A World Turned Upside Down: Syria Reckons with an Assad-Era PeacemakerAs Syria struggles to pursue transitional justice, a former commander faces false accusations of war crimes.
The fall of the Syrian government to a coalition of rebel groups led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in December 2024 put an end to several decades of rule by the Assad family, as well as a fourteen-year civil war estimated to have killed more than half a million people. The end of the war also opened space for historical reckoning with both the legacy of the Assad government and a terrible conflict that destroyed much of Syria and ripped apart its social fabric, largely along sectarian lines. One of the most notorious instances of mass killing in the war is known as the Tadamon massacre—a videotaped execution of civilians that took place in a Damascus suburb in 2013 at the hands of government forces. The new government has vowed to bring the perpetrators of this atrocity and others to justice, arresting individuals alleged to have committed war crimes during the conflict. But as this deeply reported story by longtime Syria reporter Nir Rosen shows, the quest for transitional justice has also swept up individuals whose connection to crimes committed during the war—including the Tadamon massacre—raises serious questions of proof and culpability. Meanwhile, sectarian violence continues to break out as people attempt to take justice into their own hands. –Murtaza Hussain Drop Site's journalism is free to read because thousands of readers choose to fund it. If our work matters to you, please consider making a tax-deductible donation today.
One Thursday night in August 2011, I walked through Daabul street in the Damascus suburb of Tadamon. It was the first Ramadan of the Syrian uprising. In much of the country, men gathered in mosques for that month’s nightly Tarawih prayers then burst out onto the streets in protests that were often turning into violent clashes. I walked past four buses full of men armed with clubs, electrical tasers, and shotguns in anticipation of who might emerge from the nearby Osman mosque. To opponents of the government these were “shabiha,” or pro-government thugs, while to supporters of the government these were “hafz al nizam” or “protecting the order” forces, locals armed to protect their neighborhoods. I continued to Yalda roundabout and saw similar buses waiting outside the Umahat al Mu’mineen mosque. This escalating cycle that would soon lead to a full scale civil war. Like many residents, my local guide Amir was originally from Idlib. He had faded tattoos from his days in the army. Idlib had been at war since at least June, when local militias killed over 100 soldiers in the town of Jisr Shughur, and many of the men in Tadamon had relatives in the nascent insurgency. Amir stopped by a group of men from his province who were gathered in case security came to arrest people. Their mission was to throw stones or delay them to allow for people to escape. They were all bearded, skinny, with angular faces. “Today it’s a light security presence,” one of them laughed. “Yesterday there were 19 vans in the neighborhood.” These narrow, working-class streets of Damascus were often unpaved and full of hastily built and partially completed illegal apartment buildings housing diverse communities that had migrated to the capital, Sunnis from Idlib or Der Ezzor, Alawites from the coast as well as from the Israeli-occupied Julan, and Druze from there as well as from Sweida. By the summer of 2011 these communities were already clashing and forming neighborhood militias to protect their communities from the others. In response to a government crackdown on protests, armed men began joining protests that summer; soon they were firing on the security forces. At the time Tadamon was an unknown slum on the outskirts of Damascus. It would become notorious in 2022 when the world saw video footage of a sadistic massacre of 41 prisoners conducted in April 2013 by the regime’s Military Intelligence Directorate, more commonly known simply as Military Security. Other videos allegedly showed a total of 228 prisoners being executed in four different pits. Over years of working in Syria as a journalist and for NGOs, I became familiar with many of the massacres committed by the various sides of the civil war, as well as brave efforts to end the violence. During the 14 years of civil war and state collapse in Syria, Tadamon was at once a sectarian battleground between supporters and opponents of the Assad government and a front line in the war against ISIS on the border of the Syrian capital. Tadamon was also a testing ground where a local pro-government militia commander named Fadi Saqr worked as a peacemaker during the war—and is doing so once again today. Syria is a deeply divided society that has just emerged from a long and brutal civil war. There is no consensus or common narrative about the conflict and no single “Syrian people” who want the same thing. Some insist on “transitional justice” as a necessary step. In places such as Rwanda, South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Cambodia, this has included trials and executions on one extreme and truth and reconciliation commissions on the other. This idea is controversial in Syria, even among the former opposition, because insurgent factions fought bloody wars against one another and against “revolution activists,” and senior officials in the new government could be implicated. Residents of government-held areas were subject to massacres committed by insurgent factions and daily bombardment by insurgents in places like Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs. Many Syrians who belonged to the opposition are eager for their 2006 Saddam Hussein execution moment to feel catharsis, revenge, or some symbolic justice for the imprisonment, displacement, or death of loved ones. But most of the senior regime officials have fled. It is largely the rank-and-file criminals who remain in the country. Current Syrian law does not even have a framework for dealing with crimes such as those that took place during the civil war, though the 2025 constitutional declaration did acknowledge international humanitarian law. The April arrest of Amjad Yousef, who led the mass execution in Tadamon, has refocused attention on how to implement a Syrian transitional justice process and what role should be played by former officials in the new government. Following Yousef’s arrest, accusations were made on social media and in the press against Fadi Saqr, a former commander of the National Defense Forces (NDF), the pro-government militia created by the Assad regime in 2012 in an attempt to impose order on the many armed factions that were fighting the insurgency. Some people refused to countenance any officials from the former government playing a future role, believing any security or military official who fought for the former government against insurgents must be a criminal. Others maintained that Alawites like Saqr should be excluded from the new regime. Well-intentioned detractors accepted false accusations that Saqr was involved in the massacre, even though he was not yet a member of the security forces at the time. He joined the NDF in June 2013, two months after the killings, and he would later defy the former regime and work as a peacemaker, a mission he is pursuing once again on behalf of the new government in Damascus. Thus the man who was behind the local peace and reconciliation processes was blamed for the Tadamon massacre. The following account is based on years of interviews and reporting for organizations such as Al Jazeera and Frontline, much of which occurred at the time of the events described. Many of the sources spoke on the condition of anonymity and cannot be named without putting their lives in jeopardy. Others are senior officials in the new Syrian government who are not authorized to speak with the media.
Civil War BeginsBefore the events in Tadamon there was Homs. The civil war started in Homs almost as soon as the protest movement began: its militias were out of government control, just as its myriad insurgent factions were unruly and lacked centralized command. In Homs, which was largely segregated along sectarian lines, neighborhood militias were formed by Sunnis, Alawis, and Shias within days of the March 2011 protest movement starting. When majority Sunni protestors and rioters descended into streets from mosques, a local regime security official organized counter-protests that ended up being mainly majority Alawite, exacerbating social tensions. An inchoate Sunni insurgency committed violations against Alawite civilians so gruesome the regime feared an explosion of revenge against Sunni civilians were videos to be leaked. Poor and marginalized Alawis and Shias were on one side, facing urban Sunnis from the same class background, as well as tribal Sunnis. My first time getting shot at in Syria was in July 2011, when I attended a night protest outside the fire department in the Waer district of Homs and local militiamen from the adjacent Shia neighborhood of Mazraa opened fire with automatic rifles. I sprinted for shelter in the nearby Birr hospital. It was also the first time I saw pro-opposition men holding rifles and pistols as they rushed to the front line. More recently the governor of Homs has ordered the Shia areas adjacent to Homs to be destroyed, displacing thousands of people. This was after they ordered a nearby market with many Shia and Alawite shopowners to be destroyed as well, all part of unfinished business from the civil war. In October 2012, I went to the office of Saqr Rustum, the NDF commander in Homs, to interview him on behalf of the International Crisis Group. A local militiaman called Wael Salameh (who boasted to me that his own nickname was “the butcher”) took me to him. The regime and insurgents both turned to former criminals in those early days. Former gangsters had a chance to rehabilitate their reputation, protect their neighborhoods, or enrich themselves under the guise of heroism. After I sat down, Rustum told me that I was his guest. I naively thanked him. He repeated it with emphasis. He told me to hand over my phone and notebook. Confused at first, then slowly realizing what was happening, I stood up, protesting that my friend Khaled al-Ahmad, an advisor to President Bashar al-Assad, had arranged my entry into Syria and was protecting me. Rustum evinced no interest. Three other men were in the room behind me. A muscular one pushed me back down on the seat and loaded his pistol next to my ear. I realized they were going to execute me. I was in a room with no windows and I was outnumbered. Feeling stupid, I surrendered myself to what was going to happen. Suddenly Rustum received a call and the mood changed. It turned out the man he had ordered to execute me had called al-Ahmad from outside to ask him about me. Al-Ahmad called Rustum’s boss and uncle, the powerful Generl Bassam Hassan, and warned him not to harm me. Rustum smiled at me and said, “You’re on candid camera.” I left, my knees shaking for several hours. Rustum became notorious for his brutality within the former regime. His NDF unit was the Arkan’s Tigers of the Syrian civil war. In 2012, most of Homs was controlled by insurgents. Early that year, during the battles to retake the southern neighborhood of Bab Amer from insurgents, the Syrian army first took the nearby areas of Jobar and Sultaniya. There were many civilians in these areas. The regime left the women and children but gathered the men so that Political Security, headed by General Hossam Louka, could check their names in the system to see if any were wanted. Also there, according to people who were present, were Governor Mustafa Abdelal, Colonel Firas Al-Hamed of State Security, Rafiq Shehadeh the head of Syrian Military Security (ostensibly in charge of the Homs battle), Malik Habib the head of Military Security for Homs, and other military leaders involved in the operation. Rustum arrived with his men in armed pickup trucks and they opened fire, massacring these local men and shocking the hardened regime officials who stood by helplessly. They were part of a chain of command and had received orders to cooperate with him. They knew that Bassam Hassan was the one really in charge of Homs and that Rustum’s local Alawi thugs were more trusted than the official security forces who were of diverse backgrounds. This was normal in Homs, where Alawi civilians were also kidnapped and killed and their neighborhoods besieged or shelled by insurgents. Shehadeh, a ruthless servant of the Syrian state, felt paralyzed. He knew that Rustum could not operate without orders from the presidential palace. Later that day he complained that they should all be ashamed of themselves, they did not deserve the ranks on their shoulders and they should all go home if this could happen in front of them and they could do nothing about it. Their military dignity was insulted by this asshole Rustum, he said, who was empowered by his uncle Bassam Hassan, a man Shehadeh hated. Afterwards the governor of Homs sat in his office crying and State Security’s Hamed was furious and felt ashamed. They foolishly believed that Assad did not know about these things and would be angry if he found out, so they told one of his advisors. Assad ordered them all to stay silent about it. Rustum fled Syria after the former regime collapsed and did not respond to interview requests. By 2014, the regime had restored control over most of Homs, besieging insurgents in the middle of the city in an area called Old Homs, an island of fighting that looked like Stalingrad surrounded by the city. Insurgents sniped and fired mortars at the government side, and the NDF and other security forces sniped and fired mortars at them. Inside were hundreds of civilian relatives and supporters of the opposition. In February 2014, I was working for a humanitarian organization and I entered Old Homs together with a United Nations convoy so that I could propose a plan to safely evacuate them several kilometers north to insurgent held areas outside the city. The convoy of white armored SUVs was approved by the most senior security officials in Homs and Damascus. It included Red Crescent trucks full of aid. As we drove over the detritus of war, Saqr Rustum’s NDF began firing mortars, machine guns and sniper rounds at us. We made it inside with only superficial damage, though some insurgents waiting for us were killed. They hid us in a basement as I and the head of the UN delegation made calls to arrange for our safe exit. Despite the promises from Damascus, as we rumbled out we were met by the same mortar and sniper fire. Rustum brazenly defied the senior command in Damascus, but he represented an ignored constituency: poor angry Alawites who felt like they had been fighting Sunni extremist insurgents alone and resented the aid and protection their enemies were receiving. They were spoilers, like Protestant Unionist militias in Belfast, sometimes collaborating with the state while other times provoking and undermining it. Nobody from the UN or the regime had thought to include them in the negotiations. Similar battles were taking place in Damascus and its suburbs. One such area in the Syrian capital was Tadamon.
Field ExecutionsTadamon has neighborhoods with concentrations of Alawites, Christians, Druze, and Sunnis from places like Idlib in the northwest and Der Ezzor in the northeast. Majd, a member of Tadamon’s “nazih,” or refugee community from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, recalled taking his son to school at 6:30 a.m. in the autumn of 2011 when a bomb exploded in front of his house. The target was a female senior Baath party official. Majd said this was the turning point that led to Tadamon men forming their first ad hoc neighborhood-watch group. “We sat in our neighborhoods, friends, everybody in his neighborhood so nobody would come and explode anything. We would sit and smoke nargilla. We did not have weapons, only clubs,” Majd said. The Al-Bustan Charity, which belonged to Assad’s cousin and business tycoon Rami Makhluf, funded its own militia and was the first to send weapons and reinforcements to Tadamon in 2011 after protestors began firing on security forces. At the beginning of 2012, after months of violent attacks, the Republican Guard and military security organized people and gave them AK-47s, Majd said. Most men in the popular committees had other jobs. Majd was an employee of Syriatel, one of the two main telecom companies. There were Sunnis in the committees as well. Military security would give ID cards to its committee members and take them on operations. In April 2011 Assad canceled Syria’s state of emergency as part of concessions he offered the protest movement. Assad needed a legal basis for field trials and executions, so he created the exceptional committee for field executions composed of top officials, including the defense minister, General Fahd Jassem al-Freij and Mohammad Kanjo Hassan, the head of the military court, according to senior officials, lawyers, and internal documents. This committee authorized the heads of security branches to give death sentences. Kanjo identified battle areas and he authorized officers in charge of these areas to send their interrogations to a judge. Security arrested and interrogated prisoners. There was nowhere to send them because prisons were full so they were kept in overcrowded and inhumane conditions. Prisoners in these branches were detained in the name of the military judiciary. Different branches all had their own detention centers. Their interrogations were sent to the judiciary through the national security office. Because military police branches were full beyond capacity, the military judge would send a judge to the security branch, where prisoners would be executed. Thus the authority to conduct field executions was given to the local head of the field execution committee, who was the head of the security branch. Judges would come every day to review investigations. They would question prisoners and verify for themselves that they were “guilty,” ordering some to be moved to civilian prisons. Anybody accused of armed activities was moved to execution. Heads of divisions became the field judges. Using informants or while on their raids, Military Security captured suspects who were part of the insurgency or who were accused of supporting it financially or logistically or in any other way. Checkpoints would also detain men. Those who had money could pay to be released. Some who were stopped at checkpoints in their cars could give up their car and escape. Those arrested were taken to security branches. There was no trial, presentation of evidence, or opportunity for defense. Confessions were often extracted through torture. Once military judges approved the execution order the prisoners were sent to Amjad in Tadamon as well as his counterpart in Qadam and presumably elsewhere for execution in these designated military zones. Military Security personnel like Amjad had civilian auxiliaries under their command as well. At first they were called popular committees or belonged to the Bustan charity; later they belonged to the NDF. Head of Syrian National Security Ali Mamlouk approved the policy of arming civilians, according to senior regime officials, and Rami Makhluf helped through his Bustan charity under the leadership of Samir Darwish. At first, in order to ensure the loyalty of the newly armed men, they were selected largely on a sectarian basis, and minorities were preferred. Rifles were distributed to Alawis, Druze, and other minorities in Damascus. In 2012, these militias got out of control and began kidnapping for ransom. The government’s solution was to establish the NDF, Majd remembered. They hired local Sunnis to join the force. By the summer of 2012, the NDF was established and people like Majd who had been working with Military Security through the committees and Bustan joined it, while Bustan continued to finance them. The Iranians had proposed the idea of the NDF based on their own Basij civilian paramilitary volunteers. But the Basij were united by ideology and discipline. The NDF and other regime militias lacked an ideology and were at best motivated to defend their areas and at worst motivated to steal refrigerators and washing machines. Once these militias got out of control, provoking the regime and its security forces, the regime imposed laws on them, regulating them, even executing many of their unruly members, at the same time as it legalized the violence they were committing against anyone living in insurgent-held territory or suspected of collaborating with the insurgency. By 2013 the government realized it had 200,000 rifles unaccounted for in Damascus alone. At that time Damascus was a ghost town at night and various regime militiamen kidnapped for ransom or disappeared people. All these areas of southern Damascus were out of the government’s control. It distributed security sectors and missions to military and security units. These southern Damascus neighborhoods offered insurgents access through Tadamun to Qaddam to Moadamiya and Daraya thus threatening to cut the capital off from the south.
Chain of CommandEven before the uprising, Amjad Yousef was the head of the local Tadamon Military Security detachment of the Regional Intelligence Branch, or Branch 227. Amjad was originally from a village in the Hama countryside. He joined Military Security in 2004. He had two children, one of whom was handicapped. “We knew Amjad from the area,” said Majd. “He was present from the beginning, together with Major Jamal Ismail.” Majd remembered Amjad as a bully, tyrannical and mean. But when the battles with insurgents started he was also known as a brave and disciplined fighter. Amjad’s brother was a conscript in the Syrian army who was killed in 2012 or 2013 in the Daraya area. Insurgents filmed themselves kicking his severed head. Amjad commanded a local detachment whose diversity might surprise people who now see the conflict through a simplistic sectarian prism. His team included several Sunnis from Daraa and attached to them were civilian popular committee members including Druze from Sweida and Quneitra and a Sunni from Damascus. Amjad was a non-commissioned officer, at the bottom of a chain of command that started with President Bashar al Assad. Alongside him was another more senior NCO called Jamal al-Khatib, a Sunni from the biggest family in Kisweh. According to Fadi Saqr, also from Tadamon, “Jamal Khatib from Kisweh killed more people than Amjad. Khatib was the right hand man of Jamal Ismail.” The Tadamon detachment was under the authority of Colonel Jamal Ismail, who in turn answered to Shafiq Massa, head of the Regional Intelligence Branch. “Shafiq Massa was more dangerous than 100 Amjads,” said Fadi Saqr. An area near the Hajar al Aswad neighborhood in Tadamon was closed off from the rest of the population and even the military. “The location of the massacre was a closed off security sector” Majd remembered. “As fighters protecting Tadamon, we didn’t dare enter it. We never heard of massacres.” “It was a Bermuda Triangle for us,” recalled Fadi Saqr. He was not aware that hundreds of prisoners were taken there to be executed by Military Security. Local Tadamon NDF men told me after the video of the massacre was released in 2022 they learned that Amjad and his men had dug pits using bulldozers taken from the municipality and water department as well as the train station. They put tires and wood over the corpses to help burn them and conceal the smell. And they did all this implementing orders that were documented and approved at every step of the chain of command, according to security officials and internal security documents. Two months after Amjad Yousef’s videotaped execution of prisoners in Tadamun, Fadi Saqr was appointed to run the NDF in greater Damascus. A popular Alawite originally from Latakia, Saqr was appointed as head of NDF in Damascus to regulate the militias and redeploy the men to serve under the different military and security agencies. The regime needed a more civilized face to run the NDF in Damascus and Saqr had managed one of the biggest state-run companies, a commercial cooperative with thousands of employees, logistics, customer relations, giving him a strong network of relationships throughout working-class areas as well as experience managing many employees. Saqr had clashed with his corrupt former boss in the cooperative, beating up his bodyguards and smashing his face with an ashtray. His predecessors at the NDF, Mazen Qassem and Ghasan Nsur, were both Republican Guard officers and did not know how to deal with a civilian neighborhood militia. Nsur had distributed weapons to civilians belonging to the popular committees, mainly to non-Sunnis, and Saqr wanted to counter this sectarian policy. Saqr’s connection to working-class neighborhoods helped him reach out to local opposition leaders and insurgent commanders. This attracted my attention and I reached out to him. “The police [many of whom were Sunnis from Idlib] had a vacuum after all the defections and police know the neighborhoods,” Saqr told me in May of this year, “it was street fighting so they needed locals to help them. The military and security established the committees. They came to neighborhoods to look for former informants, Baathists, whoever, and put them in committees. It was chaotic, so they established the NDF and gave it a leadership structure. They looked for whoever was pro-state and put them in the NDF. I wanted the people of the neighborhoods to participate or we would be like Libya. I didn’t gather the thugs; I brought local officials and religious leaders and asked them to bring me men.” Saqr recruited many Sunnis, who helped him negotiate with insurgents. Saqr’s NDF in Damascus had 22,000 members and he ran it like a manpower agency, distributing men to different areas. He was administratively in charge of his men, but they were under the orders of local security officers in charge of the areas to which they were dispatched. Security officers who had been running their own civilian militias placed them in the NDF because they had no legal mechanism for hiring them directly. The Damascus NDF did not have its own operations room, and Saqr could not tell his men where to go. For that he had a head of operations and head of intelligence who were military officers from the Republican Guard. They received requests from the security forces and acted as reinforcements. In late 2013, Saqr reached out to insurgents in a besieged opposition stronghold called Barzeh. He entered and prayed with his enemies in their martyrs’ cemetery and established joint checkpoints with his men and insurgents who reconciled. The siege was eased. Khaled al-Ahmad, who had read about the American “surge” and counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, introduced Fadi Saqr to President Assad and they proposed dividing the opposition between reconcilable local factions and irreconcilable factions like Jabhat al Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria, and ISIS. Security and the military were harshly opposed to this approach and tried to undermine it, as did extremists in the opposition who saw it as a betrayal of the revolution. “NDF were sons of the neighborhood,” said Saqr, “the military didn’t want to get involved and was not in a position to recognize the other.” In 2014 members of Hamas in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp joined ISIS, as did former insurgents in adjacent neighborhoods like Tadamon, Babila, Yalda, Beit Saham, and Qadam. “The NDF helped take south Damascus back bit by bit through reconciliations until ISIS was surrounded,” explained Majd, who was by then working with Saqr. The NDF and al-Ahmad persuaded the regime to arm former insurgents against ISIS, like the Awakening groups in Iraq. Saqr partnered with leading Sunni clerics, usually Sufis who had their own reasons to fear extremist groups.
I visited Babila with Saqr in 2014, together with local leaders and NDF men. We were suddenly surrounded by ISIS men, but the local insurgents protected us from them. Yet once when leaving this area with NDF men I was surrounded by Military Security men who wanted to arrest me and a tense armed standoff ensued. Because the NDF in Damascus was not sectarian it was able to cooperate with insurgents against ISIS. Indeed Saqr could cross frontlines and sit with insurgent groups who would condemn Syrian security and the military, but they welcomed him and did not accuse him of crimes. Saqr managed to recruit former Hamas fighters to fight ISIS as well. In March 2014 Sheikh Anas al-Tawil, a leader of the rebellious southern Damascus area of Babila and a commander of the Sham al-Rasul faction, brought insurgent commanders from the adjacent Yarmouk camp neighborhood to the NDF headquarters. These areas were contiguous with Tadamon and key to securing southern Damascus. Saqr took me into the meeting, where I sat off to the side and took notes. Two Palestinian insurgents attended in full military uniform, along with civilian representatives from the besieged area. “People got tired and are looking for any solution,” said Tawil. Saqr told them he had gone to school in the camp and grew up in it. “You have come to your brother now,” he said, “the people of the camp are my family. The camp was betrayed by both sides. Both sides hurt it.” He blamed the regime-backed Palestinian commander Ahmad Jibril for arming thugs and provoking the community. The delegation included insurgent commanders and civilian leaders. They complained about the regime firing mortars at the camp and security preventing food from entering. They demanded that regime-backed Palestinian militias be banned from entering the camp. They also warned that they were surrounded by ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and Islamic factions who opposed reconciliation. One man demanded that Yarmouk be neutralized from the Syrian conflict, fighters from outside leave, a local administration and security force be established, the population return and services reestablished. “Yarmouk is more dear to me than my village in Haifa,” said one leader, “I was born there and I will die there.” “You are speaking from your pain and your words are sincere,” said Saqr, “I am not afraid of the people inside the camp, I am afraid of the people outside. I never even shot a firecracker at the camp. I speak to you as people who armed themselves for their cause. I speak to the Free Syrian Army as people who armed themselves against the regime and were led astray. I am a popular force, and you are a popular force. Don’t think we did not pay a price, in the thousands, how many men did the coast lose?” Saqr offered to smuggle out any urgent medical cases through Tadamon without security knowing. He said he wanted to empower them inside the camp and would try to help with detainees as well. Ayman Abu Jaafar, a former weight lifting champion who once represented Syria, was one of the Palestinian military commanders (a UN official later told me he was with Jabhat al Nusra). He said the civilian leaders of the camp had priority over the military factions. Then he stood up. “You don’t know me and I don’t know you,” he said, “but people know who is Abu Jaafar.” He lifted up his coat to show us a pistol and suicide belt of explosives. “I didn’t know where I was coming,” he said, “but next time I won’t wear it.” Saqr was nonplussed, but I couldn’t wait for the meeting to end. “Everybody who comes to see me has an explosive belt,” he told Abu Jaafar, “sometimes seven at a time, and I tell the guards not to search them.” Saqr would eventually arm Palestinian insurgents to fight ISIS and he evacuated their leader Zarmut (a former bodyguard for Hamas’s Khaled Meshal) for medical treatment after he was gravely wounded in an ISIS attack. “We are here,” Saqr told me in August 2014, putting his hand on one side, “and ISIS is here,” he put his other hand on the other side, “Sunnis are here in between, whoever wins them over will win.” Already by then he had lost 2,300 men in his group, 400 of them Sunni, in addition to 120 former insurgents from the Free Syrian Army (FSA) who had cooperated with him against ISIS. “A Sunni fighter is better than an Alawite,” he said, “the Alawite has no choice. Sunnis have a choice. All that was wanted from Sunnis was not to support the armed groups.” He explained to me back then that his NDF was “a bridge between the citizen and the state.” He said that if the regime allowed civilians to return to these areas they would oppose the presence of “thugs.” “The civilian returning is an ally,” he explained, “his sister wants to marry, his daughter wants to go to university. The FSA cannot cooperate with ISIS no matter what. FSA are sons of the area.” He stopped the conversation to talk to an FSA leader in south Damascus called Moro Abu Raed. “Our enemy is one,” Saqr told him, as he arranged to evacuate one of Moro’s wounded men by first calling a general in Military Security and then calling the head of Damascus’ Mujtahed hospital. “The farther away you went from the [NDF headquarters], the more the NDF became independent or out of control,” Saqr told me this year. Saqr recalls massacres committed by both sides of the conflict in areas like Qadam. Once Saqr’s men received reports of weapons on a farm and went to investigate. “We found dead people who looked as if they had gone to sleep yesterday,” he said, “we dug them out and found a man with his clothes on and his identity card and his money in his pockets.” They were killed by insurgents, he said, “if the NDF had buried him they would have stolen his money.” From mid-2013 on, Military Security began arresting NDF members for crimes they were committing if people complained about them. Salaries were cut the next year and many NDF men joined the army or joined the Tiger militia led by Colonel Suheil al-Hassan. Syrian courts contain records of hundreds of NDF and other militia men sent to jail or executed under Saqr’s watch for crimes such as kidnapping and murder. In February 2016 Saqr was removed as head of the NDF in Damascus. Assad was losing patience with Saqr’s reconciliations and preferred to see insurgents deported to the opposition enclave in the north. Saqr remained in the NDF working on reconciliations until 2018 when he left in frustration with the deportations. Assad arrogantly thought he had won the war and no longer felt the need to compromise. No longer wanting to be associated with an armed force of the regime, Saqr used his widespread network in Damascus to enter the Baath party leadership. In May 2014, insurgents who wanted to leave besieged old Homs with their light arms were given safe passage to the north together with those civilians who wanted to join them. Others chose to stay and cooperate with the government. This process was repeated throughout greater Damascus and parts of the south as well as the divided city of Aleppo, where until the end of 2016 insurgent and government forces took turns besieging one another’s areas. In 2018 it was also implemented in the east Ghouta suburbs of Damascus. The regime even reached an agreement with ISIS in southern Damascus and allowed them to evacuate to northeast Syria. It seemed as if the Syrian regime had won the war. The reconciliation process was unprecedented. At the time it was condemned for “helping the regime win” but potentially saved hundreds of thousands of lives while reducing the amount of destruction that could have taken place. And it helped focus on the common enemy, which was ISIS. International backers of regime change opposed it and refused to cooperate and help protect areas that had reconciled, even cutting off aid to them. This process of giving insurgents and their civilian administrations an opportunity to live and fight again another day allowed them to all gather in northern Syria where the Turks secured a safe haven for them to experiment in self-governance, sever ties to al-Qaeda, and be better prepared to seize the country. “Thank god we didn’t take power in 2015,” said one senior official in the new Syrian government today who was a leading member of Jabhat al Nusra at that time. Had the besieged insurgents just been defeated then the regime would have never fallen. In April 2022 the Guardian published the video showing Amjad Yousef executing 41 prisoners on April 16, 2013. He appeared to be enjoying it, telling them to run before shooting at them. The regime went into damage-control mode, according to documents from the time and a lawyer who was the legal advisor to Military Security. The lawyer met senior security and intelligence officials and said that the executed men were prisoners, not civilians. Head of Military Security Kifah Melhem wanted to execute Amjad. Kamal Hassan, then head of the Palestine Branch, and Luna al-Shibl, a senior advisor to Assad, argued that if they executed Amjad they would be implicating themselves and the regime. The popular committees and the NDF would be convenient scapegoats, just neighbors killing neighbors. By this time the NDF didn’t exist anymore anyway. Amjad was jailed for two months. Not for executing prisoners; that was perfectly legal. He was supposed to have lined them up against a wall and shot them. Instead he filmed himself and executed them in an unconventional way. “He was having fun with them,” said one former security official. “The war was over when the video came out,” said Majd, “Military security was in control and we could not talk to them. Amjad stayed nearby in the Zahera neighborhood for a week or two then disappeared and we heard he was arrested. The massacre surprised us, our role was to get people to like us as NDF, to attract the people.”
The Regime CollapsesIn 2022, Khaled al-Ahmad, former advisor on strategy and negotiations to Bashar al-Assad, crossed into Idlib from Turkey. The province was the last bastion for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria. He was taken by van to meet a childhood friend from his old Damascus neighborhood, East Mazzeh: Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the current president of Syria. They had not seen each other in about 22 years and they were on opposite sides of the war. I had taken PBS Frontline’s Martin Smith to Idlib the previous year to interview al-Sharaa and conveyed a message from al-Ahmad asking to reestablish contact. I accompanied him to Idlib to witness the reconciliation. Al-Sharaa came from an Arab nationalist family and his grandfather had been displaced from the Israeli occupied Golan. He grew up in a secular diverse community and his friends included Alawites and Ismailis. Inspired by the second Palestinian intifada, al-Sharaa became politicized and more religious. When the U.S. invaded Iraq three years later he joined thousands of other Syrian volunteers to defend the country. Most hastily returned home when they realized it was not as romantic a battle as it seemed. Those who stayed ended up being integrated into groups like Abu Muhamad al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad, later the Islamic State in Iraq. The young al-Sharaa was arrested in Mosul in 2005 by Americans who believed he was Iraqi. He was released as the Americans were withdrawing in March 2011, just before the Syrian uprising began. He proposed to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq (later ISIS when it incorporated Syria) to establish a Syrian-led jihadist group to help the Syrian Sunni uprising without repeating the mistakes they had made in Iraq, where the Islamic state had alienated people. He was given some start-up cash and a few companions and crossed the border in the summer of 2011. Al-Ahmad was the scion of a founding father of Syria’s Baath government who had been a critic of the Assad dictatorship. His father took the young Khaled to meetings with senior Syrian and international officials, educating him in politics. When the uprising started, al-Ahmad abandoned his business and began advising the Syrian regime on how to negotiate with the opposition, insurgents, the Obama White House, and officials from the first Trump administration. Despite his successes he grew disgusted by Assad’s stupidity, corruption, and brutality and eventually left by 2020. In Idlib, the two old friends spent most of their reunion catching up on childhood memories. But al-Ahmad told al-Sharaa that together with Saqr and other senior officials he was working on an internal move against a decaying Assad system. Even former loyalists were at the point of exploding due to the regime’s abuses and corruption. Alawites were protesting and attacking the regime on social media. Al-Ahmad expected the regime to collapse from within. In the event of an implosion he did not want al-Sharaa’s forces in Idlib to make a move and frighten people in government areas with the prospect of extremist militias descending upon them. He hoped they would stay in place and later reach an accommodation. He was right about the weakness of the regime. In November 2024, al-Sharaa’s HTS launched what was supposed to be a minor attack on government positions in the north. In less than two weeks they were in Damascus, surprising themselves and their patrons as the hollowed-out regime collapsed. Members of the security forces vastly outnumbered the insurgents but they were tired of fighting and resented the regime. They were also assured that no harm would come to them. Al-Ahmad watched from exile as his predictions came true, but not in the way he had hoped. Two weeks after the regime fell, as Alawites were coming under increased attack from the Sunni militias that had conquered the country, a video of an Alawite shrine being destroyed was published, causing protests. Fearing a civil war, al-Sharaa invited al-Ahmad to come work with him. Recognizing that the new regime would need a strong Alawite partner who could control the hundreds of thousands of armed men who had served the former government, al-Ahmad persuaded al-Sharaa to provide a secure escort to Fadi Saqr to Damascus from the Latakia mountain redoubt to which he had absconded. Saqr had fled Damascus to the coast, leaving his home as insurgents entered his neighborhood. He was driven down to Damascus again with the newly appointed governor of Latakia, a former insurgent, and Hassan Soufan, former head of the Islamist insurgent group Ahrar al-Sham, who had been arrested in Saudi Arabia and transferred to the former regime, serving 14 years in Assad’s jail before being released in a prisoner exchange. I was in the lobby of the Damascus Four Seasons when Saqr arrived, looking visibly shaken to see it full of uniformed HTS men with beards and long hair. A Fragile PeaceSaqr’s first urgent task was once again to secure the peace in Damascus. The NDF’s former personnel were scattered strategically throughout the working class neighborhoods that surround Damascus. They were all armed to the teeth and scared for themselves and their families. Vindictive Sunni militias were looting, killing, and seizing property. Syria did not go through a transition process as international powers had planned. In the end it was as if someone flushed the toilet in Damascus and the entire regime went down the drain, sucking insurgents from Idlib to the capital, something none of the countries opposed to the Assad regime, including the Turks who had protected the Idlib enclave, had sought. Nobody was prepared for this. Now it was up to former adversaries to reach their own agreements where the international community failed. The transition to an HTS-led authority was deeply traumatizing for Alawite communities, who were unfairly stigmatized and exposed to revenge. They needed a credible strongman figure capable of reassuring public opinion that there would be no reprisals, evictions, or mass arrests. In Damascus, Saqr convened numerous meetings in the immediate aftermath of the transition to provide such reassurances. He established neighborhood-watch mechanisms, mediated emerging disputes, facilitated search operations, and intervened when necessary within the evolving security landscape. If an Alawite figure like Saqr, so widely labeled as a senior member of Assad’s criminal regime, could survive and cooperate with a new pragmatic leadership, then surely average Alawites, other minorities, and former government employees would also survive and be reintegrated. Saqr also had the credibility as a former commander of hardened fighters to rein them in and prevent a nascent insurgency from erupting as hundreds of thousands of members of the police, army, and security forces were fired and humiliated. Saqr focused on greater Damascus communities that had concentrations of Alawites. Prior to the collapse of the regime, Damascus had about one million Alawite residents. It is probably down to 600,000 now. Their areas faced waves of arrests and checkpoints that harassed them. There were also occasional killings. “I got the Alawites to hand over weapons,” said Saqr, “there would have been a rebellion. When they saw that I was staying here they felt reassured.” Saqr and his team wanted to focus on Homs and Latakia where Alawites faced daily killings and kidnappings. “We are paying the price for what the NDF of Rustum did in 2013,” Saqr said. “Alawites in Homs cannot talk about oppression. In Homs they did to Sunnis one thousand times what Sunnis did to Alawis. Rustum killed more Sunnis than Alawis are being killed now.” But Saqr’s advice to the new regime was not heeded, and when in March 2025 armed Alawites attacked a security patrol of the new government coming to arrest people, there was a country-wide mass mobilization of new government security forces, armed Sunni groups, and civilian volunteers that resulted in the killing of over 2,000 Alawites, nearly all unarmed civilians. Saqr was deployed to Latakia on the first day of the crisis to try to calm things down. Armed Alawites trusted him and his team and released close to two hundred Sunni government forces they had captured. In the months that followed Saqr also exposed foreign and locally backed networks attempting to provoke an insurgency and captured drones and IEDs, including attempts by the leadership of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a PKK-led militia once backed by the Americans that used to have Arab fighters, to weaponize Alawites and pressure the new regime. Saqr assembled a diverse team, including individuals from military backgrounds, as well as lawyers, educators, syndicate representatives, doctors, and philanthropists. They created humanitarian initiatives without support from the UN or international NGOs. In parallel, Syrian President al-Sharaa established the Supreme Committee for the Preservation of Civil Peace in Syria, led by two hardline clerics well respected by the Sunni armed factions composing the new security forces, Anas Ayrut and Hassan Soufan, as well as Khaled al-Ahmad, who was now an official member of the new government. With Saqr and his team, assisted by a Syrian Sunni NGO worker from Homs, they have changed the course of post-Assad Syria, averting much greater bloodshed. “I was one of the hawks of the old regime,” Saqr explains to leaders in the new government, “but what can we do, we are sons of the state. I was in the state for 30 years. We were employees of the former state...we were the state and they were terrorists back then. I worked with the state and you were a gang, carrying weapons against the state, but the state did not know how to talk to you. I am with you now because you are the state, not an armed faction. I am convincing people to accept you because you are the state.” Saqr opposes recent attempts to impose a clerical leader on the mostly secular Alawites, explaining that their project is the state and they do not need leaders. He warns against following the marginal cleric Ghazal Ghazal, who attempted to support a separatist trend in the coast. “We do not want a Sheikh Hajari,” he says, referring to the Druze cleric who assumed leadership of the Sweida province after Sunni militias and some government forces attacked this southern province in July 2025 (killing over 2,000 people) and who is now pushing for secession and greater alliance with Israel, which intervened militarily on behalf of the Druze. Although the media continued to portray Saqr as a war criminal, he did not flee but persisted in his work and engaged with the new authorities and the Alawite community, the most stigmatized minority. Every day since has involved putting out multiple fires, releasing people who have been kidnapped or jailed, returning homes that were confiscated. What Saqr and the Civil Peace Committee are implicitly doing is retroactively creating the transitional agreement that was never made because of the sudden collapse of the regime. There are attempts by reactionaries on both sides to undermine their work, as some former regime officials outside want to provoke violence or establish an autonomous Alawite region on the coast, while Sunni extremists prefer to see a fascist Sunni apartheid state established. Saqr and his team have worked to prevent collective suicide and taken advantage of Alawites’ state-oriented mentality. Many had worked for the state under the former government and want to be part of the state again, though it remains unclear if Alawites will be allowed to return to government employment after many were collectively purged. The new security forces are being established on an exclusive Sunni identity. Saqr resents the Assad regime that turned Alawites into soldiers, security personnel, and bodyguards for officials. Al-Ahmad has labored to prevent a sectarian or religious leadership from emerging, as happened with Druze in southern Syria following an unprovoked massacre that also killed over 2,000 civilians there and resulted in an Israeli intervention on their behalf. He fears a system emerging that resembles the sectarian Taif regime of Lebanon. When Al-Ahmad was negotiating ceasefires and cooperation with insurgents on behalf of the Assad-led Syrian government he would surprise his interlocutors by accepting that their dead were also martyrs. “Let’s consider everybody who fought and died for a cause a martyr,” he would say. He struck an implicit pact with the new regime. “The stronger side on the ground didn’t fight you,” he said to senior officials in the new government. “You made a deal with the people, they closed the door to their houses and didn’t fight you, then you go after them and arrest them, so maybe they would have been better off fighting you then.” Al-Ahmad worries about the legacy of the Assad regime on its security forces. “Amjad and guys like him had a euphoria from torture, unlike the Jabhat al-Nusra guys who thought they were doing it for God,” he said. “I worry they got addicted to violence and to the feeling of power over others. The country was a huge prison. They were managing prisoners in an industrial way. Now these guys are outside in society.” Saqr knew Amjad Yousef from Tadamon, both because he was the Military Security official in charge of the area and because Amjad’s sister Wafa and his brother in law were local employees of the commercial cooperative Saqr had managed. “Amjad was cruel,” Saqr recalls. He first learned of the massacre when the video was released. “He was vindictive,” he says, “so he filmed them and did not execute them against a wall but instead took pleasure in it, he took his anger out on them. He is sick but he was following orders. He became extreme during the war. The state put him in a place where he would be a criminal and he abused people. If you were caught in the southern Damascus triangle you could be executed.” Saqr reached out to Amjad’s sister Wafa, attempting to persuade Amjad to turn himself in. When she refused to cooperate he gave her number and other relevant information to his partners in the new Syrian security. Amjad had been hiding in Lebanon, but returned to his family’s house in their Hama village and was arrested in April.
Following Amjad’s arrest, the Guardian quoted Zahra al-Barazi, deputy chair of a new National Commission for Transitional Justice, claiming that a case was being prepared against Fadi Saqr. Security officials deny they have evidence against him or that they are preparing a case. Al-Barazi later complained that her words had been misconstrued by the reporter and that she had been pressured to give an answer; she has since been told by the Interior Ministry not to speak publicly about Saqr, and has avoided the media on this issue. The commission remains a consultative body but it is the ministries of Interior and Justice that are actually in charge of investigating and trying suspects. At present there are no laws governing the commission and it lacks power to open investigations, but it is under great pressure to deliver a sense of justice from activists and aggrieved populations who lived under siege or were displaced. Saqr would be a much more prominent and satisfying scapegoat for Assad’s regime than a low ranking soldier like Amjad. Decades of unresolved contradictions and a civil war that halted without any resolution, a regime that collapsed without any settlement, and a failed UN-run process that was a fantasy all reaffirmed a culture of no compromise. Those from the opposition who were ready to reach a settlement with Assad for only minimal returns are now calling for the annihilation of entire population groups, and exclusion or even punishment of those who simply stayed and endured the Assad regime. To them, the silent majority who lived under the former regime and anyone who ever worked for the former regime should be at minimum politically discarded if not physically annihilated. This is the price that everyday Syrians are paying now, and calling for the head of prominent figures like Saqr symbolizes the absolutist agenda many of the victors possess. But doing nothing about the real need for justice or closure will leave open a festering wound. Apart from promises, handshakes, and condescending pats on the back, little is being done to help the Syrian people build a stable country. In a recent visit to Berlin to meet with the German government, President al-Sharaa also met with the Syrian community there, including activists and journalists. Al-Sharaa asked activists to cease their attacks on Saqr, explaining that his role was very important in the December 2024 battle for Damascus. He said Saqr had disbanded large forces, at least 100,000 men. If he had not disbanded them there could have been more massacres, more fighting, and the liberation of Damascus would have been delayed, al-Sharaa said. On April 29, Ministry of Interior spokesman Noureddin al-Baba was in a meeting with high-ranking officers and various government officials. He was asked why Fadi Saqr was not arrested and why the government was covering for him. Baba told them that Saqr was not connected to the crimes and that he had been working with them for years, according to two senior security officials who were present. He said that without the help of Saqr the HTS forces who became the government would not have been able to enter Damascus. Saqr was not receiving special protection from the president, Baba said, but he had now been working openly with the new government for a year and a half and nobody had submitted a case against him and none of the investigations or interrogations conducted by the security forces had produced any information about him. Had the government known he committed any crimes they would have taken action, he said. The investigation of the Tadamon massacre is ongoing. At first Amjad denied to Syrian government interrogators that he received orders to carry out the mass execution, according to senior security officials. Later he admitted that he knew he was finished and did not want to implicate others. He did not hate his friends or superiors, he said, he wanted to take full responsibility. He liked Jamal Ismail and did not want to betray him. It’s possible he also did not want his family, still in an Alawite village, to face retaliation should he cause others to be arrested. But by the fourth day of interrogations, Ajmad admitted that he had been implementing orders from the chain of command, whom he named. Amjad did not collapse or express remorse during the interrogation. Additional videos were given to security showing him brutally torturing people. Two of Amjad’s men, who had escaped together with thousands of other prisoners when the regime fell and were later rearrested, were also brought in for further interrogation. They admitted to killing hundreds of others in the same way and were interrogated to identify other massacre locations. According to a senior Interior Ministry official in charge of investigating former regime officials, none of the men named Fadi Saqr. By the end of April he concluded that the NDF had not been involved in the massacre. More recently, this official said, the government has completed a film that it will soon release about the Tadamun massacre, based on the testimony of Amjad Yousef and his accomplices, which he said will also fully exonerate Fadi Saqr. In June the Syrian government confirmed that the videos of Amjad solved the mystery of what happened to Dr. Rania al-Abbasi, a Syrian dentist and former national chess champion who was arrested with her husband and six children in March 2013. None were ever seen again. Abbasi’s father is a hardline Salafi cleric who spent years in the former regime’s jails. When Amjad and his men murdered Abbasi and her family they boasted that this was what happened to financiers of the insurgency and he said it was revenge for his brother. Security authorities fear the gruesome videos will provoke an explosion of violence so they are not releasing them. The revelations alone provoked an intense and widespread sectarian mobilization against Alawites all over Syrian social media, causing Facebook to remove many pages and posts. Amjad became an avatar for all Alawites, and there were calls to attack Alawite neighborhoods in Damascus and Homs as well as to boycott Alawites economically. The Syrian interior minister was filmed with relatives of Abbasi in a message meant for many frustrated Syrians demanding justice or revenge. There were many other criminals still hiding in Syria and others were abroad, he said. He spoke of a big responsibility and the challenge of restraining his men, some of whom did not want to wait for trials but just wanted to kill suspects. He warned them not to do one percent of what the former regime had done but to rely on the law. In mid-June, demands to punish former regime officials and collaborators erupted into vigilante violence in different parts of Syria. Mobs attacked with impunity, and in some cases killed Sunnis accused of working with the former regime. They also surrounded Alawite neighborhoods and tried to storm them. Ministry of interior spokesperson Baba warned against vindictive behavior. Justice cannot be achieved through random punishment or revenge, he said, it was the state’s responsibility to hold people accountable. A new regime composed of leaders who were combatants in the civil war has struggled to address the competing and conflicting needs of different constituencies who all feel aggrieved and entitled. The Syrian government’s security forces and spokesmen seem sincere in their attempt to restrain mobs but might get overwhelmed as demands for justice turn into collective punishment in a context where 14 years of war left people with little patience. Apart from promises, handshakes, and condescending pats on the back, little is being done to help the Syrian people build a stable country in a region that sees only continuous conflict and with their own economy thoroughly destroyed. Sanctions continue to hold the country back. Trump is volunteering al-Sharaa as his proxy to fight Lebanese Hezbollah, something the new government has no intention of doing. Meanwhile, Israel has already occupied much of southern Syria, and it is increasingly treating parts of Quneitra and Daraa like the West Bank, conducting raids and arrests. A new regime composed of leaders who were combatants in the civil war has struggled to address the competing and conflicting needs of different constituencies who all feel aggrieved and entitled. “The victor decides,” has become an oft-heard slogan. Sunnis in former government-held areas remember Sunnis in insurgent-held areas firing mortars and rockets at them. Alawite civilians can point to their towns and neighborhoods being attacked and their people massacred. Druze who were pro-opposition and in a state of rebellion against the former regime are shocked that many in the Sunni majority suddenly turned on them. Anything perceived as an attempt to equate suffering is met with opprobrium. The new regime is trying to reduce the expectations of the jihadists who hoped for an Islamic state and placate a public that demanded a real revolution and some kind of justice. It is still relying on a closed inner circle of original Jabhat al Nusra and HTS members to rule the country and is reluctant to share power or trust even Sunnis who lived in government areas and have essential experience. Former fighters and activists want jobs in the new state. The masses remain poor and the economy is broken. The new leaders have not adopted a development strategy and have stripped away what remained of subsidies and welfare. They say they want Syria to be a state like others in the region, but the former opposition had no political project other than installing a Sunni president. Donors who were happy to finance war and the destruction of Syria have moved on now that the mission was accomplished. On July 7, two explosions shook Damascus as French President Emmanuel Macron visited the Syrian capital. Ahmad Dalati, head of security for rural Damascus, announced that ISIS was behind the attacks. CCTV footage helped authorities find a foreign fighter from a former Soviet country who drove one car bomb to its location, and this led to further arrests. The new government has been confronting attacks from a variety of rejectionist Sunni extremist organizations, including a slowly reviving ISIS reemerging from eastern Syria. There have also been attacks from disgruntled jihadists who oppose pragmatic policies they see as a betrayal of the cause, as well as armed factions who resent not getting their share of power and resources. There have been attacks on checkpoints, security men, and Iraqi oil tankers on the Tartus highway. A state attorney was killed in Babila, and bombs have exploded in various neighborhoods of Damascus like Bab Sharqi and Sheikh Muhyedin, including one near a courthouse. Despite the pressure from within the ranks of former insurgents there is a sincere desire among some of the new ruling class to reconcile and build a new state. In December 2025, al-Sharaa spoke in Qatar. He admitted that Syria had inherited many conflicts from its predecessor including pitting sects against each other. The Syrian people had to get to know each other and obtain a sustainable and secure future. He warned that many states that underwent conflicts persist in having conflicts after the original one is over. Syrian civilization was 8,000 years old, he said, and had defined peaceful coexistence between different religions. This was a message to some Syrians who have embraced a narrow Umayyad identity, referring to a dynasty that ruled from Damascus for 90 years in the 7th and 8th century. In another message to his own constituency, he said that Syria had not gone through a Sunni revolution. Al-Sharaa said that Alawites were the ones who paid the highest price for the practices of the former regime through starvation and poverty and using their sons as fighters. He criticized the notion that Alawites had all been with the former regime, explaining that some had feared what would happen with the fall of the regime. “We saw great poverty in Alawite villages,” he said, “we inherited a big problem, we are all victims.” On April 25, Hassan Soufan of the Civil Peace Committee was in Idlib lecturing hundreds of officials as he often does. Soufan is one of the leading influential state theorists who created the new state’s narrative that political Islam can govern and engage in international affairs. Soufan has credibility not simply because of his extremist past—spending over a decade in regime prisons, where he helped lead the famous 2008 Sednaya prison uprising—but also because he helped found Ahrar al-Sham, an insurgent group that once fought Jabhat al-Nusra under his leadership but now plays a key role in the new government. Some of the audience that day complained about the role of Fadi Saqr. “Hafez al Assad came to power and ruled for decades,” Soufan later recounted. “Hafez did not rule Syria alone but instead he relied upon Sunnis to lead security branches and ministries. He told Alawites no economic projects or business for you, you have to go to the army and security. Sunnis are the majority, he couldn’t throw them into the sea.” He asked the men gathered which of them had any relatives who had served in the former government. “We were excluded from government,” he said, “how can you be an expert in your job? We are new in this, we need to learn governance. We have to ally with who is with the state, we can’t have our people rise up against us. How can I bring in an unknown guy and expect him to have influence on the ground?” Soufan’s defense of the new regime’s cooperation with Saqr, like the partnership of al-Ahmad and al-Sharaa, closes a circle that started in 2014. Soufan told me when we first met in Idlib in 2021 that back then he was in the former regime’s Adra prison. Due to corruption there he was able to smuggle out text to be posted on Twitter under the name Shadi al-Mahdi. “We received news in Adra about reconciliations,” he recalled years later, referring to Saqr’s efforts, “and asked ourselves who is behind this, it’s destroying the revolution, there was no way Bashar al-Assad could be that clever.” In a 2014 tweet under his pseudonym, he explained that those who engaged in these agreements could not be condemned as apostates or infidels because they were made under duress due to “fear, coercion, and necessity.” He also called for sympathy towards those faced with this choice. He warned that they should not be burdened with additional condemnation as infidels and apostates and should be strengthened and supported instead. Eleven years later, the roles have been reversed: Soufan has now befriended and partnered with the architects of those truces and reconciliations. “The world turned upside down,” he told his audience in Idlib, and now the people the regime used to call terrorists were on top. “Why should he scare his son from your beard like your father scared you of the regime?”
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