates, while also unravelling the intricate web of politics, (post-)colonialism, and kinship, ultimately fostering solidarity.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post 2013 – Getting the process going appeared first on Untold.

جنة جنة جنة يا وطنا [Paradise, Paradise, Our Country is Paradise] 

Words and the relentless music penetrate my body, inebriated and exhausted as it rests on a sofa of a semi-stranger, with the only bond we share being Syria. Night eventually descends in summery Berlin, while I am listening countless times to the song Janna Janna remixed by the Syrian-German band Shkoon.

Its beginning and end dissolve into a flow of sounds, words and beats. Darkness reaches the palm frond framing the window, its slow motion devouring every single object of that unfamiliar living room. The night is untamed, almost ruthless, in its carnivorous mission, ingesting my own body and mind, too, until now occupied by the crescendo of the synths and the pounding of the beat. The entire space and myself, the past and the present, dissipate profanely and profoundly.  

***

May 2021, Berlin, a desk

It was not the first time I listened to this song, even to this specific remixed version. As happened to a lot of the traditional musical repertoire, the piece was reinvented with new meanings in March 2011 and became the soundtrack of this historical period, the revolution, after protests sparked in Syria. The song, also, became tied to one of its uncontested icons, Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a young prominent football goalkeeper who had embraced the revolution and led the protests in Homs with his words and presence. He later turned into a Free Syrian Army fighter in the wake of the brutal repression and siege laid down by the al-Assad regime in his hometown, a transformation captured by the documentary Return to Homs by filmmaker Talal Derki. The song and its infinite re-interpretations also became the sonic landmark of my nightlife in the German capital, since my arrival in May 2018. I witnessed its innumerable metamorphosis–that did not scratch its sacred power–in the many Arab parties populating pre-pandemic Berlin. 

***

February 2019, Berlin, a nightclub

An unremarkable winter night. An electro dabke version of the song instigates a powerful energy reverberating on the dancefloor. Squeezed next to each other, partygoers are greeting each other, some others dancing and drinking, others simply chatting. The moment this song starts, this heterogeneous group becomes a single entity. My friend Azad, standing next to me, is also infected by the song and the atmosphere. He starts to shout, singing along. Holding my hand, he initiates a spontaneous dabke line where I follow his voice and body. We ignore the heat, the lack of space and oxygen; we dance, sneaking around single dancers, trying to find an empty spot for our next steps amongst the other chains of people whose hands clasp together. The song is replayed immediately, the energy still inhabiting the room with force as sweating bodies and loud voices continue to move and sing in unison. 

I did not reflect much in that moment about what was happening –as similar to other such moments punctuating my nocturnal life. I just danced, I let myself be carried away by the sound and the vibe. There was no time, space and, even, willingness to dissect the power of the song as it was all about living in the moment, savouring its addictive and hedonistic flavour like an animal starving in the middle of a dying forest. Maybe those moments on the dancefloor were just so cathartic because they were about holding onto something beautiful that was about to end or it had already ended but we were not ready to let go. 

Revolutions never last for an eternity, nor should they. Yet, those moments of pure magic can survive, or we want (we need) them to survive, not to fall down, collapse forever–and us–with them. They always remind me of Eugenio Montale’s poem, I Limoni [The Lemon Trees], his wandering in a noisy city made of cement punctuated by a moment of pure beauty as he suddenly glimpses a lemon tree hidden in the courtyard of a building. Maybe the revolution had the smell of the lemons Montale was desperately seeking, that ultimate treasure that life, the world, and nature can offer to ordinary people. Maybe the paradise–Janna Janna–was Montale’s lemon trees. 

***

October 2022, Berlin, an old kneipe

For Azad, –the friend who held my hand in captivity dancing dabke that night– the song is an allegory of his revolutionary past. Three years after that night; a lifetime after the revolution, we talk about my ideas behind this text. He smiles at me and his partner, with a hint of bitterness, saying that he forgot about that night, but he remembers the song as part of his young self reaching the square to protest, dance, listen to Janna Janna and to fulfill the promise of a different future for Syria. His enduring attempts always failed as the regime’s snipers and their bullets were always faster in dropping the curtains at these rebellious gatherings and claiming some people’s lives in the process. 

***

August 2015, Lebanon, a school courtyard

For me, that dabke reminds me of those evenings spent in the courtyard of the school in the midst of agricultural fields. Created by the Syrian community displaced from rural Homs, the school and its courtyard–situated not far from its informal settlement – became the stage for any sort of event that required a sahra [party]: celebration of an engagement, a wedding or just ordinary life. The singer with his voice and the musician with his electric piano animate those dark nights and their summer breeze amusing the usual crowd while guests arrive from far and not so far away. 

Sometimes, we just listen to his singing, making up impromptu celebratory or ironic lyrics about one of us. Other times, the electro dabke pushes us in the middle of the courtyard/dancefloor as circles of men and women, sometimes mixed, dance not far from children playing around. The atmosphere is not always joyful, nostalgia and melancholia arise amongst a tensed silent audience as his voice recalls the past and what has been lost. 

There was no revolutionary fervor in those summer evenings. Janna Janna and all the other revolutionary songs never made it to the courtyard –to be honest, the revolution seemed to have become a chimera by the time of my arrival in August 2014. Sarout was never mentioned there either. Yet, those moments also were revolutionary in their own essence: they were celebrating the ‘minor struggles’ to be alive and continue to live despite displacement and the devastation of the war. 

***

Berlin, October 2024, a bed

The dancefloor was neither the street nor the courtyard. Yet, Berlin 2019 managed to bring Syria 2011 and Lebanon 2015 back as if we were inside a half-broken TV from the nineties, in which, from time to time, one channel blended with another one –as if time and space collapse making it impossible to distinguish what we were doing, with whom, where and when. The dancefloor, after all, was just a vacuum that helped everyone postpone a sense of an ending and a future repeating an eternal past. After all, this was Berlin, it was not Sarout singing, it was only a remix. Like my friend, I also danced the night away. But that waning dusk on the sofa was different. It was not a time of reckoning the end, but a time of remembering its beginning.  

***

August 2012, London, a crowd, the Syrian embassy

Another Saturday afternoon in front of the Syrian embassy in the most imperial looking parts of Central London. ‘Janna Janna’ is filling the air of those revolutionary protests: we are not Syria, but Syria and the revolution are here. For the young and older generations of Syrians protesting from a distance, this is a moment of hope, euphoria, togetherness until then unimaginable, as fear and silence brought from Syria were carefully cultivated and generationally transmitted even in the diaspora.

I was happy to touch again those moments that were, so far, buried by the passing of time. Yet, they felt more distant than ever, belonging to a parallel universe that crashed in front of the violent reality. 

***

June 2019, Berlin, a computer screen

A week after me lying on that sofa,Sarout died after being wounded in battle between Hama and Idlib. My Facebook newsfeed becomes a reel of mourning for this man and his legacy: the video of him singing during the protests, his interviews and pictures of the funeral attended by thousands of people in Idlib. In Lebanon, members of the Syrian community I lived with commemorated his death, abandoning their usual carefulness in posting anything political and revolutionary at their own very real risk. In Berlin too, the news feels devastating––he was a symbol of the revolution, but almost an embodiment of the Syrian predicament and its contradictions. His death feels like a kitchen knife cutting deeply through the skin and flesh of a finger.

***

November 2024, Berlin

We are no longer on a dancefloor, its darkness and the darkness of the night did not protect us from the reckoning of this bitter end; there weren’t any lemon trees to uncover in any hidden corner. Like the TV of my childhood where white, black and grey lines dominated the screen, eating up one channel and the intrusive other, the feelings, people, years and places belonging to the revolution became mixed up with neither beginning nor end. A dream I did not live but watched in front of a broken TV showcasing fragments of my diaries, fieldnotes and memories. Maybe I can only archive these fragments, making some order and clarity in between these monochromatic lines as a final act of mourning, or as a way to deal with the lingering melancholia. I put a date, a place, I unpack and deconstruct the secret beauty of a lemon tree, the captivating lyrics of Janna Janna, reminding myself that even revolutionary icons like Sarout are human.

***

 7th December 2024, Berlin, Sonneallee/Arab Street,

I am walking towards Sonneallee to catch the bus to go home and watch the speech of Bashar al-Assad that never happened. My friend Nawal and I are stopped by a young boy standing in front of one of the many Syrian patisseries that found their homes in this long avenue. Wearing the Syrian revolutionary flag like the mantle of a superhero, he stands next to an old stereo singing Janna Janna, offering sweets to people passing by to celebrate the imminent fall of Bashar al-Assad. The revolutionary flag reappears in a blink of an eye, worn like an accessory by men walking in the street or attached to the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag at the entrance of many shops. 

The day after, even Sarout reappears in flags and posters brought by the jubilant crowd celebrating the collapse of the regime and its eternal aura. I smell again the lemon tree as Janna Janna is blasted in the middle of Kreuzberg, almost symbolizing this surreal moment of touching paradise with the point of that finger, effortlessly, at least for the here and now.

I do not know what to do with this text now that it tells a different ending written only in November from the one we witnessed more recently. I want to delete that part, but I can’t. I am tempted to rewind the tape, letting the interferences in the screen just be what they have been, without any order or logic, to preserve that revolutionary momentum as it was, as it is now, and with it, those who are not here with us, celebrating the many ways in which they also contributed to make the unimaginable and unforeseeable become history. 

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post Paradise, interrupted. The archive may not end appeared first on Untold.

The sea was there when we cried,
The first cry
Out loud,
And left our moms
With memories floating in the air,
Separating us from our destiny.

In silence,
Silenced we spoke
By the sea because it took us by word, and here we are.

The sea is there as we cry,
With memories floating in the air,
Memories of the now.
This sea is now nothing but home
For the years of emptiness,
Choking our words.

Now these words are optional,
Yet we choose to say them
And hope is our way

To remember
And be remembered.

– 08.12.24, for my hometown Jableh

In times when we are expected to envision utopias and heavens, can we take a moment to rewrite a Syria of the past? What if we think beyond trauma? What if we call it a process of marginalization of both memory and the self to the extent that we embody what has passed, yet force ourselves to forget we lived it? 

Coming from Syria, we find ourselves misplaced in a story with no clear beginning, starting mid-narration—easier to label as tragedy or misery than to fully comprehend. Our memory, shaped by fear, mistrust, and control, has become a battleground, caught between “trauma porn” and modern tactics of erasure and forgetting. A rainy cloud dominates our minds. It feels vivid to us, yet incomprehensible to those around us. We know what we know, but how do we truly remember?

Memory

The collective memory of Syrian society has undergone various phases of distortion from the onset of the era of Hafez al-Assad – the Assad father – in 1970 until the first moments of the 2011 revolution and continues to this day. During my childhood and adolescence in Syria, I was not accustomed to hearing comprehensive answers to my questions. The responses were constrained by the policies of collective memory, which were shaped by conspiracy theories targeting the Syrian Arab nation and its cause.

The concept of collective memory is attributed to the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). He relied on it to interpret how individuals understand the past and its connections to the present within their social environment. Consequently, the formation of individual memory and history becomes a product of factors provided by the surrounding environment, such as interactions with others, language, place, and time in their political dimensions. 

Collective memory, in turn, represents a system that includes selected elements from the sum of individual memories, arranged to narrate a past that aligns with its current reality. When I look at Syria now, I have a question that is not new: How can we resist the present in the presence of the constant struggle with forgetting, oblivion and distortion, not only at the level of Syrian society at home and abroad, but also on international and Arab levels? 

Are we allowed to call things by their true names?

My impressions of living inside Syria are profoundly shaped by the overwhelming support I witnessed among many people on the Syrian coast for Bashar al-Assad. Some are neighbors, relatives, friends of friends and schoolmates. Amid their criticism and complaints about the ever-worsening living conditions, expressions of loyalty and resignation emerged all the time. 

What is particularly interesting, is the generalization of convictions: “We are the poorest, we are the weakest, we are the oppressed in this equation.” Among them are those who have been brutalized by the Assad regime and others who hesitantly formulate meaningless ideas and incantations such as: “May God help us all.” 

Everyone remembers what pleases them and eases their conscience to avoid the discomforts of reality or taking responsibility for themselves and those around them. Political passivity is not the primary trait in Syria; rather, it is fear. Fear and the desire to be free from this fear are the underlying drivers of people’s movements and attitudes. 

Either you are part of the apparatus of fear or among those rebelling against fear and the fearful! A duality that aligns with the regime’s propaganda and the mindset of its followers: “Assad or we burn the country”. In this statement, the initial threats –despite their seriousness– were later concealed or downplayed in the regime’s official narrative of combating terrorism were hidden: a medieval fantasy about burning evil souls that disturb the serene kingdom. Well, Assad has eventually run away, and Syria remains wounded. However, we haven’t yet been defeated. 

Marginalized memory

Before or after prison? My cousin answered his kindergarten teacher’s question about what he wanted to become in the future. A few years later, I noticed that this family memory no longer existed for him, as if it had been replaced by absolute silence. The collective memory enforced by the Assad era was governed by fearing the unknown and filled with narratives resembling those of superhero movies., The main character was the regime itself: the only force capable of confronting imperialism. At the same time, Assad was practicing other sorts of imperialism, reinforcing the idea that any change could only have been part and parcel of that imperialism –the one threatening Syria– and  inevitably leading towards the destruction of the nation.

This memory transformed the loud cries for freedom in the country’s streets into indicators of Western dominance and the unquestioning support for Assad into signals of resistance. This distortion transcended the system’s ideology and its media’s conspiracy theories, becoming a life philosophy deeply ingrained in Syria’s DNA. Even our youngest lived within this memory, fighting enemies they only knew from the tales of their teachers of socialist national education at school—or whatever it was agreed to be called. 

Our mothers, fathers, and their comrades referred to their prison time and friends with code words and among their adopted names hid the narrative of marginalized memory.

One of the habits of Syrian society, adhering to Assad’s memory policies, is mocking pain and ignoring it if necessary, especially if its nature is politically inevitable. During my first years of exile, I noticed that most of those I met from my generation responded only with incomprehensible jokes or sarcasm when discussing the experience of imprisonment within our families. 

Many looks followed me and others, disbelieving as I continued talking about the societal stigma I endured long before the revolution with my family. We are the children of these times and places, yet we are unable to remember or believe, I thought to myself. An internal rejection prevails among us, as if our memory has forgotten the existence of what came before us.

In my adolescence, I was searching for justifications for our fear and silence, where fear was, and still is, greater than memory and recollection. But what is the reason now? Are these just mere reactions?

Forever No More

In March 2011, the voices of neighbors echoed phrases like: “We have always lived together without any problems.” I have often asked myself, who are those who lived in peace? And how was their life so problem-free? I can only recall stories of prisons, constant policing and words of assault. 

I asked and ask myself about the thousands killed in the Hama massacre of 1982, the constant oppression of Kurds in Syrian narratives, about those displaced all over the world and in refugee camps, about those who left us forever, about those who have been forcibly disappeared until now or those who have been absent from participating in the details of daily life even after their formal release, and about everyone who committed to the policy of self-isolation and rejection, silently or loudly. 

All these stories were censored by the Assad collective memory. Those influenced by it recount tales of the leader as the builder of dams and the defender of frontiers, and his soldiers as victims of saboteurs and terrorism. Or they fabricate stories of a revolution with no known past. Even the term “terrorism” has lost a clear meaning in the Syrian context—not because it is inaccurate, but because of its multiple sources and causes. To be frank, the regime has not hesitated to claim the top ranks in terrorism, killing, and destruction, utilizing state organs, supporting militias, and even assistance from Russia and Iran.

Counter-memory

Memory policies within Syria erupt sporadically and cannot be confined to narrow narratives that exclude others. The diversity of the Syrian landscape—politically, religiously, and ethnically—reflects a variety of oppressive scenes and their accompanying narratives. Yet, none of this alters the regime’s oppressive narrative, which has been consistently excluded from the memory of the present. A memory that forgets violent episodes and even justifies the oppressive mechanisms of the regime itself.

This marginalization extends beyond Syria, affecting many outside the country and across the political spectrum, where political memory and its revolutionary agents have been overshadowed by various propagandas. Counter-memory is, therefore, a necessity—one that has always been hidden in children’s questions and the cries of demonstrations. Essayism, what, for me, is reflective, exploratory mode of writing that blends personal, sociopolitical, and analytical perspectives, offers a tool to build a foundation for this counter-memory.

There exists a living, non-static memory that the regime’s ideology has intermittently suppressed, only for it to resurface in vain. With the fall of the Assad regime today, we cannot deny that there is a complete rebellion against various narratives and the expectations of the multitude of political parties in Syria.

Meanwhile, we face the added challenge of asserting agency against intervening imperial powers. Not blinded by the moment, we cannot place trust in parties that have played brutal roles in the war, waged over the bodies of the revolution. Yet, maintaining hope remains our moral obligation—to mobilize, organise, and ensure political change for all.

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

The post A life lived without memory, yet together appeared first on Untold.

A video found on the phone of one of the paramedics found in the mass grave shows their last moments and was presented to the United Nations Security Council.

🚨This video was discovered on the cellphone of a paramedic who was found along with 14 other Palestinian rescue and medical workers in a mass grave in Gaza.

The Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies presented it to the UN Security Council this week. https://t.co/FozXtJ3Nsb

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) April 5, 2025

The incident highlights not only a pattern of violence against healthcare workers and hospitals but also the near-total absence of accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, where the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled that acts of genocide are plausible. These systematic attacks violate core principles of international humanitarian law and reflect an increasingly normalized assault on the right to health in war.

A global trend of escalating violence

In recent years, the targeting of healthcare workers, hospitals, and health infrastructure in conflict zones has escalated alarmingly, particularly in the West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region. Nowhere has this been more devastating than in Gaza, where the systematic destruction of the healthcare system by Israel has reached unprecedented levels. By early 2024, over 761 incidents of violence against Palestinian healthcare had been recorded — equivalent to the total number of attacks in Sudan, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo combined.

The 2023 report by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition documented a 25 percent rise in assaults on healthcare facilities and personnel globally, making it the worst year on record. These included bombings, looting, and killings that paralyzed healthcare systems and left civilians without essential care. The report found that nearly half of these incidents were attributed to state forces. It identified clear patterns of violence against healthcare in places like Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and, critically, in Gaza.

“Conflicts where violence against healthcare becomes a consistent pattern frequently start with extreme levels of violence against the health system,” the report noted. In 2023, this trend was particularly stark in Manipur (India), Sudan, and Gaza.

Israel’s war on Gaza: Healthcare under siege

Israel’s bombardment and siege of Gaza have not only devastated homes and infrastructure but systematically dismantled its healthcare system. Hospitals and clinics have been bombed, medical convoys attacked, and healthcare workers abducted and killed. The Kamal Adwan Hospital, for example, was targeted in repeated airstrikes, and its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, remains in Israeli custody where he has reportedly been mistreated. Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex, was also attacked and destroyed, with an investigation by Forensic Architecture revealing mass graves in the hospital grounds. 

By February 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that every hospital in Gaza was either damaged, destroyed, or rendered inoperable due to fuel shortages and attacks. The WHO had already documented 427 attacks on healthcare in Gaza and the West Bank by November 30, 2023, resulting in 566 deaths and 758 injuries.

Dozens of videos filmed by Israeli soldiers demolishing hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure have circulated online. One recent example is the destruction of the Turkish Friendship Hospital.

🚨Breaking: The Israeli army blows up and destroys the Turkish Friendship Hospital, the only hospital in Gaza dedicated to cancer patients. pic.twitter.com/QM0b3JKsDI

— Gaza Notifications (@gazanotice) March 21, 2025

In March 2025, a UN investigation concluded that Israel’s destruction of reproductive healthcare facilities in Gaza — targeting maternity wards, IVF clinics, and restricting access to essential care — amounted to genocidal acts. The report detailed how these deliberate attacks, along with restrictions on food and medical supplies, have partly destroyed the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza. 

“They ordered all of us, men and women, to take off our clothes and to continue walking, ordering us to only look forward. I was walking naked between the tanks, not even wearing underwear. An Israeli soldier spit in my face. I forced myself not to react as I knew they would… pic.twitter.com/8hW3C901tj

— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) March 21, 2025

Israeli attacks on healthcare in Lebanon

Israel’s attacks on healthcare have extended beyond Palestine’s borders. During its attacks on Lebanon, from October 2023 to October 2024, Israel bombed 37 health facilities and killed 70 health professionals. By November 1, 2024, the toll had risen to 178 healthcare workers killed and 292 injured. A total of 243 ambulances, 84 clinics, and 40 hospitals were affected by Israeli attacks.

The WHO has noted that nearly half of the healthcare attacks in Lebanon resulted in fatal outcomes, making it the most deadly conflict for health workers globally in terms of mortality rate per incident.

The sheer scale of these attacks has prompted international legal responses. In December 2023, South Africa filed a case at the ICJ accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza. Numerous countries from the global majority have joined the suit. In 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Despite these moves, Israel has faced no sanctions or meaningful accountability from its Western allies. This impunity stands in stark contrast to the legal obligations of states under international humanitarian law and the Genocide Convention.

A broader pattern: Attacks on healthcare in Sudan, Syria, and Yemen

In Sudan, the ongoing conflict has led to significant damage to healthcare infrastructure. In the first 500 days of the civil war, nearly half of the hospitals in Khartoum were damaged, severely impacting medical care. A report documented damage to 41 of the 87 hospitals in Khartoum, violating international humanitarian law and pushing the already fragile health system to the brink of collapse, with 70 percent of health facilities inoperable in affected states.

​An UntoldMag investigation revealed systematic attacks on hospitals in Al Fasher, targeting medical professionals and further decimating Sudan’s healthcare infrastructure.

Sudan has since lodged a case at the ICJ against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), accusing it of breaching the genocide convention by funding and arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rebel group in Sudan’s ongoing war. Sudan alleges the UAE supported the RSF in committing genocide, murder, rape, and other human rights violations.

In Syria, the decade-long war has also witnessed extensive targeting of healthcare facilities and personnel, leaving the country with a battered and overwhelmed health system. In 2021, a report by the International Rescue Committee showed some of the devastating losses and attacks on healthcare in the country. Of the people surveyed in the report, 56 percent said they would be afraid to live near health facilities because they are targets.

In Yemen, the protracted conflict has led to numerous attacks on healthcare facilities by the Saudi-led coalition, further deteriorating the already fragile health system. The destruction of hospitals and clinics has left millions without access to essential medical services, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Reports indicate Saudi Arabia and the UAE have conducted over 130 attacks on hospitals and healthcare infrastructure, violating international humanitarian law. 

The collapse of a legal and moral order

This increasing normalization of attacks on healthcare facilities and personnel reflects a crisis in the post-WWII world order, with international law, institutions, and protections under an unprecedented attack. 

Protections enshrined in international law — particularly the Geneva Conventions — are routinely flouted, especially by powerful states and their allies. While legal mechanisms like the ICJ and ICC offer glimmers of hope, they remain toothless without enforcement mechanisms and political will.

The ICC and ICJ cases, along with reactions from Western countries, highlight the lack of accountability for perpetrators. Without sanctions, legal action, and the end of political shielding for countries like Israel, the erosion of norms protecting civilians in conflict will continue — and with it, the further collapse of the fragile systems meant to protect life in times of war.

An emotional speech by pediatric intensive care doctor Tanya Haj-Hassan, who has worked in Gaza, reflects the dangers of normalizing attacks on hospitals and medical workers.

18 months of this holocaust. Our leaders still support it.

“When I was in Gaza, I felt like it was the prelude to the end of humanity,” heroic doctor Tanya Hassan told UN.

Don’t you feel it, too? I cannot see a way back from what we’ve allowed to happen.pic.twitter.com/bf0YvDzF8c

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) March 20, 2025

The normalization of attacks on healthcare is a direct consequence of this impunity. It reflects not only a collapse in global governance but a dangerous redefinition of what is permissible in war. As long as perpetrators face no consequences, hospitals will continue to be bombed, doctors will be treated as combatants, and the right to health will remain one of war’s earliest casualties.

The post Across War Zones, Targeting Healthcare has Become a Strategy, not an Accident appeared first on Untold.