Opinion
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The threat of counter-revolution is real. But so is stagnation
As Syria’s new leadership charts a post-Assad course, it faces a stark dilemma: how to protect the revolution from its enemies without suffocating the pluralism it once promised.
21. February 2026
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The Damascus book fair was a festival of freedom
Queues, Kurdish titles, Ibn Taymiyyah, prayer halls and free buses to the exhibition ground. The Damascus book fair offered a compressed portrait of a country testing its new limits of plurality and free speech.
17. February 2026
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Let’s admit it: we’re fragmented
In today’s Syria, the loudest voices trade accusations while the language of development, justice and national renewal is drowned out. Admitting that we are a fragmented society is the first step towards rescue.
14. February 2026
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How Fawwaz Haddad’s novels expose the Syrian condition
Fawwaz Haddad is a novelist who has traced the Syrian experience over the past fifty years. Long considered seditious under the former regime, his novels examine how political domination reshapes thought, culture, and moral judgment. In doing so, he has become one of the clearest literary voices of his generation.
07. February 2026
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A Kurdish perspective on the SDF-Damascus agreement
In the Kurdish street, the SDF–Damascus deal is not the end of the story but the beginning of a new chapter. It begins with stopping bloodshed and averting mass displacement, and ends with achieving political decentralisation by political means.
05. February 2026
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Syria’s Kurds have an opportunity
With the military balance shifting and regional dynamics realigning, Syria’s Kurds face a rare opening: shift decisively from armed militias to political engagement and pluralism within a constitutional framework. They should seize the opportunity or risk further reversals.
31. January 2026
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The fall of Syria’s Berlin Wall
For a decade, Syria lived with an invisible partition between east and west that reshaped loyalty and daily life. Its collapse opens a dangerous transition in which unity must be rebuilt before the divide hardens again.
29. January 2026
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The Baath Party: a sadistic reading
A pair of Baathist memoirs, read against de Sade’s Justine, reveal a politics that rewards brutality and betrayal while clinging to the language of virtue.
26. January 2026
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What comes after the liberation of eastern Syria?
The return of the state to eastern Syria may have secured territory and resources, but it has yet to answer the harder question of people. Without putting citizens – not oil – at the centre of reconstruction and decision-making, liberation risks becoming a missed political moment.
22. January 2026
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When revolutionaries are asked to forget their dreams
A revolution that learned to restrain itself now finds its dreams quietly expropriated by those who rule in its name. When calls for “state-building” serve to discipline the public but not the powerful, disillusionment and anger will set in.
20. January 2026