Bashar al-Assad Still Haunts Damascus

One year to the day, Bashar al-Assad collapsed, dragging down with him half a century of dynastic tyranny, disguised as modernist “secularism” and as a bulwark against chaos.

Good riddance.

Good riddance to a regime that turned Syrians into the raw material of an industry of terror, in the name of a pseudo-Arabism grafted onto the so-called “alliance of minorities,” alternately handed over to Iran and Russia, and, ultimately, so convenient for Israel. Good riddance to a power that transformed the Alawite community into both a human shield and a commercial asset, and that survived only by incarcerating “God Himself” in the underground hell of Saydnaya. Good riddance, too, to the comforting fiction according to which barbarism was the price to pay to avoid something far worse: chaos, Islamism, a war of all against all. Syria paid the highest price to prove that the worst option was him.

The opening of the prisons, the exposure of the regime’s “black sites,” acted like a delayed electric shock. Many who still clung to denial or to self-serving nuance finally confronted the monstrous nature of this system—unless they were afflicted by moral blindness, a scourge sadly transversal across eras and cultures. Syria discovered that it had not merely lived under a dictatorship, but inside a fully assumed concentrationary universe, where fear was not an exceptional instrument, but the very grammar of power. The families of the disappeared received—alongside proof of the horror—the atrocious confirmation of what they already knew: their dead were not “collateral damage,” but the fuel of a regime.

No one will mourn Assad. Not even his allies, who abandoned him before his fall. Not even his army, which did nothing to protect him. Assad belongs to the mass grave of History—to put it plainly, to its garbage dump.

Into this void stepped another name: Ahmad al-Sharaa.

The former warlord, ex-Jolani rebranded for the chancelleries, became in record time the face of post-Assad Syria. He traded fatigues for a suit, the lexicon of the fatwa for that of “reconstruction” and the “national pact,” shortened his beard and adopted a tie—yet never fully erased the memory of what he once was, despite all efforts. For the international community, Jolani’s metamorphosis into Sharaa enabled a sleight of hand: no longer dealing with a genocidal pariah, but with a “presentable” president. The question was no longer what he represented for Syrians, but what he allowed others to settle and close. In the same movement, Syria reopened to the world after half a century of autarky serving a mafia family draped in the costumes of the Alawite community and a hollow Arabism. At that level, so much the better.

The gradual lifting of economic sanctions, the return of investments, Damascus reopening to liberalism—all of this represents a major step. For a country drained dry, ruined by war, corruption, and the combined predations of militias and foreign patrons, the mere sight of returning capital, reopened air routes, cranes on the horizon amounts to a silent revolution. But it is an economic revolution still suspended, in the long term, from a political question: who benefits from this opening, and under what conditions? One can only hope that, for once, it will be the Syrian people.

Yet a somber shadow looms over the picture. More than somber: sinister.

For this opening to the world has not been accompanied by a genuine democratic transition.

Neither the new Constitution—hastily stitched together to secure the permanence of the new power—nor the bloody treatment inflicted on the ground upon Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish minorities signals a clean break with past logic. The façade has changed, the vocabulary has evolved, but old reflexes remain. Sharaa has not managed—if one puts it mildly—thus far to address Syrian territorial unity and pluralism otherwise than by reverting to the old reflex: brute force. The security apparatuses have not been truly dismantled; transitional justice remains a slogan; unspoken red lines continue to tightly frame political speech and freedom of organization. Militias operate with impunity where sovereignty is supposedly being restored. The shabiha have merely changed sides.

Granted, the transition is difficult. Sharaa did not inherit a state, but a field of ruins: zones under foreign influence, de facto autonomous enclaves, a mosaic of militias that have not all disarmed, a hypertrophied informal economy, a society exhausted and traumatized. He was endorsed by the international community in exchange—no doubt—for a more or less avowed adherence to the Abraham Accords—what Assad could not offer openly but practiced under the table. The implicit message is clear: you are recognized on the condition that you enter the regional arrangement as it stands, with its compromises, hypocrisies, and red lines.

Iran and Russia have been replaced, for the new master of Syria, by a Saudi-Turkish Sunni umbrella, overseen by the international community and, above all, by Washington. Is this a good thing? The future will tell. In any case, once again, no one will mourn the murderous remnants left by Khamenei and Putin on Syrian soil—while praying that history does not repeat itself under Syria’s new geopolitical configuration.

Israel, for its part, distrusts a strong Sunni regime that might one day revive the Palestinian cause: in this worldview, the enemy is first and foremost the Sunni. Other minorities are downgraded when needed, instrumentalized when useful. Crude Machiavellianism. Tel Aviv is preemptively enforcing a de facto buffer zone in Syria, exploiting part of the Druze minority, ensuring that the new Syrian state can never become a structured pole of resistance—and to pressure the new regime into yielding and making peace.

But none of this in any way absolves the regime of massacres committed against innocent civilians on a communal basis, nor does it justify ethno-confessional score-settling on the coast. One does not wash away half a century of crimes by producing, in turn, a new cohort of martyrs.

A crucial test awaits Sharaa: to definitively turn the bloody page of the Assad regime while respecting—despite colossal challenges and traps on all sides—freedoms, democracy, pluralism, human rights, human dignity and its finality, the right to life. To break with the logic of the permanent internal enemy; to understand that security is not built against society, but with it; to accept that the Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish communities are neither scapegoats nor alien bodies to be punished, but integral components of the national pact.

Thus far, however, it must be acknowledged that one year on, Sharaa has not fully managed to erase either the Assad within him… nor the Jolani.

And there lies the tragedy. One naturally recalls Hannah Arendt’s warning about the deepest trap in any exit from tyranny: the tyrant is overthrown, but the mental structure he patiently forged is not dismantled in one stroke. Totalitarianism is not merely a state apparatus. We are dealing with what the psychoanalyst Chawki Azouri calls the “Pinochet syndrome”—the internalization of a regime’s archaic practices into the collective psyche over half a century. Beyond the barbaric state lies regression into barbarism itself, despite the revolutionary impulse, stifled and crushed by the regime along with its symbols of civic dynamism. Assad succeeded in installing an entire mode of perceiving the world, a full pedagogy of fear, like Orwell’s Big Brother. Year after year, he instilled the idea that the other is a threat, that disagreement is subversion, that order is maintained only by force. Society eventually absorbed these patterns as second nature—to the point that the fall of the master is not enough to erase them.

Syria, one year after Bashar, still bears the scars. Mistrust circulates like an old muscular reflex; the temptation of the internal enemy remains the easiest mental shortcut; the obsession with security outweighs political risk-taking; and the very idea of authentic pluralism continues to frighten a society trained for fifty years to consider difference as a breach.

The tyrant is gone, but tyranny has not yet moved out: it inhabits gestures, silences, habits, survival reflexes.

This, ultimately, is the real challenge awaiting Sharaa—assuming he is capable of it and, better yet, convinced of it: not merely managing the post-Assad era, but healing the interior of a society contaminated by decades of terror, re-teaching a people that freedom is not a danger and that the state is not a predator. Arendt would have phrased it differently, but the idea is the same: one truly exits a totalitarian regime only when fear ceases to be the mother tongue of politics. As long as that grammar remains intact, the country risks less a return to the old order than its reproduction under another name.

One does not dismantle a concentration camp to build another.