For episode 178, From the Periphery collective members Leila Al-Shami, Elia Ayoub, Karena Avedissian, and Ayman Makarem gathered together for a roundtable to discuss the latest developments in Syria and to provide a historical and political background to help understand the current moment. We discuss a broad range of topics starting with an overview of the what’s happened in the last week or so, including: the origins of the Syrian revolution, the counter-revolutionary war, the abuses and crimes of the Assad regime, foreign interventions and regional factors, descriptions of groups such as HTS (Hayat Tahrir al Sham) and SNA (Syria National Army), Kurdish movements and the concerns of ethnic/religious minorities, the racist tankie ‘hot take’ industry, and the connections between liberatory movements for Palestine and Syria. We cover a lot, but of course we couldn’t do everything justice. We will provide links below for further resources, but also plan on doing more episodes in the near future on all of these topics as things develop and progress.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of⁠ ⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠⁠. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: From The Periphery Podcast, The Mutual Aid Podcast⁠, ⁠Politically Depressed⁠, ⁠Obscuristan⁠, and ⁠Antidote Zine⁠.

To get early access to our episodes as well as other perks (monthly hangout, movie club, exclusive content and so on) you can join our patreon on Patreon.com/fromtheperiphery 

For more:

• Elia Ayoub is on ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠, ⁠Mastodon⁠, ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and blogs at ⁠Hauntologies.net⁠ 
• Laura Vidal is on Bluesky
• The Fire These Times is on Bluesky,⁠ IG⁠ and has a⁠ ⁠website⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠
• From The Periphery is on⁠ ⁠Patreon⁠⁠, ⁠Bluesky⁠, ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠,⁠ Instagram⁠, and has a⁠ website⁠⁠

Transcriptions: Transcriptions are done by⁠ Antidote Zine⁠ and will be published on⁠ The Fire These Times’ transcript archive⁠.

Credits:

Leila Al Shami (host), Elia Ayoub (producer, sound editor, episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics). 

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

We don’t know what’s going to happen over the coming days, weeks, and months. But what we do need to be doing is supporting people on the ground who are still there, still want to live a safe, peaceful life, some kind of democratic future.

Ayman Makarem: Welcome to this very special episode of The Fire These Times. It’s a roundtable on Syria. As many of you may have noticed in the news, there is a lot going on in Syria: there’s a rebel counteroffensive that has taken everybody by surprise, and they have recaptured Aleppo [city] and large swathes of the Aleppo countryside, as well as the south of Idlib, reaching almost to the gates of Hama.

With that, there has been a resurgence of certain narratives and discourses that are very problematic, or at the very least not helpful to understanding what is happening situated within the context of the Syrian revolution, and we thought it would be good to talk about what’s happening and provide a resource for people to understand what’s happening with a Syrian-centric perspective—obviously factoring in geopolitics, but also lived experience.

This is coming eight years after the fall of Aleppo, and thirteen years into the Syrian revolution. So we’re four people from the From the Periphery media collective and we’re going to talk about that.

First up, Leila if you’d like to talk about your reactions to what’s going on and maybe a brief overview? A lot is happening, and it is at a pace that is very hard to keep up with.

Leila Al Shami: My first reaction, like most Syrians, was absolute shock, because this was so unexpected at this time. We woke up to news that rebels were advancing on areas that had been firmly out of rebel hands since 2020 in the north in Syria, where the negotiations between Turkey, Russia, and Iran froze the power-sharing agreement. It was a shock that all of a sudden a coalition of rebel forces (we’ll talk later about who those are) managed to get into those areas and liberate that territory—and the speed at which regime forces crumbled; there wasn’t really any massive resistance to that.

The question is Why now? There are a number of factors external to Syria which made this time possible. One factor is that the regime, which is massively unpopular and is kept in power by foreign states—its foreign backers were significantly weakened. Russia is bogged down in Ukraine at the moment, and Iranian infrastructure in Syria has been completely decimated by Israeli airstrikes, including the Iranian proxy Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shi’a militia. So the regime was isolated and rebel groups seized on that opportunity. 

By contrast, rebel groups seem to be much more organized and unified than ever before. Part of that is because so many groups have been forced into Idlib over the past years; in the areas where the regime has control, rebel groups were displaced into Idlib province. This could be a factor as to why there is now more unity among them. They certainly seem much better disciplined than they’ve been, and under unified command. 

And they seem to have access to much better weapons. They have drones now, for a few months. That has empowered the rebels, because prior to that they didn’t have any form of aerial warfare. During this offensive they’ve captured massive weapons stores from the regime, when the regime forces fled.

It’s really taken me a few days to digest what’s happening. Syrians have very mixed emotions, how they’re responding to it. Many Syrians, both inside Syria and abroad, were celebrating, because they hate the Assad regime and this is the first successful push against it for a long time. But people are very nervous and fearful at what might come in the future in terms of regime retaliation. 

We’ve already seen that the regime has been bombing Idlib and Aleppo—as always, it’s not targeting rebel forces, it’s targeting civilian communities; it’s been targeting residential areas, hospitals, camps for displaced people. Many people have been killed; many more injured. In fact, doctors in Aleppo issued an emergency appeal saying they were really struggling with the influx and that they needed assistance to respond to the casualties.

But on the ground, the regime forces haven’t put up much of a fight. We’ve heard in the past twenty-four hours of the entry of Iranian-backed Shi’a militias from Iraq—we’ll see how that changes the balance of power on the ground.

AM: Some of the images we’re seeing of the developments are really hard to take in. It’s happening very quickly, and it’s all very big and new and I don’t know how to describe it. With that there’s a great deal of trepidation, hesitation, fear—unsureness of where this leads.

But with that a lot of questions. And there are a lot of people for whom this might seem new, and a lot of our listeners who have joined us from listening to our stuff on Palestine, and people who have been radicalized by what they’ve been seeing in Palestine and entered into political action, a lot of them very young—I see a bit of confusion.

There’s going to be space here to talk about some of those questions and misconceptions, some of the problematic narratives.

Elia J. Ayoub: Like Leila said, virtually every Syrian I know—for quite some time, Syria was basically my world, even more than Lebanon and Palestine—is expressing a combination of shock (both positive and negative) and fear: How can something like this happen this quick? Conspiracy theories are rife in our region—that’s not anything new—so many folks have partly nestled into the stories that they’re more familiar with: This is all Turkey; this is all Israel. Some stories are more valid than others; fears over Turkey’s role are valid and legitimate. 

That being said, some of the rebels are very young. You mentioned some of our listeners are very young and may not know 2016, let alone 2011. It baffles me sometimes that it’s really been eight years since the fall of Aleppo—almost to the day! The fall of Aleppo was December 2016. And we’ve seen photos of rebels who are maybe eighteen or nineteen, maybe younger, who had photos of themselves leaving Aleppo [as children], being forcibly displaced in 2016, saying We will be back to liberate our lands.

That emotional resonance is quite something to take in. The siege in 2016 was extremely brutal, very much compared to Gaza, at least in 2014—because at this point the scale of what’s happening now in Gaza is difficult to compare to most things; 2014 is a more accurate or fair comparison.

As for fears over what might happen next: the more obvious one is what’s already happening, that the Assad regime and Russia will step up their attacks. They do still have air dominance, and they will very likely always have that. The entrance of drones on the rebel side surely changes dynamics to some extent—to what extent remains to be seen, but it’s certainly changing. 

But it points to one really important thing that we have seen in Gaza as well: the Israelis, for example, in Gaza have difficulties dealing with Hamas when they’re only fighting on the ground, when it’s more “equal” (even though it’s not that equal), or in south Lebanon for that matter, if they’re fighting Hezbollah on the ground. Which is why they have air dominance; this is ninety-five percent of what makes a difference here.

In Syria, we see this a lot as well: the Syrian regime was on the verge of collapse once, and needed the intervention of Iran and its allies; then again, even with that, it was on the verge of collapse a second time and needed the intervention of Russia. Russia made a huge difference, in addition to what was already there.

LS: I don’t think they have the current capacity to have an intervention on the scale that they previously had. It looks like that, whether Iran and Russia are going to secure what they see as their interests in Syria and focus on those areas which are important to them, such as the corridor from Iraq to Lebanon which Iran relies on.

AM: I’ve been seeing some anti-aircraft weapons that I’ve never seen before with these rebel groups, and some reports even that a war jet was shot down over Aleppo—which honestly is kind of my dream. Death from the air is something that all of us from the region experience in this brutal way.

But before we get into it, and I’d like to get into the slightly larger question of how we got here historically, Karena, if you’d like to share any reactions you’ve had or how you’re reading the situation, where you’re coming from?

Karena Avedissian: I’m Armenian, and I have lots of Armenian friends from Syria and Aleppo specifically, and I have a lot of contacts among the Kurdish community also, which itself has contacts in Rojava (or the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria). It’s almost as if you’re dealing with a parallel universe with regard to these latest developments.

The main forces on the ground for the Kurds, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), primarily led by Kurdish elements and the various forces under them—their position has been deeply influenced by years and years of systemic oppression and cultural erasure of Kurdish communities prior to the revolution and the outbreak of the civil war after that.

They shouldn’t be seen as pro-regime, but these developments are very concerning; the minorities in Aleppo, specifically the Christian and Alawite minorities, are also watching with trepidation. The situation so far seems calm but very tense. The HTS (at some point we can go into who the SNA and HTS are) have made public assurances in Aleppo that they won’t harm minorities, specifically Christians. Early indications seem to suggest that that’s the situation right now, although I do know of an Armenian who was recently sniped and killed in Aleppo. I know their relative, who lives in Armenia now.

There are videos of older Christian Aleppans expressing that they feel safe; one says that she has her Christmas tree up. I just read this morning that bishop Boutros Kassis of the Syriac orthodox church in Aleppo has stated that Christian leaders have coordinated and decided they’re going to stay; they’re not going to leave the city. But despite these assurances, the conversations I’ve been having with different people in Rojava and Aleppo indicate that specifically Armenians, Kurds, Assyrians, and Yezidis do remain fearful. 

In Aleppo right now, many are still afraid to leave their homes; they’re not leaving. Their fear, more than regime reprisals (because it’s a completely different context), is of the more extremist Islamist groups that they have bad memories of. They have troubling history with some of these factions’ (including HTS’s) past alliances with ISIS and Al Nusra against the YPG in 2013, as well as their involvement in the ethnic cleansing of Afrin in 2018 and Ras al-Ayn in 2019.

These groups pose a threat also because of the involvement and backing of Turkey specifically; that is the main bogeyman for these groups, and really for anyone who’s opposed to pan-Turkism or Islamist supremacism. These concerns are not hypothetical; they actually reflect tangible actions on the ground, even in the last couple of days. A massive Turkish flag was unfurled over the Aleppo citadel, which signals to some degree Ankara’s influence and ambitions, even though they might not be directly backing this banner drop.

We’ve also seen the hashtag #Halep82 circulating; it refers to Aleppo as Turkey’s eighty-second province (Turkey has eighty-one provinces). There are fears that this could mean the end of certain communities, Christian communities, in Aleppo, because of that Turkish-backed element. If they were to completely take over control, they fear that they would be either targeted for murder, disappeared, or ethnically cleansed from the city.

We can talk about SNA separately; that’s another element. The Syrian National Army is more overtly, directly backed by Turkey.

LS: The Kurds are in a particularly vulnerable position right now, because it’s anticipated that America may well withdraw its forces which have been supporting the SDF in Syria. It’s also important to point out that many Syrians are also very fearful of the composition of these forces; they contain a lot of radical and extremist elements, and they certainly don’t represent Syrians’ aspirations or the values of the revolution.

EA: It’s important to point out that in the areas where HTS has already ruled, there have been protests and demonstrations over the years; notable activists have been assassinated as well. That has happened. It is also true that they have “changed” on some level in the past few years; that is notable. It could be, as Leila mentioned, that the fact most of the forces were in the same place, Idlib, for a number of years may have shifted things. Maybe they’re more organized; the more extreme, reckless elements are pushed to the side. It doesn’t mean they’re not there, but they’re pushed to the side.

I would guess that the Turkish flag over the citadel is one of the less organized elements, and the more organized elements are the ones who unfurled the Free Syrian and Palestinian flags which we also saw on the citadel. We also saw on day one or day two that some idiot took down a Christmas tree; the next day they put it back up. Clearly there is some coordinated element. I saw speeches by [Abu Mohammed] al-Jolani himself, the leader of HTS, basically saying no one shall be harmed, all property shall be preserved, etcetera.

At the very least this seems to suggest that they are aware of bad PR, which is not nothing. It’s something that can make a huge difference; a lot of the time, panic can ensue if you fear—rightly, for very good reasons—that you might be next. So saying openly that No, you’re not next; no, you’re safe is something. Of course it’s good that they bring up Christians; they usually don’t bring up Kurds. That might be because they don’t make the distinction (“everyone is Sunni” in their eyes), but it’s also a question mark. More importantly, they (HTS) don’t bring up Alawites for the most part. 

Among people who are just there—the vast majority of people in any of those areas have nothing to do with HTS (they don’t have a gigantic membership; it’s in the low thousands, maybe, not hundreds of thousands). Those people are the ones who protest against HTS, and some of those people will have very complicated feelings about what is happening now: celebrating that a statue of Hafez al-Assad is taken down, and the Syrian regime flag taken down, and they went into the palace of the Aleppo governor and shit like that, while also being worried about what comes up.

For me that is very understandable; I would have had similar fears about Hezbollah, to be honest, in the nineties, and I know of writers at the time who expressed very similar things to what we’re hearing today—it’s a different context, but similar enough that it’s worth mentioning.

We’ve mentioned HTS. What about the SNA? Who wants to explain them?

KA: I think it would also be helpful because the minority perspective that I’m looking at conflates the two. I know they’re very different, but some people insist they’re the same.

EA: What I can say about HTS: I’m not a fan, but they’re locals. The HTS folks in Aleppo are from Aleppo, and there is very clearly a familiarity to them. I’ve seen the video you mentioned of that old lady—she wasn’t talking to an HTS guy, she was talking to a journalist, but the way she was talking about the HTS guys—she was calling them “the guys,” “the youth.” Because many of them are young—we really have to emphasize this—and clearly with a direct connection to Aleppo, for the most part probably exiled in 2016, as many were.

That creates some kind of accountability to some extent. Again, all of this is very limited and still in the context of war. But more than I take my orders from Turkey. It’s a very distinct dynamic there.

The SNA I’m less familiar with, other than I also don’t like them. Maybe Leila can explain more.

LS: The Syrian National Army was established in 2017, composed of former Free Syrian Army brigades that were backed, funded, trained, and provided with military support by Turkey. They really seemed to focus on a Turkish agenda, not a Syrian agenda, and that’s been primarily to stop aspirations to Kurdish autonomy in the north, and also to create a “safe area” under Turkish control in northern Syria where the refugees that Turkey no longer wants can be expelled back to.

While HTS seems to have gone on this massive drive to reassure minorities—it’s even set up emergency hotlines in Idlib and Aleppo if anyone suffers any abuses or there’s security incidents—and it seems for now that they’re very concerned about popular opinion and getting popular support, and they’re trying to reassure minorities that they will be safe, the Syrian National Army has been focusing its fight on areas controlled by Kurdish forces, such as Tel Rifaat area.

I’ve seen some horrific videos of abuses and humiliation of SDF soldiers that were carried out by these Turkish-backed forces. So at the moment, if we take HTS at its word, at face value, my main concern for ethnic conflict or sectarian backlash comes from these Turkish-backed forces.

EA: I agree with that. It’s the elephant in the room what’s going to happen with that and the incoming Trump administration.

We don’t know this one hundred percent sure, and we can’t know, because Turkey isn’t transparent about these things, but the campaign does seem to have taken the Turks by surprise—which is saying something.

LS: It seems that they’d given the green light for some limited operation, but certainly nothing on this scale. I agree with you, I think it completely took the Turks by surprise. In fact, on the first day there were reports that Turks prevented the Syrian National Army from entering Aleppo and joining the liberation of the city.

KA: If I can just add a couple things about the SNA and why Kurds are so worried: they were the ones with Turkish support who were responsible for capturing Afrin in 2018, and they reduced the Kurdish population from ninety percent to under twenty percent through systematic murder and torture. So you could also see them as a broader pan-Turkic project to reshape the demographics of northern Syria.

I wanted to also mention that it was these same forces, or fighters from some of these forces, who, again coordinated by Turkey and Azerbaijan, sent at least five hundred (and possibly up to four thousand) fighters to target Armenians during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) war. Fighters from the SNA, Sultan Murad and al-Hamza divisions, arrived in Azerbaijan and were involved in the fighting there. So they have genocidal experience, and I really do understand the trepidation around them.

LS: It’s also important to point out that it’s not just minorities that don’t like the SNA. Syrians in general and Sunni communities also have a lot of problems with the SNA, because they have a reputation for corruption; they have a reputation for abuses; and they were constantly involved in infighting between rebels.

In addition to that, Turkey, which was once seen as an ally of the revolution, has really fallen out of favor with Syrians—for two reasons. One, because Turkey has been pursuing normalization with the regime, and secondly because of the rise of xenophobic nationalism and attacks on Syrian communities inside Turkey.

None of the formations represent the interests of the majority of the Syrian people, and of course as Karena has said, minorities in particular feel very vulnerable at the moment.

EA: I’ve even heard Syrians describe them as “shabiha,” which is a term that’s usually used almost exclusively, historically, against the Assad regime. Even in Lebanon it was specifically about the Assad regime.

AM: I want to take a little bit of a step back for listeners who might be a bit unfamiliar with how we got here. That’s a huge question, but it’s important, and important to discuss some of the narratives, some of the “hot takes” (I say “takes” not “analyses,” because they are not analyses). 

Let’s situate this in a historical process. I think we can start with the Syrian revolution in 2011. In the broadest terms, what are we seeing here, how is it connected to that, and what other historical processes can lead us up to this moment?

LS: For a quick overview of the past decade and a half in Syria: the Syrian revolution arrived in the context of a transnational revolutionary wave sweeping the region, which was called the Arab Spring. People saw the protests that were happening in Egypt and Tunisia, and started to ask, Why not here? Why not us?

The Assad regime, by 2011, had been in power for four decades, and it ruled Syria as a totalitarian police state. Any dissent against the Assad regime was severely repressed: any political opponents were thrown into prison, torture was widespread, there were no political freedoms, no media freedoms—there were three state-controlled newspapers in the country—and there was absolutely no space for any form of civil activism.

In addition to that, Syrians had gone through a period of massive poverty, precisely because of the neoliberal policies brought in by Bashar al-Assad when he came to power when his father died, which developed this kind of crony capitalism where people related to the sectarian regime (it’s a regime which is from the Alawi sect, a minority sect in Syria), people from that sect, and members of the Assad regime greatly benefited.

There was this very brutal form of crony capitalism that was practiced, and meanwhile subsidies that Syrians were reliant on for daily needs were slowly eroded, and life became more and more difficult, economically. So there were real reasons within Syria why Syrians no longer wanted this regime, and people went to the streets and started protesting in 2011.

The response from the regime was absolutely brutal. From the very early stages, the regime was shooting at people who were involved in protests; it was carrying out mass arrests of political dissidents and people involved in protests; it was carrying out rape campaigns in dissenting communities. This level of brutality galvanized Syrians who were initially calling for political reform, but then more and more people started taking to the streets and calling for revolution.

That’s the context of how the Syrian revolution arrived, and why. Over the years, of course, the response was more and more brutal, and people started to take up arms to defend themselves and their communities from regime assault. At first this was local neighborhood militias, but by July of 2011 people started unifying under the Free Syrian Army umbrella.

The Free Syrian Army was never really a unified army or a unified command, but was a collection of these local militias who were all signed up to the twin aims of protecting protesters from regime assault, resisting that, and trying to go forward to a democratic transition, which is what the goals of the revolution were. People wanted a democratic transition away from the regime.

So of course the conflict escalated; violence breeds more violence. The reprisals started getting heavier and heavier on dissenting communities. But the Free Syrian Army had some successes, and managed to liberate large swathes of Syrian territory. At one point some four-fifths of the country were no longer under regime control. 

The liberation of territory was amazing for Syrians, because what that meant was civil activism could really flourish in those areas. As the regime was pushed out, people set up local councils which were democratically administering the needs of the community. They were running the healthcare system, the education system, the water and food supply. And in addition to that, there was lots of civil activism: independent newspapers were set up, all these new ideas that people were coming to for the first time because of the revolution were debated, were discussed. Women started setting up women’s centers all around the country to try to enable women to participate both politically and economically in Syrian life and participate in the revolution.

That was a very useful experience. When you talk to Syrians about the revolution, it’s these things which had a huge meaning for them. It completely changed Syrians’ consciousness and the way that they interacted with each other.

Now, this was a revolution that wasn’t just Sunni Muslims. It comprised men and women from all of Syria’s religions, sects, and ethnicities—which was the greatest threat to the regime. Having a democratic alternative was the greatest threat, and that was why it was so absolutely, viciously destroyed. We saw chemical massacres, targeting hospitals en masse across the country, causing a very severe humanitarian crisis.

The regime couldn’t hold power on its own, and it was enabled to stay in power by the intervention of foreign states; both Iran and Russia have given significant backing to the regime, both economically and politically. They’ve shielded the regime, Russia specifically, from any level of accountability through the Security Council. But Russia also gave the regime a great deal of air support—Russia has been targeting residential areas and hospitals throughout the years—and Iran provided the ground forces. 

These were collections of Shi’a militias from all over the region—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran itself, even from Afghanistan—that came in to support the regime on the ground. If you look at Syria over the past years, you can actually talk about an Iranian occupation in Syria, because many communities across the country, when they were retaken by the regime, their population was completely forcibly expelled (many of them went to Idlib as we previously mentioned), and over time Iranians, or Shi’a from across the region, have been moving into those communities, changing the demographic balance in a way the regime feels it has support among the community.

The other factor that’s important to talk about is that the Free Syrian Army never got any significant support, either financial or military. There were drips and drabs of support from, for example, America—never enough to force the regime from power, but to force the regime to the negotiating table. After the gas attacks in Ghouta—this was a traumatic event for Syrians—Syrians realized at at that point that they weren’t going to get any kind of support.

This is when we really see the rise of Islamist battalions in Syria. There’s a whole range of Islamist battalions, from more moderate to really extremist, but the vast majority of them are authoritarian, not really having anything to do with the original values of the revolution, and they increased in strength. They looked to the Gulf states for support and funding.

This created a situation where there’s lots of different militias in the country, lots of different warlords. The space for civil society activism decreased massively—also because of mass arrests and people being tortured to death in Assad prisons, and also from the millions who fled the country into refugee camps around the region or further afield to Europe.

That’s the situation that we’ve been in a stalemate from for the past couple of years now. A lot of the country came back under regime control, apart from Idlib and parts of northern Syria which were divided among different power bases or different armed groups. The economy is in absolute shatters; the regime runs the country as a drug mafia—it gets all of its money today from the sale of captagon, which is an amphetamine-like substance—and refugees have chosen not to go home, because they fear if they do go home they will be subject to arrest (which is absolutely the case with people who have returned) so they have stayed outside the country. 

This is one of the reasons why so many people were hopeful by the events of the past few days. One, because there’s a hope that people can return to Syria if land is liberated from the regime. That’s a massive thing, because that means that all the democrats and civil society activists who were forced out of the country could return to build the country. Civil activism could resume in the country.

The second thing that made people very emotional was seeing the release of prisoners. The rebels in the past few days have liberated a number of prisons; people are reunited with their families. You can’t imagine what an emotional thing this is for Syrians, because none of us have a situation where we don’t have family or friends who are in regime prisons.

So this is two central things for Syrians: one, they want to go home and rebuild their country, and two, they want the release of the prisoners. That’s why they’ve taken some kind of hope from what’s been happening in the past few days.

AM: Wow, thank you so much for that, Leila. That was a presentation.

LS: I’ve done it a thousand times.

EA: I would add something very quickly. You mentioned it towards the end: the scale of the gulags, the underground prisons, is unheard of around the world; it’s up there among the worst in the world. We’ve seen footage; one man was released by the rebels after five years, another after eight. One of the rebels himself—there’s a video of him running across a field and hugging his father. This is what I mean by the big question being whether the rebels are locals or not. 

Many Syrians watched the video of rebels releasing women and men from that prison in Aleppo with hope that their loved ones would be next. Because many people don’t know where they are, or if they know the location of their loved ones, they don’t know if they are alive. There’s been hundreds of reports; one of the most notorious is the Saydnaya prison, which Amnesty International called a slaughterhouse in a 2017 report because [between 5,000 and 13,000] people were hanged there in a matter of a couple of years—just mass hangings.

We’ve seen photos like the Caesar files, and videos of soldiers just mass executing people and throwing the bodies into mass graves. And those are just the ones we’ve seen. We’ve obviously heard much more from survivors who have described horrors that are on a scale that, again, is very difficult to compare to most situations, certainly up there among the worst.

Folks who don’t take into consideration just the scale of what we’re talking about—I know anecdotally of a queer feminist from a pretty privileged background (formerly) in Damascus cheering on the HTS offensive. Those are not natural allies. Those are desperate. This is a situation of desperation. That should be understood. How bad can a regime get? How bad does it have to be for people to say, How much worse could it get?

LS: It’s important to raise—with the rise of the Islamist militias, to some extent there was support for them because they were fighting against the regime. They were seen as part of the opposition to Assad, but they were never seen as part of the revolution. Certainly when those militias became dominant in certain areas, there was a lot of public protest against them, as we’ve mentioned, because of their abuses and because they were trying to implement a system of control that didn’t resonate with Syrians. They had a very sectarian, hardline religious ideology which didn’t match with the general population, so they were widely despised. 

What we also didn’t mention was the rise of ISIS. ISIS, the Islamic State, appeared as a third force. This was neither part of the revolution nor part of the regime. They had an agenda that wasn’t Syrian; their agenda was to set up a global Islamic caliphate. And they also carried out horrific abuses against minorities, against anyone who dissented.

Syrians always saw ISIS and the regime as two sides of the same coin; they were against both of them. As we know, with the foreign intervention of Western states, ISIS was crushed—although it’s now reorganizing in eastern Syria.

EA: Yassin al-Haj Saleh called them “necktie fascists” and “bearded fascists.”

AM: I’ll add a question that will lead us up to what I think is an important point to hit on for this roundtable, which is: hearing how you describe things just now, Leila—go to Twitter or Instagram and it’s a completely different show. It’s a shitshow. There are these narratives. Especially for those listening, a lot of the accounts that people have been following and retweeting, unknowingly—a lot of us do this work of reaching out and asking, Do you know who this person is? Because we know these people who are “good on Palestine”—you might notice them now chiming in on what’s happening in Syria, and saying things that are very different to how we’re discussing things.

Their narratives, and the “history”—it’s all very different. This is a ploy! Why now? Oh, well, because it’s just after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. We’ve seen these narratives before, and we’ve seen them grow. But if anyone wants to take this—otherwise I’m happy to talk about it: the parallel development of the Russian interference in Syria with its air force and also with its propaganda machine. I definitely was very conscious of this as it was happening in 2015; I noticed both those things escalated instantly.

We’re not just talking about RT, but a lot of different operations, and it formed a narrative that had a sort of internal cohesion. So I don’t know. Anyone want to talk about the rise in 2015 of that sort of propaganda? And then we can talk about the core narrative, the takes, the framework that we’ve been seeing from some very big accounts. To my mind, they just sound like Zionists all of a sudden.

LS: I agree with you, I think it really changed in 2015 with the intervention of Russia. That’s because much of the left falls into this campist framework of how it views anti-imperialism; it sees imperialism as only being carried out by the West, by the US, by Israel and its allies. Anything that axis does is very bad, but on the other side it sees other states like Russia and China and the Syrian regime as being anti-imperialist states, and makes excuses for the abuses they carry out, and discredits anyone who opposes them.

We saw, for example, when chemical massacres happened, chemical atrocities, these anti-imperialists on the left actually tried to excuse them, or deny them and pretend they didn’t happen. They’ve taken a stand whereby any opposition to Assad is constantly slandered either as CIA agents, Zionists, jihadists—really using the worst kind of Islamophobic, War-on-Terror language.

That’s the situation we’re in. Unfortunately there are many people who are very prominent in the pro-Palestine movement who have this worldview, and while their politics on Palestine have been “good,” there’s a double standard in how they respond to what’s happening in Syria. For us Syrians—fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t know—the US is not our main enemy. Our main enemy is the regime, and the imperialist powers which are supporting that regime and carrying out mass atrocities, the Iranian and Russian states.

As has been mentioned, Russia (both of them, but specifically Russia) has a very powerful propaganda arm, and its propaganda arm’s aim has not just been to dispute things with an alternative explanation, but really to bombard and pollute the public space with so many different narratives that no one can really work out what is going on, who to support. 

It’s a messy situation.

EA: It’s like that book Nothing Is Real and Everything Is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev. [Transcriber’s note: here are two interviews with Pomerantsev on this book, on From the Periphery-associated sites.]

Before we started recording, I was worried I would be exhausted by the end of this, because Leila and I basically met in this context—ranting about campists and tankies online and shit like that in London—almost ten years ago now, and some of the same actors are still around. Literally the same faces are still around, with even bigger budgets now.

I don’t blame people who find themselves following a bunch of accounts and suddenly those accounts are pushing a different narrative, a more or less coherent narrative on Syria, and they think, Well, I’ve trusted them on Palestine, why wouldn’t I trust them on Syria? I get that. It’s a misinformation problem, more than meaning badly. The problem is that it causes the same amount of damage regardless.

We said “good on Palestine.” I would quibble over that. They’re anti-Israel, fine. When Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, it’s good to be anti-Israel. I’m fine with that, no problem. The problem is that it’s not relevant if you’re from Yarmouk. It’s not that if you’re from Yarmouk, it’s not relevant to be anti-Israel. It is. But if the Assad regime is the one exterminating your camp, as happened a decade ago now more or less, then your main problem is Assad.

LS: For listeners: Yarmouk is a Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Damascus.

EA: And the largest in the diaspora, before the Assad regime destroyed it.

For me, as someone who knows a bit too much about the Assad regime, including in Lebanon—the Assad regime’s role when it comes to Palestine is, at best, abandoning the Palestinian cause, abandoning the Golan Heights; at worst it’s intervening in Lebanon in 1976 on the side of the Christian far right in order to crush the Palestinian resistance and their Lebanese allies—and of course in 1982, while the Lebanese, backed by the Israelis, were committing the massacre in Sabra and Shatila, the regime was committing the massacre in Hama.

They’ve done this time and time again. Same fucking year, 1982. This has happened multiple times. The Assad regime and the Israeli regime have a lot of things that are similar, a lot of things in common; in terms of tactics, in terms of obsession with crushing any kind of Palestinian dissent. The only Palestinian they like is a docile one who doesn’t complain. That’s the only thing the Israelis are happy with; the Assad regime does the same thing. It’s fine to be a Palestinian in Syria, no problem. As long as you shut the fuck up.

For me it’s like two parallel universes—but not like the parallel universe Karena was describing initially, where if you’re a Kurd from Rojava and your main fear right now is the Turkish regime, in some ways you’re in a parallel universe and your “analysis” might be off sometimes, but it comes from a positionality of pain and fear, which I’m not going to judge. I’m not in that position. But that’s not the case with the Assad regime.

We’re talking about a now five-decades-old dynasty, first the dad and now the son, that has done absolutely everything humanly imaginable to stay in power at whatever cost. This is the situation we’re in. If we don’t start our analysis of Syria with Syria, starting with Syria, not with fucking geopolitics, not with Iran and Israel and Turkey and America—we’ll include those at some point, but start with Syria: What is it? Who’s ruling it? What is that regime’s politics?

What are we doing if we don’t do that?

LS: It’s such a racist discourse, because it totally denies Syrians any agency at all. Everything that happens is always the result of foreign powers. And yes, foreign powers have intervened and are intervening, and they’re going to intervene—but not everything that happens starts and ends with foreign powers. Syrians also influence events, and as we’ve seen in the past few days, united Syrian forces have influenced events quite significantly.

The question now will be to what extent foreign powers try to take advantage of that.

EA: And allow them to exist as an alternative. We had a period of time when the liberated areas were sort of “allowed” to be that way. Same for Rojava. In the case of eastern Aleppo, which was a liberated area, it was “allowed”—partly because of geopolitics, Assad and Turkey. And with Rojava it was at least partly because of the Americans being on the ground, providing some kind of buffer against the Turks.

But that doesn’t mean that you deny the importance of Rojava, that experiment, that revolution. You just recognize that they are in a shitty situation and the more progressive among them have tried to do their best with that shitty situation. In Syria right now, the armed forces aren’t the ones who are progressive, but there are Syrians who are just there, civilians who are just there in their hundreds of thousands, who are liberals and progressives and leftists—they don’t have the guns, because this is the world we live in. But it doesn’t mean they’re not there and we get to erase them just because they don’t have the guns.

One thing I find baffling about this discourse is it’s effectively a War-on-Terror discourse. We see the Israelis calling Hamas “terrorists” and we see people rightly saying this is an Islamophobic Bush-era doctrine—and then five seconds later they’re calling all of the Syrian Sunnis who have a beard and have guns “takfiris.” It’s the same fucking thing. What’s the difference?

AM: And then conflating everybody, including civilian populations, with those groups. And basically all these people, regardless of whether their concerns with HTS are legitimate, are completely silent when Russia is bombing civilians. 

It’s a hypocrisy that we know has existed for a very long time, but I think and I hope we are in a slightly different phase. I think there are a lot more people plugged in. It’s as if we’ve been in a group chat on the region, sharing experiences, and then like forty thousand people join this group chat and it’s like, We’re here now, what do we do to free Palestine? I have a bit more energy these days to try to address those people. 

With [Lebanese-American political science professor] Asad Abukhalil, I only ever send him that picture of graffiti someone painted in Lebanon saying Asad Abukhalil Eat Shit. He’s a tankie, he’s a campist. Any time any of the Blumenthals or Khaleks or whatever—I just spit in their face. I just write, Shut up, you’re a genocide denier, no one should listen to this person.

But to the people who are posting them unknowingly, I give slightly more benefit of the doubt and slightly more conversation. That’s what I think is useful for us to be establishing. I’m not really trying to convince anyone when I tell Asad Abukhalil to eat shit—I’m definitely not trying to convince him, and I’m not trying to convince anyone else. But new people, and people who have been radicalized by scenes of people being absolutely massacred by war jets, who have nothing—ten years ago we were seeing this on the daily. 

There was a painful thing Leila and a lot of Syrians have talked about, and it’s really hard: you never really want to correct someone, because everything in the last year has been atrocious and horrible in Gaza, but when people describe it as the “first live-streamed genocide”—it’s not. We saw those images ten years ago.We were seeing these images for years in the mid-2010s.

And now there’s that hypocrisy: people who were championing the Assad regime—and even when people say “Assad is a butcher, he is a murderer, he is a dictator…but…” this is part of denialism and apologia. Even people like Rania Khalek can never say, No, he’s great! The line is: He’s bad, but the alternative is worse. It’s not just in the analysis that we should start with what Syrians are saying—they are the main ones who are experiencing it.

LS: That’s a total erasure of us, a total erasure of the fact that there was a massive, radical, democratic experiment that went on for years in Syria. That’s the alternative. That’s always been the alternative, and it’s still the alternative today.

AM: Totally. But where I was going with that was that I’ve seen a lot of Lebanese reactions to it, and it’s almost instantaneously: What does that mean for us? Oh, shit’s happening in Halep, what does that mean for us? Oh no, HTS, what does that mean for us?

There’s not a minute where it’s, What does this mean for Syrians? What does that mean for them? They’re the primary people affected by this. The geopolitical concerns trump actual lives, and that is a fundamentally racist discourse.

Here’s the thing. I have a question, but I’m very aware that you have spent the last ten years answering this question, and it’s frustrating. Elia, you were just saying how exhausted you are, because yeah, we have been having this conversation a lot. The main thing is seeing this within the lens of a geopolitical play, so I don’t know if you can talk specifically against or towards the claim that the rebels are being funded by Israel. I’m sorry, it’s because I know it’s going around!

But also, within that narrative is: Why would Israel fund these rebels? Well, because the regime is part of the resistance against Israel! It connects to all that, so I think we should talk about it. I’m so sorry to have to ask this question.

EA: I can do this quickly if you want: where are the fucking Golan Heights? Where are they? They were annexed by Israel since the eighties. Smotrich, one of the leaders of the far right in Israel, was fucking born in the Golan Heights. What has been done, concretely, by the Assad regime to liberate the Golan Heights? The answer is absolutely nothing. Not a single thing.

In fact, in 2011, during the uprising, one of the popular chants was: Why are you directing the tanks towards us? The Golan Heights is fucking that way! People were aware of this, because why wouldn’t they be? It was a good chunk of Syrian territory that was annexed in the eighties—occupied since ’67, obviously, but annexed in the eighties. And that’s it, that’s the end of it, the Golan Heights are done, as far as the Assad regime is concerned.

Again: concretely, what has been the role of the Assad regime towards Palestine? Beyond having a flag here and there, or how they call one of the security branches where they torture people the “Palestine” branch? What is it? I mentioned 1976, which was the Tel al-Zaatar massacre against Palestinian refugees, and I mentioned 1982 with the Hama massacre, but Yarmouk is much more recent. 

We even did a couple of episodes on this podcast: one with Mohammed Suleiman, who grew up in Gaza, talking about the Assad regime being insanely unpopular in Gaza, nowhere near what people seem to be imagining in that parallel universe on social media; and one with Nidal Betare, who grew up in Yarmouk, talking about the specificity of being a Palestinian-Syrian growing up in Yarmouk and being obviously aware of the Assad regime early on, and of course aware of the Israeli state, and always making the parallel, the link between the two, and how similar they are, kind of taking that for granted, and then having this weird out-of-body experience when you go online and see people actually saying the Assad regime is “resisting Israel.”

Maybe somewhere? On some planet? Not on this one, not for the past four decades!

AM: But the route between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon!

EA: Sure, but Hezbollah went to the east, which I’m pretty sure is not where Jerusalem is. 

The thing is: a regime that crushes people cannot liberate people. If we don’t take this as a 101, what are we doing? Where is this liberation going to happen? He lost four-fifths of Syria, as Leila mentioned, because of Syrians. Syrians took to the streets against him, and he lost, because he did not have the popular legitimacy. He needed two (arguably three, if you count the Hezbollah one as separate from the Iranian one) interventions just to be propped up. How did he do that? By selling off a bunch of assets to the Russians and the Iranians, and allowing the Iranians to do ethnic cleansing in large parts of Syria.

What is this guy going to do for Palestine? Sometimes it’s so blatantly absurd that I feel—I don’t know what people are talking about. I mean, I know. I know campism, and I’m now educated and well-versed in this anti-imperialism of fools, I know Leila. But in terms of concrete usefulness, I know more Palestinian-Syrians, either personally or indirectly through acquaintances, who have been either forcibly disappeared or tortured—or their parents or relatives have been—by the Assad regime, than I know Palestinian-Syrian activists “on the left” who are pro-regime. Because why the fuck would they be?

The regime crushed unions, destroyed the communist movements, imprisoned and tortured them. This is the legacy. Do you expect me to be surprised that someone in Ramallah or Gaza is not a fan of Netanyahu? Why would I be surprised by that?

AM: Also, the Assad regime is not a threat. The Israelis do not see it as a threat, because it is not and it never has been.

EA: The most peaceful border Israel has had since the eighties.

LS: Another question, just stepping back a bit, is why people are prioritizing states to give solidarity to. Where are the people in this discussion? The people struggling against their states, the people struggling for liberation, the people struggling for better social and economic conditions? Those are the people we should be supporting, not saying which state is involved—Oh, should I support this state? Is that a good state or is that a bad state?

The question is bullshit. Where are the people in this analysis? We should always be looking for people, people who we can support, who are our people on the ground. There are always people on the ground who you can identify with and extend solidarity to.

EA: And we have no problem doing that when it comes to Palestine, where there is no state. We have no problem doing that where we have a state being opposed, the Israeli state; there is technically a “state of Palestine,” but that’s not what we’re talking about when we say Stop Bombing Gaza or From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free, or Free Palestine, or Stop Apartheid. We’re not thinking about the state of Palestine. We’re thinking about the Palestinians, the Palestinian cause.

I can put on this analytical hat and go through the theoretical flaws of campism. We had Rohini Hensman on, and we had an episode with Leila and Dana El Kurd and Romeo Kokriatski talking about anti-imperialism from the periphery; I can do that, and that is important. But fundamentally: I know people. When the scenes of prisoners being released came out, I messaged Wafa Mustafa, who was on this podcast, whose father has been disappeared for a fucking decade now. I thought of Yassin al-Haj Saleh, whose wife Samira was forcibly disappeared—not even by the regime, by Jaysh al-Islam—over a decade ago.

Those are the stories that, if we don’t center them—we center Hind Rajab, we center all of the Palestinian activists and writers and kids, because why wouldn’t we? Sure, people were also centering and romanticizing [Yahya] Sinwar when he was assassinated. But most people, when they’re thinking of Gaza, they’re thinking of that kid, and they’re thinking of that professor or that poet who was assassinated. Syrians don’t have those? Syrians don’t have kids?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Bana Alabed, if you guys remember her. In 2016, there was an insane amount of propaganda against her, calling her AI—She’s not real, she’s fake, managed by handlers—even though her mom helping her tweet was all that was happening. I’ve interviewed her. We have kids in Gaza today, also tweeting and posting and livestreaming on Instagram what’s happening around them, and that discourse doesn’t exist—accept on the Israeli side. They call it “Pallywood.”

Why is this different than the people who said that the 2011 uprising in Syria was created in some studio in Qatar? Why is that different? It’s the same fucking thing; it’s just different actors using the same language against mostly different people—but in some cases not even different people: if you’re a Palestinian-Syrian, you’re being talked about in the same way by the Assad regime and by the Israelis and their apologists.

For me, if we don’t start from that—this analysis of power, of authoritarianism—if we don’t include all of that, we’re just playing Risk. That’s fun to play when you’re a teenager, but that’s not the real world. There are people involved in all of this.

KA: I wanted to bring together a couple of these strains of thought that we’ve been talking about, especially regarding power and anti-imperialism. In the beginning I was talking about minorities as this parallel universe, but they’re not. I don’t want to get into the statist definitions, but they do live in the same political entity. And I’m generalizing minorities—they’re very different; obviously they’re not a monolith. But the Kurds largely are anti-imperialist; their project is anti-imperialist and not statist. 

And then there are some of the other minorities in Aleppo: they’re not necessarily fans of Assad; they preferred to keep their head down and keep going. But is that sustainable in the long term? I wanted to rhetorically pose this question: these discourses, these positions are so separate, and they don’t speak to one another; it’s almost as though they consciously avoid acknowledging one another—what are the obstacles? Why is that happening? And what are other ways that could look?

LS: Do you mean why the unity that we spoke about previously at the beginning of the revolution broke down?

KA: Even more broadly—maybe drawing on that idea. I still haven’t read that piece in Antidote Zine about Kurdish-Arab rapprochement [Transcriber’s note: here’s a second earlier one as well], or Leila, what you and I have spoken about: how the Kurdish revolution in Rojava wouldn’t have been possible without the Syrian revolution and the Syrian revolutionaries, and how so many Western observers romanticize the Kurdish project as the first egalitarian feminist movement in the Middle East, whereas Syrian revolutionaries were doing the same—without erasing the well-grounded fears of these communities and their experience.

It’s so difficult; it’s a constant question in my mind and I don’t know how to approach it.

EA: If we talk about what’s ideal—maybe we’ll start from a more abstract, theoretical place. I would not say it’s impossible; it’s just extremely difficult, for largely geopolitical reasons. But there is such a thing as the southern front, which is inactive right now, but as far as I know (this is from memory, because it’s been a while now) it was multi-ethnic and secular. The big question right now is what happens with Sweida. It’s question mark because it’s an autonomous region within technically regime-held territory. They’re very much not fans of the regime, and there are regular protests, including waving the Free Syrian flag.

I would ideally see some kind of rapprochement between forces in the south—which for different reasons (bordering Jordan, for example) don’t have the same pressures from Turkey and shit like that, or from Iran for that matter, and have been able to do things a bit more like the early days of the revolution. Not quite the same, but a bit more than what rebels had to deal with in Aleppo in 2016, and certainly today—some kind of reconciliation, a serious one, between the components that formed the original parties or movements (I don’t want to say the FSA or SDF, because what will that look like in a year?).

And not “original” in the sense that we need to go back in time—that’s done, that’s in the past. But I don’t see any other path forward that’s good for Syria. There are alternatives and scenarios—the more likely scenarios are all bad; that’s what’s currently happening. In terms of a more progressive vision: the Rojava project continues as it is (without Turkey doing what Turkey has been doing for a long time), and the rest of Syria recreates the original forms of the local councils, and those two link up. Because those are more similar than not—it’s just that the local councils were destroyed by the Assad regime (Omar Aziz, one of the leading thinkers, died in prison, held by the Assad regime).

That’s what I would like to see. How to get there? There’s a lot of bad blood, animosity, and lack of trust—which is understandable. And that lack of trust is easily manipulated as well, and preyed upon by the wider powers, whether it’s the Assad regime and its Russian and Iranian allies, or whether it’s Turkey.

LS: And also of course by the Free Army forces, the Turkish-backed militias, the SDF—the decisions they have taken are decisions that haven’t worked in the interests of Syrian unity.

We need to come to a realization that our liberation and our freedom is very much tied up with the liberation and freedom of the other—whether that’s Arabs and Kurds, whether that’s Syrians and Palestinians. The whole issue for the whole region is democratization. If we had a democratic Middle East, the Gaza genocide would have been stopped by now, because the states would have acted to reflect their populations’ wishes. 

If we were in a democratic Middle East, we would be in a very different situation. Saudi could have such a big influence on ending the genocide in Gaza, just by turning off the oil tomorrow. I think its population would support that. Or Egypt or Jordan—these leaders are not acting in the interests of their people. We have to start thinking: how do we work together? People-to-people solidarity to really build a movement to take us forward to a different future.

EA: No disagreement there. And maybe we should stop calling everyone “terrorists.” Maybe we should give that up; let’s just stop doing that. Daesh are terrorists—I don’t care, go for it. But Hezbollah calls the FSA and all of the Syrians “terrorists;” the SDF calls all of the other Syrians “terrorists;” and HTS people and people in Idlib and Aleppo call the YPG and YPJ and SDF “PKK terrorists.”

LS: It’s not only the War-on-Terror language that we need to move away from; it’s the Islamophobic language that we need to move away from. Any group that has any sort of religious name or religious goal is just put in the “extremist” bracket—and Syria was never a revolution between secularism and religion. That wasn’t what the dividing line was! The dividing line was between democracy and authoritarianism.

Many people in Syria are religious. But they can organize themselves, under a religious framework, democratically. Many people will support that. But any kind of hint of Islam coming in is instantly discredited or brushed aside.

EA: And yet, the second largest group in Gaza is called Islamic Jihad, and that’s no problem! It’s okay, we can be nuanced! Hezbollah called their people “mujihadeen”—No problem, we can be nuanced! But Syria breaks people’s brains.

AM: I agree about the term “terrorist”—it’s just the term for the baddie. It’s never something you do, it’s always what they do.

EA: That’s what George W. Bush said: If you’re not with us, you’re with the terrorists.

LS: Maybe we should just reserve the term for states—terrorist states. I can get on board with that.

AM: I feel like we’re wrapping up; those are all great concluding statements.

EA: One second. Karena, have we dealt with the minority question fairly? It’s not an easy one.

KA: Honestly, I don’t know. It’s not an easy one. But I think we’re doing the best we can.

AM: I did want to add one thing. What I find frustrating about some of these tankie, campist narratives, the sensationalist ones you see online, is that they don’t hold an analysis. It’s not thorough. They don’t ask you to read about Syria, it’s just, Look at this take. Again, this is different from Palestine: Watch this film, read this poem, listen to this song, read this book. But all these people producing these takes on Syria do not say, Read this. It’s just, Read this one weird article, or just read Noam Chomsky and nothing else.

Like you said, Elia, I don’t like using the term “terrorist”—it is a purely ideological term. What I find frustrating is some of these people claim power by saying, No, now you’re the terrorist. We have been, as Arabs, described as terrorists for decades. So there’s this feeling of: Actually, now I’m going to call you the terrorist! And it’s literally the idea of using the master’s tools! I don’t see the power in that at all.

Not just using the term specifically, but the whole package, the whole narrative and ideology. We’re not going to War-on-Terror ourselves out of the War on Terror. So doing the bullshit that the Zionists do vis-á-vis Palestine and Palestinians—erasing the Palestinians, literally and epistemologically; they don’t exist and they can only exist as these vague entities, like Hamas; Oh, it’s Iran; there are no Palestinians. This is Iran coming and using these people—justifying the “human shields” logic.

It’s sad that children are being killed in Gaza…but…Hamas. You’ll see the same thing from people who condemn this, with Syria: Okay, children being killed by Russian warplanes is sad…(again, this is the best they can do; for the most part they’ll be silent about these things)…but…HTS. But…Israel something something.

Both are condemnable. Not just the attacks, but the apologia for those attacks. And I really hope that a lot of these people who have been radicalized and whose hearts bleed, who have been so shaken by what we’ve been seeing in Gaza the last year, will have at the very least that emotional consistency, and at best that political consistency: that all of this comes from a struggle for liberation, that even though it’s manifested itself very differently at this point, thirteen years on, we are still seeing a counter-revolutionary war, and none of it will ever really end without those core issues of the revolution being addressed—i.e. the overthrow of Assad.

LS: Nothing can begin without the Assad regime ending. Whatever comes now, it’s going to be a mess. Syria’s been completely devastated and destroyed; the country is run by warlords; there are so many foreign powers involved. But Assad going is a prerequisite to even start talking about the day after or what comes next.

AM: Alright! That was a productive, interesting, exciting—I loved this conversation. It was what I had hoped and more. Is there anything else anyone wants to add or share, or reflect on?

LS: Just to say: we don’t know what’s going to happen over the coming days, weeks, and months. But what we do need to be doing is supporting people on the ground who are still there, still want to live a safe, peaceful life; they want some kind of democratic future. Those are the people we should be looking for and supporting. And certainly we should be condemning the violence and abuses of states, whether that’s the Assad regime or whether that’s any state that’s involved, and have a more human-centered focus on what we’re doing.

AM: Thank you everybody for listening. Thanks, guys, for joining. This was a great conversation.