The Death of Syria: A Confession in Exile

Syria fell due to our ignorance, to the sectarian blindness, to our failure to see each other as human before labeling each other as enemies.

Let me tell you something you already know, but we’re all too scared to say out loud: Syria is gone. Not only physically but also the soul, its shared identity, its possibility of coexistence. And we killed it. Not just the "regime", not just the "rebels", not just foreign actors, but the collective “we,” inside and out, that let ideology, revenge, and ignorance reign.

I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as an “outsider.” Born in Aleppo in 1987, I lived side by side with Kurds, Sunnis, Christians, Armenians, Alawites. My University was mixed, my friends fasted during Ramadan, and I joined them. There was no talk of who's more Syrian, who belongs. We simply were.

But war changes people. It strips the skin off identity and exposes the bone-deep rot. One day you’re sharing meals, the next, you're asked if you're an “outsider,” as if four generations of being born and buried in Syria isn’t enough to count. As if the jihadi from Chechnya who just crossed the border with a Kalashnikov has more claim to the country than I do.

The violence wasn’t just in the bullets or the bombings, it was in the shift. Friends turned strangers, neighbors turned jailers. Minorities became bargaining chips in a war not of their making, demonized for alleged crimes they never committed.

Take the Alawites, for example. A community now collectively punished, starved, and scapegoated. Are they not Syrians too? They’re being hunted, burned out of their lands, erased in silence.

We forget—or choose to forget—that the Assad regime was not a sectarian monolith. Most of its political and financial machinery was Sunni. Yet somehow, the Alawites carry the original sin. Somehow, the Druze are now suspects too. The nuance dies where ideology begins.

Let me be clear: This is not a defense of Assad. It’s a plea for honesty. If we can’t separate the actions of the former regime from the ethnicities and sects that happen to be associated with it, we are no better than those who use religion as a sword. If ISIS were 100% Sunni, and we didn’t blame all Sunnis, why then do we blame all Alawites for Assad?

This is genocide through silence, displacement through distortion. And it didn’t start with Assad. The Alawites fled to the mountains generations ago for a reason. They were persecuted centuries before the word “Ba’ath” even existed. These aren’t new tensions, they're old wounds, reopened and infected by Qatari propaganda and petrodollar-funded fanaticism.

Some people still talk about rebuilding Syria. With what? Social media receipts of our betrayals? Video footage of churches and mosques destroyed? Our sectarian hatreds are archived now, tagged, captioned, and searchable. There is no forgetting. There is no healing when the wound is kept on loop.

There’s a brutal kind of clarity in exile. When you're stripped of flag and myth, what remains is truth. And the truth is: Syria, as we knew it, is over. It fell due to our ignorance, to the sectarian blindness, to our failure to see each other as human before labeling each other as enemies.

We mourn a country that no longer exists. We carry its corpse in our memories. But don’t be fooled, we’re not looking backwards. We’re just refusing to lie about what’s ahead.

—Kevork Almassian is a Syrian journalist, geopolitical analyst, and the founder of Syriana Analysis.