Assad's long shadow

My parents lied to me about who we are for most of my childhood. Lately, I've found myself grateful for that lie. It freed me from over-identifying with any one religion and allowed me to see people first and foremost as human, before sect, faith or ideology.  

I didn't know I was Druze until I was a teenager. We briefly lived in Saudi Arabia in the early 2000s, and I was enrolled in public schools where Wahhabi religious instruction dominated the curriculum. Every subject circled back to a rigid interpretation of Islam—who was right, who was wrong and who was destined for hell.  

In that environment, my parents didn't just avoid telling me we were Druze; they actively concealed it. "We're Muslim," they said, and I believed it. I was a talkative child. The lie was meant to protect me, and it probably did. 

When we returned to Syria years later, I started to notice cracks in the story. Once, a relative whispered that our cousin had run away with a Muslim man she met in Damascus. I remember thinking, "But… aren't we Muslim?" 

I didn't yet have the vocabulary for sectarianism, but I began to sense that "we" were different and that this difference mattered. 

Sectarian slogans of the revolution

It wasn't until the 2011 revolution that I fully confronted the weight of sectarian identity. When the uprising began, I took part because we were fighting for justice. The revolution was about freedom, dignity and rights—universal values I thought everyone could agree on. 

I remember the unifying chants: "One, one, one, the Syrian people are one." I remember the clever signs from Kafr Nabl and the creative spirit of our protests. I also remember the occasional sectarian slogans and how fiercely we debated them.

One memory in particular has stuck with me: an old teacher threatening a friend of mine for supporting the revolution. "If you keep this up," she said, "the fundamentalists will come for us. They'll rape our women and kill our men."

At the time, I thought: "But was it okay for the children of Daraa to be tortured and killed? Was it acceptable that peaceful protests were bombed and silenced—just because it wasn't us?"

I didn't understand this logic and still don't. If the regime could get away with killing one Syrian, it could get away with killing all of us.  

Today, in 2025, as I witness people in Suwayda, my hometown, being killed simply for being born Druze, I can't help but think of the fear that others must have felt before us.

Assad's manipulation of minorities

Under the Assad regime, sectarianism was not an abstract idea; it was a lived reality, weaponised against all Syrians. It was fear in the classroom. It was whispered warnings between neighbours. It was a system, carefully maintained by Assad, that dictated who could live and who could be killed without consequence. 

Sectarianism in Syria didn't fall from the sky, and it's not something we were born with. Madawi Al-Rasheed, a professor of social anthropology at King's College London, writes that sectarianism "is not an inherent historical quality of the Arab masses." It is manufactured and sustained by dictators and sectarian entrepreneurs who politicise old religious identities to hold onto power.

The French colonial authorities institutionalised sectarian divisions as part of their divide-and-rule strategy. They fragmented Syrian society by creating separate statelets along sectarian and ethnic lines—like the Alawite and Druze states—undermining any sense of national unity. But the Assad regime took it further. Bashar al-Assad didn't protect minorities—he instrumentalised them.  

As Middle East expert Peter Harling points out in an interview with the Carnegie Middle East Center, the regime's relationship with minorities was far more complex and calculated than the common narrative of "protection" suggests. According to Harling, the regime "both coopted and repressed" the Druze. 

At the same time, the regime "manipulated and contained the Kurds. It sheltered Christians while promoting forms of Sunni activism that terrified them. And while it relied on the loyalty of Alawites, it undermined their community's internal structures to consolidate their dependency, ultimately treating such Alawite supporters as an army of slaves." 

This was not coexistence, but control through fear and fragmentation. The consequences were visible and long-lasting: destroyed neighbourhoods, displacement, demographic engineering and the destabilisation of entire communities. 

Throughout the revolution and even during my own displacement, I clung to my Syrian identity. I rejected sectarian labels and told myself I didn't care what sect I came from. 

At the same time, I couldn't ignore the reality around me. I had a complicated relationship with my sect. I hated that many prominent Druze sheikhs decided to remain "neutral", while those who openly resisted were assassinated. 

I left my hometown, Suwayda, after several confrontations and amid growing fear—not just of the regime but also of those from my own community who said: "We cannot oppose the regime. No one will protect us if they come for us." 

And they were correct. I witnessed what the regime did. People disappeared, were tortured and killed. I also observed that Druze were less affected by attacks, arrests and murders than Sunnis. 

I remember studying for my final exams and hearing the sound of bombs falling on neighbouring Daraa. Guilt and anger ate at me. The regime was using our province as a base from which to kill our fellow Syrians. One thing became painfully clear: not all suffering was equal. Some groups were spared, not out of compassion, but political calculation. 

I started asking myself uncomfortable questions: Do I want to fit into this binary? In the broader geopolitical conflict, are we Druze simply seen as part of the Shia bloc? These questions made me uneasy. So I avoided them. 

Today, Assad is gone. But his legacy remains. His sectarian strategy left behind deep psychological and political wounds. And now, those wounds are reopening. Recent months have seen a wave of sectarian violence: the targeting of Alawite areas in March, the clashes with Druze communities in Sahnaya in southwest Damascus in April and May, and the suicide bombing at Mar Elias Church in June.  

These events may suggest that sectarianism is now worse than ever, and that Assad was in fact a protector of minorities. In truth, what we're witnessing is the full exposure of the sectarian divisions Assad spent decades reinforcing. What was once suppressed under the weight of authoritarian silence is finally being spoken aloud. 

During the massacres in my hometown of Suwayda in July 2025, I lost cousins, friends and people I loved. In the days that followed, I looked through folders of pictures of corpses disfigured beyond recognition and tried to identify the missing—just as we once did with the "Caesar" photographs, which were taken and smuggled out by defectors from the Syrian military police. 

This time, it was the transitional government—the people who had promised a new Syria—now playing the same old game. Their official media incites hatred against entire communities to hold on to power.

And amid this chaos, Israel intervened. When Israeli attacks targeted the transitional government's troops advancing on Suwayda, many said these bombs had saved lives. But they sealed Suwayda's fate in another way. They provided a new pretext. Suddenly, our deaths were seen as justified.

Timothy D. Sisk, professor of international politics in Denver, explains how certain destructive conceptions of identity, though artificially produced through "the manipulation of passions and the cultivation of hatred," can deepen and harden over time. 

This view is shared by historian Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi of the University of York, who warns of the "danger of generating path dependencies whereby deficits of security are transfigured into totalising sectarian animosities… perceptions of enmity displace relations of amity, and become increasingly difficult to challenge and overturn."

In other words: sectarianism is a political project, not a natural fact. But if we'ree not careful, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

We must not accept tactics of division

So, what can we do? We must rebuild a national civic identity rooted in civil rights, not in sect and not in religion. We have to rethink "minority protection" as equal participation. 

We must create political frameworks that foster solidarity across trauma lines, not ones that reinforce the divisions left behind by Assad. That means telling the truth. Naming what happened. Acknowledging that sectarianism was weaponised does not deepen the divides—it is the only way to begin to heal them.  

There are already signs that healing is possible: a courageous group of Syrian women who have travelled across provinces, bridging sectarian divides through dialogue, listening and trust-building. They have worked tirelessly to mend communities fractured by war and propaganda. 

Yet as violence escalates, their work has been halted. Peace is a prerequisite for healing. The bloodshed must end. The transitional government must wield its newfound authority to build bridges, not walls. 

We can't move forward by pretending sectarianism doesn't exist, or by clinging to the empty phrase "minority protection" and accepting the divisive tactics used by those in power to control us. Syria's future depends on embracing the complexity of who we are, rejecting instrumentalisation and choosing participation over fear. 

This will be hard and messy. But if we don't do it now, sectarianism will continue to define us, and Assad will have won, even in his absence. 

This text will also appear shortly in a joint edition of Qantara and Kulturaustausch magazine. Find more stories, interviews and analyses in our Syria focus section.