During the year that followed the fall of the Assad regime, Syrians lost many things. Their losses were not limited to their homes or their sense of safety; they also extended to friendships and relationships that had endured for years. This time, the cause was not migration or changing life circumstances. Rather, it was the positions people adopted in the aftermath of the massacres carried out by forces affiliated with the new authorities in both the coast and Sweida. Suddenly, many found themselves confronting people they believed they knew well, only to see them justify killings, cast doubt on victims’ testimonies, or treat bloodshed as a political detail open to debate.

For me, this was not merely a matter of following public debates on social media or hearing scattered accounts from close friends. It involved people with whom I had shared years of everyday details and common memories. People with whom I believed we had arrived at a shared understanding of fundamental concepts such as injustice and the sectarian violence that Syrians endured throughout the years of war.

I reread what they had written more than once, perhaps because I was searching for a less painful explanation, or for the possibility of a misunderstanding. But the problem was that their words were too clear, leaving little room for interpretations that might preserve the friendship.

The way they treated the massacres, as narratives open to doubt or events requiring further justification before they could be acknowledged, became a turning point from which there was no return.

What this moment revealed was not simply a difference in political positions. It exposed the fragility of what we had believed to be a shared moral compass. After everything Syrians have lived through over the past years, it was shocking to see the killing of innocent people once again become something to be denied or justified, as though we had learned nothing from all that devastation.

The Illusion of a Shared Experience

Many Syrians believed that the hardship they had endured would be enough, at least in part, to cultivate a greater sensitivity toward violence, killing, and sectarian exclusion. At times, it seemed as though simply surviving years of war and witnessing such immense loss might lead Syrians to agree on what should never be allowed to happen again.

There was an unspoken assumption that those who had lived through the same fear, or experienced the loss of loved ones, displacement, and humiliation, would become more capable of recognising injustice when it reappeared before them, and more wary of the language used to justify it or diminish its severity.

Perhaps Syrians needed to believe this for a long time because it gave some meaning to all that suffering. It offered the idea that collective pain, despite its brutality, could produce a different kind of awareness or leave behind a moral imprint that would make the repetition of violence more difficult in the future.

What happened after the fall of the regime, however, revealed something far more complex: the same experience does not leave the same mark on everyone, and surviving violence does not necessarily mean rejecting it when it is inflicted upon others.

What was particularly shocking to me was discovering how some people could reuse the very language that had once harmed them, only this time against different victims. Suddenly, the vocabulary of accusation, suspicion, and justification resurfaced, albeit in different and sometimes more modern forms.

It became easy to reduce victims to their sectarian or political identities and to transform massacres into a technical debate about context, causes, and background, rather than treating them as a human catastrophe that should, in itself, be sufficient to demand a clear moral response.

What felt most frightening in those moments was not simply the existence of this discourse, but how easily it spread among people I had known for years and with whom I had shared countless conversations about justice, fear, sectarianism, and violence. They were people I believed had developed, through the Syrian experience itself, an implicit understanding of what it means for people to be killed because of their identities, or for civilians to once again be reduced to numbers that can be justified within a political narrative.

Over time, I began to notice that many discussions were not really about the massacres themselves. Instead, they revolved around whether the victims deserved sympathy. There was always an unspoken condition that preceded any acknowledgment of suffering: Who were these people? What did they represent? Did they belong to the “right” political or sectarian camp?

It was as though death alone was no longer sufficient to warrant grief or condemnation.

Perhaps the most difficult realisation was that many long-standing relationships had been built on assumptions that had never truly been tested. The assumption that collectively experiencing violence necessarily produces shared values, or that the fear Syrians lived with for years would make them more capable of understanding the fears of others.

Yet in moments of profound rupture, distances that were previously invisible sometimes come into view. It becomes clear that sharing pain does not necessarily mean sharing the same understanding of it, or the same way of responding to it.

At a certain point, it becomes difficult to separate the person you have known for years from the language they use to justify the killing of others or to cast doubt on their suffering. Not because people lose the right to disagree, but because some positions leave a mark that extends beyond political debate itself. They touch something deeper: the way we regard the lives of others, and the very meaning of justice after everything Syrians have endured.

Estrangement as a Personal Loss

For many Syrians, severing ties with friends or acquaintances was neither an easy decision nor as abrupt as it might appear from the outside. In most cases, it did not take the form of a direct confrontation or a clear declaration that the relationship was over. Instead, it happened gradually: through silence, through the slow cessation of conversation, or through that heavy feeling that suddenly emerges while reading a new post or hearing an offhand remark.

Some of these relationships predated the revolution itself. They were friendships formed in school, at university, or during the early years of professional life, relationships that had endured political upheaval, displacement, and personal loss. For that reason, it was painful to see them end this way, or to find them burdened by moral questions that seemed impossible to overcome.

For a long time, many people tried to preserve these relationships by avoiding political discussions or steering clear of sensitive topics. There was a persistent belief that what united people was greater than what divided them, or that the collective exhaustion experienced by Syrians deserved a temporary respite from sharp divisions.

But the recent massacres pushed many of these fragile balances to collapse. Suddenly, silence itself began to feel like complicity, and ignoring what was being said became more difficult than confronting it.

The problem was not merely a difference in opinion. It was the feeling that the relationship itself had lost something essential, something that had once made its continuation possible. When the killing of civilians becomes a matter open to justification or doubt, it becomes difficult to return to ordinary daily conversations or to behave as though nothing has changed.

For me, the most difficult part was not the estrangement itself, but the realisation that I was looking at people I had known for years through entirely different eyes. It felt as though something had been hidden all along and then suddenly revealed, leaving behind a mixture of disappointment, grief, and an inability to understand how such a distance could have existed between us without ever being noticed before.

Perhaps that is why these ruptures feel heavier than ordinary political disagreements. They are not simply about differing views on a particular event. Rather, they involve re-evaluating long-standing relationships built on certain assumptions about others, only to discover those assumptions were never as solid as they once seemed.

What Remains After All This?

The cruelty of this period lies not in division itself. Syrians have lived through sharp political and sectarian disagreements for many years. Rather, it lies in the way these divisions have entered intimate personal relationships and the spaces that were once assumed to be the safest and most stable. Suddenly, many people found themselves reassessing old friendships and reconsidering the image they had long held of those closest to them.

Over the past months, it has become increasingly clear that collectively surviving the war was not enough to produce a shared understanding of the violence that Syrians experienced together, albeit to varying degrees. With each new massacre, the distance between people became more apparent: in how they understood suffering, in whom they chose to empathise with, and in the limits they considered acceptable or justifiable.

Perhaps this is why these disagreements have not felt temporary or easily surmountable. Some positions alter the very nature of a relationship, making it difficult to return to what existed before, even in the absence of a direct conflict or an explicit break. Sometimes, it is enough to see someone close to you respond casually to the suffering of others for something fundamental to shift within you.

In the end, massacres do not leave their mark on the victims alone. Their impact also extends to the way people see one another and to their ability to sustain relationships that once seemed stable and secure.

Perhaps this is why many Syrians today feel that what they have lost during this period cannot be reduced to political or material losses alone. Part of that loss lies in the collapse of the belief that the Syrian experience, by its very nature, had created a shared moral ground among those who lived through it.