Forget Rifaat al-Assad ?

If basic decency prevents us from rejoicing even at the death of a monster, it does not prevent a certain sudden lightness from being felt, or even a fleeting sense of relief, upon hearing the news.

Rifaat al-Assad is dead.

Faced with the retrospective and retroactive feeling of powerlessness and desolation in the face of the worst atrocities in history, one consoles oneself as best one can.

Assad takes with him a part of the darkest memory of the contemporary Levant: cities crushed for having screamed too loudly against barbarity, neighborhoods razed to serve as examples. One need only read the testimony of Michel Seurat, who paid for it with his life, to grasp with dread how Hama and Homs, in 1982, became laboratories for Assad’s almost clinical experimentation with death. Lebanon too, from Tripoli to its humiliated margins, paid the price for Rifaat’s inhumanity through his militias, the so-called “Red Knights.”

Hafez’s brother was the regime’s designated executioner, its chief butcher, its most brutal and authentic face. A role later assumed with the same feral passion for cruelty by his nephew Maher. This was before France offered Rifaat a gilded exile, and before certain officials honored him with lavish and scandalous dinners.

Rifaat’s descent into the dustbin of history strangely coincides with a moment when Syria once again seems tempted by an authoritarian rewriting of its unity, this time under the banner of a territorial “reconquest” led by the regime of Ahmad al-Chareh.

After the Druze, after the Alawites, the Kurds are now designated as the next obstacle on the road to a state rebuilt through force and coercion, as though Syrian history, cursed as it may be, were incapable of producing unity except by crushing otherness.

The term reconquest is far from neutral. It conveys a vertical conception of sovereignty, in which territory precedes people, and geography and borders disregard the ultimate purpose of the human person. In such a logic, diversity is no longer perceived as a political wealth but as an anomaly, a fundamental defect to be corrected by any means necessary. Syrian Kurds cease to be citizens to be convinced and become a problem to be dealt with, by force if required.

This does not mean one should accommodate militias or para-state armed groups. There are clearly parallel agendas seeking to destabilize the new Syrian regime, whether under Israeli, Iranian, or former Assad-loyalist influence. All militias, moreover, commit abuses. But none of this can justify abuses against the civilian population. That distinction is what, in principle, separates authority seeking to restore the state from the arbitrary power of militias. In principle.

It must be stated plainly: the crushing of the Sunni majority under Alawite Baathism, with varying degrees of minority acquiescence in the name of a hollow alliance, will not be redeemed by even a tacit revenge against those minorities under the banner of Islamism. What is built on injustice and repression can only produce more injustice and repression. It cannot lay the foundations of legitimate power or true authority.

That this orientation pleases Ankara is hardly surprising. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan openly welcomes a Syria that reasserts control over its Kurdish peripheries. The convergence is almost mechanical: a Syrian state recentralized through coercion reassures a Turkish power obsessed with any form of Kurdish autonomy, from Qamishli to Diyarbakir. The alignment is not merely ideological; it is also security-driven. And that is precisely what makes it dangerous.

Recent Syrian history has already shown where such shortcuts lead. The Assad regime, father and son alike, not forgetting the “trigger-happy uncle,” endlessly proclaimed national unity while governing through fragmentation, fear, and collective punishment. The “stability” it claimed was that of silence imposed by shabbiha militias, tanks, torture, and camps. Prisons, disappearances, and massacres were its sole source of legitimacy.

Here the specter of Rifaat al-Assad returns as a warning. He embodies that moment when a power convinces itself that violence is not only effective but foundational, when the state is reduced to its repressive apparatus and sovereignty to the mere capacity to crush.

Syria paid the price for decades. It is time for this to end, without the so-called international community once again looking away.

A warning must therefore be addressed to Ahmad al-Chareh, almost as a philosophical reminder. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that one must beware, when fighting monsters, of becoming one, and that whoever gazes long into the abyss will have the abyss gaze back. Governing a shattered country like Syria exposes one precisely to this vertigo: the belief that the end justifies the means. Yet order cannot replace justice, nor can unity be forged at gunpoint.

Turning Syria into a new gulag, whether Islamist, Arab-nationalist, or recycled from Baathist reflexes, would be yet another betrayal, added to the many that have marked the country’s modern history.

Forced fusion (insihâr) has never produced lasting nations. It produces only anxious states, haunted by their margins and obsessed with their minorities. One need only look at the ruins of the Arab world today to see this.

There is in this grim spectacle a moral dimension that cannot be avoided. Since 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, tortured, or exiled for demanding something disarmingly simple: dignity. These civil revolutionaries, crushed between regime brutality and subsequent radicalizations, demanded neither partition nor revenge. They demanded a modern state governed by the rule of law, one that would recognize them as full political subjects. Their deaths are not background noise to be drowned out by new discourses of order and sovereignty.

Their ghosts today listen and watch. They observe every decision taken in their name, every compromise sealed without them, every “reconquest” that forgets why the country rose up in the first place. Syria did not implode from an excess of pluralism and freedom, but from their negation in the name of tyrannical terror.

Unifying Syria may indeed be a historical necessity. But there are two ways of doing so. One repeats old mechanisms under new flags: brutal centralization, denial of differences, tactical alliances with regional powers at the expense of internal rights. The other is slower, more fragile, less spectacular. It passes through dialogue with Kurds, Druze, Alawites, Sunnis, Christians; through recognition of their fears and rights; through the construction of a state that protects before it coerces, and perhaps through new internal administrative arrangements, internationally guaranteed against interference by neighboring regimes invoking “strategic necessities” or “vital spaces.”

In death, Rifaat al-Assad may finally serve a purpose other than shedding the blood of others.

May his disappearance remind us that a new Syria does not need new executioners convinced they act for its good, but leaders capable of resisting the temptation of the abyss. May monsters belong to the past. And may Syrian history finally be written in something other than letters of blood.