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Syria in the Abyss
Since December 8th and up to May 4th, 2025, Syrians have been following news of Israeli airstrikes in the south as if it were a routine weather report.
No one stopped to ask: How did Syria reach this point? How did the south become a testing ground for Israel’s grand dreams and a front for proxy wars under sectarian and militia banners? How did the last wall of national unity collapse, leaving only its name on the maps of negotiators and investors?
What is happening today isn’t a trivial detail in the transitional phase after Assad’s fall. It is the silhouette of a civil war forming before our eyes, and no one dares to put an end to it. It began in the coastal cities, and now in Sweida—the city that preserved the spirit of the revolution when it was extinguished everywhere else—gasping its last breaths under the guise of “legitimate demands” at times, “dignity” at others, and “the state” whose shape, constitution, and justice we do not even know.
In the background, the government of Ahmad al-Shar’a, formed from the victory over tyranny, now acts as a refined clone of Assad’s regime. The difference isn’t in repression, but in justification. This government, which millions of Syrians once welcomed, has abandoned dialogue and resorted to escalation against Sweida. It directs its fire towards the Druze of Jabal al-Arab under the cover of incitement and demonization of minorities, recycling the discourse of “terrorists, agents, remnants of the previous regime, and separatists,” but under new names and religious banners.
The issue is no longer sectarian or even confessional alone. It is about the shape of the coming Syrian state: a state of contracts or a state of dominance? A state of citizens or a state of strength? If the new project mimics Assad’s authority in its structure, ideology, weaponry, and the practice of suspicion, then what has changed? Was the fall of the regime merely a replacement of the general’s name with a bearded one?
In this vacuum, Israel moves with unprecedented confidence. Its strikes on Mount Hermon, Quneitra, Rif Damascus, and Daraa are not just “deterrent messages,” as some say. They are field tests to reshape southern Syria politically and geographically. Israeli talk of protecting the Druze is only a cover for drawing new security borders—reminding us of projects like “L Saturday” army, the “safe zone,” or even the “Dawood Passage” plan that begins in the Golan and ends only in Iraqi Kurdistan. Between calls for protecting minorities and dismantling geography, Israel stands as a confident actor, backed by the US, with no cost and no reply.
Meanwhile, Turkey doesn’t seem far from the ongoing bloodbath. It strengthens its military presence in the north, pushes its political threads in the south, and engages in behind-the-scenes negotiations to expand its influence. It refuses to leave the vacuum to Israel and seeks to be the de facto guarantor of any new borders—especially since the south remains the “last area” whose loyalty is yet to be decided. What is happening isn’t just internal collapse; it’s an external race over what remains of the homeland.
As for America, as we’re accustomed, it doesn’t support state-building but manages chaos. Its moves aren’t driven by justice but by balancing power. It gives Israel a green light under the pretext of “national security,” turns a blind eye to the extremism of some factions of Al-Shar’a’s government, and keeps the Tanf base as a control point along regional transport routes—not to prevent war, but to organize it.
The Syrian interior is now ready to explode. All the conditions for a major civil war are in place: suspicion discourse, media incitement, regional clashes, invasions, the absence of rational voices, and collective cheers for the coming holocaust. Each party prepares to “decide its battle” against the others, without a second thought about what remains of Syria. Blood is being prepared to be spilled in Quneitra, Saydnaya, Daraa, then Idlib, Aleppo, and Deir ez-Zor—because fire knows no borders once it ignites, and gunpowder treats Sunnis, Druze, Alawites, Kurds, and Bedouins equally.
Syria’s sons, who once dreamed of freedom in a spring, are now inciting each other to kill in the name of “restoring the state,” “defending dignity,” or “ethnic cleansing of separatists.” It’s as if we learned nothing. As if the fourteen years of revolution, displacement, and massacres weren’t enough to teach us the meaning of coexistence.
If we do not do it now, today will not only be remembered as the date of the south’s explosion but also as the official beginning of Syria’s division.
The curse of history will not mercy us when we ask: Where were you while you watched your homeland being sold piece by piece?
Time has not run out yet. But it’s breathing its last. And the final cry is still possible. Listen to it.
Syria is not a laboratory or a sectarian trophy. Syria is a homeland for all, or it is nothing.
Shadi Adel Al-Khash
