“Turn off the camera and do whatever you want.”

This phrase circulated in Syrian WhatsApp groups, while we received horrifying videos from Suwayda. Attempts by perpetrators to prevent documentation of abuses usually fail, as these criminals want us to witness their atrocities. This is not the first time sectarian invaders have proudly filmed their actions. With the ease of recording and sharing, it’s as if killing and torture have become rooted in spectacle, showing off what they’ve committed.

Scenes of sectarian massacre and humiliation aren’t new in this devastated region of the world, but each time they get increasingly brutal and absurd. Recently, Druze villages in Suwayda were attacked by armed Bedouin tribes, accompanied by regime-affiliated operatives from Damascus. The result was massacres, violations, lootings, and brazen sectarian slogans.

The scope of brutality expanded to include revenge operations targeting Bedouin tribes themselves, no less savage than the initial assaults. What began as an authority-backed invasion has spiraled into an ongoing cycle of vengeance between groups dragging each other into hell.

In sectarian conflicts, violence becomes a means to prove one’s loyalty to the group, to show dominance over the enemy, even to earn “legitimacy.” Here, killing is not viewed as a crime but as a ritual of entry into full membership. Flaunting murder becomes a display of loyalty.

When division solidifies, politics fails, and citizenship fades, the “enemy” is redefined as an object—not as a human being—and guilt is erased. Boasting here is not mere display; it reflects a profound conviction that what is being done is “heroic.” Psychologists call this mechanism “dehumanizing the other,” which makes killing and torture possible, and then being proud of it without hesitation.

These invaders don’t just document for memory; they do it to spread terror, to say: “We decide who lives and who is humiliated.” Publishing clips of torture or degradation is like messages aimed at other groups: “We are stronger, you must submit.”

In these semi-enclosed arenas, a kind of “symbolic economy of violence” arises. Each new video and each new image of a victim raises the stature of the fighter within the brutal logic: the more savage you are, the more recognition you gain. It fosters internal fame and group validation, encouraging more violence.

When the law disappears and weapons become the ruler, there is no incentive to hide crime. Instead, publicizing it becomes evidence of power. Impunity not only invites atrocities: it makes declaring them a means of enhancing status.

It’s not hard to trace the origins of the attackers in recent videos. Many have lived under marginalization, poverty, humiliation, and boasting of what they do may be a form of “revenge” for their former weakness. They commit violence to reclaim mastery over their fate, but at a terrible price.

It’s a death-and-revenge spiral. Today’s victim becomes tomorrow’s executioner, and the wheels of slaughter grind onward in grotesque repetition. Anger, hatred, humiliation ring out, and they recast the Syrian scene into yet another repetitive collapse, with roles constantly shifting, but armed identities always dominating. Dignity lies buried under the rubble of vengeance.

This infernal cycle of violence, replayed in near-identical versions across Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, reveals the depth of the crisis gripping the Levant: an identity crisis that has evolved beyond cultural or religious belonging into a tool of murder—a substitute political project for the state, a never-ending cycle of “vengeful justice.”

Identity Becomes Deadly When It Is Reduced

In his book “In the Name of Identites,” Amin Maalouf writes:

“When a person is required to reduce his very being to a single belonging, that is the shortest route to killing.”

This is exactly what is happening: the person is no longer seen as human, or even a citizen, but as “Druze,” “Bedouin,” “Sunni,” or “Shia,” they are held accountable for their group rather than their actions.

In these environments, identity is no longer a psychological or cultural refuge; it becomes a system of mobilization, exclusion, and incitement. It is not merely a narrative of belonging; it morphs into a survival strategy amid collapse, even if the cost is executing or humiliating the different other. While societies are drained economically and individuals lose trust in official institutions, sectarian fanaticism becomes a last resort for belonging…and a weapon.

What happened in Suwayda is merely a continuation of a method well-practiced by regimes and armed groups in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon: weakening the state, the only identity meant to unify everyone, as opposed to empowering sub-identities.

In Iraq, Ba’athist rule and later U.S. occupation were turning points: rebuilding the political system on sectarian quotas paved the way for repeated internal warfare, from al-Qaeda bombings in Shiite neighborhoods to Shia militia attacks on Sunni villages in the name of vengeance. The outcome: no justice, no shared memory, just communal injustice perpetuating further violence.

In Lebanon, the fifteen‑year civil war didn’t truly end; it was frozen by a political agreement that entrenched sectarian warlords and legitimized power-sharing. The war’s end reinforced the logic of militant hegemony, boosted by Tehran and Damascus, making Hezbollah’s weapon a sectarian tool and a ruling instrument around which other sects rallied. Every dispute, political or security-related—even the tiniest—inevitably generates sectarian strife. Everything is ready to explode at the slightest crack in the fear balance.

In “In the Name of Identity,” Amin Maalouf sees identity not as a static or innate entity, but as a multi-layered fabric—one that turns “toxic” only when reduced to a single dimension, be it religious, sectarian, or national. Then the individual becomes captive to that dimension, seeing others as existential threats: “When people feel their belonging is threatened, they cling to it until it becomes a weapon.”

Thus, belonging in itself poses no problem. It is the reduction to a violent dividing wall between people that’s disastrous. It’s wonderful to recognize the plurality of identities within each of us, so this plurality does not become fuel for conflict.

In his writings and public interventions, especially after the Lebanese Civil War, Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm addressed sectarianism not as a religious inheritance but as a produced political structure for power-sharing. Al‑Azm argues that sect becomes dangerous when it is politicized—and the biggest danger is the sectarianization of the state itself: “The weaker the national state, the more people return to the sect, not because they love it, but because it protects them.”

In Lebanon, we are submerged in and around interests that have made sectarianism a cultural and social default, shaping loyalties and everyday relations while sidelining the idea of citizenship in favor of “primary” belonging. Here, authorities don’t always need repression: they succeed better by making people internalize that the status quo is natural or fated.

The danger of this model lies in its indefinite reproducibility; it depends not only on political context, but is embedded in education, media, and collective memory. We face societies that do not produce a shared national narrative, only parallel narratives in conflict rather than conversation.

Worse, this violence does not produce only death, it generates whole generations that see revenge as justice, sectarian belonging as eternal identity.

There is no salvation for this Levant if its people continue to live within the prisons of their identities. Religious or tribal affiliation should not be a ticket to power or justification for killing—or a tool for protecting oneself. We need a new political project: one that restores citizenship not just as a legal status, but as a shared ethical contract.

The conflict in Suwayda, like anywhere else, will not be resolved through military superiority, sectarian deterrence, or international and regional pressure, but only when we recognize that identities reduced become killers, and that justice lies not in shaving a Druze’s beard or punishing Bedouin tribes, but in breaking this legacy of humiliation and rebuilding humans whom we see first as human, not as potential enemies.

Perhaps the only hope amid this darkness is that a new generation will face the future without sheltering under sectarian shadows, or at least we hope so.

In this context, sectarianism becomes not just a result of weakness or ignorance, but the product of long-term investment in discourse, institutions, education, religion, and media. What appears sectarian becomes “normal” because it is part of daily life.

Identity does not kill by itself; it kills only when it turns into a tool of reduction, oppression, and exclusion. And in our lands rich with identities, there can be no revival without reclaiming the human as a multi-layered being, not merely a bearer of sect, blood, or language.