Image by Alex Shuper.

The Syrian regime’s brutal response to protests with bullets set this grim reality in motion: from the very beginning of the Syrian uprising (March 2011) mourning halls and visitation rooms were opened across Syria. Syrians gathered in these spaces as if they were the only social horizon left for their existence. These gatherings evolved from spaces of grief into arenas for the exchange of ideas, mobilization, and recruitment in a country increasingly torn apart by war. As deaths occurred daily, society -fractured along ethnic and sectarian lines -experienced mourning that was sharply divided, with each sect grieving independently.

On March 11, 2025, a video circulated on social media showing a mother standing between the bodies of her two sons and her grandson. Meanwhile, the killer, an operative of the current transitional government, placed his boot on the head of one of the victims and hurled insults at her, accusing “her people” (the Alawites) of betrayal. In response, she uttered a single word in the Syrian dialect that would come to symbolize defiance against the genocide: Fasharto (“You lie!”). The word quickly went viral across social media, resonating as a powerful rejection of brutality. This video brings to mind another widely circulated clip from 2013, which showed Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers stomping on detainees forced to lie face down on the ground in the city of Baniyas in the coastal region. The scene reflected the regime’s brutality, which resulted in the mass killing of civilians in the city during the early days of its systematic crackdown against protests. Between these two videos, the values and slogans of the Syrian revolution, once envisioned as transcending sectarianism, were shattered after 14 years of bloody conflict.

One of the most prominent and insightful Arab intellectuals to recognize and speak out about the sectarian turn of the Syrian revolution in 2014, was the late Syria-Palestinian Marxist writer and activist, Salameh Kaileh. His sharp understanding of the situation made him one of the first to address this critical issue. In an article published in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed on August 6, 2015, titled “Sunni Grievances in Syria,” Kaileh argued that after four years, the struggle was no longer a revolution against a corrupt, authoritarian regime, it had become a matter of “Sunni grievances.”

Kaileh criticized both the elites and individuals who had “hijacked the revolution,” including the late Syrian Marxist philosopher and writer Sadik Jalal al-Azm, who, according to Kaileh, wanted people to accept as an undeniable truth that the conflict was about the “natural right of the Sunni majority” to rule, given that the “Alawite minority” had monopolized power.

In the aftermath of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall on December 8, 2024, a phrase began circulating on social media that captured the spirit of the new order: “Bilad al-Sham (Syria) has returned to its people – Umayyad, Umayyad, despite the spiteful.” However, in this context, “the people of Bilad al-Sham” did not refer to Syrians – the........

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