Editor’s note: This article was written before the overthrow of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024 and followed by Israel’s invasion and substantial bombardment of Syria.
The Northwest of Syria functions as an open-air prison. Residents face severe restrictions on movement, unable to access government-controlled areas without resorting to illegal crossings or tahreeb (smuggling). It is a black-market industry that preys on the desperation of those seeking to cross that charges exorbitant costs–physical, emotional, and financial. Exiting this area is nearly impossible, besides the slim chance of being granted permission to enter Turkey for medical treatment.
Students in Idlib who wish to pursue studies at accredited universities outside Northwest Syria are a major clientele for smugglers. A close family member of mine experienced this harsh reality firsthand after completing her studies at the University of Aleppo. To return to her family in Idlib, a trip that should take just 54 minutes by car, cost her over $500 in payment to smugglers.
What should have been a short trip turned into a grueling 48-hour ordeal filled with fear and uncertainty. Moving discreetly through the night, she had to abandon all her belongings, turn off her phone, and eventually discard it to avoid detection. She navigated treacherous paths to avoid checkpoints, driven by the constant fear of arrest or kidnapping and the ever-present threat of being shot dead by border guards.
This process is nothing short of gambling your life on the promises of smugglers—whose credibility rests solely on a fragile web of word-of-mouth recommendations.
Borders in Syria are not just a physical barrier but a brutal manifestation of the dehumanization Syrians endure daily. Syria is a fractured reality where systems of control, whether imposed by the regime, rebel groups, or international powers, have reduced people’s lives to endless calculations for survival. Traveling between territories within the same nation has become a privilege of wealth or an act of sheer desperation.
As an open-air prison, Northwest Syria is a reminder of how deeply fragmented Syria has become. Borders are not lines on an ever-changing map but a microcosm of a larger struggle–a fight against tyranny and a system that has rendered ordinary lives collateral damage in a geopolitical chess game. A fight against a system that renders people incapable of deciding their fate.
The conditions in rebel-controlled areas are not much different from those in regime-controlled areas. People survive not because they are truly living, but, as a common Arabic expression puts it, عايشين من قلة الموت (they are alive only because death has not yet claimed them).
You sitting behind your laptop, attending a Palestine rally, or camping out for a cause does not make you an authority on our struggles.
I will not apologize because our story does not fit neatly into a simplistic “good cop, bad cop narrative” nor will I apologize for my people standing up against tyranny. I will not apologize that our reality is more complex for global leftists than the clear-cut apartheid of a Zionist regime committing genocide against our brothers and sisters next door.
We exist in contradictions, and the truth will always belong to those living the reality on the ground.
So let me be clear: in the face of a Palestinian mother thanking Hezbollah for saving her son, I will remain silent—just as I will remain silent before a Syrian mother condemning Hezbollah-backed forces for killing her son.
I will never ask those in pain to diminish their suffering to suit anyone’s narrative because our fight is not with each other but with the propagandists and mouthpieces who wish to pit us against one another. No land of ours shall be reduced to a battleground for agendas or anyone’s interpretation of political developments.
Earlier this year, during a brief encounter I had with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah at the Oxford encampment for Palestine–while discussing perceptions of pain and power dynamics amongst Palestinian and Syrian refugees–he told me, "The wounded will always outlive the political project that caused their wound."
I've carried that sentence with me ever since, and now, more than ever, it resonates so deeply. Syrians are wounded by the very same forces that claim to care for the wounds of Palestinians. My people's scars will endure long after the project crumbles, and it will crumble. And so I will always shout the loudest for the people—their lives, dignity, and boundless humanity. I will scream against systems and institutions that seek to define us by the master's parameters, by categories that erase our pain and simplify our struggles.
The political project is always the master's design: to divide us, pit us against each other, and force us to choose between false binaries of loyalty or betrayal, silence or complicity. We can honor the pain and suffering of our people and acknowledge the immense complexity of their righteous struggle without glorifying their oppressors or celebrating the hand that kills them.
The fight for freedom is not neat. It is not pure. But it is ours.
And I will not let it be claimed or erased by those who have never tended to the wound.
Read just ten pages from the thousands of prison literature books written in blood by Syrian prisoners, and then dare to scream in the faces of these people that they are imperial puppets who should reconcile with their torturers in a happy dance of peace and love. All so they can fit your fantasy of the good Arab anti-imperialist leftist.
The left's acclaim for championing oppressed peoples is failing miserably when it comes to Syria. It is grounding the narrative of the Syrian struggle in institutions that prioritize hegemonic ambitions over human realities, betraying the very principles the global left claims to uphold.
While they calculate the empire's grand scheme and its next move, branding Syrians as either imperial puppets or foreign terrorists, I’m drowning in the reality unfolding before my eyes. I project their perception of us onto my aunt, uncle, and cousins, only to find that the mold they’ve created for them doesn't seem to fit.
For me, the fate of Palestine is inseparable from the fate of Syria. You cannot strip Syria of its humanity, reduce it to a mere weapon transit zone, and crush its people under the weight of your geopolitics.
The global left exists in a state of profound cognitive dissonance, clinging to a fundamentally flawed logic that loudly proclaims our struggles are intersectional while simultaneously denying Syrians the justice they are seeking and deserve. They have become consumed by the very language they claim to oppose, failing to see that their hypocritical, hollow support is not just insincere but actively harmful to those standing at the brink of despair and action. It’s a moment in history that shall serve as a constant reminder of the devastating consequences of empty and, quite frankly, arrogant rhetoric.
This arrogance is particularly insidious, as it reflects the presumption of outsiders who believe they have the authority to dictate the fate of Syria.
This logic twists narratives to fit a worldview entirely detached from the brutal realities of our pain and struggle. The current status quo in Syria exists solely to serve Assad and those in power. Viewing Syrians' struggle solely through the prism of imperial imposition is not just offensive, deeply flawed, and arrogantly dismissive—especially to those of us living the consequences of this perception—but also a striking historical case of how a tyrant consolidated global support while erasing the voices and existence of the land’s inhabitants and owners. Perhaps our obsession with empire rhetoric is exactly what keeps us shackled.
You cannot raise a fist for Palestine while simultaneously crushing Syrians under your boot.
Syria today serves as a microcosm of 21st-century imperialism. It is a battleground for every expansionist power and global voice while its people are reduced to collateral damage.
Assad will truly be one for the history books–especially for how he managed to rally non-Syrians from around the world to lecture Syrians across the political spectrum who had lost faith in the future of their own country and their president that they should not oppose him or oppose him in a way that they see fit.
Why? Because he is the final chess piece in their game of global empire, a pawn they're desperate to keep on the board, no matter the cost to Syrian lives.
The narrative of preserving Syria as part of an “Axis of Resistance” has drained the country of its lifeblood. This discourse reduces Syria to a pawn in regional power struggles—focused on weapons flow, stability for surrounding regimes, or maintaining the status quo—while entirely sidelining its people. Framing Syrians' demands for freedom and dignity as a conspiracy undermining resistance against the Zionist entity is offensive and pernicious. It is a narrative rooted in the claim that Arabs at large, and Syrians specifically, are irrational beings incapable of resisting injustice unless orchestrated by regional powers.
A fractured, starving, and divided Syria cannot sustain itself, let alone serve as a foundation for regional liberation. Our liberation as Arabs—whether the Global Left likes it or not—is deeply interconnected. Our futures are intertwined: an unwell Syria means an unwell Palestine.
A collapsing empire that has maintained the same status quo for 54 years will leave behind a vacuum, and if we fail to meaningfully engage with the dynamics at play and those that ought to surface—Syria being our first real opportunity at post-revolutionary state-building in the 21st century—we risk being consumed by them entirely.
Moreover, the political implications of a stable Syria extend far beyond its borders. A successful post-revolutionary Syria with entirely new, unpredictable players would upend the regional order. Israel’s military superiority depends on maintaining the current dynamics in Arab states. A new, uncharted actor poses a far greater challenge to Israel than a 54-year-old regime that, while not directly assisting Israel, has enabled a calculable stability. Israel has adapted to the limitations of its current geopolitical reality, but ambiguity—the uncertainty now emerging—is its greatest threat.
Amidst all this disarray, ambiguity, complexity, and contradiction, here we stand—lost, in pain, and fearful. While some celebrate, others are disillusioned. While some dream of returning home, others fear losing theirs. I am reminded of Mohammad Al-Maghout, the Syrian poet and playwright, who critiqued Assadist Syria only to be imprisoned by it, and whose plays were later co-opted and performed by the very regime that once silenced him.
Al-Maghout exists within contradictions, and I engage with him through the very contradictions that were ever so present in his writings, including the state-sanctioned reproductions of his work. After all, to write about something is to enter into a relationship with it—a relationship of knowing, witnessing, and understanding an object on one’s own terms.
While speaking of party affiliations and his early decision to join the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) instead of the Ba'ath Party, Al-Maghout recounts: "I joined a party without reading its principles. It was cold and wintry. The Ba'ath Party was in a distant alley, muddy and filled with dogs, whereas the SSNP was conveniently located next to our house, complete with a heater, prompting my visit. The person in charge at the Ba'ath Party was a boxer, and my disdain for physical aggression, coupled with fear, swayed me away from them.
Al-Maghout's legacy transcends the regime that sought to use or suppress his voice. His words were never about glorifying power structures; they were for the people—their wounds, their dreams, and their defiance in the face of systems designed to oppress and divide. His very existence and his work are a mirror of the state that our region exists in—a landscape of contradictions.
In one of his famous plays, Shaqa’iq al-Nu’man (Anemone), enacted by Duraid Lahham—a figure embodying yet another contradiction in Syria’s modern history—the actor who had brought Al-Maghout’s critiques of power, the state, and hierarchies to life ultimately became a steadfast supporter of Assad. Would Al-Maghout, who passed away before witnessing this transformation, have ever imagined that the very words he had written—and Lahham had performed—would come to stand in stark contrast to the man who would later align himself with the very system those plays critiqued?
He would, and I’d like to believe he did, even back then because he was a byproduct of that very contradiction. In his poem “The Icon,” Al-Maghout writes in his book The Red Bedouin, “I write and wipe my pen under my armpit because I write about honor. And I let my pen graze wherever it pleases because I write about freedom." Existing is untamed, harsh, dirty, and painful. It is complex and so very contradictory.
Nimer, the protagonist of Al-Maghout’s play Anemone, brought to life by Lahham, captures the spirit of collective struggle and shared fate when he declares:
“I shall tie the dreams of millions of martyrs with a rope made of anemone. The million martyrs you are discrediting… Is that not shameful of you? I shall tie their dreams in a rope made of anemone, and I’ll turn it into fabric and make it sail. I’ll make the sinking ship sail. Because if the ship sinks, we’re all sinking. No one will survive… No one. Don’t think there is someone close to them and someone far away. Oh no, no, no… all of us… all of us to them are just a bunch of savages, camels, and horses.”
Let this be the final word: the fight for liberation is not a distant struggle. It is ours—collective and indivisible. If the ship of justice sinks, no one will survive. Syria’s struggle stands as the litmus test for our region. Do not raise your fist for Palestine while simultaneously crushing Syrians beneath your boot.
Free Palestine, free Syria, and free us all from your selective solidarity that ignores and insults our lived realities.
Image credit: Hakan Akgun, SOPA Images
