Events in Syria: Beyond Iran and Assad Regime Remnants

By Hicham Bou Nassif | Weinberg Associate Professor of International Relations and the Middle East and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College-California

The circulated footage of Alawite civilians being executed by armed groups affiliated with the new regime in Syria is horrifying. Forcing victims to howl like dogs before shooting them is a chilling act. These events unfolded in Syria’s coastal region, coinciding with Druze protests in Suwayda denouncing the Syrian authorities and strained relations between Damascus and Syrian Kurds. It is clear that Syria’s nightmare has entered a new and grimmer phase in recent days.

I grew up hearing Syrians proudly claim that “there is no sectarianism in Syria,” unlike in Lebanon. In truth, the issue of identity is complex in both countries. The difference lies in Lebanon’s freedoms, which have allowed its sects to express themselves through political parties, media institutions, and quotas in constitutional structures. By contrast, successive Syrian regimes have imposed a narrative of Arabism and nationalist struggle, emphasizing unity and the Palestinian cause over societal realities. In Lebanon, political discourse acknowledges the country’s sectarian composition and debates the best ways to manage it, whether through consensual democracy among its ethnic groups or ethno-geographical federalism. In Syria, however, the political discourse has, for a century, denied the existence of a sectarian issue, clinging instead to extreme Arab romanticism that often contradicts the idea of Syria as a distinct entity. Syria is the only Arab state to have effectively dissolved itself, as it did during the United Arab Republic era.

The most dangerous aspect of this type of ideological orientation is its detachment from reality in favor of theoretical absolutes and its impatience with distinct groups, always suspected of conspiring with external forces and disrupting the nation’s imagined unity. If we add to this the religious supremacism that drives members of Al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda today, the accumulated hatred even among non-religious Sunnis after decades of the Assad regime’s crimes against Sunnis, as well as the recurring news of remnants of the Assad regime being involved in attacks on the new authority’s forces, it becomes clear that Syria’s societal fractures have reached a breaking point. The postponed appointment of Syrian minorities with terror has arrived.

The threat is exacerbated by the fact that the liberal world order, which could theoretically be relied upon to ensure that a group of people is not entirely left to their executioners, is crumbling. Under the Trump Administration, the United States has abandoned even the pretense of caring about human rights. Europe, in turn, is facing its most severe crisis in decades. Who, in the midst of this complex global scene, would care if fundamentalists killed a thousand Alawites or ten thousand? Furthermore, who cared in the past decade when Bashar al-Assad’s regime killed hundreds of thousands of Syrian Sunnis? And before that, who lost a single night’s sleep over the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, where the number of Tutsi victims reportedly was close to a million? International institutions failed to prevent the massacre at that time when the world order was relatively stable after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States assumed global leadership. There is no reliance on these institutions today.

Nor can regional players be relied upon to end the Syrian bloodshed. It is likely that Iran has not yet accepted the region’s developments and is seeking to turn back the clock. It is no secret, of course, that the mullahs have used Lebanon’s Shia without mercy and continue to do so to this day. And if what is said about Iranian fingers behind the developments in the Syrian coast is true, I would not be surprised. However, it would be analytically wrong to place all the responsibility on Iran or to reduce the events to the issue of remnants of the previous regime. There is a real Alawite issue in Syria, an issue of a group with a distinct identity, whose concerns are understandable given the historical realities of majority rule in the Levant. Similarly, there are Druze, Kurdish, and Christian issues, alongside the profound Sunni sense of injustice that fuels a clear desire for vengeance.

Ignoring these issues, or resorting to suppressing them with majority dominance, is a surefire way to perpetuate the Syrian bloodshed.

This article was originally published in Arabic by Nida al-Watan on 10 March 2025. The original can be found here.

The views expressed in this op-ed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of SyriacPress.