There’s no doubt that the road to justice in Syria is long, difficult, and complex; one that will take years to complete. The war of the past decade robbed Syrians not only of over a million lives from all sides, but also of the psychological safety and national cohesion essential for any society to rebuild itself in line with modern social, scientific, and political progress.
While the world races ahead, countries like ours, mired in civil wars and caught in the crossfire of global power struggles, remain light-years behind even the least developed of the “second world” states.
For a country like Syria, emerging from catastrophe and left in ruins at every level, the need is clear: strategic plans drawn up by experts across all fields to guide a comprehensive rebuilding process. But such a vision is impossible without activating a genuine transitional justice process, something the current transitional government, now in its ninth month, shows no real intention of pursuing.
Instead, it has dismantled every national institution in the name of breaking with the Assad regime: the army, the police, the judiciary, and top legal advisory bodies; the very structures needed to build a fair system and implement transitional justice. In their place, it has installed sectarian, one-color structures staffed by unqualified or inexperienced loyalists.
At the same time, the government has normalized ties with former criminals or financiers of the old regime’s crimes, while arbitrarily arresting people for alleged past offenses without due process. This approach has rendered victims’ rights fragile and justice hollow, opening the door to revenge killings and uncontrolled acts of violence.
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From the start, the government’s so-called “forgiveness” policy was empty talk; real reconciliation requires truth-telling, accountability, apologies, and reparations. A genuine national dialogue could have paved the way for a unified project to end grievances. Instead, Syria got a farcical conference and tribal-style deals, substituting real state processes with archaic customs.
The result has been a collapse of national discourse into violent sectarian rhetoric, sanctioned by the transitional government itself. This has fuelled new massacres with a clear sectarian dimension, from the coast to Suwayda, deepening mistrust and pushing people back toward pre-state identities: tribal, sectarian, and religious.
The deliberate neglect of the transitional justice file can be understood as one of the conditions imposed on Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham before taking power. Setting aside the theory of “liberation in ten days,” the reality is that an international consensus removed the Assad regime and installed an Idlib-based government in its place. Among the conditions of this “handover” appears to have been freezing the transitional justice file and the missing persons’ file; two files that remain untouched to this day.
However, the HTS government, accustomed to factional rule in Idlib, failed to realize that Syria is far more than a small province, and that its complexities and divisions demand significant political expertise to manage. This miscalculation led to the coastal massacres, followed by the Suwayda massacres, and the bombing of Douweil’a Church. All of this occurred alongside daily violations: abductions of women, sectarian killings, and unprecedented lawlessness across every sector, all justified by official media that brands critics as traitors.
These mobile massacres, especially along the coast, served as a form of compensation for the majority audience that had been denied true justice. Yet this so-called compensation only deepened the fractures within Syrian society, created new grievances, and gave rise to a new generation of criminals who acted openly and brazenly, fully aware that they were safe from punishment as long as the transitional government continued to support them.
There is no need to dwell on the government’s delay in issuing the report on the coastal massacres, as this file has become nothing short of a scandal. It only came to light during the commission of an even more horrifying massacre in the Suwayda governorate, carried out by the same actors and under the same “popular mobilizations.” This was accompanied by an official and public discourse that was even more violent and accusatory toward the Druze, alongside a siege reminiscent of those once imposed by Assad’s militias and Hezbollah on entire Syrian cities.
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All of this also occurs with the direct orders and approval of the transitional government. Those committing the massacres are members of its army and security forces; those calling for “tribal mobilizations” are its officials; and those accusing the people of Suwayda of disloyalty are its media and supporters. As happened in the coastal region, a committee was formed to investigate the violations; but, as expected, no one will be held accountable, punished, or imprisoned for the crimes they committed.
What stands out in the current Syrian situation is that the transitional government, instead of implementing transitional justice and working on national reconciliation as a step toward building the state it constantly talks about, has actively created new societal grievances, turning past victims into present-day oppressors and criminals. It is as if its goal is to strip every individual or group in Syrian society of integrity, plunging into the depths of society to expose its worst aspect; making it impossible to rewrite a new social contract, and rendering coexistence a strange and rejected concept in the new Syrian lexicon.
The current government is deliberately cultivating a fascist, populist society capable of destroying any inclusive national project. This is completely incompatible with the concept of justice. Authority-backed populist fascism produces only a failed state, a fractured society, warlords, sectarian leaders, militia and faction commanders with no national allegiance, and de facto powers that render the state absent and its idea forgotten, reducing the term “justice” to a romanticized notion mentioned only in literature, nothing more.
