The gun is swift as the eyelid
and the savage trigger is calm before the green eyes

—“The Killing,” by Mohammed al-Maghout (Shi‘r Magazine, Issue 6, 1958)

In 2015, French researcher and psychoanalyst Richard Rechtman published his book The Ordinary Life of Genocidaires. Having worked for more than 30 years with survivors of genocides from around the world, Rechtman seeks to “read” the lives of perpetrators of mass killings; their daily details and routines. Here, killing is not meant in its conventional criminal sense, such as murder for theft or personal revenge, but rather in the sense of extermination: “purifying” killings that target an entire group whose “life” is deemed not worth living.

The diverse testimonies collected in the book, and Rechtman’s analysis of them, are attempts to answer a central question: Who are those capable of killing? What runs through their minds and shapes their lives to explain their actions? He notes that the killers’ absence from public view—or our ignorance about them—“forces us to imagine and construct their lives in order to give them meaning,” and this explanation is often pathologized.

In the course of answering this question, a line appears in the book’s introduction in Rechtman’s voice: “Ideology does not kill; people do.” This focus on the identities of “those people” explains the book’s title, which does not examine ideology or mental illness per se, but instead employs the concept of “everyday life” to understand those who kill without batting an eye. These are not suicide attackers, but rather those who kill and then “go on with their lives.”

Yet the very question opens the door to a division between “us—those who do not kill” and “them—those who kill,” as if “we” possess particular traits or intellectual, emotional, or linguistic makeups that make the choice of mass killing inconceivable in our understanding of relations with the other.

Similarity and Classification in Syria

This division (killers vs. non-killers) inevitably recalls Syria in the era of transitional administration, and the forms of mass killing practiced by individuals, killings celebrated by crowds that have embraced a fabricated “Neo-Umayyad” identity and a blind narrative of victimhood, exalting in killing while mixing Islamist symbols into the display. Among the most repeated phrases in this context is: “The new administration is like us.”

This strange statement was never explained. Who exactly are the people who “resemble” the authorities? And in what ways?

The massacres in the coastal region and in Suwayda, along with the campaigns of moral assassination carried out by “state activists,” made clear the precise nature of this desired similarity: anyone who refuses to submit to the will of the “new state” and does not resemble it becomes the target of killing, whether physical or symbolic. Similarity here is a form of loyalty, one that extends beyond merely consuming and displaying the symbols of power; it also entails the “killing” of the other who rejects similarity. This is in addition to clinging to the “state” whose ostensible mission is to monopolize arms, in other words, to strip killers of the modern weapons they so proudly flaunt.

This similarity moves between its most banal meanings—copying Ahmad al-Shara’s haircut and outfits—to stripping known symbols, like the flags of ISIS or Jabhat al-Nusra, of their original meaning, or wearing “Umayyad” T-shirts. Resemblance rests on reproducing symbols to create the “group” and to define the boundaries that distinguish it from “others”—outsiders deemed deserving of various forms of assassination, displacement, dispossession, and the destruction or public humiliation of the symbols they cherish (the shaving of Druze sheikhs’ mustaches being the clearest example).

Similarity here stands in opposition to individuality; it is the price of entry into the crowd and the erasure of the self into the “whole.” It is blindness to the disappearance of individuals, sometimes to the point of killing them. What we are witnessing is the forging of a new consensus around symbols and stories, to the point of denying facts altogether. The daily, lived concerns are obliterated in favor of the symbol, and anyone who refuses or criticizes is “killed” for not resembling the euphoric genocidal crowd.

The killing carried out against Syrian communities by armed mobs is the most potent enabler of the tyranny of resemblance. It annihilates the “other” and degrades the survivors by dehumanizing them—turning them into howling animals, “dogging” or “pigging” them—thus rendering their killing permissible because “they are not like us.”

But this brings us back to the central question: Who are these killers?

Are They “Beasts”?

The stories of Syrian killers entered history through the trials held in Europe for fugitive war criminals. We are speaking of war crimes and crimes against humanity, documented in the words of the perpetrators themselves before the courts. Perhaps the most harrowing among them is the testimony of Dr. Alaa Mousa, sentenced to life in prison in Germany.

But in the “new Syria,” there are no such testimonies from the killers—only the victims’ descriptions of them. Again and again, the word “beasts” or “beast” appears. Stripped of its everyday meaning and placed into the realm of political theory, the term evokes a creature resistant to domestication, beyond sovereignty because it does not submit to it—neither through violence nor discipline. The beast exists outside the social contract, untethered from the “state,” acknowledging no “other,” neither as equal nor peer.

The beast/killer bypasses the frameworks of ideological or national contracts. This is starkly illustrated in the infamous field-execution video from Suwayda, where the killer asked his victim: “What does ‘Syrian’ mean?” The question, posed before the killing, struck at the very depth of belonging and national identity, past and future. The chilling part is that the victim did not lie to save his life, nor choose the safest answer. Instead, he chose what could unite him with his executioner: Syria.

That choice forces us to revisit Albert Camus’s famous remark: “I have never seen anyone die for an ontological problem,” referring to great cosmic truths like the earth being round or flat. But in the context of killing in Syria, is the question “What does ‘Syrian’ mean?” an ontological one, where the ambiguity of the answer could cost you your life? Yes. Because the debate was not about whether the victim was Syrian or not, but rather: Do you resemble us, or don’t you? Were you born a pig or an Umayyad?

What stands out in Syria’s sectarian killings is the removal of national belonging from the victim. His Syrian-ness neither saves his life nor redeems him (a delusion many have lived with). This is not about the political struggle over the form of government, but about everyday, face-to-face killing, on streets, sidewalks, and inside homes. The sharpest irony is that blame was often cast on “foreign fighters,” as though those who kill are not Syrian and “do not resemble us.” But as videos and recordings released by the killers themselves spread, the question of foreign fighters became absurd: the killers speak Syrian Arabic in all its rhetorical variety and dialects.

The Genocidal Influencer

In the past, answers to questions about “the daily life of genocidaires” resembled a puzzle, pieced together from trials, medical reports, and confessions, not from the kind of laboratory-like observation that is nearly impossible. Details emerged outside the act of killing itself within the “everyday.”

Today, however, we are faced with the killer-influencer. From the coastal massacres to those in Suwayda, the “daily lives” of killers are broadcast in real time. They themselves display the killing, filming car trips from one massacre to another, mocking and taunting devastated cities, documenting executions as they happen, and posting moments from before or after: drinking juice, singing songs. The gap between the act of killing and its public discovery is now minimal; almost instantaneous.

We see the killer playing, humiliating, and “creating content.” Sometimes he swims or engages in sports. The killer addresses an audience. This is a conscious act to be known, with his face clearly visible. Killing, then, becomes a daily, unexceptional occurrence, as if nothing new is happening.

Yet we still have no definitive answer: Who are these people who “resemble the authorities”? Improvising here, they are men whose brains have been dissolved by testosterone—men who kidnap, curse, spit, beat, and kill, wielding the power of their arms and sometimes swords and rifles. They do not speak to their victims face-to-face; instead, the killer forces his “target” to kneel, gazing down at him in parallel with the camera lens, an enactment of frustrated phallic dominance, a practical application of the male gaze.

These killers see “others” only as objects of violence: pigs, dogs, sluts, “cute ones.” These are those who do not “resemble the authorities,” masculinity inflamed in the name of the “state” and in its defense. Hyper-masculine men—some who do not touch women, others who abduct them as spoils—all with the complicity of the “state.” The arrogance of violence and killing feeds this virile fantasy, one that arguably began on the very first day the regime fell. What else explains the riding of horses in the squares of Damascus and Aleppo?

What is most terrifying is that some killers were not simply “following orders.” Some acted out of “faza’,‘”a spontaneous urge. They ventured into the Syrian desert for no reason other than killing and “purifying.” The geography of these journeys is revealed in the videos they posted online. The killing was not an emotional outburst in the heat of the moment, but a decision that took hours—or even days—to reach the “other.” It was not killing in self-defense, but exterminatory killing, traveling between Syrian cities and broadcasting it live.

Investigative reports and social media pages have documented the killers’ identities. But do we truly know them? Do we really recognize them? Or have they become estranged—monstrous—in the sense of being unknown? This question may reveal the tension between the everyday and the genocidal. In Syria, the answer is clear: the killers identify themselves in the very act of killing. The “disguises” they use, masks, police uniforms, army gear, are pointless, because the killer often appears in a selfie he chose to take. The image of killing is composed of three elements: “the killer’s face, the victim’s face, the weapon,”a formula for horror and terror, distilling killing into a single moment where the camera’s aperture aligns with the barrel of the gun.

What is truly frightening, and threatening to “everyone,” is the Damascus authorities’ leniency toward the killers. Many of the “optimists” about the new government believed the problem was judicial or legal. But what we face is a problem of “authority,” one that neither monopolizes arms nor possesses a bureaucratic decision-making structure, but instead operates via Telegram messages, unleashing violence and leaving it to the whims and impulses of the armed.

The state, in this sense, manages savagery. It channels and directs violence; it does not regulate or restrain it. It does not exercise authority over weapons—it is more like a shepherd, attempting to guide the movements of a herd without fully controlling them, steering them to graze the land and whatever is on it. And here, the metaphor is literal: overgrazing has threatened Syria’s food security after herders were let loose on the lands of the al-Ghab plain.

Syria’s killers return to their daily lives, driving their cars, eating meals. Some may have wives (or multiple wives) and children. The rhythm of the everyday and the banal blends seamlessly with the rhythm of killing. The term “beast” in its political sense does not quite apply; nor does the image of mujahideen hiding in caves beyond civilian life. This is pure killing—extermination—not for the sake of building, but to dismantle the means of life itself and prevent it from existing. Those who kill do not settle or occupy; they withdraw, leaving the land to its survivors and to the mass graves.