Afrasianet - Sally Obeid - Autumn is not like the seasons, when homelands are wiped out with pens, not bombs. Since independence, Syria's minorities have not been social extras, or guests on the sidelines; they have been partners in the creation of the national idea itself. Christians, Druze, Alawites, Ismailis, and Kurds all contributed to the building of the first republic, and faced tyranny as everyone else did. But when internal and external forces redefined "a possible Syria," these sects were not listed as founding elements, but as obstacles to the new equation.
Between the "promise of the republic" and the "tutelage of the gun", the Syrian state slipped from the ambition of citizenship to the reality of disguised quotas. With the collapse of the center after 2011, the alternative did not come civilianly, but sectarian with the masks of the revolution, and security with the tools of religion. The factions filled the vacuum, and identities were reconstituted not through dialogue, but through weapons, naturalization, and disappearance.
This investigation not only monitors what happened, but also places it in the dock:
• How did diversity turn into a charge?
• How did the communities go from partners in the national contract to "on-demand residents"?
• How did religion become a tool for re-sorting, the media a means of concealment, and nationality a commodity conditional on loyalty?
It's a determined, slow-bleeding, deadly autumn. It is not announced, but carried out, without noise. No statement. Religion is no longer a collective; it has become a tool of alignment. Friday sermons are held in security rooms, sheikhdoms are chosen to satisfy the narrative of power, and churches are emptying their independent pastors.
The media is no longer a mirror; it has become a curtain that hides voices and shows tame faces. Citizenship, on the other hand, has turned into a political lease: it is granted to those who praise the name of the new state, and it is withdrawn from those who have not renewed their allegiance or have not bowed to the prevailing narrative.
Thus, the country changes silently. Associations are closed, institutions are dismantled, names are removed from the registers, and added to the lists of "suspects." You wake up one morning and find the neighborhood as it was, the street as you memorized, or your name as it was first pronounced.
Autumn without a season, but when it does, it leaves behind nothing but the ashes of identity, and maps that only recognize those who spoke the language of the group, or took up arms in defense of its narrative. In this context, trees are not burned; records are burned. Papers are not withered; nationalities are taken away.
Colors do not fall from the sky, but from the faces of those who have not renewed their loyalty. The "Autumn of Minorities" in Syria is not a passing chapter in the narrative of war, but rather a long path of complex accumulations: military, media, administrative, and symbolic. It is the embodiment of the collapse of the inclusive state and the rise of a new authoritarian model. He writes history, redefines the citizen, and then asks everyone to applaud the official narrative, even if it is written on their ruins.
From the "Promise of the Homeland" to the State of Sectarian Guardianship
The Syrian state was not born as a homeland for all, but as an unfulfilled promise, always threatened by foreign discourse and internal whips. Since independence, the idea of a civil state has been put forward on paper, but the reality has been haunted by an obsession with disintegration, as if the state was created to defend itself, not to serve its citizens.
With the rise of the Baath, citizenship was not consolidated but dismantled: secularism was presented as a façade, but what happened was the dissolution of identities in a closed security center, run by officers from one sect, not as its representatives, but as arms of power that saw belonging as an accusation and loyalty as salvation. When Assad was in power, the regime transformed from a political project into a system of sectarian tutelage:
• It does not mention the sect, but rules by its name.
• It does not declare sectarianism, but it manages everything according to its own scales.
• It raises slogans of unity, but it bases its judgment on suspicion and sorting.
However, minorities played a symbolic role in this equation:
- the Christians are the gateway to the West;
- the Druze are the balance of the mountain;
- the Kurds are the bet of the borders;
and the Ismailis are the needle of the balance in the middle.
But they were not partners in the decision; The regime did not like minorities, but rather feared the majority. The more fear intensified, the more it symbolically embraced them, not out of love, but as a precaution. When the revolution broke out, everything was revealed.. The secular façade fell. The state was stripped naked, and the apparatus was revealed.
The street exploded, and he did not find an institution in front of him, but a league. While the security grip has collapsed in some areas, no alternative civilian model has emerged; rather, the sectarian monster that has long lurked beneath Syria's skin has surfaced. The groups that filled the vacuum were less courageous than the regime, but more visible than it was (black flags, sermons, sharia committees, and field courts).
These were not the beginnings of freedom; these were the beginnings of a civil war with restored sectarian identities. The Syrian was redefined not on the basis of a law; but on his sect, his residence, his triple name, and for whom he shouted. Carrying a personal identity became less important than carrying a "sectarian biography."
Here the state was not bombed; it was bombed by citizenship. The parliament was not demolished; the idea of national partnership was destroyed; thus, Syria fell not only in a revolution against dictatorship, but also in a collective disillusionment with the promise of the state itself. A new Syria is beginning to take shape, not like the homeland we dreamed of in the morning song, but rather a farm of frightened identities, sectarian safety squares, and maps drawn by weapons and not by the constitution.
"Timber Sycamore", when weapons become a tool of social dismantling
In 2012, the CIA, in partnership with Gulf states and Turkey, launched the Timber Sycamore program to arm the Syrian opposition. The stated goal was nothing more than to support the "rebels" against the Assad regime, but the truth soon became clear: the weapon was aimed not only at the regime; Money was lavished, weapons flowed to factions with a clear sectarian character, and suddenly all talk of building a civil state disappeared. What was required was not only the overthrow of the regime, but the production of a sectarian system that intersected in its formation with the interests of the supporting countries, and derived its legitimacy from weapons rather than from the people.
Idlib and Systematic Screening
In Idlib, where "supported" factions, such as Jaish al-Fatah, and then Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham, were based, demographic change began to take on a slow engineering character. There were no mass massacres, but the result was a massacre in stages. Alawite families were evicted from the mixed villages of Jabal al-Zawiya, and Christian families disappeared from the heart of Idlib city. Those who remained lived under the domination of the "security fee," the "safety tribute," or preferred to leave in silence.
Land redistributed: homes of displaced people have been inhabited, land confiscated, and mosques have been rehabilitated according to a new religious discourse. Even schools have changed their curricula to perpetuate this transformation: there is no place for neutrality, but a clear position within the narrative of the victorious group. Statistics of violations in Idlib and its countryside:
• More than 267 Alawite men were arrested and abducted between January and April 2025, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and field sources.
• 38 cases of abduction of women against minorities were reported with the aim of pressuring the community and subjugating men by humiliating their families.
• 42 cases of field killings of Alawite civilians were monitored in Idlib and Hama by extremist factions.
Sweida and the costly stability
In contrast, Sweida, which has a Druze majority, was an area that the Timber Sycamore did not enter. There were no armed factions funded, and no change in the structure of control. The result? Demographic stability, but fraught with marginalization.
The people of Sweida were not abandoned, but they were punished by international silence, by the blockade of livelihoods, and by the complete neglect of support networks. Their areas were not bombed like others, but they were deprived of every political or development project. They remained the same, but the price of this stability was isolation and contraction, not presence.
Statistics in Sweida:
• From the beginning of the year until May 2025, 107 Druze martyrs were recorded, as a result of assassinations and direct sectarian revenge.
• The governorate has witnessed an indirect crackdown by denying support to its institutions and preventing independent civic initiatives.
Between sorting and freezing. A model of structural contradiction.
In Idlib, local identity was forcibly dismantled, under the banner of Tahrir. In Suwayda, identity was frozen until it lost its presence in the equation. The first was actively screened, and the second was silently excluded. Both came out of the circle of "homeland," but with two different tools.
This contradiction reveals the nature of the "Timber Sycamore" as a tool for redrawing the demographic and political map: not only through military support, but by imposing a new sectarian model that corresponds to regional interests, not to the interests of Syrians, when a region is granted the right to arms, and another is denied The result is the same: the dismantling of the state from within.
The absence of direct massacres was no excuse, because soft change, when it is built on exclusion and substitution, produces in essence no less harsh results: villages without their people, cities without their memory, and Syria shrinking into a landscape that does not resemble a homeland, but rather a map of imposed balances.
Bloody background. March 2025 massacres in the Sahel
The number of martyrs registered in the Syrian coast between December 8 and May 7 reached more than 7,342 people, including 5,514 civilians, 4,582 men and youth, 402 women, and 260 children, and 2,092 cases of direct summary executions, most of them from the Alawite community, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Structural mechanisms of repression
Macro – "Clean-up the Coast" campaigns: Armed groups affiliated with the transitional government launched organized operations against Alawite villages, using heavy artillery and mass executions, and ended with hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves near the beach.
Meso Level – Restructuring the Police in accordance with Sharia: The "morality police" was established and raids were imposed on special occasions under the pretext of deviating from values, leading to arbitrary arrests of Christians and Muslims who did not adhere to the Salafi narrative.
Micro-level – individual assassinations and symbolic pressure: Included daily abuses, such as insulting minority elders, removing Alawite passengers from buses, and random checkpoints targeting the Druze by requesting color identity cards to identify them.
Bottom line: The Sycamore Timber was not just an armament plan, but a tool for forging a new social map. Armaments became a license to be abolished, demographic sorting became a cover for silent annihilation, and Syrian society was divided by loyalty rather than identity.
From "Sharia" to "Shariah"... Sectarianism in the clothes of the state
Ahmed al-Shara, formerly known as Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, came to power not through ballot boxes or a national mandate; rather, it was through a gradual float process led by regional and international powers out of the need for "de facto stability." Because the new authority cannot justify its existence with civil or institutional discourse, it has chosen the most dangerous path: legitimizing religious and sectarian affiliation as the identity of the state.
Sharia has never explicitly stated that its state is "Sunni," but it has also not denied that its project is reshaping Syria according to a conservative religious perspective that excludes those who do not fall within its architecture. Educational institutions have been reformulated to produce imams and guides instead of professors, the number of "civic" schools has been reduced, and philosophy has been abolished in a number of areas under the pretext of "dismantling Western thought."
More dangerously, Sharia's discourse enshrines the idea that minorities are not partners, but trustees: They are left with a symbolic margin in the administration, but without real representation in security, the judiciary, or the economy. This proposition is reminiscent of the model of the "dhimmis" in Islamic history, but this time it is wrapped in a technical, contemporary administrative cover that makes discrimination seem like an administrative organization rather than a sectarian one.
The Structural Transformation of Power. From centralized authoritarianism to job exclusion
When the post-2011 contours began to become clear, the Syrian transformation was not just the collapse of an oppressive regime, but the beginning of a coup d'état in the very concept of the state, replacing the authoritarian central logic with a fragmented functional logic that kept the state shell and emptied it of its sovereign essence.
The irony is that this shift was not random, but was consistent with the literature of some Western think tanks, as in a 2016 report by the RAND Corporation titled "Adherence to the Functions of the State, Not Its Structures. Post-conflict reconstruction," he said bluntly: "In post-war states, it is sometimes better to entrench the basic functions of the state – such as policing and providing services – without the need to rebuild full political centralization. Multi-functionalism may be a gateway to temporary stability, even at the expense of national unity."
This vision, which may be understood theoretically in multi-identity states, has turned into a harsh field application in Syria: it has not built local governing institutions, but rather centralization has been stripped of its meaning, and each region has turned into an administrative, sectarian, and geographical fiefdom, managed by the logic of "functional loyalty"; in the north, the Sunni Sharia system has prevailed with military references, in the east, the Kurdish nationalist model has been imposed, and in the Sahel, the Alawite presence has returned to a security shell rather than a political one. Damascus has turned into an administrative coordination center between these entities, not to the actual capital of a sovereign state.
All of this was accompanied by the drafting of a new constitution in 2024, which was described in the media as progressive, but in fact entrenched the principle of "functional representation" rather than political citizenship: minorities are granted media or social quotas, not sovereign rights. The Kurds are included in the "eastern component," not as a cultural identity, and Christians are referred to as a "historical" component, not as part of future sovereignty.
In short, it is a state that produces institutions without content, and grants legitimacy to those who perform the required role well, not to those who represent the people. It is a functional state in the full sense of the word, which, according to the literature of Western decision-making centers, intersects with the concepts of "smart decentralization" and "stability above justice." If these functions provide apparent reassurance, they hide a soft system of exclusion underneath: those who do not serve the job are expelled from the equation. Not only politically, but existentially.
Media and religion. Narrative Controls
Since 2021, the new media has used a means of reproducing the image of the sects, not conveying their voice. Christian figures representing al-Wefaq, Alawite proclaiming "reconciliation," and Druze speaking the language of the state emerged, but independent, critical voices that were not involved in the official discourse gradually disappeared from the screen and then from public life.
Worse, religion itself has used a sorting tool. Sharia councils have been reconstituted, and traditional references of sects have been dismantled. In Banias and Latakia, mosque preachers have been replaced for political reasons, and in Jabal al-Arab, a new cleric has been promoted while independent figures have been barred from holding their events. In Idlib, a religious model has been imposed that is supposed to be "moderate," but it eliminates any non-Sunni religious manifestation.
Thus, minorities have no longer been politically excluded, but their religious narratives have been tamed, and their beliefs have been transformed into decorations that are invoked when needed In order to demonstrate "official pluralism", and with it the rise of fictitious armies: electronic mobilization as a tool of symbolic subjugation, with the cracking of the central state structure and the rise of de facto authorities, it became necessary to move the battle for control from the battlefields to the fields of consciousness.
According to European reports issued by the Atlantic Council's DFRLab and the EU DisinfoLab, more than 600,000 fake accounts were created from Syria and Turkey in less than two years, targeting activists, human rights defenders, and independent journalists, in Arabic, English and French. The European Union's March 2025 report (report by the European Parliament's Digital Campaign Monitoring Unit) noted that there is a coordinated wave of incitement against Syrian minorities and activists of Kurdish and Christian origin are sourced from organized networks linked to the de facto authority in northern Syria.
It was noteworthy that dozens of the main accounts that launched the smear and incitement campaigns carry official photos and slogans of local media outlets affiliated with the Salvation Government or close to the Sharia government, and some of them belong to figures with official administrative or media positions.
At home, the militarization was no less vicious, but rather a form of "digital operations rooms" run by units specialized in security and community media, which follow up on opposition tweets, draw up lists of wanted persons digitally, and fabricate content in a defamatory or religious inflammatory format. Some of the bullying campaigns have even gone so far as to close their accounts or seek asylum outside the country, as has happened in documented cases published by the Women Journalists for Freedom Network in cooperation with the Syrian Center for Media Freedoms in The Hague.
European countries, such as France, Sweden, and Germany, through their offices specialized in digital freedom of expression, submitted objection memoranda to the European Commission, requesting that these campaigns be classified as "crimes of transnational hate speech," but the Syrian internal response did not go beyond ignoring them, and instead recorded statements by some official media professionals mocking these accusations, and seeing them as "a war on the discourse of the revolution."
The result was not only to silence voices, but to create an imaginary environment of consensus, as fake accounts repeat the same tweets, create artificial internal "trends," and portray those who reject the mainstream approach as "traitors" or "conspirators against the Syrian Islamic project," using terms such as: "the tails of secularism," "the enemies of God," "the heralds of the Kurdish hell," and "the descendants of Lawrence." Thus, electronic mobilization has become a bulletless gun, but it kills meaning, replacing chasing with debate, and herd with identity.
International Initiatives. Settlement or repackaging of the problem?
In June 2025, information was leaked about a Saudi-US initiative to resolve the so-called "minority crisis" in Syria, through a centralized dialogue sponsored by Riyadh and Washington, preceded by economic measures and openness to civil society. This initiative appears to be a tentative opportunity, but it suffers from structural simplification: treating communities as groups in need of protection, not as visionary political actors.
The approach of "economic containment versus abandonment of political ambition" may succeed circumstantially, but it deepens the logic of sharing, not citizenship. It also walks over unaddressed memory mines: massacres, displacement, exclusion, family disintegration, and the expropriation of religious symbols.
If the initiative is serious, the keys lie not in the appointment of a Christian clerk or the inclusion of an Alawite sheikh on the advisory council; rather, it is an explicit recognition that what has happened is a societal engineering that requires dismantling its tools, not embellishing them. Although more than half of Syria's communities and their social forces have been victims of "active exclusion" through displacement or liquidation, the Kurdish spectrum has faced a different form of deportation: Silent exclusion through marginalization, and gradual exclusion.
The Kurds, who formed a vital nucleus of revolutionary forces in its early stages, and developed models of local governance that ranged from civil communes to self-administration, were not merely a national component, but a political trend that tended toward secularism and liberalism, and strongly rejected the religious or sectarian project of the state. This tendency put them on the margins of the new formulation of the Syrian state, which after 2024 moved towards a hybrid structure that blended political Salafism with the military system.
The new state did not attack the Kurds directly; it weaved a strategy of "systematic neglect" around them:
• Their representation in higher institutions is absent,
• Their self-management was not recognized despite its effectiveness.
• He called their political discourse "separatist" whenever they demanded de facto decentralization.
On the other hand, some individual Kurdish figures who engaged in the discourses of loyalty were summoned as a formality, without any real powers or representation. Thus, the Kurdish question was contained without being resolved, and the illusion of participation was issued, while the actual decision remained confined to Salafi nationalist forces.
Worse, some international powers, notably the United States, played a dual role: Kurdish forces were used militarily to combat terrorism, but they did not provide them with any political cover to protect their societal gains, with the result that the Kurdish spectrum, while more modern and organized, also became the most politically fragile because it refused to enter the game of sectarian quotas. Thus, under a regime that recognizes only security loyalty or doctrinal dependency, the Kurds have been left without a seat, even though they were among the first to set the table.
Transient naturalization and withdrawal of citizenship. From Citizenship Card to Exclusion Tool
On May 4 , 2025, the "Syrian-European Justice Center" in Brussels published a report documenting the situation of the citizen (H.N.), born in 1970 in Al-Zahraa neighborhood in Homs. His father became Syrian citizen by presidential decree in the 1990s, and H.N. had been an employee of the Ministry of Irrigation since 1995, and never left the country. Suddenly, however, he received a notice from the Northern Government's Civil Records Committee that his citizenship had been revoked on the grounds of "a defect in the birth condition that corresponds to the new national identity."
When he tried to appeal, he was asked to "prove his allegiance through tribal mediation," which he refused, only to later be informed that he was "not registered as a citizen in the new national register," effectively meaning he was becoming a refugee in his homeland. In early February 2025, a photo of an Uzbek fighter nicknamed Abu al-Baraa al-Turkistani receiving a symbolic naturalization document inside a Jisr al-Shughour camp went viral. The document was signed by an official of the Migrant Affairs Committee and bore the slogan of the Salvation Government.
The message did not need an explanation: those who took up arms on the side of the "revolution" would be rewarded with belonging, and those who did not speak the language of the group would be dropped from even their name.
Between the revocation of citizenship from an Alawite in Homs and its granting to a foreign fighter who fought in the Al-Ghab Plain, the real politics is unfolding quite clearly: citizenship is no longer an expression of a legal or emotional attachment to the land; rather, it has turned into a credit card with the ruling authority, granted to those who serve the agenda, and withdrawing from those who see it as a deviation.
Citizenship, which is supposed to be a natural right, has become a conditional privilege under the new authority. Birth, residency, or professional registration are not enough, but on top of that, it requires a declaration of sectarian loyalty, applied silence, or complete identification with the identity of the new state, which does not accept complex affiliation or internal differences.
Human rights organizations have issued lackluster statements. No serious lawsuits have been filed. Even European countries, which often preach human rights, have remained silent because the political embarrassment is too great to face, and because the narrative of "stability" that these governments support cannot be reversed in the name of justice.
But the use of nationality as a political weapon is not new in history. The only new is the brazen publicity in Syria today. It is the 21st-century version of apartheid in South Africa, where it creates flexible legal layers of affiliation that are judged on the measure of loyalty, not the honor of belonging.
In this new equation, the Christian, the Ismaili, the Alawite, or the Kurdish have no place except as a temporary visitor. If he wants to stay, he must erase his memory and redefine himself in the language of the new regime: the language of the community.
In April 2025, one of the EU's most embarrassing human rights scandals exploded: an official report issued by the Dutch Foreign Ministry on the security situation in Syria, which the government tried to withhold and delay publishing, despite its legal release. What did the report reveal? And why did it come as a shock to the political and human rights circles inside the Netherlands and in Europe in general?
The document, which was later leaked after lawyers went to court, was not only a security assessment, but also a clear condemnation of international attempts to portray Syria as a "safe country to return," especially in areas of the regime and the "government of Sharia." With clear names and documented facts, the report affirmed the persistence of arbitrary arrests, enforced disappearances, restrictions on civil rights, and the refusal to integrate minorities politically and socially.
More seriously, the document exposed the new transitional government's policy of selective naturalization: the naturalization of hundreds of foreign Sunni fighters, in exchange for the revocation of citizenship of Alawite, Ismaili, and Christian civilians, under elastic pretexts such as "imbalance of standards" or "lack of loyalty." Although the report recommended that Syrian refugees, especially minorities, be not returned to these areas, the Dutch government sought to bury them, fearing that its publication would lead to:
• Freezing the deportation decisions of dozens of Syrian refugees.
• Opening the door to a legal challenge to the principle of "safe return".
• The tacit acknowledgment that what is happening in Syria is not the end of a conflict; rather, it is a perpetuation of a system of religious-identity exclusion.
But activists and lawyers have succeeded in forcing the report to be published by legal force, opening up a unique moral battle: Can European democracies adapt their reporting to serve their policies, even if it costs innocent lives? It's a moment Bleak. A moment when justice abandons its law, and when the state closes its doors to its original children, opening it wide to newcomers... If they are the right size.
After Autumn Syria as a Depluralistic Area
Today, fourteen years after the revolution, Syria itself is no longer the same. The sectarian presence has declined from participation to survival. The Alawites, who had been entrenched in the state institution for decades, have retreated to their villages, or have been symbolically absent. Christians have lost faith in the state's horizon, and tens of thousands have left in silence. The Druze are caught between a faint religious discourse and a confused security reality. The Ismailis have withdrawn from civic work, after the windows of influence have been closed.
These minorities have not only gone into exile; they have gone into internal exile: no political influence, no actual representation, no private discourse; but a symbolic presence directed by power. Even linguistic and cultural pluralism, once a national feature, has been recycled within the framework of a "disciplined identity."
The next stage does not necessarily foreshadow a bloody clash, but rather the hardening of a monolithic identity that produces a formal democracy that excludes those who do not speak its language. If this path is not broken by an inclusive project that guarantees rights, we will witness the birth of a new state, with a single meaning and only multiple in pictures.
Warning from the Vatican. When the world warns of the extinction of the Orient
In June 2025, Pope Leo XIV (the first U.S.-born pope) issued his blunt warning about the fading of Christians in the Middle East, saying that "migration is no longer an individual choice, but the result of an entire system that silently drives denominations to disappear."
His statement was not an exception, but a belated strategic warning, which came after the Christian hemorrhage in Syria became a reality, not a future danger. In Syria, displacement was not just a side effect of the war; it was a silent policy spread over three levels: direct killing, systematic marginalization, and voluntary facilitation of migration. Perhaps compounding the tragedy, this migration was not only imposed from abroad, but often with internal complicity, through clerics who quietly engaged in the process of emptying the community.
In more than one governorate of Syria, with testimonies from independent Christian associations, it has been observed that some church priests have contributed to facilitating mass migration, not for legitimate individual survival, but as part of a deliberate reposition. They have submitted "weak protection" certificates, drafted letters of support for the departure of families, and facilitated engagements with international bodies that were implementing "humanitarian reception" programs, but without any conditions for return or reintegration into the homeland.
Thus, the priest has transformed from a shepherd of his community to a mediator of exit, sometimes with the intention of protection, sometimes out of a lack of hope, but the result is the same: everyone who was a voice within the homeland has quietly exited it. In this context, Christian cities – from Maaloula to Sednaya to Qalamoun – have been transformed from deep-rooted cultural spaces to places embalmed in memory, visited by the displaced in nostalgia, not in life.
In light of this hemorrhage, Pope Leo's warning came not only in defense of the Christian community, but also as a comprehensive condemnation of the process of "redesigning" the Orient, in which those who fight are rewarded, those who take root are excluded, citizenship is granted to those who have taken up arms, and those who have built a church or written a Bible are withdrawn.
What is more dangerous is that the international community has remained silent, and at times even contributed to this symbolic liquidation, under the banner of "humanitarian aid", without accountability for the reasons for the exit, the right of return, or the guarantee of protection inside the country.
The Vatican sounded the alarm, but local churches — or some — had opened the doors and blessed the exit. Is there anyone who still hears before the last door closes?
Conclusion
On the fringes of memory, when nations are erased, not because they have been defeated, but because no one has defended their meaning. In post-2024 Syria, war is no longer fought with cannons, but with interpretations. Shells are no longer weapons, but decrees, speeches, and soul books. Murder has become a law that has been deferred from implementation, and the absence of a policy that does not recognize the mirror of history.
The danger was not in a bullet fired, but in a question that is repeated in a thousand ways: "Who is the Syrian?" a question that hides behind citizenship papers, reconciliation councils, and news bulletins, but its real answer depends not on birth, residency, but on loyalty. Anyone who does not match the identity of the group will be erased from the picture, not in the form of execution, but in the form of ignorance.
When Alawite citizenship is revoked in Homs and granted to a foreign fighter who killed in the name of "liberation," we are not facing a state, but rather an affiliation agency that issues identities on the basis of the market, not history. When minorities are asked to remain silent and then thank those who have kept them as symbolic ornaments, we have entered the stage of "reconciliation by coercion", where memory is an accusation, asking is a crime, and silence is a ticket to survival.
Today, the citizen does not reside in his village, but in his security file. He is not recognized by those who have roots, but by those who have a shepherd. Cities are no longer named after them, but by the names of the martyrs of the "party authorized to write."
The "autumn of minorities" was not a passing wind, but rather a creeping path in which everything that was national disintegrated, and the homeland turned into a conditional, temporary space, fraught with surveillance, withdrawal, and symbolic discrimination, not because the minorities came out, but because no one took them into account for the new state.
If civil forces and living consciences – at home as well as in exile – do not rise up to confront the exclusion machine that feeds on silence, what we are seeing today is not the end of the war, but its postponed beginning, as the massacre does not begin when the bullet is fired, but when its butcher is confessed and the victim is told: You do not look like us.
A new Syria will not be built if the right is not restored not to the gunmen, but to those who carried memory, language and hope.
If the novel is not written in its entirety, the victor will write it alone, in his language, in his nationality, and on the ruins of a homeland whose houses have not been demolished, but whose features have been obliterated. As for the question: "Why did this destruction happen?" His answer is as painful as it is explicit:
• Because the center has fallen, and no one has risen in its name;
• Because the revolution was permissible by the warlords and religion;
• Because the major powers colluded to maintain the balance, not to correct the course;
• Because the elites have chosen safe silence over conscious resistance.
Syria did not enter the autumn of minorities when the first Druze was abandoned, the first church was crushed, or the last Kurdish left, but when the silent majority said, "This is none of my business," and the authority said, " Diversity is an unreliable obstacle." This autumn was not a coincidence; rather, it was the result of careful calculations, carried out by an authority that improves the management of the devastation, and is monitored by a scientist who pities the victims, provided that they are not minorities. When the last door closes, the last bell is silenced, and the light in the last church is extinguished, there may be nothing left in Syria except history It circulates among refugees, and maps that no one dares to draw as they were.
Sources:
A list of the main references and sources that I relied on in the construction of this investigation, including reports from international research centers, human rights institutions, and specialized media reports:
1. References to the Dismantling of the State and Exploring the Concept of the "Functional State" after Conflicts
• The RAND Center Report (2016): "Holding State Together Functions not Structures: Rebuilding After Conflict" ch+3ndupress.ndu.edu+3rand.org+3
shows how concepts of the state have been transformed into mere "functions," without examining political structure or sovereignty.
• RAND Report (2005): "Establishing Law and Order After Conflict" org+7rand.org+7 A
case study on the rebuilding of security and judicial institutions in post-conflict countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.
2. Sources on Media Mobilization and Digital Assaults
• DFRLab/Atlantic Council Report: Indicates that more than 600,000 fake accounts were created between 2023 and 2025 to target active minorities org+9rand.org+9dcaf.ch+9medium.com+1dfrlab.org+1
• 2020 Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation: Talking about Systematic Campaigns in Syria oii.ox.ac.uk
3. Human Rights Statistics and Sectarian Massacres
• The figures mentioned for massacres in the Syrian coast between December 2024 and May 2025 (7,342 martyrs, including 2,092 summary executions) are based on data from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and field operations documented by local human rights organizations.
4. Additional resources related to media and digital reporting
• Middle East Eye: Report on foreign accounts on "X" spreading fake news about Syria com+2middleeasteye.net+2en.wikipedia.org+2
• EU DisinfoLab Report: Addressing the Cyber Targeting of Syrian Minorities. (Dedicated link can be requested from EU DisinfoLab)
5. Other media references and reports
• Atlantic Council: "Sectarianism, social media, and Syria's information blackhole" discusses information fragmentation and the impact of media on sectarian narratives org+1medium.com+1
Items that don't include direct links:
• European Commission Report 2025 – Digital Campaign Monitoring Unit.
• Report of the "Syrian-European Justice Center" - Status of Revocation of Citizenship (H.N.).
• The scandal of the Dutch Foreign Ministry document (April 2025) and the events of its subsequent blocking/publication.
Note: Extensive documentation was done using major turning points reports from reputable research centers (e.g., RAND andDFRLab) matched with field data from the Syrian Observatory, as well as European media sources.
