What we witnessed on the Syrian coast in March 2025—and what we continue to see in other parts of Syria—is not an inevitable fate, nor was it simply a byproduct of war. It is the direct result of years of incitement, division, and dehumanization of the “other.” Genocide and systematic violence are not the natural outcomes of difference; rather, they are the product of a long process of psychological and social conditioning that normalizes violence as acceptable practice. Understanding these psychological mechanisms is the first step in preventing such tragedies from recurring, not only in Syria but in any society vulnerable to division and hate.
The deep divide among Syrians in how they have responded to crimes and massacres since 2011 reveals the extent of the psychological and social crisis within Syrian society. Perhaps the most painful aspect is witnessing how a victim can transform into a perpetrator—or a cheerleader for the murder of innocent civilians.
How can people share and laugh at videos of men being forced to crawl and howl while being kicked in the head? How can images of children killed alongside their families in their homes—or on the rooftops of buildings with their neighbors—not shock us? Doesn’t all of this compel us to ask: how did we get here?
What many fail to understand is that genocide is not a sudden event: it is a process that unfolds in stages, beginning with words and ideas before manifesting in action. In Syria, we have witnessed over the years how this process evolved, and how social divisions became fertile ground for systematic violence and the emergence of categories like victim—or “the greater victim.”
In every genocide, there are overlapping circles of actors: direct perpetrators, inciters, collaborators, and victims. Among these, psychological factors play a fundamental role in turning members of society into instruments of repression and killing—or into passive witnesses, or even celebrants. Syria is no exception. The Syrian war, with all its massacres, ethnic and sectarian cleansing, and systematic media incitement, reads like an open manual on the psychological mechanisms that lead to genocide.
Social psychologists divide genocide into overlapping stages. According to political scientist Gregory Stanton, genocide unfolds in ten phases: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and finally denial. In Syria, these stages can clearly be traced through the country’s events since 2011.
“Us” and “Them”
Before the uprising in 2011, Syrian society already harbored deep divisions—along sectarian, ethnic, ideological, and class lines—though they were not always visible on the surface. But starting in 2011, these divisions were violently reinforced and rapidly accelerated. People were sorted into binary labels: “loyalists” and “infiltrators,” “shabbiha” and “revolutionaries,” “moderates” and “extremists,” “Arabs” and “Kurds,” “Sunnis,” “Alawites,” “Shiites”, and so on. These were not simply political or functional classifications—they evolved into deep identity-based divisions. This mirrors what occurred in Rwanda with the “Hutu” and “Tutsi” labels, and in Bosnia between “Serbs” and “Muslims.”
Such divisions are often intended to create an “other”—someone whose humanity can later be stripped away. Once this dehumanization occurs, violence against them doesn’t just become justified—it becomes expected.
In early 2011, Syria’s state media and pro-regime militias were already pushing a narrative that framed dissenters as “terrorists.” In the years that followed, opposition factions and jihadist groups also engaged in their own dehumanizing rhetoric—labeling others as “separatists,” “Magians,” “Rafidha,” and “apostates.” These labels made the physical elimination of those so-described seem like a legitimate form of “cleansing.” A similar process took place in Bosnia, where Bosnian Muslims were stripped of their humanity before the massacres by Serb forces, portrayed as existential threats to be eradicated. In Syria, we’ve seen similar media campaigns using the same logic, often as a prelude to mass killings.
In these early stages, hate speech and stereotyping begin to emerge. We heard opposition groups being called “germs” or “dogs,” while regime supporters were described as “pigs” and “Assad’s dogs.”
These were not just words spoken in anger; they were tools of dehumanization. In Rwanda, Radio Mille Collines described Tutsis as “cockroaches.” In Nazi Germany, Jews were referred to as “rats.” These animal metaphors are intentional—they strip people of their humanity, making their deaths easier to stomach and less likely to provoke empathy.
As hate speech intensifies, society starts seeing the “other” as a thing, not a person with emotions, dreams, fears, or a family. In Syria, we saw this as the bodies of victims became mere numbers on news scrolls. Images of torture in regime prisons or ISIS executions—or those by extremist groups and opposition factions—circulated as casual content, stripped of the horror they ought to provoke.
In Bosnia, Bosniak Muslims were described as “snakes”—a prelude to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. In Homs and Latakia, pro-Assad militias exterminated entire families; people who had been their neighbors for years. In Eastern Ghouta, opposition fighters executed civilians and paraded women and children in mobile iron cages through the streets after a long siege, motivated by rhetoric that framed “the other” as responsible for their suffering, or as a threat.
In regime-controlled areas, portraying dissenters as “terrorists” was used to justify barrel bombings of entire neighborhoods. In opposition-held areas, portraying loyalists as “shabbiha” or part of the regime’s “support base” was used to justify indiscriminate shelling or executions.
Organization, Polarization, and Deepening Divides
Genocide cannot succeed without a structural apparatus to support it. The violence in Syria was not random; it was organized and deliberate. Death squads and armed militias were formed, and tools such as torture and enforced disappearances were deployed to spread terror. Groups like the Shabbiha, the National Defense Forces, and others were funded and trained to carry out mass killings, mirroring tactics seen during the genocide in Darfur, where the Janjaweed militias were armed to carry out violence on behalf of the state.
Syria’s security institutions were also instrumental in carrying out systematic crimes, such as mass arrests, torture, and executions—most notoriously in Saydnaya Prison, where thousands of detainees died. This mechanism is similar to what occurred in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, where prisons were turned into factories of death.
Social media also played a critical role in polarizing society. In 2013, videos circulated showing Jabhat al-Nusra fighters beheading prisoners, while pro-regime pages shared images of “heroic soldiers” “cleansing” areas of “terrorists.” This kind of polarization dehumanized victims and made empathy for them more difficult.
In this stage, extremist groups emerge, and ideologies that justify violence are spread. In Syria, we witnessed the rise of groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, as well as pro-Assad militias like Liwa al-Fatemiyoun and Liwa al-Zainabiyoun. Polarization becomes more intense, and the middle ground disappears. Those who are “not with us” are cast as “against us.” This was reflected in slogans like “Assad or we burn the country” on one side, and calls for sectarian cleansing and takfiri rhetoric on the other.
In Bosnia, such polarization led to the rise of Serb, Croat, and Bosniak militias who fought each other and committed atrocities against civilians. In Rwanda, it led to the formation of the Interahamwe militias, responsible for most of the massacres against the Tutsi.
At this point, preparations for mass violence begin, sometimes with the circulation of lists of individuals to be targeted. Syria witnessed such practices in various regions. There were regime “wanted lists” circulated at checkpoints and border crossings across the country, as well as identity-based kidnappings and killings at ISIS and Nusra checkpoints.
Then comes the stage of execution: a phase Syria has known all too well, in towns and cities like Houla, Douma, Qusayr, and more recently, in the massacres along the coastal region. In all of these cases, the massacres were not spontaneous. They were the result of a long process of psychological and social conditioning.
In Rwanda, the genocide was preceded by detailed lists of Tutsi residents in each neighborhood and village. In Srebrenica in Bosnia, Serb forces separated Bosniak Muslim men from women and children before executing them. In Syria—in places like Houla, Talkalakh, and the Syrian coast—entire families were slaughtered.
Denial and Doubt
As in every genocide, mass killing in Syria has often been accompanied by outright denial, questioning, or minimizing the massacres. After every atrocity, the cycle of denial begins: “Nothing happened,” “They killed their own to frame us,” “The numbers are exaggerated,” “Where were you when such-and-such massacre happened?” “They deserved it.”
Assad and the Russians denied the use of chemical weapons in several incidents, including the Ghouta attack in 2013. Despite overwhelming evidence—videos, international investigations—many still cast doubt, claiming the regime was “winning” and had no military reason to use such weapons. Similarly, some opposition armed groups denied their responsibility for attacks on civilians, like the Kafriya massacre in 2015.
We saw the same in the recent massacres on the Syrian coast. Some denied they happened at all. Others questioned the identity of the perpetrators or the death toll. Some justified them as a form of “justice,” while others downplayed their significance compared to their own suffering.
This pattern of denial is neither new nor unique to Syria. In Turkey, denial of the Armenian genocide remains official policy over a century later. In Japan, for decades the government denied the atrocities committed in Nanjing against the Chinese and any talk of it remained absent from official discourse.
The Collapse of Empathy
One of the most dangerous outcomes of this psychological process is the erosion of human empathy—our capacity to imagine ourselves in the place of others and feel their pain, which compels us to act. In prolonged conflicts, this capacity is gradually worn down, sometimes even replaced with mockery or glee at others’ suffering.
In Syria, some now view the suffering of others as deserved, the result of their “positions, ”often assumed rather than known, based on region, sect, ethnicity, or religion. When cities deemed “opposed to Assad” are bombed, some justify it as “cleansing terrorism.” When civilians in regime-held areas are killed, others rationalize it as “just punishment”—sometimes even celebrating it.
This lack of empathy is not always rooted in cruelty; it can be a coping mechanism, a way to shield oneself from ongoing trauma. When people are bombarded by atrocities daily, emotional numbing becomes a form of psychological survival. But often, it’s more than that.
In Rwanda, not all Hutus who participated in the genocide hated the Tutsis. Many were victims of a gradual process of desensitization and social pressure—to the point that even moderate Hutus were killed. This emotional detachment was not accidental—it was deliberately engineered.
In Bosnia, some Serbs were forced to watch videos of crimes allegedly committed by Muslims to fuel hatred. In Syria, children and teenagers in jihadist training camps were shown videos that justified violence against “infidels” or “heretics.” Similarly, studies on Nazi Germany reveal how the bureaucratic machine turned killing into a mechanical “job” performed by officials—or, horrifyingly, by Jewish prisoners themselves assigned to aid in exterminations—without consideration of the human cost.
This is when the most terrifying stage of genocide unfolds: the death of empathy. In Rwanda, killers sang songs as they murdered their neighbors. In Syria, daily scenes of death became “normal,” even fodder for memes and mockery on Facebook and Telegram.
Hate Speech and Social Media
Social media has played a central role in amplifying hate speech in Syria and broadening participation in it. Platforms like Facebook and Telegram became spaces for circulating violent images and videos, normalizing this violence and embedding it into daily life. Algorithms that push controversial content to the top only deepened polarization and generated more violence, bullying, hatred, and threats. The more extreme and emotionally provocative the content, the greater its reach.
Many Syrians began investing time and energy into attacking, mocking, or discrediting posts expressing sympathy for victims, sometimes even threatening their authors and commenters. This mirrors what happened in Myanmar, where Facebook helped fuel hate against the Rohingya ahead of the genocide. In Rwanda, radio served the same purpose: inciting violence against the Tutsi. In fact, it was the primary platform for that matter.
Collective Trauma and Coping Mechanisms
What must be discussed seriously is the depth of collective trauma Syrian society has endured over more than a decade, and how an entire generation has been raised in a context of violence and often extreme ideological, political, and emotional conditions. In such a context, societies develop coping mechanisms that may seem bizarre to outsiders.
Emotional numbness, even toward one’s own suffering, is one such mechanism. So is binary thinking (“black/white,” “with us/against us”), which simplifies a complex reality and makes it easier to navigate. Denial and moral justification also emerge when reality becomes too painful to confront. Faced with truth, the mind may reject it—or rationalize it.
In Bosnia, some Serbs continued to deny the Srebrenica massacre even after overwhelming evidence. In post-WWII Germany, many citizens adopted a strategy of collective silence to deal with the legacy of Nazism.
So Why Do People Participate in or Remain Passive Toward Genocide?
The psychological explanation is complex but is based on three primary factors: The normalization of violence; when violence becomes part of daily life, people become desensitized. Syrians witnessed violence for so long, it became familiar. Then comes social pressure and blind obedience; as Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments showed, people may commit immoral acts simply by following orders. whether those of a military, political, religious, tribal, or even administrative authority. Then comes the third factor, moral justification through revenge; in sectarian conflicts, violence is often framed as self-defense or righteous vengeance, making it easier to rationalize.
How Do We Break the Cycle of Genocide?
As bleak as the picture is, history tells us that societies can heal from even the deepest wounds. But healing does not begin with denial—it begins with courageously facing the past. The first step is to acknowledge these psychological patterns and begin to address them. In Germany, after World War II, educational programs were mandated to counter Nazi ideology, and international trials held perpetrators accountable. In South Africa, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions confronted the legacy of apartheid. In Rwanda, community-based Gacaca courts sought to combine justice with reconciliation. In Bosnia, grassroots intercommunal initiatives slowly rebuilt trust.
Returning to Syria, the process must involve transitional justice—public trials, wide-reaching community dialogue, a reformed and rights-respecting national military and police force, judicial and educational reform, and the establishment of fair and impartial accountability mechanisms to deal with hate speech, incitement, and violence.
For healing to begin, we must recognize everyone’s suffering. We cannot build a shared future without acknowledging that pain has touched us all, even if unevenly. We must break the cycle of vengeance that feeds violence. True justice does not come from revenge, but from a fair process that ends impunity. We must rebuild empathy, through community efforts that bring Syrians from all walks of life together—to listen to each other.
We face a choice: either to continue in a spiral of revenge, division, and hatred—or to walk a difficult path that may save what remains of our social fabric and our country. Understanding the psychological mechanisms that drive mass violence is not an intellectual luxury: it is an essential step toward dismantling them. Instead of remaining passive victims of these processes, we can choose to be agents of rupture.
Because in the end, no matter how much we differ, we are bound by a shared fate: either we drown together in a sea of hatred and violence—or we survive together by choosing our shared humanity above all division.
