ruba mansour,samir sadek
08-11-2026
Around 2012-2013, the silence in Syria was broken, and talk began about the dangers of a full-blown civil war, The beginning was in Damascus when Buthaina Shaaban accused suspicious elements of killing people and spreading sectarian conflict in the country, noting what happened in the 1980s when events flared up following the killing of an Alawite sheikh and a Sunni sheikh in Latakia, At that time, almost no one was talking about a sectarian war or sects.
Buthaina Shaaban held the fundamentalists and Salafists responsible for the violence in the country, and Mufti Hassoun supported her in this, At that time, an organized media campaign broke out under the title “My sect is Syria,” coinciding with a promotional campaign against the Salafist specter and against armed gangs that roam freely in the country, Even at that time, civilians were involved in the spiral of violence, and it seemed as if one sect was confronting another.
At that time, the practice of sectarian violence was at its peak in the city of Homs, which prompted many of the city’s Alawite residents to flee to the coastal region, that is, the beginning of a new demographic distribution for fear of identity-based killings that claimed many lives, especially after a bus was bombed in the village of Al-Mukhram Al-Fawqani, which belongs to the city of Homs, because the residents of this village are Alawites,
At that time, media outlets, mostly funded by the Gulf states, contributed to fueling the internal conflict,The Assad regime prevented foreign media from entering the country, except when it suited its whims and interests, such as allowing the filming of the Hasr al-Shughur massacre, The media outlets that were permitted, and those that were banned, resembled war propaganda, reporting only what served their funders, For example, the officially banned media (the Gulf media) ignored the demonstrations in the predominantly Ismaili city of Salamiyah and the predominantly Druze city of Suwaida, focusing instead on religious slogans, This included adopting religiously themed names for Fridays, such as “Abu Bakr Friday,” “Descendants of Khalid ibn al-Walid Friday,” and “We Will Bow Only to God Friday,” which were adopted by channels like Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Al Safa, Wesal, and others, This occurred despite objections from administrators of the “Syrian Revolution” Facebook page, who argued that such names contributed to entrenching sectarian divisions in the country, divisions exacerbated by other practices such as broadcasting additional sectarian rhetoric, like the deification of the Assad family, In addition to all this, there were interventions by religious figures like Qaradawi,, Al-Lihyan and Al-Arour, considering the uprising a holy jihad against the Nusayris, then broadcasting news about the desecration of mosques and the actions of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Hezbollah factions, and the Mahdi Army, The Assadist media outlet did not spare the Syrians from fabricated news similar to the news of the other side in terms of style and opposite content,
Some were optimistic and confident that Syrians would not be drawn into sectarian fighting, but the majority were pessimistic, Then there were those who did not realize the implications of sectarianism as a negative value, and all of them failed to grasp the psychological fabric necessary for the outbreak of civil war, such as the mobilization of citizens, the militarization of the mind, the commodification of the number of dead, and the monopolization of the concept of martyrdom by both sides, The warring parties did not care about the dead or martyrs of the other side. Rather, patriotism was manifested in the ability to annihilate the other side, as if the civil war was not a war between “families.” One side called its dead martyrs destined for paradise, and the other side called the dead of the other side “carcasses destined for hell.” Al-Arour did not feel any loss when 7 or 8 million Syrians were killed and did not consider it a human tragedy. Some promoted death, as there is no revolution without blood, etc.
The brutal structure of the Syrian regime only served to promote further brutality, What helped this brutality flourish was the absence of a unified military force, crippled by defections within the army and security forces, and by the division of the various factions into pro-regime brigades and opposition groups, The concept of “no solution” without the annihilation of the other side dominated the Syrian scene, Scenes of killing and slaughter became commonplace, and the country lost its name as a homeland for all, acquiring instead the names of sects and religious groups, The phrase “peaceful civil” lost its meaning for the brigades and factions, There were no longer citizens, only Sunnis and Alawites. What is the point of a homeland without citizens? Believers need places of worship, not homelands!
We consider the development of the Syrian situation into the al julanism situation a historical inevitability that will eliminate the Syrian state project completely, In eliminating the Syrian state, Assadism, the al julanism and its ilk have partnered, In general, the al julanism can be considered the last link in the regression of the Sykes-Picot project, that is, the development of the 185,000 km2 state project into a state of emirates and states founded on sectarian human homogeneities in the quasi-Syrian state that was born after the First World War,
Initially, four entities can be expected to emerge as quasi-states based on sectarian geography,Since Christians do not possess that geography as the Alawites, Druze, Kurds, and Sunnis do, the extinction of their presence in the formation of sectarian mini-states has become an automatic and inevitable matter, Therefore, they emigrated, and those who remain of them, about 250,000 out of about three million, must emigrate as quickly as possible, because sectarian groups cannot live except with sectarianism and sects!