March 10, 2025
By Nasser Kandil
• The final toll of the massacres committed against unarmed Syrian civilians, peaceful families, women, the elderly, and children, has yet to be fully revealed. Reports unanimously confirm that what is known so far is merely a fraction of the catastrophe, a mere tremor in the larger earthquake. The officially declared numbers already exceed thousands of martyrs and wounded, with the German Foreign Ministry alone acknowledging that more than a thousand people have been killed.
• The attempt to suppress and erase the crime from public memory has failed, despite the efforts of media channels that, in theory, should be exposing the truth rather than concealing it. When complete silence became impossible, these outlets tried instead to downplay the scale of the atrocity, reducing it to isolated violations. Yet even this proved futile, as the scale of the disaster forced acknowledgment, though only after major international powers issued statements and external pressure compelled the regime to admit to the events and announce an investigative committee.
• This earthquake has torn away the mask of moderation the regime once wore in its leader’s speeches. The actions of its security apparatuses have laid bare the true structure of the state being built – a state whose president decided that its army and security forces should be composed of jihadist factions previously under the command of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib, following the dissolution of the Syrian Army and the dismissal of all security and police personnel. What has transpired is the clearest expression of the regime’s nature.
• The claim that these massacres were carried out by irregular groups is an outright falsehood – an ill-conceived justification that collapses under scrutiny. It exposes the contradiction of allowing armed individuals to move freely and operate in state-controlled areas despite not belonging to any official security body. Legally, these individuals are civilians who have not surrendered their weapons, yet the regime’s rhetoric has always insisted on disarming civilians. How, then, can a full-scale military campaign be launched against villages and towns in the coastal region under the pretext of pursuing those who refused to disarm, while at the same time, these very areas remain open to civilians who are also armed? The ultimate scandal, then, is that the demand to surrender weapons applies only to certain sectarian groups, not to all Syrians equally.
• Beyond the scale of the massacres and the staggering loss of life, what is most disheartening is that the regime saw no need to form an investigative committee until a country like the United States raised its voice in condemnation, warning that it would not remain silent, soon echoed by Britain and Germany. These are states that have sought engagement with the regime, whose support it desires and whose discontent it fears. Only then did it comply, hastily adding a so-called “Committee for Civil Peace” alongside the investigation.
• What has unfolded is a wound that will not heal, one that no amount of procedural remedies can erase. The only true solution lies in a state where the government, military, security apparatus, and judiciary belong equally to all Syrians, where they are represented equally and stand before the law as equals. A state defined by sectarian and partisan dominance will never be one in which Syrians can feel secure.
• It is also tragic that a regime so vocal about national sovereignty, despite having never been legitimised by a constitution or free elections, and whose institutions are nothing more than militias operating under different names, is the same regime that neglects its sovereign responsibilities in the face of the occupying army’s actions in southern Syria. It speaks of sovereignty only in terms of strength and weakness, yet it is disgraceful for a regime to wield power against its own people while cowering before an external aggressor. As critics once said of the previous regime, the same now holds even truer for the regime that was promised to Syrians.
