Ziad Majed: Since the Second World War, there has never been such a concentration of ruins in one region of the world

The Arab world is going through one of the darkest periods in its history. Lebanon is at war, society is fractured, and the South is threatened by a lasting Israeli occupation. The April 8 massacre — 357 dead and nearly 2,000 wounded — adds to the litany of tragic dates that have marked the country’s chronology from 1975 to the present day. The ceasefire between the United States and Iran, signed on April 8, remains particularly fragile and does not include Lebanon, at least for the time being. The opening of direct negotiations between Tel Aviv and Beirut is deeply dividing society and casting Hezbollah as more threatening than ever. At the regional level, despite the multitude of reports by international organizations and experts accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza and denouncing an apartheid regime, each day seems to carry us a little further away from a just solution in Palestine. As for Syria, although the Assad era is over, the country’s future remains uncertain. While each situation follows its own logic, there nevertheless remains the sense of a “Levantine,” and more broadly Arab, destiny shared in hardship.

A Franco-Lebanese political scientist and researcher, and the author of Le Proche-Orient, Miroir du Monde (La Découverte, 2025), Ziad Majed has lived in France since 2006, where he heads the Middle East Studies Program at the American University of Paris. Together with the intellectual and journalist Samir Kassir — assassinated on June 2, 2005, in an attack widely attributed to the Assad regime — the novelist Elias Khoury, and activists from different generations, he co-founded the Democratic Left Movement in 2004 and took an active part, in 2005, in the Independence Uprising. In L’Orient-Le Jour, he analyzes the roots of the current cataclysm.

Interview by Soulayma Mardam Bey.

Syria, One Year On: The Democratic Condition, Reconstruction, and the Specter of Civil Conflagration

A significant share of the political analyses that accompanied and followed the collapse of the Assadist dictatorship, marked by the flight of its leader, his entourage, and the capital they had methodically amassed, proceeded from the assumption that democracy had suddenly become attainable in Syria. According to this reading, efforts to establish it, or at least to lay its initial foundations, could rely on Western powers, in exchange for the lifting of their sanctions, thereby opening the path to reconstruction and to rescuing a shattered economy.

Conversely, other analyses advanced the hypothesis of a Syria condemned to generalized civil war, to the durable tightening of sanctions, and to deepening isolation. They portrayed the new authorities, emerging from a jihadist milieu, as nothing more than an unfinished variant of Assadism and of its totalitarian model patiently constructed over half a century.

In reality, both hypotheses rest on largely unfounded representations, or on interpretations abusively elevated to essentialist characteristics—whether with regard to Syria’s internal dynamics or to the country’s relations with its regional and international environment.

Syria: The destruction of prisons illustrates the end of an era marked by repression

"Fifty-four years after the military coup perpetrated by Hafez al-Assad, 24 years after his son Bashar succeeded him and 13 years after the beginning of the Syrian revolution, the fall of the regime in Damascus is a historic event, both for Syria and for the region as a whole" - Ziad Majed in Le Monde.

The "Zone of Interest" between Palestine and Syria and the human condition

 The film "Zone of Interest" by the British director Jonathan Glazer, winner of this year's Oscar, has caused considerable controversy among writers and professionals in the fields of culture and cinema in Britain and America. Not because of its content, cinematography, or character construction, but because of what its director said when he received the Oscar.

Glazer (who is Jewish by birth) stated that the understanding of his film is not only achieved by dealing with the past or historical atrocities, but also by viewing it in the context of what is happening in Gaza today. He expressed his rejection of the use of the "Holocaust" to justify ongoing wars, dehumanization, and the perpetration of crimes.

In response, more than a thousand cinema personalities who identified themselves as Jewish rejected the comparison they said he made between the Nazi Holocaust and the war in Palestine since October 7, 2023.

On the other hand, intellectuals and progressive Jewish organizations defended Glazer, arguing that the refusal to confront the past with the present and the attempt to confiscate the memory of the "Holocaust" are nothing but attempts to hide the crimes and the "genocidal war" waged by Israel against the Palestinians.

Naomi Klein, the Canadian feminist journalist and academic, wrote a powerful article in The Guardian in which she compared people's habit of living close to the genocide they know is happening (separated from its horror by a wall), as depicted in the film, with our lives today, just a few walls away from Gaza, where acts of genocide have been occurring for almost six months now, yet no one has intervened to stop them.

On the French Judges' decision to issue arrest warrant for Bashar Al-Assad for crimes against humanity

The decision by French criminal investigative judges to issue arrest warrants for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher al-Assad, and two other senior officials for the use of banned chemical weapons against civilians in the town of Douma and the Eastern Ghouta district (killing more than 1,400 people in August 2013) sets a very important precedent.

ٌRussia, Ukraine and Syria - A reminder

The Russian army has been training and testing its military arsenal for 7 years against Syrian civilians, hospitals, infrastructure, schools, roads and agricultural lands and against the command centers and positions of Syrian opposition fighters in the north, south, center and around the capital Damascus.

It has turned millions of Syrians as well as their towns and villages into targets, regularly praising the effectiveness of its tactical and strategic weapons.

More than 20,000 Syrians (civilians and fighters) have been killed in these strikes, and hundreds of thousands have been injured and/or displaced. Dozens of hospitals and medical centers have been destroyed or put out of service and entire neighborhoods have been ravaged or even razed.

All this happened with impunity, without Putin being worried or sanctioned.

This is a reality to keep in mind when analyzing the invasion of Ukraine today, even if the political (and geopolitical) context is very different.

Syriens Verwaiste Revolution

 

Syrie la Révolution Orpheline

publié en allemand (édition mise à jour) chez 

Editions Nautilus, Hamburg

Traduit par Harald Etzbach

Abdelbasset Al-Sarout: chronicle of a betrayed revolution

The "character" of Abdelbasset Al-Sarout probably best embodies the course of the Syrian revolution, its radiant and spontaneous beginnings, its mistakes and errors, and finally its tragic endings.

Al-Sarout was born in Homs in 1992 in a neighborhood -Al-Bayyada- whose inhabitants are mostly from the surrounding rural world. Like Baba Amr, it is also shared by another fringe of the population, former Bedouins who have come to settle in this third largest city in Syria.

Preceded by his popularity as the adored goalkeeper of the homsiote Al-Karame Club, he entered the revolution with determination and enthousiasm. With his hoarse and melancholic voice, he led the processions, flying over them like an eagle, carried on the shoulders of his fans who used to applaud him in the football stadiums. They cheered their hero and chanted with him "freedom, equality" and other slogans calling for the fall of the Assad regime.

Palestine et Syrie - Palestine and Syria

Il y a eu, ces dernières années, celles et ceux qui se mobilisaient pour la Palestine, mais ne voyaient pas la Syrie sur la carte, ni le sang des centaines de milliers de syriens et de palestiniens de Syrie qui coulait à Alep, à Homs, à Yarmouk, dans la Ghouta de Damas et à Idlib.

Et puis il y a eu celles et ceux qui se mobilisaient pour la Palestine, s'opposaient aux massacres de Bachar Al-Assad, mais ne disaient pas un mot sur les acteurs qui permettaient à Bachar de survivre et de commettre ses massacres: la Russie, l'Iran et le Hezbollah libanais.

Aujourd'hui, il y a celles et ceux qui se sont mobilisés pour la Syrie, mais qui restent muets sur la Palestine et sur les crimes de guerre, l’occupation, la colonisation et l’Apartheid Israéliens.

Est-il si difficile d’être constant/cohérent dans les positions politiques et éthiques et de considérer que les droits humains, la fin de l'oppression et de l'impunité sont les principes qui doivent guider ces positions ? 

In recent years, there have been those who mobilized for Palestine, but did not see Syria on the map, nor the blood of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Palestinians in Syria that flowed in Aleppo, Homs, Yarmouk, the Ghouta of Damascus and Idlib.

And then there were those who mobilized for Palestine, condemned the massacres of Bashar Al-Assad, but did not say a word about the actors who allowed Bashar to survive and commit his massacres: Russia, Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah.

Today, there are those who were mobilized for Syria, but who remain silent on Palestine and on Israeli war crimes, occupation, colonial expansion and Apartheid.

Is it so difficult to be consistent and coherent in political and ethical positions and to consider that human rights, the end of oppression and impunity are the principles that should guide all stances?

ZM

On the Syrian regime, its structure and networks in 2021

Professor at the American University of Paris, author of Dans la tête de Bachar al-Assad (with Subhi Hadidi and Farouk Mardam Bey, Actes Sud, 2018) and Syria: La révolution orpheline (Actes Sud, 2014), Ziad Majed evokes the situation in Syria and within the regime circles and networks.

An interview published (originally in French) in Moyen-Orient, April 2021.

Between 2011 and 2021, the regime of Bashar Al-Assad (in power since 2000) went from threatened and moribund to strengthened and durable. How did he manage to adapt in a time of war?

There are several factors that have allowed Bashar Al-Assad to maintain himself in Damascus and to survive the revolution and then the war, which he himself initiated against a large part of the Syrian society.

The first is violence, which has been his only policy since the first day of the popular uprising and long before its militarization. It became unprecedentedly intense from the summer of 2012 onwards when he started his aerial bombing campaigns, the systematic destruction of hospitals, schools and infrastructure in the areas that escaped his control, the sieges he imposed on several localities, and the torture on an industrial scale in his jails. He has thus reproduced a scenario similar to the one reserved for the city of Hamah in February 1982 (which, under his father Hafez, had suffered a siege, destruction and massacres killing and injuring tens of thousands of civilians under the pretext of facing a rebellion of the Muslim brothers). Except that this time the scenario was extended to the national scale.

War in Syria: Assad, ten years later, reigns over a heap of ruins

"A well-informed political scientist, Ziad Majed gives an overview of the Syrian conflict, which broke out on March 15, 2011, ten years ago. For him, Assad's regime is, by far, the first responsible for the disaster. And he and the djihadist camp need each other. He answers questions from Baudouin Loos in the special report entitled "The long Syrian night, a debacle for humanity" in the daily Le Soir".

What next for Assad, Syria?

 Ziad Majed's responses to Dalal Saoud's questions for the United Press International

- After 10 years of a destructive civil war, the country is in ruins and in danger of collapse. Assad survived the war and remained in power despite committing war crimes, grave human rights violations and the use of internationally banned weapons. But is he really in control of the country since he lost most of his power to his Russian and Iranian allies who came to his rescue and backed him in the battlefield ?

Foreword to the book Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State

The following text is Nassima Neggaz and Ziad Majed's foreword to "Syria: Borders, Boundaries, and the State", edited by Matthieu Cimino and published by Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2020.

The book gathers a series of papers presented in a conference organized at the University of Oxford in November 2017.

The Crossing of the "Red Line" in Syria: The Use of Chemical Weapons as Turning Point

The following paragraphs are translated excerpts from "Syrie, la revolution orpheline” (Syria, the Orphaned revolution) published in Arabic in December 2013 and in French in March 2014.

 

In August 2012, Obama responded to the violence of the Assad regime by drawing a single “red line”: that of chemical weapons use. This line clearly indicated that America wanted to avoid intervening directly in the conflict; it also suggested—albeit implicitly—that while the use of “strategic” weaponry would not be tolerated by Washington, the continuation of massacres with traditional weapons would be.

Feeling unthreatened by a possible American intervention, the regime deployed its arsenal in the repression—i.e., ballistic missiles, tanks, and other heavy weapons. It even probed US determination regarding chemical weapons by using Sarin gas on a few occasions, as many medical reports have demonstrated [1].

What Is Behind the Tensions Inside Syria's Regime?

In Carnegie's Diwan regular survey of experts on matters relating to Middle Eastern and North African politics and security, Ziad Majed (among other researchers) analyzes the dynamics of the Assad-Makhlouf rift.

"The tensions inside the inner circle of the Syrian regime reflect three dynamics. The first pertains to the family. Since the Russian military intervention in 2015, followed by the death of Bashar al-Assad’s powerful mother in 2016, the Makhloufs (his mother’s family) have been gradually ousted from positions of authority. The measures against Rami, who once controlled more than 50 percent of Syria’s economy, complete this process—after his brother Hafez and father Mohammed. He is being replaced by businessmen close to Asma, Bashar’s influential wife, in an attempt to enlarge the regime’s clientelistic networks.

The second is related to Russian pressure on Assad. Moscow wants to restructure state institutions, reorganize the army, and centralize the decisionmaking mechanisms under its command, in order to negotiate reconstruction contracts with possible Western and Chinese partners and bring Russian companies and entrepreneurs into a fully controlled theater of operations. To achieve such a situation, Iranian influence within regime circles has to be reduced and Syrian tycoons with monopoles (and Iranian ties) should be sidelined. For Assad, this provides an opening to get rid of his cousin, with his bad reputation, and say he is doing his best to fulfill Russian requirements.

The third can be read through the analysis of the regime’s history and the tensions and defections it faced. After the removal of Rif‘at al-Assad, Bashar’s uncle, in 1984, of Ghazi Kan‘an, the strongman of the security services, in 2005, and of Assef Shawqat, Bashar’s brother in law, in 2012, the Makhloufs are now being targeted. This is not surprising in totalitarian regimes with sectarian, tribal, and familial considerations—often built on the basis of delicate equations.

All this means that the regime will be facing increasing pressure and internal struggles in the coming months. Russia needs official international recognition of its hegemony over Syria and its reconstruction projects. Iran will not agree to be marginalized. And Bashar is mainly concerned with his “reelection” in 2021. Meanwhile, other foreign actors, such as Turkey and the United States, are also reassessing their roles and reshaping relations with their local allies in Syria’s northwest and northeast in preparation for the next phases".

To read the full report on Carnegie's website, please click here.

Syria: 9 years of revolution and war

An interview with Ziad Majed on Syria - France 24 English

Syria: The regime of looting and devouring corpses

Myriad are the horrors imposed on Syrians by the Assad regime over the years, throughout its decades in power. It is particularly frightening the amount of violence inflicted upon them (and upon the Palestinians of Syria) during the past seven years. It suffices to recount the names of cities and towns across the map of the country in order to bring to mind the massacres carried out in those places, and the instances of siege, starvation, displacement, torture and killing by barrel bombs or chemical weapons.

Conférences sur la Syrie en Mars 2019, à Londres, Paris et Bourges

- London, SOAS Syria Society

"The Impacts of Trump's Withdrawal from Syria", Talk + Q&A with Gilbert Achcar and Ziad Majed.

Date: Tuesday 5 March 2019 at 19h.

Place: SOAS University of London, Khalili Lecture Theatre.

For more information, please click here

- Paris, Association Revivre
"La question syrienne en 2019", discussion avec Ziad Majed.
Date: Samedi 9 mars 2019 à 16h.
Lieu: AEPP - 4 rue Titon à Paris 11ème.
Pour plus d'information, veuillez cliquer ici.

- Paris, Institut du Monde Arabe
"Dans la tête de Bachar Al-Assad", débat animé par Leila Vignal, avec Ammar Abd Rabbo, Sarah Kilani et Ziad Majed.
Date; Jeudi 14 mars 2019 à 19h.
Lieu: IMA, (salle du haut conseil, Niveau 9), 1 Rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, 75005 Paris (Niveau 9).
Pour plus d'information et pour vous inscrire, veuillez cliquer ici.

- Paris, Assemblée Nationale et Association Revivre
"Syrie, notre propre humanité en question", débat animé pas Isabelle Hausser, avec Joël Hubrecht, Garance Le Caisne, Michel Morzière et Ziad Majed.
Date: Lundi 25 mars 2019 à 19h.
Lieu: Assemblée Nationale (salle Colbert), 126, rue de l'Université, 75007 PARIS
Pour plus d'information et pour vous inscrire, veuillez cliquer ici.

- Bourges, Association Medina

"Dans la tête de Bachar Al-Assad", avec Farouk Mardam-Bey et Ziad Majed.
Date: Mardi 26 mars 2019 à 18h30.
Lieu: Amphithéâtre CHAMARD de l’IUT de Bourges, 63 avenue de Lattre de Tassigny.
Pour plus d'information, veuillez cliquer ici.

The man from Raqqa

This man's look has haunted me for three days, and despite my attempts to forget it, I keep searching for it constantly. I did not know, before yesterday, that he died hours after this photo was shot. He is one of those forgotten on the banks of the Euphrates, in the Syrian city of Raqqa, where death floods people’s lives from every direction shredding them as well as their homes into pieces...

The man looks at us in astonishment, with sadness, with sorrow, with blame, or perhaps with carelessness. His face, with horrors engraved in it, is an apocalyptic ruin, just like the faces we would imagine in a Greek tragedy, or rather nothing like what we know or imagine. How can we understand the look of a man who was broken by the bombing that brought him closer to his death, who sees the camera lens focused on his own ruins and sends us through it his last beam of soul!?

Did he know he would be extinguished a bit later? Did he want to leave us with a glimpse of what he was going through? Did he want us to interpret what his eyes said in that second, or do we do that to explain to ourselves why we stare at his image, write about it and about our helplessness and despair?

This man from Raqqa is, despite representing the Syrian tragedy in his face and his look, still an individual who was devastated by horrible bombardment, who had a life, a career, had his mistakes, dreams and unfinished projects. He probably had some papers left in a drawer, secrets kept by walls and streets. He had other photos, either alone or with his family and friends.

This man from Raqqa had a name, Obeid AlKaaka-Jeh, that disappeared behind his eyes and became the property of a collective memory, shared between those who witnessed his death and those who saw their own tragedy mirrored on the pain of his last mysterious look.

Ziad Majed

Thanks to Fadel Abuelula for translating the text from Arabic

Iran and its four Arab fronts

Foreword

This text seeks to read the strategies adopted by Iran in the Middle East since the year 2003, especially in Arab arenas that have witnessed open political, sectarian, and military conflicts[1]. In these conflicts, Iran has old and new weighty allies that it supports or has intervened directly in order to protect and guarantee their supremacy.

The text focuses on four arenas: Iraq and Syria, where Iran has escalated its direct intervention since 2011; Lebanon, where Iran’s most powerful local ally has been employed in the Syrian conflict; and Yemen, where Iran is trapping Saudi Arabia in a war that will be very hard to win.