What has recently emerged in several parts of Syria, including beatings, public humiliation, and calls to pursue those labelled as “shabiha,” informants, journalists, or activists who supported the former regime, has clearly gone beyond individual acts of anger or isolated incidents.
Within a matter of days, the phenomenon began to take on a more organized form, with local community statements calling on former soldiers and their families to leave certain areas. These calls targeted those who had served in Assad’s armed forces, acted as informants, or had been active supporters of the former regime.
Those targeted by these campaigns are identified and incited against through local networks on the one hand, and by some social media activists on the other. In other words, this is a popular campaign of accusation and targeting that takes place entirely outside any judicial process.
It cannot be understood outside the broader Syrian context. Violence spreads through the streets, and bodies become mobilized and inflamed, ready to carry out hostile acts against an “accused” person. Or a consensus forms around accusing someone, who is then swiftly condemned, assaulted, and punished on the spot.
A crowd gathers around them. Phones record. Social media pages publish the footage, celebrate it, and call for more. The entire scene turns into an improvised courtroom and a source of commentary, incitement, justification, and dispute. Violence no longer remains confined to where it occurred. Images carry it into a wider space, where it becomes a spectacle that can be repeated and imitated, a small celebration that learns from and reproduces itself.
In such a charged and polarized environment, talking about justice, due process, and the right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty can seem like a luxury.
Revenge in Front of the Camera
The recent incidents in northwestern Syria began with the circulation of calls and warnings targeting individuals accused of belonging to, or supporting, the former regime. These were followed by individual assaults and unauthorized demonstrations demanding the expulsion of those described as “shabiha” or figures associated with the former regime from northern Syria.
In Kafr Oweid, groups of local residents attacked the homes of people accused of having ties to the former regime. In Kafr Takharim, a man accused of being a “shabiha” supporter was killed after being beaten following his arrest.
Within just a few days, the campaign escalated from local warnings and social media posts to community statements, then to attacks on private homes, and ultimately to the killing of a man accused of supporting the former regime in Kafr Takharim.
There is a clear escalation toward public acts of revenge, a pattern that continued as recently as yesterday in Aleppo. It begins with labeling and public identification, followed by the circulation of photographs, warnings, gatherings, calls for action, expulsion, public humiliation, beatings, and ultimately death, or punishment through violence without access to medical care.
Following these incidents, similar calls began spreading across several Syrian cities, urging the pursuit and expulsion of former soldiers and their families, or anyone accused of having been part of Assad’s armed forces.
The danger lies in the fact that a loosely defined group, whether relatives of victims, people seeking retribution, or simply the highly motivated, has moved from demanding accountability or justice, and at times joking about a “slip on a banana peel” as a euphemism for assassination, to granting itself the authority to publicly accuse, judge, and sentence people in the streets. In doing so, large segments of society are turned into symbolic figures in a public spectacle, reduced to actors in a social performance.
The problem is larger than an individual carrying out an assault or a social media page publishing names and inciting against people. What we are witnessing is a cycle that learns from itself, accumulates its own violence, and gives disorder a social form that is increasingly capable of spreading.
The Disturbing Visibility of Violence
These scenes are the visible expression of a much longer system of violence and oppression that has shaped the lives of Syrians for decades. This violence cannot be separated from the history of fear, humiliation, checkpoints, informants, and arbitrary detention under Baathist rule and the Assad family. At the same time, these incidents reveal how that violence has evolved, transforming into tools that are insufficient both for understanding justice and for establishing it.
Any discourse on transitional justice is bound to fail if it remains confined to conference halls, discussion panels, and the language of experts.
What has unfolded in recent days exposes a deeper divide in how Syrians are confronting the country’s past. On one side are those who see violence as a necessary form of retribution for a bloody history. On the other are those who fear that revenge will become a new basis for judging and punishing people outside the rule of law. Yet such concerns can appear idealistic in a country that has endured years of civil war and authoritarian violence.
What has emerged in Syria is a wave of popular violence whose full dynamics remain unclear. It appears to be a mixture of public anger and resentment, indiscriminate incitement, individual initiatives, commentary by journalists and activists, and the eagerness of young men to take punishment into their own hands.
This phenomenon also has a dense symbolic and linguistic dimension, reflected in the recurring vocabulary used to drive the campaign and justify its victims. Terms such as shabiha, informants, remnants, Assad’s orphans, the banana, “give him one under the tongue,” “a heart attack,” “his heart couldn’t take it,” “he put on the striped uniform,” and “may the rest follow” have become part of a shared lexicon.
Such language softens the reality of violence, transforming it into a vocabulary of punishment and schadenfreude. It is often accompanied by calls to publish names and home addresses.
This is something Syrians have become increasingly accustomed to: violence becoming a form of politics, and punishment and public stigmatization turning into a broader social practice, shaped by a kind of sadistic entertainment.
The Politics of Accusation
A particular imagination has begun to take hold among many people, one that turns a single individual into a stand-in for an entire past, and creates a vocabulary that serves both to describe and to destroy.
These scenes do not emerge from nowhere. They arise from a collective memory burdened by fear, killing, and betrayal. What can be said to those returning from displacement, or to the families of the disappeared and the dead? There is no moral or institutional framework capable of addressing their pain and needs through a coherent culture or policy of justice. As a result, the void where justice should be remains vast.
The problem lies in the absence of standards and in a memory deeply scarred by violence. Who decides that someone is a shabiha supporter? Who has the authority to accuse? Who distinguishes between a killer, an informant, a follower, someone who acted out of fear, someone who was coerced, someone who willingly participated, and someone who simply dissolved into the structures of power?
And who granted “the people” this authority in the first place?
That authority does not emerge from nowhere. It stems from the state’s failure to create a clear path toward justice, and from a broad social participation in filling that void through punishment.
When the state appears to have pardoned the powerful, or left them beyond accountability, beginning with the financial settlements granted to prominent suspects, and when those who are arrested are prosecuted not as part of a wider system but as isolated individuals, reinforcing a logic of personal blame, as seen in the officially broadcast trials, a sense of injustice takes root. The same occurs when Assad-era urban planning laws and expropriation tools remain in force in areas such as rural Damascus, including the continued implementation of Decree 66 issued by Bashar al-Assad and the expropriation decrees issued before it by Hafez al-Assad. These are laws that continue to override people’s homes and lives.
Under such conditions, a harsh perception emerges: that justice reaches only the weak, while those who now possess the power to pursue an imagined form of justice are left to act on it themselves.
The state either pardoned the powerful or proved incapable of confronting them, and then left ordinary people to complete the task of meting out punishment to everyone else. The punitive crowd is not entirely separate from the state. It is, in many ways, the product of the state’s failure at the top and the push toward revenge at the bottom.
The Crowd’s Justice That the State “Left Behind”
Since the fall of the Assad regime, Syria has witnessed two major massacres: the coastal massacres of March 2025 and the Sweida massacre of July 2025. Much of the justification for both was framed in the language of defense, a concept that expanded beyond protecting people and places to take on a distinctly sectarian meaning.
Throughout all of this, justice has remained delayed, elusive, and ever-present as an open wound, one that is difficult to comprehend and impossible to contain. Security and armed actors are commonly portrayed as liberators of the country and as part of the process of freeing Syria from the rule of the Assad family. Yet at the same time, they have subjected the very meaning of justice to the power of weapons rather than the authority of a civil state.
There is a widespread assumption that justice is simply a sincere emotional response, or a direct way of repairing harm. Anger reveals the existence of a profound wound, but on its own it cannot produce fair judgment or build a country in which people can live together. When the state fails to prevent this dynamic, and when media-driven mobilization presents violence as justice, punishment becomes focused on the relentless pursuit of individuals. The list of targets steadily expands: an elderly person, an informant, a former military officer, a security official, a regime supporter, even the spouse of a supporter. The person being beaten becomes a condensed symbol of all previous wrongdoing.
It is difficult to grasp the extent to which Syrians lack an established culture for engaging with media and mobilizing rhetoric. Part of the media landscape and many public social media pages no longer merely report events or comment on them; they actively participate in creating an atmosphere of violence.
What is taking place is neither organized political action in the conventional sense nor merely a series of isolated incidents. It is a networked and highly mobilized form of violence, made up of scattered calls to action, fragmented accusations, and a constant search for suspicions and doubts, before rapidly turning into punishment in the streets: beatings, humiliation, and public abuse. In this form of violence, it is often impossible to know who initiated the wave, who is directing it, or where responsibility for it ultimately lies.
This is not transitional justice. It is closer to a form of justice that cannot be institutionalized. It emerges in the vacuum left by the state and transforms understandable anger over the crimes of the former regime into a renewed capacity to produce new victims, indefinitely. Its greatest danger is that it creates a permanent possibility of communal fragmentation and a slow-burning, everyday civil conflict.
The illusion begins when people believe that local reconciliation councils or statements posted on social media can replace the state, or that a just cause entitles them to reproduce the very practices they condemn. It begins when the collective expulsion of residents from their homes is viewed as the cleansing of an area and the fulfillment of justice.
In such cases, a public statement is not an innocent document or a neutral product. It is a moment that reveals a consciousness stripped of all mediating institutions: law, evidence, courts, politics, and the distance that should exist between suffering and judgment. When residents of a neighborhood gather to decide that Alawite residents, or particular families, must leave because they are accused of killing, participating, or remaining silent, does any meaningful right actually return to the victims?
Within this illusion, people no longer see the individual as a complex human being but as an extension of a group, while the group and the former regime become a single body that must be humiliated through any person associated with it. The desired confession then becomes distorted. Those who were once oppressed want to see their former masters reduced to the position of the powerless: fearful, isolated, expelled, and unable to speak. The positions of master and servant may change, but the underlying structure remains intact. One side seeks to affirm its humanity by stripping another side of its own.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of these illusions is that they give people a false sense of sovereignty, freedom, and entitlement. Residents begin to imagine themselves as a miniature state, capable of deciding who may stay and who must leave, who is innocent and who deserves punishment. Yet this form of localized sovereignty does not build a state; it undermines every possibility of one.
Justice in Syria today risks becoming a spectacle of humiliation. Society is left to navigate a series of low-intensity daily conflicts, conflicts that begin in the name of legitimate victims but end by creating new ones. And in that cycle, justice itself never arrives.
