None of that happened then — but some has now. On 6 March, an Assadist insurgency killed hundreds in Latakia and other coastal cities. Beyond crushing the insurrection, government forces also committed sectarian atrocities, summarily executing their armed opponents and killing many Alawite civilians. This is the first sectarian massacre of the new Syria, and it casts a fearsome shadow over the future. The revolution was supposed to overcome the targeting of sects for political reasons. Now, many fear the cycle will continue.

The previous regime was a sectarianizing regime par excellence, both under Hafez al-Assad, who ruled from 1970, and under his son Bashar, who inherited the throne in 2000. This doesn’t mean that the Assads attempted to impose a particular set of religious beliefs: but they did divide and rule, exacerbating and weaponizing resentments between sects (as well as between ethnicities, regions, families, tribes). They carefully instrumentalized social differences for the purposes of power, making them politically salient.

The Assads made the Alawite community into which they were born complicit in their rule — or, at least, to appear to be so. Independent Alawite religious leaders were killed, exiled or imprisoned, swiftly replaced with loyalists. Membership in the Baath Party and a career in the army were promoted as key markers of Alawite identity. The top ranks of the military and security services were almost all Alawite.

In 1982, during their war against the Muslim Brotherhood, Assadists killed tens of thousands of Sunni civilians in Hama. That violence pacified the country until the Syrian Revolution erupted in 2011. The counter-revolutionary war which followed can plausibly be thought of as a genocide of Sunni Muslims. From the start, collective punishment was imposed on Sunni communities where protests broke out, in a way that didn’t happen when there were protests in Alawi, Christian or mixed areas.

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The punishment involved burning property, arresting people randomly and en masse, then torturing and raping detainees. As militarization continued, the same Sunni areas were barrel-bombed, attacked with chemical weapons, and subjected to starvation sieges. Throughout the war years, the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of dead, and of the millions expelled from their homes, were Sunnis. Alawi officers and warlords were backed in this genocidal endeavor by Shia militants from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, all of them organized, funded and armed by Iran. These militias — with their sectarian flags and battle cries — were very open about their hatred of Sunnis.

The worst of sectarian provocations were the massacres perpetrated in a string of towns and villages in central Syria, particularly in 2012 and 2013. The regime’s modus operandi was that the army would first shell a town to make opposition militias withdraw. From there, Alawi thugs from nearby towns would move in to cut the throats of women and children. It’s important to note that these were not spontaneous outbreaks of violence between neighboring communities, but rather carefully organized assaults. They were intended to induce a Sunni backlash, frightening Alawites and other minorities into loyalty. This fitted with the regime’s primary counter-revolutionary strategy. Early on, it had released Islamist jihadis from prison while rounding up enormous numbers of non-violent, non-sectarian activists. For the same reason, it rarely fought ISIS — which in turn usually focused on taking territory from revolutionary forces.

Soon enough, Sunni extremist organizations provided the response the regime wanted. For example, an August 2013 jihadist offensive in the Latakia countryside killed at least 190 Alawite civilians, and abducted many more. When they saw such horrors, many members of minority groups, and some Sunnis too, felt they had no option but to fight to preserve the regime.

But in recent years HTS — the de facto authority since December 2024 — seemed to have abandoned the divide-and-rule strategy. The Islamist militia improved relations with non-Muslims in Idlib, while also sending positive messages to Alawites. It also offered an amnesty to all former regime fighters, except senior war criminals. It looked, finally, as if the new Syria might avoid further sectarian conflict. After all, throughout the revolution, many Sunnis had worked for the regime, and many Alawis had opposed it, at enormous cost, from the army officer Zubeida Meeki to the actor Fadwa Suleiman.

Nevertheless, the ingredients for an Assadist insurgency in Alawite areas were present. Men had lost their jobs in the collapsed regime army, and many feared Syria’s new rulers. Iranian funds and Hezbollah organization provided the support they needed to challenge HTS. That led to the attacks last week, with several coordinated Assadist attacks killing up to 400 members of the new security forces alongside dozens of civilians. Some of the victims were burnt alive, while hospitals and ambulances were targeted too.

Across Syria, there was a furious popular response. Impromptu demonstrations condemned the insurgency and chaotic convoys of militants and armed civilians headed for the coast. Government fighters and their allies largely succeeded in clearing the rebels from urban areas, but they also committed atrocities. Disarmed Assadist fighters were summarily executed. So too were Alawite civilians, including women and children.

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the most consistently reliable monitoring organization, 211 civilians were killed by Assad loyalists, and at least 420 people by Syrian security forces. The latter includes both civilians and disarmed fighters who were killed out of hand. It is difficult to distinguish the two: most Assadist fighters wore civilian clothes. Yet at least 49 women and 39 children are among the dead.

The Assadist assault was never going to restore the old regime — it had totally collapsed, and is widely hated across all parts of society. The true aim of the insurgency’s backers, rather, may have been to provoke a sectarian response. That, after all, was the strategy of the previous decade. If so, the rebels got what they wanted. It seems that most atrocities were perpetrated by the notoriously ill-disciplined Syrian National Army (SNA) factions, and by foreign fighters including Chechens. The extent of official HTS involvement remains unclear. But in a way, that is already irrelevant. The crimes against innocents could now turbo-charge an insurgency, preventing Syria from stabilizing, even as it serves the vultures surrounding the country.

Chief among these are Iran — which lost its most important Arab ally, and its route to Lebanon, when Assad fell — and Israel. The Netanyahu government is assiduously working to partition Syria along sectarian lines, trying, without much success, to exploit fissures in Druze and Kurdish politics. For their different reasons, these enemy states share the same desire to keep Syria weak.

Iran and Israel, as well as a range of Western Islamophobes and “Tankies” are seeking to fan the flames with disinformation. Commentators from Elon Musk to George Galloway are helping spread claims that Syrian Christians are being massacred. There is zero evidence of this, but like some of the atrocity stories on October 7, including that Hamas beheaded dozens of Israeli babies, the narrative may become fixed in certain corners of the Western mind.

The next weeks and months will determine if Syria’s future will be something like civil war Iraq, or else something better. President Ahmad al-Sharaa has been doing a good job of giving the impression of stability — stressing that no one is above the law and establishing a committee to investigate the violence. It is now necessary to actually implement real change, not least given Sharaa has yet to bring the opposition militias together under a single disciplined command.

Beyond those crisis measures, Syria urgently requires an independent transitional justice process. After decades of violence, Syrians need to air their grievances, to establish the facts of what happened, and to see justice done. Only then can a national consensus be built on past tragedies and future direction; only then will the lure of vigilante justice be neutralized.

So far, several war criminals have been arrested, but none have yet been put on trial. In some cases, criminals have been released shortly after their arrest. One example is Fadi Saqr. An Assadist commander, and implicated in an infamous massacre in the Damascus suburb of Tadamon, he went walking in the neighborhood after his release, prompting protests by locals.

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Sharaa identified transitional justice as one of the government’s priorities in a 30 January speech, yet on 27 February the authorities prevented a conference on the topic from taking place in Damascus. Organized by the Syrian Centre for Legal Studies and Research, the body is headed by Anwar al-Bunni, the human rights lawyer who contributed to the first ever trial of an Assadist war criminal. The government has yet to explain why it prevented the conference from happening.

There are good reasons for Sharaa to feel he can’t afford genuine transitional justice. For a start, HTS bears its own share of historical guilt. Perhaps in retrospect, one can justify its gobbling up of other opposition militias for the sake of military efficiency. It’s much harder to justify the group’s elimination of revolutionary civil society figures, with some murdered as recently as 2018.

Even if the HTS leadership could be exempted from scrutiny, meanwhile, Sharaa’s stabilization strategy involves bringing all military factions under one national umbrella. Putting the faction leaders on trial would contradict this effort. But the crimes committed on the coast by SNA militias show that leniency threatens social peace much more than arrests.

The more that Syrian communities are brought into the governance process, the less ability warlords will have to unsettle the country. In this respect, there is still grounds for optimism. On 10 March, al-Sharaa signed a deal with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to integrate that Kurdish-led militia into the national army, and to re-establish central control over northeast Syria. If a deal with the Druze militias follows, Israel will find it much harder to destabilize the country. To deprive Iran and the Assadist remnants of their power too, military action must be coupled with efforts to appoint anti-Assad Alawites to administrative positions, both on the coast and in Damascus. In short, then, the government must establish sufficient peace for civil society to get to work. Syrians themselves must be able to do the hard work of addressing and overcoming their trauma.

Birthed in the heady aftermath of the Second World War, the Arab Socialist Baath Party went through three major stages, each closely related to the vexed political history of the region. The first stage was one of utopian dreams. The second involved military action, power grabs and coups. The third, and worst, was of ideals betrayed, of personal dictatorships and brutal death squads. Yet, if Baathism has finally entered history, with the Syrian party officially dissolved in February, its story is far from over.

On the contrary, the lessons of Baathism must now urgently be absorbed by a new generation of Arab leaders. From the way it pitted the region’s Arab majority against minorities, and in how it took the ideology’s mythical sense of destiny and placed it into the hands of strongmen, there’s plenty for men like Ahmed al-Sharaa to think about, even if they emerge from very different ideological backgrounds — especially if they hope not to end their premierships either exiled or hanging from a noose.

Founded in Damascus in April 1947, Baathism was the most enthusiastic iteration of Arab nationalism. Whereas Gamal Abdel Nasser understood the Arab world in hard-nosed strategic terms, as a place to exert his own influence, the Baathists had an almost mystical sense of the Arabs as a nation transcending historical forces. As one of its founders put it, this was a people with a “natural right to live in a single state”.

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Such high-minded ideas are unsurprising. After all, the ideology was founded by Syrians who had immersed themselves in European philosophy, from Marx to Nietzsche, while studying at the Sorbonne. Two of the three founders were members of minority communities, and it’s useful to think of Baathism as a way of constructing an alternative Arab identity to Islam. While Salah al-Din al-Bitar was a Sunni Muslim, Michel Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian. Zaki al-Arsuzi, for his part, was an Alawite who later embraced atheism.

What all three shared was an eagerness to blend Enlightenment modernism with Romantic nationalism. Arsuzi, for instance, believed Arabic, unlike other languages, to be “intuitive” and “natural”. Aflaq, for his part, turned the usual understanding of history on its head. He considered Islam to be a manifestation of “Arab genius” and deemed the ancient pre-Islamic civilizations of the Fertile Crescent to be Arab too. Never mind the fact that the Assyrians or the Phoenicians had never spoken Arabic.

Like other grand political narratives of the 20th Century, then, Baathism was an attempt to repurpose religious energies for secular ends. Even the word “Baath” means “resurrection”. Consider the party slogan, “umma arabiya wahida zat risala khalida” in Arabic. That means “one Arab nation bearing an eternal message” — which sounds strangely grandiose, even before you realize that “umma” is the word formerly used to describe the global Islamic community, and that “risala” is used for the divine message the Prophet Muhammad delivered to humanity.

If a secular form of messianic faith was one wing of Baathist ideology, you get a sense of the other from the party’s motto. Proclaiming “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”, it evoked a single, unified Arab state stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Arabian Gulf in the east, and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. This Arab state, Baathists argued, must also be free of foreign control, and construct a socialist economic system. That makes sense: the region had long been exploited, both by the Ottomans and their European imperialist successors.

At first, Baathism was spread by rural doctors and itinerant intellectuals. In those early days, the leadership consisted disproportionately of schoolteachers, ruling over a membership of schoolboys. In 1953, however, the party merged with Akram Hawrani’s peasant-based Arab Socialist Party. This brought it a mass membership for the first time, and it came second in Syria’s 1954 election.

By then, though, democracy was becoming ever rarer. Since Colonel Husni al-Zaim’s March 1949 coup, the first in Syria and anywhere in the Arab world, politics was increasingly being determined by men in uniform. The most significant of these soldiers was Nasser, who seized power in Cairo in 1952, and promptly became a pan-Arab hero after successfully confronting Britain, France and Israel over the Suez Canal in 1956.

Nasser’s popularity fueled an already raging popular desire to eliminate colonial borders and, at the behest of Baathist officers in Damascus, Syria and Egypt merged into the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. Yet Nasser’s conception of unity, one which the Baathists would emulate, was totalitarian. There should be only one leader, one party, one truth. Following Nasser’s orders, the Syrian Baath dissolved itself. It would never be a grassroots movement again.

In the meantime, Syrian officers seconded to Cairo formed a secret Baathist military committee. This marked the start of the Baath’s next stage, with the party now belonging firmly to military elites. Following the collapse of the UAR, in 1962, Baathists tasted power for the first time, seizing control of both Iraq and Syria. The Iraqi Baath had a different sectarian make-up to the Syrian. Its membership was mainly Sunni Arab, which was a minority locally but the majority across the wider Arab world. Iraq’s Shia Muslims, therefore, associated Baathism with Sunni identity and were more likely to join the communists, then Iraq’s largest party. This meant that the Iraqi Baath appealed to some — and may well have been sponsored by the CIA — as an anti-communist force. Its March 1963 coup was accompanied by a massacre of Leftists. In November, however, it was ousted by another coup.

The Syrian Baath retained power from 1963 onwards, but was riven by conflict, culminating in 1966 in an internal coup by Salah Jadid. Arsuzi was brought back from obscurity to play the role of ideological figurehead of the Syrian wing, but most of the party’s original leadership, including Aflaq, fled abroad. Bitar was assassinated in Paris in 1980.

The Baathists turned on each other, its Syrian and Iraqi wings becoming irreconcilable enemies. In Syria, an endless series of purges further sectarianized an already sectarian army. Competent officers were replaced by loyalists, overwhelmingly from the same Alawite community as Jadid and his ally Hafez al-Assad. The consequent weakening of the army may explain the catastrophic loss of the Golan Heights in 1967, when Assad, then defense minister, gave the order to retreat long before Israeli troops actually arrived.

Under Jadid’s “Leninist” leadership, the Syrian Baath practiced a top-down Leftism aimed at eliminating the old bourgeoisie. In 1970, however, the “pragmatist” Assad launched a new internal coup. Jadid was sent to prison, where he languished until his death. Assad eased off the class warfare, concentrating instead on building his own power base. The Iraqi Baath, meanwhile, had returned to power in 1968, and Saddam Hussein ascended within it until he became absolute leader in 1979.

This marks the third stage of the Baath, in which the party became a vehicle for one-man dictatorships. Cults of personality exalted Assad and Hussein with mass rallies and titles like “first pharmacist” or “hero of war and peace”. They were lionized as “eternal leader” and “symbol of the Arab revolution” — as if the hitherto deified nation had been reduced to a single figure.

Some sections of society benefited, for a while at least, from this system. Members of hitherto marginalized rural communities, including religious minorities, entered the army and security services. Some of the urban working class benefited from jobs in the rapidly expanding state sector. In Iraq, enormous oil wealth allowed rapid development of civilian infrastructure. Yet terrifying political repression and massive corruption caused a brain drain, scaring off investment from both Damascus and Baghdad.

Then Hussein’s regime squandered Iraq’s wealth on wars of choice. Despite bloody stalemate against Iran, and embarrassing defeat in Kuwait, Hussein hailed his victories. In this, he borrowed from the Baathist playbook: Assad had done something similar in 1973, after losing to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The gap between rhetoric and reality was vast and growing, perhaps inevitable given Baathism’s totalizing aspirations.

All the while, both Assad and Hussein built fearsome security states. Far from uniting the people, repression in both countries soon took on ethnic and sectarian overtones. Hussein killed tens of thousands of Kurds — the 1988 chemical atrocity at Halabja was especially infamous — before exterminating Shia Muslims when they rose against him in 1991. Hafez al-Assad responded to the challenge of the Muslim Brotherhood by killing up to 40,000 people in Hama in 1982. Then Assad’s son Bashar, who inherited the presidency in 2000, outdid his father, responding to the 2011 revolution by killing hundreds of thousands.

Hussein was deposed by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and soon met his end at the gallows. Many of his security officers later joined ISIS which — despite its religious rhetoric — is actually the Baath’s closest successor: both revel in mass surveillance, detention and torture.

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So what became of “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”? Instead of unity, the Baath brought divide and rule, splintering society by ethnicity, sect, class and region. Instead of freedom from foreign powers, Iraq and Syria ended up occupied. In both countries, socialism ended in sanctions, neoliberalism and graft.

In Greek drama, the tragic hero is brought down by a fatal flaw in their character. The Baath party’s flaw was its identification of the Arabs with state power, and then the reduction of the state to one-man rule. An Arab nation can be said to exist, and sometimes it even transcends state borders. The Arab Spring proved this, when Arabs from Tunis to Sana’a, influencing each other, all revolted simultaneously. But the Arab countries include non-Arab peoples, and the Arabs themselves are plural and diverse, far greater and more creative than a single man or a single mystic ideology could ever be.

That still leaves one more question: what lessons should present and future leaders learn from the failure of Baathism? First, that strong men are brittle and easily broken, whatever their ideology. Second, that the highly centralized, hyper-authoritarian states built by such men end in military defeat and economic collapse. These dictatorships weaken and impoverish society, and provide security to no one, not even to the strong men in the end.

There’s a foreign policy dimension here too. The Arabs have long been assaulted by a string of foreign states: Israel, the US, Russia and Iran. The need to win freedom from the nation’s enemies — or at least to deter their aggression — is more crucial than ever. But seizing control of the state by military force is not sufficient to shift the balance. There are no shortcuts. Lasting power can only be built by liberating the people rather than smothering them: and that means human and civil rights are essential tools in constructing national power. Once the peoples of the Arab and Muslim region are able to express themselves freely and determine their affairs democratically, then their various polities will be ready to coordinate their energies. And that, more than Baathism ever did, will truly change the world.