Syrians must reckon: Assad regime was not the root of all evil

Back in 2014, in a crowded library near Beirut’s port, I attended a conference that sought to address a simple yet painful question: How do we explain what happened in Syria?

An opposition figure to the Assad regime, who was one of the main speakers, passionately put forward the case for justice for Syrians, explaining that they did not deserve to be under the constant threat of being killed by their own government.

While his words resonated with me, I was left confused. After the debate, I approached him and asked: “Why didn’t you speak about your father? When he was ruling Syria, my father was in prison.”

He froze — speechless.

Perhaps he was baffled that someone would mention his father at that moment, or that anyone who had fallen victim to his repression was still alive to tell the tale.

Certainly, the tragedy of Syria did not begin with the Assad family — its roots run deep. It can be traced across a century of “men in power.” And today, we can’t possibly deliver justice to Syrians (including the dead) without acknowledging this.

Ultimately, we cannot rebuild the country unless we look honestly and deeply into our past.

Targeting Arab unity

My father was just a young man from a village near the coast between Tartous and Talkalakh when Amin al-Hafez took power in 1963. He was a member of the Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), founded by George Habash.

During secret meetings, my father spoke of Arab unity, analysed documents, and smuggled into Syria copies of al-Hurriya, the ANM’s newspaper.
Back then, people would share political ideas and be heavily involved in activism. “We thought that it was only a matter of time before Arabs would regain their rightful place in world politics,” my father would say.

But al-Hafez heavily targeted the movement. In response, my father and his comrades joined the riots in Hama and Homs in 1964, to protest the ruler’s crackdown. Later one morning, police officers showed up at his door and arrested him along with a hundred men from the same village.

They were all taken to Homs Central Prison, where they were beaten.

“For the sake of God,” my father screamed.

“This is from God,” replied the officer, slapping his face.

“For the sake of the Prophet,” my father begged.

“This is from the Prophet,” said the torturer, as he beat his feet with a stick.

That same night, after being tortured, a group of prisoners — including my father — were brought before an investigator. A little while later, Abdel Halim Khaddam, the then governor of Homs and later Syria’s long-term vice president, entered the room.

Khaddam looked at the young men and mockingly said to one as he slapped him: “So, you’ll be the minister of agriculture.”

“And you, the youngest,” he told my father, “you must be the prime minister!” before he also slapped him hard across the face.

After this grotesque display, they were all thrown back into their cells.

The country was falling apart, but so was the ANM. This was largely due to its inability to transform itself from a small intellectual elite, into a genuine mass movement.

When my father was finally released in 1968, my grandfather stood waiting outside the prison gates.

“Walk,” he told him, holding his shoulders up. “Don’t let them think they have broken you”. The young man walked back to his mountain village — beaten, but proud.

A few days later, a police officer came to our home, pretending to rent a house my grandfather owned. My father recognised him immediately, he was among those who’d tortured him in prison.

My grandfather confronted him: “Why did you torture my son?”

“I was following orders,” the officer answered, lowering his eyes.

A few days later, my father crossed the border into Lebanon with a fake passport. He wouldn’t return to Syria for thirty years.

What about pre-Assad regimes?

To this day, no one has been held accountable for the torture inflicted on my father’s generation. Government after government, there has never been any real process of justice.

Hafiz al-Assad treated every enemy of previous regimes as his own, throwing even Nureddin al-Atassi—who served as President of Syria from 1966 to 1968 and was his close associate— into jail, where he remained until his final days.

In Syria, there’s been no reckoning with the crimes committed by past regimes.

Today, we have descendants of former dictators who have never acknowledged the oppression and destruction their fathers and mothers brought upon our country. Some even celebrate figures like Adib Shishakli , who seized power in 1954 and subsequently launched a violent campaign against the Druze community, as well as suppressed many Syrian political parties.

They present themselves as builders of a new Syria — one that claims to pursue transitional justice. Indeed, this is why justice in Syria remains largely elusive.

Since the establishment of Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, only minimal progress has been made toward achieving even partial accountability for past crimes. In May, the government created the National Commission for Transitional Justice (NCTJ), tasked with investigating serious violations committed under the former regime, ensuring accountability, providing reparations, and promoting non-recurrence.

However, the NCTJ, which was intended as a transitional instrument to examine all the grave violations, has focused exclusively on crimes perpetrated by the Assad regime. Violations committed by opposition groups, including Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham – founded by al-Sharaa – have largely been excluded from scrutiny.

In practice, this selective approach implies that only the Assads’ crimes, though undoubtedly the most numerous and violent, are subject to accountability.

Syrian state media has even broadcast images of former mukhabarat agents brought before the families of their victims, a symbolic act intended to demonstrate justice in action. Yet, soldiers implicated in more recent massacres of Alawites along the Syrian coast, or of Druze communities in Suwaida, have not been held publicly accountable.

This “victim-centric” strategy by Sharaa’s administration is designed to portray the government as uniquely capable of delivering justice in Syria’s history. However, such an approach undermines public trust, and many Syrians remain skeptical of official state narratives. This is especially the case given the events that unfolded since the new government took power.

Building a credible and transparent system of justice will require self-criticism, as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm, one of Syria’s more revered philosophers, put it. Examining all actors’ roles in past violence, regardless of their political alignment, is key to accountability. It requires confronting historical crimes that forced many Syrians into exile and left countless victims without redress even decades later. Only through such comprehensive and inclusive self-examination can Syria hope to establish a real justice system that the people can trust.

My father remains in a state of limbo, still waiting for justice to be served. Even now, in the middle of the night in a small apartment in Milan, he wakes screaming, staring into the darkness—searching for the light of a saviour and for an official apology that will likely never come.

Shady Hamadi is an Italian-Syrian writer and the author of a trilogy exploring Syrian history and his family, all published in Italian. He is also a regular columnist for Ilfattoquotidiano.it.

Follow him on X: @HamadiShady

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