Assad's long shadow

My parents lied to me about who we are for most of my childhood. And lately, I’ve found myself grateful for that lie. It liberated me from over-identifying with any religion. It planted the seeds of questioning and allowed me to see people first as human — before sect, faith, or ideology. I didn’t know I was Druze until I was a teenager. We briefly lived in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s, and I was enrolled in public schools where Wahhabi religious instruction dominated the curriculum. Every subject led back to a rigid interpretation of Islam — who was right, who was wrong, and who was destined for hell. In that environment, my parents didn’t just avoid telling me we were Druze, they actively concealed it. “We’re Muslim,” they said. That was the story. And I believed it. I was a talkative child — the lie was meant to protect me, and it probably did.

But when we returned to Syria years later, I started to notice cracks. Once, a relative whispered that our cousin had run away with a Muslim man she had met in Damascus. I remember thinking, “But… aren’t we Muslim?” I didn’t yet have the vocabulary for sectarianism, but I began to sense that “we” were different, and that this difference mattered.

It wasn’t until the 2011 revolution that I fully confronted the weight of sectarian identity. When the uprising began, I took part because we were fighting for justice. The revolution was about freedom, dignity, and rights — universal values I thought everyone could agree on. I remember the unifying chants: “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.” I remember the clever signs from Kafranbel and the creative spirit of our protests. And I remember the occasional sectarian slogans — and how fiercely we debated them among ourselves. 

One memory in particular stuck with me: one of my old teachers threatened a friend of mine for supporting the revolution. “If you keep this up,” she said, “the fundamentalists will come for us. They’ll rape our women and kill our men.” At the time I thought: But was it okay for the children of Daraa to be tortured and killed? Was it acceptable for peaceful protests to be bombed and silenced — just because it wasn’t us?

I had a complicated relationship with the Druze community

I didn’t understand this logic and still don’t. If the regime could get away with killing one Syrian, it could get away with killing all of us. Today, in 2025, as I witness people in my city killed simply for being born Druze, I can’t help but think of the fear others must have felt before us. 

Under the Assad regime, sectarianism was not an abstract idea; it was lived and weaponised. It was fear in the classroom. It was whispered warnings between neighbours. It was a system, carefully maintained by Assad, that dictated who could live and who could be killed without consequence.

Sectarianism in Syria didn’t fall from the sky, and it’s not something we were born with. The book ‘Sectarianization’, edited by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel, makes this argument powerfully. In one chapter, Madawi Al-Rasheed writes that sectarianism “is not an inherent historical quality of the Arab masses.” It’s manufactured — sustained by dictators and sectarian entrepreneurs who politicize old religious identities to hold onto power.

The French colonial authorities institutionalised sectarian divisions as part of their divide-and-rule strategy. They fragmented Syrian society by creating separate statelets along sectarian and ethnic lines—like the Alawite and Druze states — undermining any sense of national unity. But the Assad regime took it further. Bashar Assad didn’t protect minorities — he instrumentalised them. 

As Middle East expert Peter Harling points out in an interview with the Carnegie Middle East Center, a research institute based in Beirut, the regime’s relationship with minorities was far more complex and calculated than the common narrative of protection suggests. He explains that while Assad was often perceived by sympathizers as ‘protecting minorities,’ it was far more ambivalent.

“It both coopted the Druze and repressed them, notably in a brutal crackdown in 2000,” he said. “It manipulated and contained the Kurds. It sheltered Christians while promoting forms of Sunni activism that terrified them. And while it relied on the loyalty of Alawites, it undermined their community’s internal structures to consolidate their dependency, ultimately treating such Alawite supporters as an army of slaves.”

This wasn’t coexistence — it was control through fear and fragmentation. The consequences were visible and long-lasting: destroyed neighborhoods, displacement, demographic engineering, entire communities destabilised.

Throughout the revolution and even during my own displacement, I clung to my Syrian identity. I rejected sectarian labels and told myself I didn’t care what sect I came from. At the same time I couldn’t ignore the reality around me.

I had a complicated relationship with my sect. I hated that many prominent Druze sheikhs decided to remain “neutral”, while those who openly resisted were assassinated. I left my hometown Sweida, after several confrontations and amid growing angst.

There was fear of the regime, but also fear towards people from my own community who said, ‘We cannot oppose the regime. No one will protect us if they come for us.’ And they were correct. I witnessed what the regime did. People disappeared, were tortured, and killed. I also observed that Druze were less affected by attacks, arrests, and murders than Sunnis. I remember studying for my final exams and hearing the sound of bombs falling on neighbouring Daraa in the background. Guilt and anger ate at me. The regime was using our province as a base from which to kill our fellow Syrians. One thing became painfully clear: not all suffering was equal. Some groups were spared — not out of compassion, but out of political calculation.

I started asking myself uncomfortable questions: Do I want to fit into this binary? In the broader geopolitical conflict, are we — Druze — simply seen as part of the Shia bloc? These questions made me uneasy. So I avoided them.

Today, Assad is truly gone. But his legacy isn’t. His sectarian strategy left behind deep psychological, spatial, and political wounds. And now, those wounds are reopening. The recent wave of sectarian violence — the targeting of Alawite areas in March, the clashes involving Druze communities in Sehnaya after a provocative audio recording in April and May, and the suicide bombing at Mar Elias Church in June — might give the impression that sectarianism is now worse than ever, and Assad was in fact the protector of minorities. But in truth, what we’re witnessing is the unraveling of decades of Assad’s sectarianization of the Syrian people. What was once suppressed under the weight of authoritarian silence is finally being spoken aloud. In the massacres in my hometown of Sweida in July 2025, I lost cousins, friends, people I loved. In the days that followed, I looked through folders of pictures of corpses disfigured beyond recognition and tried to identify the missing – just as we once did with the pictures taken by defectors from the Syrian military police under the code name ‘Caesar’.

But this time it was happening under the transitional government, the people who had promised a new Syria – and who are now playing the same old game. Their official media incite hatred against entire communities in order to stay in power. And in the midst of this chaos, Israel intervenes. When Israeli attacks targeted the transitional government's troops advancing on Sweida, many said these bombs had saved lives. But they sealed Sweida's fate in another way. They provided a new pretext. Suddenly, our deaths were seen as justified.

Timothy D. Sisk, professor of international politics in Denver, explains that certain negative “involves the manipulation of passions and the cultivation of hatred,” feelings that deepen and harden over time. This view is shared by historian  Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi from the University of York. “There is a very real danger of generating path dependencies whereby deficits of security are transfigured into totalizing sectarian animosities, perceptions of enmity displace relations of amity, and become increasingly difficult to challenge and overturn.”

In other words: sectarianism is a political project, not a natural fact. But if we’re not careful, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So, where can we go from here? What can we do now? We have to rebuild a national civic identity rooted in civil rights — not in sect, not in religion. We have to rethink “minority protection” not as a special status, but as equal participation. We must create political frameworks that foster solidarity across trauma lines — not ones that reinforce the divisions left behind by Assad. That means telling the truth. Naming what happened. Explaining how sectarianism was weaponised doesn’t deepen the divides — it’s the only way to begin to heal them. There are already seeds of that healing: a courageous group of Syrian women who have traveled across provinces, bridging sectarian divides through dialogue, listening, and trust-building—working tirelessly to mend communities fractured by war and propaganda. Yet as violence escalates, their work has been halted. Peace is a prerequisite for healing. The bloodshed must end. The interim government must wield its newfound authority to build bridges, not walls.

 We can’t move forward by pretending sectarianism doesn’t exist, or by clinging to the empty phrase ‘minority protection’ and accepting the divisive tactics used by those in power to control us. Syria’s future depends on embracing the complexity of who we are, rejecting instrumentalization, and choosing participation over fear.

This will be hard and messy. But if we don’t do it now, sectarianism will continue to define us, and Assad will have won, even in his absence.