Less than a month before Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus, an Arab cartoonist called me on the day Assad arrived in Riyadh to attend an Arab-Islamic summit. He asked: \u201cHow can I sum up the Syrian president\u2019s presence at the summit in a single image?\u201d I replied: \u201cTake a skeleton from a medical illustration and place Assad\u2019s head on it.\u201d Of course, my friend didn\u2019t take my suggestion.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, in Geneva, an HD (Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue) employee organized a meeting between visitors from northwestern Syria and the American and British embassies and intelligence services. Preparations were underway in Hakan Fidan\u2019s office for a military operation whose minimum objective was the entry into Aleppo and the rest of Idlib province along strategic roads, and whose maximum objective was a move toward Damascus. Hillary Clinton\u2019s 2012 remark on the Syrian National Council echoed in my mind: \u201cExpired.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout more than half a century of my life, I\u2019ve always refused to be part of the \u201cLet the Devil Come\u201d party. Having followed Jabhat al-Nusra and its offshoots since the Qazzaz bombings and a funeral in Jaramana, I and several Syrian democrats saw \u201cSalafi jihadism\u201d as a counter-revolutionary force against the peaceful civil uprising. For example, Assad issued presidential pardons for al-Qaeda members while Syria\u2019s best youth fell to the bullets of his criminal regime.<\/p>\n
Our suspicions were later confirmed when Jabhat al-Nusra issued a takfiri fatwa against me and Abdelaziz al-Khayyer in summer 2012\u2014labeling me a \u201cShiite communist\u201d and him a \u201cNusayri Alawite.\u201d<\/p>\n
In my final meeting with Ambassador Robert Ford, he suggested I meet with the \u201cAhrar al-Sham\u201d movement. I declined. In spring 2014, a former Sidnaya prisoner who had shared a cell with Hassan Aboud called me. He told me that Aboud and a clever young man (Mohammad al-Shami) were working on a \u201cRevolutionary Honor Charter.\u201d It was, in reality, a last cry before collapse. Syrians had lost control of their fate; foreigners were now making the decisions.<\/p>\n
Since then, I focused my research on the Islamic State in Iraq and Jabhat al-Nusra: their formation, functions, financial and military support, the cross-border fighter networks, and the contradictions between their field religious practices and their subordination to the geopolitical strategies of Erdo\u011fan and Fidan.<\/p>\n
On July 12, 2014, in Paris, we organized a joint seminar with Turkish and Syrian opposition figures[1]<\/a>. We had verified information that the relationship between Turkey\u2019s MIT and Jabhat al-Nusra had progressed from \u201ctense tolerance\u201d to active cooperation\u2014both security and military\u2014through SADAT (a defense consultancy) and the quasi-governmental IHH relief agency. This relationship was first exposed publicly on January 9, 2014, when Turkish gendarmerie stopped weapon shipments bound for Jabhat al-Nusra.<\/p>\n Despite Turkey\u2019s declared commitment to UN Resolution 2254 and later the Sochi Agreement (2018) to clear Idlib of terrorist groups like Hay\u2019at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), Turkish cooperation with them only deepened\u2014economically through border crossing revenues and Turkish investments in areas under HTS\u2019s \u201cSalvation Government.\u201d<\/p>\n On November 8, 2018, I gave a lecture in Geneva about \u201cTurkish-Qatari support for Islamic movements in Syria\u201d and MIT\u2019s ties to HTS and its government. No Western diplomat present took my remarks seriously[2]<\/a>.<\/p>\n After the defeat of ISIS and the intervention of the international coalition, Jabhat al-Nusra\u2014then HTS\u2014focused on imposing a strict socio-religious order in its territories: monopolizing civil and humanitarian activities, enforcing \u201chisbah\u201d (moral policing) in the Wahhabi-Talibani sense. Turkish intelligence oversaw alliances, enmities, and funding. HTS propaganda became increasingly anti-Syrian and sectarian, leading to mass displacement and full prisons for those guilty of \u201csins.\u201d<\/p>\n Idlib became a strict camp of daily control. \u201cJihad of the Sunnis\u201d became the rallying cry across speeches and school curricula. HTS institutionalized sectarianism and integrated foreign fighters as a core military base. Authority structures followed the logic of \u201cloyalty and disavowal,\u201d while the war economy mirrored the regime\u2019s corruption.<\/p>\n I often corrected my friends who referred to HTS-held areas as \u201cliberated\u201d by saying: \u201cTo be accurate, call them \u2018repeated\u2019 areas.\u201d<\/p>\n HTS\u2019s ideologically closed, sectarian model was chosen (by Fidan) to be expanded across Syria. Meanwhile, the \u201cCoalition\u201d and \u201cInterim Government\u201d were sidelined and cut off from aid. Other factions, like the \u201cNational Army,\u201d were left waiting for their turn at plunder, participating in joint raids, Alawite expulsions, property confiscations, and looting under the official label of Fulul <\/em>\u201cremnants of the former regime.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth recalling that Bashar al-Assad was the only political figure in the region who said nothing all year about the genocide in Gaza\u2014even the Comoros presidency condemned Israeli massacres. But that didn\u2019t endear him to British, Turkish, or Qatari intelligence.<\/p>\n Even if the proposed alternative regime inspired little trust, replacing a collapsed, bloody dictatorship with a weaker, authoritarian one seemed acceptable to many countries involved in the Syrian war. The military-security front had exhausted itself. Civilians in rebel-held areas were simply struggling to survive. Ukraine\u2019s war, Gaza\u2019s extermination, and Hezbollah\u2019s battering had eroded the \u201cwings of defense\u201d that delayed Damascus\u2019 fall by ten years.<\/p>\n The \u201cMilitary Operations Room\u201d inherited a collapsed state and bankrupt economy. Borrowing from satirist Khateeb Badleh, it was a \u201cshattered, torn-apart, punctured\u201d country, with over 80% of people below the poverty line and under the heaviest sanctions in the developing world. The \u201cnew administration,\u201d whose top figures had Syrian blood on their hands and were listed by the UN as terrorists, was incapable of transitioning from sectarian militancy to national reconstruction.<\/p>\n Thus, dissolving the army and police were among their first moves, followed by firing over a quarter of public sector workers (mostly Alawites and other non-Sunni groups). Within 100 days, sectarian cleansing massacres occurred on the Syrian coast.<\/p>\n Gulf and Western media downplayed the events and adopted the new regime\u2019s official narrative: that this was a \u201cfoiled coup attempt by regime remnants.\u201d Despite extreme danger, Syrian human rights defenders documented the genocide-in-progress by jihadi groups\u2014most now integrated into the new army and security forces\u2014in one of the most important human rights reports in modern Syrian history.<\/p>\n Although over a million people read the \u201cHuman Rights and Humanitarian follow-up Committee\u201d (Syria) report[3]<\/a>, neither the UN Security Council nor the UNHCR, nor intergovernmental bodies like the EU or Arab League responded proportionately to the atrocities.<\/p>\n As the saying goes: \u201cEasy money teaches theft; unpunished crimes teach murder.\u201d The takfiri slogan expanded southward. We now hear the ragged, masked militia shouting: \u201cPut the weapons back on the shelves\u2014there\u2019s nothing worse than Alawites except the Druze!\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201coriginal sin<\/em>\u201d of Jabhat al-Nusra still activates mobs and the ignorant whenever the new sectarian regime needs them. Our fear is that the crimes in Jaramana, Sahnaya, al-Saoura al-Kubra, and elsewhere may go unnoticed due to local and international complicity\u2014just like what happened earlier in Pakistan. Now, the desperate masses cry out: The new regime has shattered Syrians\u2019 last civic immune defenses. It redirected people\u2019s attention away from rebuilding, national unity, equal citizenship, and productive work\u2014toward killing, displacement, and robbing fellow Syrians with the help of foreign fighters.<\/p>\n Defining loyalty through Sunni sectarian identity and casting all others as enemies has already brought us to disaster in the coast, Jaramana, Sahnaya, Soura, Homs, and Suwayda. This path promises the worst scenarios for Syria\u2019s future.<\/p>\n We will not delve here into determining responsibilities for future possibilities, which include division, partition, and civil war. The model presented to us by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham does not resemble the overwhelming majority of Syrians. No matter how much some newspapers try to report opinion polls they call “scientific and accurate” about the popularity of the group holding power in Damascus, or how some focus on the new outfits of the Takfiri jihadists, their sectarian beliefs and daily practices confirm, day after day, the necessity of exploring other scenarios before destroying what remains of this torn country.<\/p>\n Sectarian mobilization and incitement is a weapon of mass destruction. I\u2019ve said it dozens of times and will keep saying it: <\/p>\n <\/p>\n ————————–<\/p>\n Haytham Manna (Daraa, 1951), physician, jurist and anthropologist, author of about 60 books in Human\u00a0 Rights, Islam and democracy\u00a0 He is a historic activist for the cause of peoples and human rights. Director of the Scandinavian Institute for Human Rights\/Haytham Manna Foundation in Geneva and honorable President of the International Movement for Human and Peoples’ Rights (IMHPR). He received the medal of human rights from NAS in Washington\u00a0in\u00a01996.<\/p>\n ————————–<\/p>\n Washington, 12 May 2025. Syrian Conference for Democracy.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> The Consequences of War in Syria on the relations between the Peoples of Turkey and Syria<\/p>\n . SIHR\/FHM & ACHR, Malakoff 12\/07\/2014.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Hakan Fidan, the current Turkish Foreign Minister, acknowledged the longstanding relationship and coordination with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, but did not disclose this until 2024 due to its designation as a terrorist organization.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/sectarian-cleansing-as-a-policy-of-governance\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Less than a month before Bashar al-Assad fled Damascus, an Arab cartoonist called me on the day Assad arrived in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6819,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"default","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[45,140,141,130],"class_list":["post-6818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interventions","tag-haytham-manna","tag-jihadi-fascism","tag-jolani","tag-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6818"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6820,"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6818\/revisions\/6820"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sihr.fr\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cWe don\u2019t want electricity, we don\u2019t want water… At your service, O Messenger of Allah… We want the infidels executed!\u201d<\/p>\n
\nWe have no future with those who made it a strategy for domination and rule.<\/p>\n