Every so often, a new “scandal” emerges in Syria, sparked by an ordinary person informing on someone else. An everyday scene or mundane incident is transformed into a “security matter” and a viral trend, exploited to manufacture political and moral meaning. One recent example involved a taxi driver in his seventies chatting with a young woman, during which he expressed his controversial views about the Assad regime. Unbeknownst to him, another woman recorded the conversation. The footage spread online, he was vilified, and his opinions became a matter of public debate. In another case, a young man playing songs supportive of Bashar al-Assad on a bus was filmed, his social media account was exposed, and he was arrested, despite the absence of any clear charge or law criminalizing such behavior.
The phenomenon extends to digging through old social media posts and comment histories. In Latakia, a man who posted a comment mourning the death of Hafez al-Assad was arrested and “disciplined.” Old posts are unearthed and used to denounce their authors. Informing has become widespread, accompanied by a false sense of purpose that grants informants a feeling of importance. Calls to “Expose them!” and “Go after them!” proliferate. Public shaming becomes an open practice, and exposing and humiliating individuals is recast as a form of political and moral participation, however bleak.
These incidents are typically framed under slogans such as “denying Assad’s crimes” or “criminalizing Assadism,” issues referenced in Syria’s Constitutional Declaration but not yet codified into law. As a result, the practice has evolved into a kind of “popular pastime,” with smartphones serving as the primary tool: a photo here, a recording there, all feeding the weaponization of public scandal, often more powerful than the absent law itself. The net is cast widely, ensnaring not only committed Baathists and outspoken supporters of the former regime but also ordinary citizens with no official position. In the absence of clear legal standards for accountability, they have become easy prey for self-appointed “guardians of the revolution” operating from behind their screens.
The circle of informants extends beyond ordinary citizens to individuals working within the new authorities themselves. A female journalist was also briefly detained after what she described on Facebook as a report filed by an “observer.” According to her account, this observer appeared to work with, or have direct access to, the General Security Directorate. The observer reportedly became suspicious of her while she was searching for her brother’s grave in Idlib and reported her as being one of the fuloul—a term referring to remnants of the former regime. Since Assad’s fall, the label has gradually taken on the character of a criminal accusation, despite the fact that it denotes neither a clearly defined act nor proven participation in any crime. The issue is not whether genuine members of the former regime should be investigated, but rather that the label itself has become an accusation anyone can casually level against another, making the situation deeply alarming.
When Does an Opinion Become a Crime?
In her Facebook post, the journalist wrote that “the era of the informer has ended; we have entered the era of the observer.” Yet between these so called observers, people who secretly film unsuspecting strangers, self appointed informants, those who amplify their reports online, and others who scour old social media posts for incriminating material, Syria is witnessing the return of a vast security apparatus carried out by ordinary citizens themselves. This is, after all, a practice cultivated by the former regime within Syrian society. Today, the public readily responds to the authorities’ willingness to act against suspects identified through social media notoriety, becoming active participants in surveillance, suspicion, and punishment.
Syria faces the dual challenge of delivering justice for victims while holding perpetrators accountable. At first glance, the term “perpetrators” appears straightforward: the head of a security branch, the commander of a checkpoint, a former minister, individuals who wielded power over life and death and were directly implicated in grave abuses. At the same time, however, there is a strong desire to punish supporters of Assad as well, on the grounds that they abandoned revolutionaries to die, celebrated their deaths, or backed those responsible for killing them. Yet transforming an opinion into a crime is an exceptionally delicate legal matter, one that Syria’s judicial system remains ill equipped to handle. In this vacuum, it has become a popular weapon, deployed repeatedly outside the bounds of the law.
The challenges surrounding justice in Syria are often oversimplified and fragmented in ways that ultimately undermine their meaning. What does it actually mean to arrest someone who still supports Assad today? How would such a person be tried? What specific offense have they committed? An individual case cannot embody justice unless it is situated within a broader legal framework that clearly defines the crime, establishes responsibility, and determines punishment. Justice must move beyond the immediate desire for retribution toward a longer term project of dismantling the culture of killing, the normalization of death, and the systems that enabled mass atrocities.
The expression of opinion in Syria remains deeply fraught. Some views are suppressed before they are even understood. Others are so abhorrent they scarcely merit consideration. Still others arise from profound personal trauma. Protecting freedom of expression in all its forms requires a safeguarded legal space, one that is equally capable of criminalizing hate speech, incitement, and the denial of Assad’s crimes. Today, however, opinions are voiced against the backdrop of open wounds, massacres, mass graves, and a collective memory still saturated with fear and haunted by the impulse to remember.
In the absence of such a legal framework, one capable of assessing when speech crosses the threshold into criminal conduct, opinions are easily perceived as an extension of violence, a denial of it, or an alignment with those who committed it. This, too, is one of the enduring legacies of Syria’s genocidal system. It did not merely perpetrate killing, but also constructed around it a language of fear and loyalty that made it extraordinarily difficult to separate a person’s opinions from their sectarian or political identity.
Mob Justice
The figure of the informant has become far more complex than the old image of someone quietly submitting a secret report. A widespread desire has emerged, once embodied by the shabiha and now resurfacing in different forms, for ordinary individuals to become active participants in punishment. People genuinely believe they are protecting society when they report someone else. That intention may well be sincere, but it operates within a society that lacks the political and legal institutions capable of transforming fear, anger, and personal opinion into due process. As a result, political expression has become more preoccupied with conflict and impulsive, nonpolitical reactions than with understanding individual cases, the country’s realities, and the distinctions between them.
At the same time, the concept of “open source intelligence” has been transformed into a tool of intimidation rather than a supplementary means of establishing the truth, as it is ordinarily intended to be. Even without delving into investigative techniques, a screenshot or a fleeting recording cannot, on its own, justify condemning someone. Such material must pass through a chain of legal procedures that ultimately ends in a court of law. Yet today, as Syria opens up to an unprecedented level of public interaction, it is also witnessing the emergence of a cumulative system that continuously produces new informants. It begins with the traditional report writer, extends to the “new patriot” secretly filming others, then to those who expose old social media accounts and posts, followed by the determined online sleuth, and finally to a public hungry for punishment that shares, comments, and demands arrests, culminating in authorities detaining individuals because an eager online crowd has identified someone as a suitable target for punishment.
This is a single structure whose different components reinforce one another, even if the individuals involved have never met. Each part grants the others enormous additional power. The informant genuinely believes they are protecting the state or defending victims. The public believes it is delivering justice and that the authorities are responding to its demands. Meanwhile, the authorities themselves increasingly treat viral trends and online outrage as public complaints requiring action. But how can justice, rights, accountability, and civic vigilance be separated from the desire for revenge and from settling for the shallow justice of the margins?
The Need for Clear Definitions
Without a clear legal framework defining what conduct warrants arrest, how can “Assadism” itself be defined, and which aspects of it should be criminalized? How can a distinction be made between holding an opinion and actively participating in killing, coercion, intimidation by shabiha militias, or issuing threats? And how do we account for the broader decline in political understanding, something that has affected all of us? The political alignments that took shape over fifty years, and were further entrenched throughout the long years of war, will not simply disappear with the birth of a new state. Communities that have lived under fear for decades do not abandon their loyalties simply because power has changed hands.
Syrians need a comprehensive legal framework that criminalizes Assadism and the rhetoric that glorifies a culture of killing. Such a framework is essential both to deliver justice that preserves the memory of the victims and to dismantle the culture of violence itself. Yet this does not appear to be a task the current authorities are capable of undertaking. One of the most fundamental principles of law is that if an act has not been clearly defined in advance as a crime, and if its punishment has not been publicly established, then arresting someone for it merely reproduces the logic of the very authoritarian system that the new state was supposed to dismantle.
Today, Syrians have neither a firmly established state, nor trusted institutions, nor a sufficiently organized society capable of producing a shared and equitable national narrative. Such a narrative would reorder collective memory around cooperation and the rejection of a culture of killing, while building a national identity that does not rest on the division between victors and the defeated. In the absence of such a narrative, communities remain trapped within their own competing versions of the past, no matter how much time passes. It is in this vacuum that informing thrives. It fills the space left by both the state and society, giving individuals a sense of purpose through exposing others, sorting people into categories, and participating in their punishment.
Videos, secretly recorded footage, and screenshots have become a kind of social currency, exchanged from one person to another, each carrying a new name, a new face, and a new accusation. Yet their underlying logic remains the same: informing as a form of participation in public life through virality and public scandal.
People’s opinions should not be addressed by exposing and humiliating those who express them. Rather, their words and actions should be placed within a framework that allows them to be understood, debated, and assessed in terms of legal and moral responsibility. A country emerging from a genocidal regime requires a long process of building a civic culture and protecting the shared public sphere from violence, coercion, and revenge. This is an essential stage in the transition away from authoritarianism, one that replaces the impulse to classify and arrest people with the practice of examining what they have done and what they have said.
