They are the invaders of Suwayda, and this is their second raid after the coast. There’s no other way to say it. The invaders of Suwayda, crawling toward it from Damascus and the desert, bear beards that mark their rupture from humanity, from any emotional or adaptive sensibility. Islamists who have vowed to erase the crimes of Bashar al-Assad with crimes of their own, drawing on the darkest codes and riddles of our heritage, summoning rituals of killing and mutilation that we have long tried to bury beneath the rare pages of tenderness in our history books.
Radical islamists are carrying out field executions of civilians in Suwayda, Syria. They humiliated Druze elders, shaving their mustaches in front of rolling cameras. The enforcers and thugs of political Islam. Their crimes went beyond their victims, reaching a point that surpassed death tolls, because what we are facing is a crime whose perpetrators sought to erase all our faces. They wanted to send the images of their crimes into our homes to say: “Here we are, the killers of your children and women, humiliator of your elders, and more brutal than your dictator, who beat us in numbers but whom we now compete with in the clarity and spectacle of violence.”
Who is it that chose to document their own crimes with their own hands? What message doe they want to send to Syrians, other than that they are the ones who committed these atrocities?
The crime in Suwayda was one which the perpetrators chose not to hide. Dozens of videos were filmed by the killers themselves and sent to us. Among us were “revolutionary journalists” who followed the crime and pleaded with the perpetrators to “finish the job” — to kill. Among us were those who turned away, and among us were those who never apologized. We are all complicit. Everyone who received a video of an execution or humiliation became part of the scene. When we watch what was sent to us, we are fulfilling the killers’ wishes — that we witness. The crime is not just that it happened, but that we watched it. That we gave in to the killers’ desire to make their barbarity part of our daily routine.
Texts accompanied the crime, drawn from our books and our past. And the killers, in raising them, wanted to tell us: “We are committing something we share.”
We were so close to the crime. The victims were closer to us this time than in any previous massacre. Our phones were filled with messages from relatives of our friends. It was hard to look away. Our Druze friends flooded our phones with images of their anguish in a way even our Alawite friends hadn’t done when struck by a similar massacre months ago. The algorithm wasn’t selective; our accounts have been connected to theirs since their uprising against Bashar al-Assad. This made the Islamist faction’s crime feel like an extension of Bashar’s crimes. Manahel lost her uncle. Mazen and Rasha sent photos of the reception hall where no fewer than ten people were executed. Malik sent us names of the dead from his village. And a dentist’s photo told us that the murdered woman looked just like us, and that we are only one step away from the killer’s knife.
Nothing explains what happened except that Syria now stands at a tragic crossroads between the Ba’ath regime and the regime of darkness. Yes, the invaders who entered Suwayda, filming themselves as they shaved the mustaches of elderly Druze sheikhs, came from the darkness of our heritage, just as Bashar al-Assad came from a barren Arabism. The worst part of what they did is that they are turning the crimes of Assad’s regime into something ordinary, simply because all crimes now resemble one another. Worse still, they surpassed the jailers of Saydnaya by recording their crimes on video, and distributing them to applauding supporters who, in turn, use them to erase our faces.
Syrians must rise to defend the sacredness of their tragedy, a sacredness now under threat. To defend the uniqueness of a catastrophe that the fall of the regime had once revealed.
We must defend the victims of Saydnaya by standing up to those trying to make the chemical weapons massacre just another ordinary stop along a path of horrors — horrors not limited to the Assad regime alone.
As for the ultimate heartbreak of what is happening in Suwayda? It lies in the opportunity for “salvation” which it presents to Benjamin Netanyahu — in parallel with his ongoing genocide in Gaza. The Islamists gave him an excuse to destroy Gaza, and now they’re offering him in Suwayda an opportunity to “rescue the Druze.”
