Soon after a ceasefire was announced between the United States and Iran, both sides began claiming victory.

In Washington, officials were quick to argue that Donald Trump’s brinkmanship forced Tehran to the table. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pointed in particular to the President’s apocalyptic warning on Tuesday evening that “a whole civilization will die” as the decisive moment behind the agreement.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council also claimed victory, saying the US and Israel were forced to accept Tehran’s 10-point plan. The Trump administration will also discuss tariff and sanctions relief for the regime.

The two-week truce was brokered by Pakistan at the 11th hour, after 40 days of intense US-Israeli strikes on Iran as part of “Operation Epic Fury.” The campaign has prompted Iran to launch unprecedented strikes on neighboring Gulf nations and close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow Gulf waterway through which around 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas shipments pass. Iran’s navy has largely been decimated, but the war has effectively cemented Iran’s strategic domination of the strait.

Cracks have already appeared in the fragile truce. While Shehbaz Sharif, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, and Iran both insist the ceasefire also covered Lebanon, this was disputed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and backed by the Trump administration. On Wednesday, Israel launched its biggest bombing campaign of the war on what it claimed were Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, hitting the capital, Beirut, and leaving nearly 300 dead.

Iran has warned that it could withdraw from the ceasefire if the war against all components of the “axis of resistance,” including Hezbollah, continues. In the past four weeks, Israeli strikes have killed around 1,500 people, displacing more than one million civilians, roughly a fifth of Lebanon’s population.

“It will be interesting to see how much Israel is willing to play along with the negotiations or whether it is going to continue its operation in Lebanon. If it continues, that could potentially derail the truce,” says Jonathan Hackett, a US Marine Corps veteran specializing in counterintelligence and the author of Iran’s Shadow Weapons: Covert Action, Intelligence Operations, and Unconventional Warfare.

This tension will likely be central to upcoming diplomatic discussions, as delegations from Washington and Tehran meet in Islamabad this weekend. Whether the ceasefire holds remains to be seen, but some parties are already emerging as immediate beneficiaries.

“The winner is clearly Israel,” says Hackett. For decades, Benjamin Netanyahu had been trying to persuade America to go to war with Iran, and he has at last found a willing participant in Donald Trump, first in the 12-day war in June 2025, and again this year.

Russia has also been cited as a major victor of rising oil prices following a temporary reprieve on sanctions and a realignment of international relations that could play to the Kremlin’s advantage.

Pakistan has also benefited by adopting the role of mediator in one of the most striking developments of the conflict. Sharing a border with Iran and maintaining close ties with Washington, Islamabad was uniquely positioned to act as an intermediary—despite being mired in a war with Afghanistan.

Domestic dynamics also play a role. Pakistan has a significant Shia minority, estimated at 15-20 percent of the country’s 250 million population. Following Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s killing on February 28, angry protesters tried to ransack American consulates in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad.

President Trump has previously heaped praise on the head of Pakistan’s armed forces, General Asim Munir, referring to the de facto leader of Pakistan as “an exceptional human being” and his “favorite field marshal” who knows Iran “better than most”.

China could prove to be one of the quieter beneficiaries. While not the principal broker of the ceasefire, Beijing helped create the conditions for it, providing political weight and strategic backing. Iran is also China’s partner. Beijing doesn’t need Iran to win, but to survive. An isolated, weak Tehran serves China’s interests. A stronger or Western-aligned Iran would not.

The “losers” are clear. Iran’s Gulf neighbors have borne a heavy toll while seeking to avoid direct confrontation. Even after the ceasefire announcement, several countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain, reported incoming missiles and drones from Iran on Wednesday.

The war has also exposed the limits of the Gulf’s security bargain with the US, which involves hosting bases and troops in exchange for Washington’s protection. But it was precisely these ties with Washington that made them Iran’s primary target.

“The Gulf countries never had the intention to fight a war or be the aggressors. We built our defense system just for defense, not for aggression,” says Ahmed Khuzaie, a Bahraini political analyst. The region may now reassess whether to remain purely defensive or move towards a more proactive posture, he adds.

For years, countries like the UAE touted themselves as regional safe havens, seeking to attract expats with the lure of low taxes and golden visas. That confidence has now been shaken, further undermined by a sweeping censorship crackdown.

In recent weeks, around 70 British nationals, including tourists, residents, and airline crew, have been detained in the UAE for filming or sharing images of Iranian missile and drone strikes, or even forwarding footage in private messages. These arrests highlight how the conflict has permeated everyday life across the Gulf.

While the status of Iran’s nuclear program and stockpile of enriched uranium remains unresolved, the “biggest loser” in all this is the Iranian people, says Hackett. “Nobody has represented their interests at all; nobody knows what’s going on inside the country.”

Thousands of civilians have been killed or injured, and there is still an internet blackout. Although Ayatollah Khamenei’s bloody reign has ended, the regime he headed survives.

As Washington and Tehran both claim some success, the reality on the ground tells a different story—a region left more unstable, and an Iranian population that has paid the highest price. The aim of the bombing, according to Trump at one point, was regime change, but the Islamic Republic continues under the same authoritarian theocracy that has been in place since the Revolution in 1979.

It’s highly likely that the war has given more power to the hardliners, and this hardened regime will undoubtedly double down on the repression of its own citizens over time.

Recent weeks have brought new images of disorder to Syrian streets: protesters massing outside the American and UAE embassies in Damascus and in city squares across the country, demonstrators on motorcycles in Daraa attempting to rush the border with Israel before being turned back. To casual observers, these scenes fit a familiar template—an unstable post-revolutionary state losing its grip, streets filling with anti-Western sentiment, the transition unraveling.

That reading is not entirely wrong. But it is incomplete. What is playing out in Syria’s streets is not a spontaneous popular uprising against normalization or foreign influence. It is a performance—staged by a coalition of actors with distinct agendas, united less by shared conviction than by shared opportunity. Understanding who they are, what they want, and why this moment suits them is more important than the footage itself.

Among the most active participants in the embassy protests were members of Palestinian factions long resident in Syria, most prominently the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command. The PFLP-GC’s record in Syria requires no elaboration for anyone familiar with the country’s recent history: it backed Assad throughout the civil war, participated in the suppression of the Syrian uprising, and served as one of the regime’s auxiliary instruments of violence. It is not a liberation movement in any operative sense. It is a militia sheltering behind a cause—well, the Cause.

That shelter is now being reclaimed and renovated. The holy vocabulary of resistance—al-muqawama, al-qadiyya (the resistance, the cause)—is being deployed with renewed confidence, doing what it has always done: foreclosing accountability, immunizing its users from scrutiny, and allowing the reassertion of failed projects without any reckoning with their failure.

But the PFLP-GC is not alone in rediscovering the Cause’s lingering utility. They are all back—the Ba’athists, the Nasserists, the Syrian nationalists, the members of the Syrian Social National Party, the assorted ideological “whateverists”, and the residual Assadists who populate the left-nationalist spectrum of Arab politics. The fall of Assad, paradoxically, gave them oxygen: the regime in its final years had been suffocating its own base. Now the transitional government’s pragmatic engagements with Washington and its implicit accommodations with Israel have handed them the narrative they needed—betrayal, normalization, and the abandonment of the cause. They did not need to update their arguments. They only needed to dust them off.

None of these movements has undertaken any serious ideological reckoning with what they actually produced, not even regarding their own role in sustaining the Assad regime through more than five decades of repression and fourteen years of civil war. There is no accounting, no self-criticism, no apology, and no attempt to explain why their ideas and the institutions built around them failed, or what would be different this time. There is only the reassertion—louder now, emboldened by the chaos of transition—that the real problem was always imperialism, Zionism, reactionary tendencies, and the enemies of the Arab nation.

Among those rejoining the fray is a different kind of leftist: those who were part of the revolution from the beginning and watched with bitterness as it was forced into armed insurrection and then captured by Islamist factions flush with Turkish, Qatari, and Saudi funding. These are not Assadists. Their grievances against the hijacking of the revolution are real. But by boarding the anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, anti-imperialism bandwagon now, they too are choosing the comfort of a sacred vocabulary over the harder work of reckoning with what went wrong and why.

The embassy protests have given all these currents a megaphone and a moment. Anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Gulf, anti-normalization: this is the register in which the left-nationalist tradition feels most alive and most legitimate. It is also the register in which it most reliably avoids answering for itself. The sacred vocabulary does what it has always done: it elevates the argument to a plane where ordinary scrutiny cannot follow. The Cause is the vehicle. The destination is a return to relevance.

The pressure on Syria’s transitional government does not come only from outside its circles. Within the Islamist current that brought Ahmad al-Sharaa to power, there is growing consternation, expressed carefully, but unmistakably, about the pragmatic line he has chosen to follow.

Engaging Washington, tolerating rather than confronting Israeli military actions on Syrian soil, and accepting the constraints that come with international recognition. These are the calculated compromises of a leader who understands that Syria cannot afford another cycle of isolation and war. But to those who fought and bled under the banner of a different vision, they look like surrender dressed in diplomatic language.

The Muslim Brotherhood wants to recover the influence it considers rightfully its own. Radical factions—some inside the governing structure, some hovering at its edges—want to assert their presence before the transition hardens into an arrangement that leaves them marginal. Both can point to the same evidence: talks with Israel that yielded no tangible gains, painfully slow sanctions relief, and living conditions that have hardly improved since the fall of Assad.

What makes this moment structurally distinctive, and dangerous, is the convergence it produces. Islamist hardliners and leftist nationalists arrive from opposite ends of the ideological map, carrying irreconcilable worldviews, and find themselves marching toward the same intersection. The Palestinian cause, anti-Israel sentiment, anti-normalization, anti-American, anti-Gulf—this is the shared terrain where the two traditions meet without having to resolve their contradictions.

The transitional government finds itself, then, in a pincer: squeezed from without by spoilers exploiting the language of liberation, and from within by factions that supported its political rise but are losing patience with its compromises. President al-Sharaa’s room for domestic maneuvering is considerably narrower than the optics of his Berlin and London visits, or his reception of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, would suggest. The performance of statesmanship abroad does not resolve the contest for legitimacy at home. And that contest is increasingly being waged in a vocabulary designed not to build Syria but to prevent anyone else from doing so.

Today, the United States is known in Iran by one of the most famous and colorful political insults in modern history: the “Great Satan.” It is easy to assume that this hostility reflects something ancient or inevitable, that Americans and Iranians were always destined to view each other with suspicion. But history tells a far stranger story.

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iran did not see America as an imperial threat at all. Many Iranians saw the United States as the opposite.

Historian John Ghazvinian notes that when Americans first appeared in Iran in the nineteenth century, they did not arrive as soldiers or colonial administrators. They came as missionaries, doctors, and teachers. They built schools and hospitals, not military bases. In the city of Urmia, American missionaries opened some of the first modern schools in the region and introduced Western medical training. One physician, Dr. Joseph Cochran, helped establish what became one of the first modern medical schools in Iran. Patients traveled from distant villages to seek treatment. At a time when foreign powers were often seen as domineering outsiders, many Iranians instead encountered Americans as surgeons, nurses, and teachers.

These early encounters mattered.

For villagers arriving after days of travel to reach an American clinic, the United States was simply the place where the doctors came from.

Some Americans became deeply woven into Iranian political life. The Presbyterian missionary Howard Baskerville became something of a legend during Iran’s Persian Constitutional Revolution in 1909. Baskerville was teaching at an American mission school in Tabriz when fighting broke out between constitutionalists and royalist forces. Against his superiors’ wishes, he left the safety of the mission and joined the constitutionalist fighters. He was killed by a sniper at the age of twenty-four.

Thousands attended his funeral. One Iranian mourner reportedly said, “He gave his life for us though he was not one of us.” More than a century later, Baskerville’s grave in Tabriz is still visited by Iranians who remember him as someone who died defending their parliament.

Baskerville was just one of many cases showcasing America as the friendly outsider. In 1911, Iran hired an American financial administrator, Morgan Shuster, to reform the country’s chaotic finances. Shuster attempted to build a modern tax system and challenge the privileges of powerful elites and foreign interests.

His efforts angered Russia, which issued an ultimatum: remove Shuster from his position, agree to seek Russian and British approval before hiring foreign nationals in the future, and pay an indemnity for the costs of deploying Russian troops from the Caucasus.

The Iranian parliament cracked under pressure, and crowds gathered in Tehran shouting in support of the American adviser who had done his best to defend Iran’s sovereignty.

These stories explain why many Iranian reformers once viewed the United States differently from other foreign powers. As Ghazvinian writes, America appeared to them as “a disinterested outsider,” a country that seemed free from the imperial ambitions that defined European involvement in the region.

Iranian intellectuals followed American politics with fascination. Newspapers wrote admiringly about the American constitutional system. Some reformers believed the United States was proof that a powerful modern state need not become an empire.

Iranian students soon began traveling to American universities. Some returned home describing New York and Chicago with amazement, writing letters about electric lights, modern industry, and universities filled with students from across the world.

For a brief moment in history, America was not the Great Satan. It was the foreign country that many Iranians trusted the most.

But that perception did not last long.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the relationship gradually changed, with admiration slowly giving way to suspicion. Strategic interests, regional politics, revolutions, and ideological battles reshaped how the two countries viewed each other.

By the time of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the image of the United States in Iran had transformed dramatically. Anti-American rhetoric became one of the defining slogans of the new Islamic Republic. The chant “Death to America” echoed through the streets and soon became an integral part of the political language of the state.

In the United States, the embassy hostage crisis seared the image of Iran as an enemy deep into the American political imagination. For many Americans, the future story of U.S.–Iran relations effectively began at that moment.

Over time, both societies forgot the earlier chapters. Americans came to see Iran through the lens of revolutionary slogans, hostage crises, and regional confrontation. Iranians were taught a narrative of foreign interference and humiliation.

By the late twentieth century, the relationship had shifted from curiosity to direct confrontation.

Historian David Crist describes the modern phase of this relationship very differently from Ghazvinian’s early story. In The Twilight War, Crist writes that the United States and Iran fought a long “shadow war” across the Persian Gulf.

American sailors stationed in the Gulf during the 1980s lived with the constant possibility of confrontation with Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats. Small speedboats packed with rockets and machine guns could suddenly appear on the horizon. Encounters at sea were tense and unpredictable. Sailors knew that any confrontation could escalate within minutes.

The same Iran that chants against America once mourned an American who died defending its freedom. The same United States that now treats Iran as a permanent adversary was once admired by Iranian reformers who studied its institutions and imagined a similar future for their own country.

Two histories sit side by side. In one, America is a distant country associated with schools, hospitals, and a young teacher buried far from home. In the other, it is a rival power, representing warships, sanctions, and regional conflict.

Both are real. Both are part of the same relationship.

Each side remembers its own grievances more clearly than the other’s intentions.

And yet the earlier history does not disappear. It sits in the background, largely forgotten, but still there.

A century ago, Iranians gathered to honor an American who died for their parliament. Decades later, Americans watched images of their fellow citizens held hostage in Tehran. Each moment shaped how the other side would be understood for generations.

Neither tells the whole story on its own.

The relationship between the United States and Iran was not always defined by confrontation. It does not have to remain that way forever.

Ali Hosseini Khamenei ruled Iran for more than three and a half decades. He outlasted presidents, uprisings, sanctions, and generations of dissent, building a system that fused theology with security apparatus and leaving little room for political oxygen. When news broke that he had been killed in a joint U.S.–Israeli strike, reactions inside Iran suggested a suffocated nation could finally breathe again.

In some neighborhoods, people poured into the streets. Fireworks peppered the night sky. Videos circulated online of young Iranians dancing and people shouting, “The dictator is gone!” Other Iranians remained cautious, wary of reprisals, still uncertain about what comes next. But it is unmistakable that for millions of citizens, Khamenei’s death triggered a sigh of relief more than 35 years in the making.

To understand why, one has to understand the system he oversaw.

When Khamenei assumed the position of Supreme Leader in 1989, he succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolutionary cleric who reshaped Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution into a theocratic state rooted in the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, or guardianship of the jurist. He inherited not just a title but a constitutional mechanism explicitly designed to concentrate power in the hands of a single unelected authority. The office commands the armed forces, appoints the head of the judiciary, influences state broadcasting, selects key members of the Guardian Council—the body that vets electoral candidates—and ultimately sets the boundaries of acceptable political life. Over the decades that followed, Khamenei fortified that revolutionary architecture, tightening its grip and expanding its reach.

Over time, he used that authority to steadily strip Iranians of political agency—narrowing who could run, what could be said, and how dissent could be expressed without fear of retaliation.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) grew from a parallel military force forged to safeguard the 1979 revolution into a political and economic empire. It became a central pillar of domestic oppression and regional projection. The Basij militia (formally Sâzmân-e Basij-e Mostaz’afin, or “Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed” is a large, volunteer-based paramilitary militia in Iran that acts as an auxiliary branch of the IRGC) embedded itself in neighborhoods and campuses. Elections were held, but candidates who strayed too far from the ideological line found themselves disqualified before ballots were printed.

Khamenei rarely governed in the daily sense; he did not need to. His authority functioned as a ceiling. Presidents came and went, reformist waves waxed and waned, but the system he constructed remained intact.

The defining chapters of Khamenei’s later tenure were written in the streets.

In 2009, after a disputed presidential election, millions of Iranians joined what became known as the Green Movement. Protesters alleged fraud and demanded accountability, and the state responded with force. Demonstrators were beaten, detained, and in some cases killed. Images of a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, bleeding to death on a Tehran street became an emblem of the crackdown.

Khamenei sided unequivocally with the security apparatus. The protests were framed not as civic dissent but as foreign-backed sedition, something he would go on to repeat time and again whenever Iranians dared to demand better.

A decade later, in November 2019, nationwide demonstrations erupted over fuel price hikes. Security forces used live ammunition against unarmed civilians. Human rights organizations estimated that hundreds—possibly more than a thousand—were killed in a matter of days. The internet was shut down across much of the country, isolating Iranians from the outside world as the violent suppression unfolded.

Then came 2022.

After 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in morality police custody for allegedly violating Iran’s strict mandatory hijab law, protests spread with a slogan that would echo globally: “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The movement was led in large part by young women and teenagers who openly defied compulsory veiling. Once again, the response was severe. Rights groups documented hundreds of deaths, mass arrests, allegations of torture, and expedited trials. Several protesters were executed after proceedings that international observers described as deeply corrupt. Forced confessions were routine under Khamenei.

Each wave of unrest deepened the divide between ruler and ruled, but the state he built was carefully constructed to withstand dissent.

Iran has maintained one of the world’s highest per-capita execution rates. Under Khamenei’s leadership, the use of capital punishment expanded beyond ordinary criminal cases to include political charges such as “enmity against God” and “corruption on earth.” Human rights monitors reported hundreds of executions annually in recent years, including cases linked to protest activity.

Prisons like Evin became a place that, for many detainees, especially women, came to represent a kind of hell on earth. Former detainees described solitary confinement, forced confessions, sexual abuse, and psychological torture. Journalists, lawyers, labor activists, and women’s rights advocates, including 2023 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, all found themselves vulnerable to arbitrary arrest.

Religious and ethnic minorities faced additional persecution under his tenure. Baháʼís were systematically barred from higher education and public employment. Kurdish and Balochi regions experienced heightened security operations. Women’s rights were systematically stripped, essentially rendering them second-class citizens.

As opposition mounted in the latter years of Khamanei’s rule, he responded by steadily shrinking the space for civil society.

Under Khamenei’s watch, Iranian intelligence services were repeatedly accused of targeting dissidents abroad—plotting kidnappings, surveillance operations, and assassination attempts against critics living in exile. Among the most prominent targets was journalist and women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad, who faced multiple Iranian plots to abduct or kill her on U.S. soil. Distance did not guarantee safety. The new tactics were designed to show that dissent, even from abroad, would be pursued and punished.

The Iranian government has repeatedly rejected accusations of systemic abuse from international governments and rights organizations, arguing that it was enforcing Islamic law and protecting national sovereignty. But the consistency of the allegations—across years and protest cycles—left an indelible mark on Khamenei’s legacy.

Khamenei expanded Iran’s regional footprint through alliances with armed groups in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Support for Hezbollah, involvement in Syria’s civil war in defense of Bashar al-Assad, and backing of various militias formed what Tehran described as a defensive “axis of resistance.” The deadly attacks perpetrated by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, were supported by his regime.

These ventures drained resources from an already strained economy and entangled Iran in proxy conflicts. Hundreds of thousands left the country in search of a better future elsewhere. Ordinary Iranians bore the economic consequences of sanctions layered atop structural mismanagement and corruption as billions flowed abroad and IRGC leadership lived lavish lives. The Iranian passport became one of the most globally denied.

Inflation climbed steadily, eroding purchasing power as the national currency lost much of its value. Youth unemployment remained persistently high, leaving millions of educated young Iranians struggling to find stable work. For a generation born after the 1979 revolution, the regime’s promise of ideological steadfastness and resistance often translated not into prosperity or mobility, but into fewer economic horizons and opportunity.

Khamenei projected calm authority in public appearances with his measured speech, deliberate pacing, and religious framing. He often depicted unrest as a product of foreign interference and portrayed resistance as a moral virtue. He was a leader insulated from the daily realities of his citizens.

In recent years, Iranians reached their limit. “Death to the dictator” was chanted openly. Graffiti targeted him by name. The people had had enough, whatever the consequences. In January, thousands poured into the streets to protest not just their declining purchasing power, but the regime itself. The state’s response was ruthless: security forces opened fire on demonstrators, enforced a near-total internet blackout, and carried out what human rights groups described as mass killings across cities nationwide. Estimates of deaths exceeded 30,000 as authorities used lethal force to disperse crowds and suppress dissent on an unprecedented scale.

In the immediate aftermath, the state continued to respond with surveillance, arrests, and messaging campaigns emphasizing cultural authenticity and resistance to Western influence. But for an increasingly youthful Iranian population, these maneuvers resonated less than they did with previous generations. The new generation—digitally connected, globally aware—forcefully declared that a theocratic system that denied them basic agency had any claim to rule at all.

When reports emerged yesterday that Khamenei had been killed in a joint U.S.–Israeli strike, the geopolitical implications dominated headlines worldwide. Analysts debated the risks of escalation and succession scenarios. But inside Iran, cheers and celebrations filled the streets with the sound of a people who, for the first time in decades, might just be on the brink of freedom.

For families who have lost children in protests, political prisoners still behind bars, and young women who cut their hair and burned their hijabs in defiance, his death symbolizes the end of an era they spent years resisting.

But this is day two of what many believe will be a protracted military engagement, and people are afraid. The institutions Khamenei shaped remain intact for the time being. The Assembly of Experts has reportedly selected Alireza Arafi as his temporary successor. The IRGC is armed, and the citizenry is defenseless to fight back. A single death of a tyrannical dictator does not dismantle a system built over decades.

But it does matter.

Khamenei presided over a republic that brought death and destruction upon the people he was charged with leading. He will be remembered by unmarked graves, economic devastation, prison cells, public executions, and a generation that went unheard.

The question now is how the state he built will confront the society he leaves behind. And Iranians face a steep uphill battle ahead, no matter what happens next.

History will record the date of his death. Iranians will decide what it ultimately means.

Few words in modern Arabic and postcolonial discourse have been praised, invoked, and misunderstood as much as revolution. It has inspired generations who hoped it could deliver both renewal and deliverance. Yet beneath that hope sits an old tension: some imagine revolution as a transformation of meaning, others as a transformation of lived reality. That divide shapes not only the disagreements between the Syrian poet Adonis and the anticolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, but also the inconsistencies of Subhi Hadidi, one of Syria’s sharpest exiled intellectuals. Hadidi’s embrace of the Syrian uprising, followed by his recent dismissal of Venezuela’s María Corina Machado, shows how even the most discerning critics can become captive to their own assumptions when events run counter to their expectations.

For Adonis, revolution begins not in public squares but in language, imagination, and myth. His body of work—from al-Thābit wa al-Mutahawwil to his post-2011 interviews—treats it as a civilizational rupture and a renewal of cultural foundations that must precede political change. That belief guided his 2011 open letter to Bashar al-Assad, where he addressed the ruler not as a culprit but as someone capable of leading Syria’s “renewal.” The demonstrations rising from mosques signaled to him a society not yet ready: without a secular consciousness, he argued, genuine change could not take hold. “Nothing will change unless there is a separation between religion and the state,” he said in 2016, insisting that without such distinctions, Arab decline would deepen.

His project has always been aimed at the underlying symbols and assumptions that shape the possibility of democracy and citizenship. In his 2019 Kalam al-Bidayāt, he wrote: “Revolution is not about overthrowing a regime so as to establish another in its place; rather it is about abolishing the regime insofar as it is law—that is, insofar as it is the instrument and symbol and justification of oppression, and insofar as it stands between the human being and his/her self-creation.” It is an almost theological hierarchy: the word must be transformed before the world can be. But when real people finally demanded change in Daraa and Homs, he hesitated, unable to see in their actions the very opening he had long described.

Fanon started from the opposite direction. In The Wretched of the Earth, he wrote: “Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”

Those who live under it do not wait for clarity or consensus. Their existence is denied, and liberation only begins with reclaiming that existence through struggle. Meaning emerges through action, not before it. Revolution, in Fanon’s vision, is not the fulfillment of a philosophy but the moment when one is born.

Hadidi once wrote with Fanon’s instinct. From exile in France, he condemned Adonis for distancing himself from the Syrian uprising, accusing him of siding with authority over the people’s demand for dignity. In columns for Al-Quds al-Arabi, he celebrated the Syrian revolt as an assertion of life that required no prior justification, and he pushed for sanctions and isolation of the Assad regime. He rejected the posture of the “neutral intellectual” who tries to balance oppressor and oppressed.

Yet in 2025, when the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who mobilized millions against Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship, Hadidi’s tone shifted. In a scathing column, he derided Machado as a puppet of Washington and a disciple of Israel’s Likud, mocking the Nobel Committee for “humiliating nations and cheapening words like democracy and opposition.” The same writer who demanded recognition of Syrian agency now denied Venezuelan agency altogether. The critic of metaphysical distance became a gatekeeper of ideological correctness.

This reversal exposes a larger pattern. Hadidi faulted Adonis for letting fears of Islamism cloud his judgment; yet he now allows fears of imperialism to do the same. Both assume that revolution must meet a standard of purity before it counts. For Adonis, the Syrian uprising’s religious undertones contaminated it. For Hadidi, Machado’s liberal language and Western ties make her untrustworthy. Both use purity tests that reduce complex human struggles to ideological archetypes. And in both cases, the people disappear. What Adonis denied the Syrian demonstrator, Hadidi now denies the Venezuelan protester the right to define the meaning of their own rebellion.

This blindness also ignores reality on the ground. Machado enjoys broad popular support. In 2023, she won the opposition primary with over 90 percent of the vote. When barred from running, she backed Edmundo González Urrutia, who went on to win the 2024 presidential election by a wide margin according to independent monitors. Unlike many exiled leaders, Machado stayed in Venezuela until recently, often in hiding, working with citizens despite constant threats. Her presence and her insistence on acting before theorizing match what Fanon described as the first gesture of liberation. To call her a “hawk of war” is to confuse discomfort with clarity.

The parallel between Adonis and Hadidi points to a deeper ailment in Arab intellectual life: the struggle to reconcile universal principles with the specific contexts in which people fight for them. The leftist fears imperialism, the secular poet fears religion, and the Islamist fears modernity; each reacts to inherited anxieties rather than contemporary realities. Their revolutions remain hypothetical, always waiting for conditions that never arrive.

Fanon, despite his flaws, grasped something elemental: liberation is lived first and explained later. The task of the intellectual is not to bless or veto revolutions from above, but to accompany them critically and humbly, aware that meaning follows being, not the other way around. Adonis’s task was not to lament the Syrian revolution’s lack of meaning, but to participate in its creation—to seize the opportunity that history had offered him, to help breathe life into the very debates that were striving to shape the better future he claimed to desire.

Recovering that humility is one of the great challenges of our time. The new wave of uprisings—from Caracas to Tehran to Damascus—calls for a different ethic of solidarity, one that moves beyond the old binaries of Islamism and secularism, imperialism and resistance. Adonis demanded metaphysical perfection, and now Hadidi demands ideological alignment. Both are responding to their own fears. Yet history, as Fanon reminds us, is never tidy. The work of the intellectual is not to decide a revolution’s meaning from above, but to listen to what people are trying to bring to fruition—and then add their voice to that unfolding effort.

I grew up in a country where there was a particular word you didn’t say. You could hint at it, gesture toward it, refer to it by titles like “the enemy,” “occupied Palestine,” or “beyond the border,” but never speak it plainly. In Lebanon, to utter “Israel” was to cross an invisible boundary everyone recognized, even if no one ever described it. It was a taboo woven into schoolbooks, news bulletins, political speeches, Friday sermons, Sunday Masses, dinner conversations, and the quiet pauses adults used when they didn’t want to answer tough questions.

There were no debates about peace. Not because the country had weighed it and rejected it, but because even considering dialogue—or imagining negotiations—felt treasonous. The law reinforced that feeling. Contact with Israelis was a punishable offense. Speaking of normalization made you a suspect. Universities discouraged research that touched anything related to the neighboring state. The word itself felt like a live wire: spoken in low tones, often replaced with metaphors.

Yesterday, Lebanon crossed that boundary when a civilian Lebanese delegation sat down with Israeli officials and entered a negotiating framework with the goal of implementing a “cessation of hostilities”. Not a secret back channel, not a militia-mediated exchange, not a UN shuttle. A meeting between civilians, face to face, with names known, and a formal agenda—something we were raised to believe was impossible.

Watching the news, I felt dumbfounded. The country I grew up in, where acknowledging Israel’s existence as a state could cost someone their job or reputation, was suddenly talking to it.

Today, I find myself suspended between cautious optimism and the history that demands pessimism remain on the table. Decades of conflict with Israel have exacted a heavy toll on Lebanese lives, yet even the smallest step toward de-escalation feels like a rare and necessary opening.

I was a child when I first understood that the Lebanese state did not fully command its own authority. The realization came in bits and pieces, from people speaking in hushed tones, breaking news flashes, tense neighborhoods, and the peculiar instinct every Lebanese person develops to read political weather.

I remember the killing of Officer Samer Hanna in 2008. He was flying an army helicopter when Hezbollah fighters shot him down because he was flying too close to their bases. No consequences followed. No confrontation. No insistence from the institution sworn to defend its own. I learned then that some actors in Lebanon operate above the state, and the state knows its limits.

I remember the days of May that year, when Hezbollah’s militias invaded Beirut and the city fell under their control. I’ll never forget how the army did not confront them, nor how officials ordered journalists to abandon their posts because the army could not (or would not) protect them. Sometimes, the collapse of state authority arrives through a message delivered by someone wearing the uniform of a country that cannot enforce its sovereignty.

And then there was the recent confession by the Minister of Defense, in response to a dispute over an image of deceased Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah projected onto the Raouché Rock. He supported the armed forces’ refusal to implement the Prime Minister’s orders, warning that confronting Hezbollah’s supporters could fracture the institution. In other words, the army’s cohesion itself could be jeopardized if it tried to enforce state authority against a powerful domestic actor.

These memories surfaced as I watched headlines report that Lebanon and Israel were speaking directly.

Because if the state fears collapse over a projected image, how does it intend to negotiate war and peace? If an officer’s killing passes without institutional response, who guarantees the outcome of any future agreement? If past confrontations ended with the army stepping aside, can the country truly stand alone in setting its borders, making decisions, and shaping its relationships?

These events shaped the air we breathed, the assumptions we internalized, and the boundaries we never should have been taught.

And still, I cannot deny that yesterday felt different.

There was something extraordinary about seeing Lebanese civilians engage directly with Israelis. For decades, the idea of dialogue was treated as a fantasy, a betrayal, or a foreign imposition. It was easier to imagine the border as nothing more than a line over which to exchange airstrikes, not a frontier between two actual states.

The meeting did not change laws, topple taboos overnight, or dissolve threats. But it changed something. It made visible that Lebanon could—under some constellation of pressures and decisions—sit down and speak. This has long been a forbidden image to even imagine.

That was what unsettled me most: not the negotiation itself, but the realization that our political imagination had shifted. The unthinkable had been spoken aloud. The forbidden had been enacted by officials of the very state that once criminalized its possibility.

A new space exists now, and it will not simply vanish, despite many trying to deny it.

I do not know what yesterday will lead to. Nobody does.

Maybe it will become a symbolic footnote that fades into obscurity. Maybe it will mark the start of a slow political recalibration. Maybe it will change nothing at all. In Lebanon, history has taught us to be cautious with hope and mercilessly honest with memory.

But I know this: a country that has labeled something impossible for seventy-six years cannot perform it without consequences. Even if Hezbollah remains armed—an unacceptable reality— even if the state remains tentative and the red lines intact, something has shifted.

For the first time in my lifetime, the taboo cracked.

Yesterday, Lebanon used a word it had avoided for generations, and it did so in the context of formal dialogue. Whether the outcome endures or evaporates, the line that was crossed is now part of the record.

When Taliban officials in Herat began blocking women from entering hospitals this month for not wearing the blue chadari (or burqa, as it is known in the West), it appeared to be yet another tightening of Taliban rule. But the garment, now used as a gatekeeping tool in healthcare, did not begin in Afghanistan, nor in religion, nor in the customs of ordinary people. Its origins lie in a very different world: the elite royal households of empires.

The story starts long before the Taliban, long before modern Afghanistan was created, and long before Islam.

Across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, seclusion was synonymous with status. In classical Greece, women of aristocratic households veiled heavily in public; those of lower status did not. In the Achaemenid Persian world, elite women traveled behind curtains in enclosed carriages, unseen by outsiders. Seclusion worked less as a moral prescription and more as a social hierarchy. The more invisible a woman was, the higher her rank.

This logic then spread into the Persian, Timurid, and Mughal courts. From the medieval period to the 1500s, royal and noble women lived behind purdah, literally “curtain” in Persian, enforced through screens, balconies, and palanquins. When elite women appeared outside, they wore a chador cloak and a separate face veil: the rū-band or pīcheh. The system was architectural as much as sartorial. It kept noble women hidden, while ordinary women worked publicly without these restrictions. There was still no burqa as we recognize it.

That changed in the late sixteenth century.

A folio of the Akbarnāma, painted around 1590 in Mughal India, shows three women travelling by boat. Two are enclosed in fully tailored garments: a cap, a long pleated cape, and a screened panel over the eyes. The third woman’s veil is pushed back, revealing her face. Sitting beside them is a servant, unveiled, hair showing. The hierarchy is deliberately on display. This is the first visual evidence of a true mesh burqa form, worn exclusively by elite women. Servants were not allowed to wear it. Ordinary women wore bright clothes, jewelry, patterned fabrics, perhaps a dupatta or light scarf. The full-body veil was not a religious symbol. It was a court uniform of prestige, used by both Hindu and Muslim aristocratic households.

From this Mughal epicentre—Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and Kabul—the garment spread through elite marriage alliances and courtly imitation. Kabul, culturally tied to both the Persian and Mughal worlds, absorbed these styles not through rural tradition but through royal families, administrators, merchants, and Qizilbash households. By the early nineteenth century, the chadari appeared in paintings by James Atkinson and James Rattray: white, pleated, with a mesh screen over the eyes. These images depict Kabul’s urban elite. They do not show farmers’ wives, nor nomads, nor women of the northern valleys. The chadari was still urban and still class-bound.

Around the same time, in Qajar, Iran, elite women wore face-covering veils and horsehair masks, garments related to the Mughal burqa. But in 1936, Reza Shah banned these forms entirely under the Kashf-e hijab decree. The courtly face veil in Iran disappeared. In India and later Pakistan, the burqa experienced no legal abolition, but it declined steadily throughout the twentieth century with urbanization, women’s education, and the spread of lighter head coverings. The full-body veil faded across much of the region.

Afghanistan then decided to take the opposite path and began enforcing it more widely.

By the early nineteenth century, a small number of ordinary urban Afghan women were wearing the chadari, but it remained limited. Rural regions maintained distinct traditions of dress: brightly embroidered shawls in Badakhshan, patterned robes in Bamiyan, light scarves in Kandahar. The chadari was overwhelmingly an urban garment, tied to class and respectability.

That began to shift by the late nineteenth century. As urban life expanded, the chadari became an aspirational marker. Respectable families, not wealthy enough to be elite but close enough to the city’s social institutions, adopted the garment as a sign of modesty and status. By the early twentieth century, it was widespread enough for the state to intervene.

In 1903, King Habibullah banned the white chadari and introduced color rules: khaki for Muslim women, yellow for Hindu women, and slate for others. This system of differentiation has roots across the Islamic world, but its Afghan application shows how central the chadari had become to public space. For the first time, color was used to identify communities of different ethnic and religious groups through clothing—a political decision, not a cultural one.

The twentieth century then reshaped the garment again.

Synthetic fabrics and machine pleating allowed mass production. New regional palettes took hold. Burnt oranges and deep greens become common around Jalalabad. In the Hazara regions, yellow versions appeared. In the northern provinces, white remained popular among older women. Around Kabul, a mid-blue synthetic fabric became fashionable—light enough to manage, sturdy enough to pleat, and inexpensive.

When the Taliban enforced strict dress codes in the 1990s, Kabul’s blue version became the de facto uniform in areas under their control. Western media now codifies it as the defining image of Afghan womanhood. What began in palaces became a national symbol.

It is against this backdrop that the Herat hospital restrictions land. A garment engineered centuries ago to protect elite women from the public gaze is now being used to deny ordinary women medical care. Afghanistan already suffers from one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates. Restrictions on women’s movement, shortages of female medical staff, and the collapse of parts of the healthcare system make the problem worse.

For the Taliban, the chadari today is not just clothing; it is a governing tool. It functions as a visible measure of obedience and a way to compress all Afghan women into a single silhouette that can be policed at a glance. A woman who appears without it is read not as improperly dressed, but as defiant, a threat to the moral and political order the Taliban claim to embody. In this logic, enforcing the burqa at hospital gates becomes a test of submission. The message is simple: healthcare is conditional on conformity.

Afghan women understand this politicization clearly. Many describe the chadari not as modesty but as necessary for survival: you disappear inside it so you can move through Taliban-controlled spaces without being noticed. Younger women who never grew up wearing it now experience it as a uniform of erasure, the garment the Taliban use to signal that public life belongs only to men. And so they push back in small but deliberate ways: removing the chadari once past checkpoints, wearing thinner or shorter versions that technically pass inspection, using masks and long coats as alternatives, and sharing information on lenient clinics and sympathetic guards. These micro-acts do not overthrow the rule, but they carve out slivers of autonomy within it.

And there is one more layer to this story—the way the garment has come to define Afghanistan in the global imagination. No other Muslim-majority country uses the Afghan chadari in this form: the stitched cap, the pleated canopy, the mesh screen. It is visually distinct, instantly recognizable, and therefore easily generalized. Colonial photography fixed that image early. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western travelers and soldiers depicted Afghanistan as a tribal frontier, a place outside time, its women hidden behind unfamiliar veils. Those images circulated widely, and postcards, travelogues, geopolitical reportage, and the chadari became shorthand for a society described as backward, unknowable, and unchanging. That impression stuck.

A garment born in royal courts has become a tool for restricting movement, visibility, and even access to life-saving care. But its long history shows that meanings shift, and Afghan women—through small acts of noncompliance—are already imagining a future where the chadari no longer defines their place in the world.

Perhaps few among the new generations of Iraqi journalists have ever heard of the royal-era writer who called himself “Alwan Abu Shararah.” It is almost certain they have never read his sharp and daring satirical writings from the roaring 1920s.

Behind that pseudonym stood Musa al-Shabandar—a diplomat, politician, and intellectual who lived through Iraq’s defining decades. He was one of the country’s most prominent foreign ministers during its turbulent struggle for independence from Britain, serving in several governments, including that of Rashid Ali al-Kaylani during the 1941 uprising against British domination.

When al-Shabandar died in 1967 at the age of seventy, his most enduring legacy was not his political career but his Baghdadi Memoirs, an extraordinary record of a city and a nation in transition. Written with candor and wit, these memoirs chronicle Baghdad’s transformation from Ottoman rule to British occupation and the early years of Iraq’s monarchy.

Born in Baghdad around 1897 into a respected merchant family, al-Shabandar came of age as the old Ottoman order was collapsing. At just twenty, he witnessed one of the most dramatic moments in modern Iraqi history—the fall of Baghdad in 1917, when British troops entered the city as the Ottoman army withdrew.

He described those hours vividly:

“The news was confused and the rumors many. What was certain was that the Turkish army was in continuous retreat before the British advance. Fear filled the hearts of the people — fear of the retreating Turks, fear of the advancing British forces, and, worse than both, fear of the surrounding tribes during the interval between withdrawal and occupation.”

That night, an explosion shook his home; the detonation of a Turkish ammunition depot marked the empire’s retreat. In the aftermath, he witnessed chaos and looting, reflecting bitterly on the illusion of liberation:

“We had been angry and resentful of the Turks for their oppression, yet God showed us at the hands of the British occupation what made the Turks’ injustice seem gentle and merciful.”

In the decades that followed, al-Shabandar rose through Iraq’s political and diplomatic ranks. Fluent in several European languages and educated abroad, he served as Iraq’s representative to the League of Nations, held postings in European capitals, and twice served as foreign minister during the monarchy.

But his political fortunes shifted with the tides of history. In 1941, as part of the nationalist Rashid Ali government that sought to free Iraq from British control during World War II, al-Shabandar found himself on the losing side of the Anglo-Iraqi War. When British forces defeated the insurgent regime, he fled to Tehran, only to be arrested and extradited back to Iraq.

In 1944, he was sentenced to four years in Abu Ghraib Prison, where he endured solitary confinement. It was there, in a small, dimly lit cell, that he began drafting the reflections that would later become his Baghdadi Memoirs.

He described those years with painstaking clarity:

“Yes, I am now in Baghdad, in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib, in this desolate room of this desolate building, a prisoner in solitary confinement. The door is locked, the guard paces the dark corridor back and forth before the cells. Is this a disturbing dream or a bitter reality?”

Even in captivity, al-Shabandar’s sharp humor and intellectual rigor persisted. He compared Iraq’s prison system to Europe’s darkest institutions:

“If the Dachau concentration camp is a stain of shame on the German people, then Abu Ghraib Prison will bear the same shame upon those who created it in Iraq.”

The words would prove prophetic, echoing across decades as Abu Ghraib became infamous once again under foreign occupation.

Al-Shabandar’s Baghdadi Memoirs are not only political testimony but also an intimate portrait of a city in flux, from its narrow alleyways and riverside markets to the salons where politicians and poets debated the future of the new Iraqi state. He wrote of floods, uprisings, and court intrigues, but also of the humor, irony, and contradictions that defined Baghdadi life.

He recorded his impressions of key figures—Nuri al-Said, Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, Muzahim al-Pachachi, Taha al-Hashimi, and others—offering insight into the personalities who shaped modern Iraq. Yet his writing remains intensely personal, driven less by political ambition than by a desire to understand his country’s restless soul.

Half a century after his death, al-Shabandar’s voice resurfaced when his son prepared the memoirs for publication, and Faisal al-Damlouji helped bring them to print through Riyad al-Rayyis Publishing House in London and Cyprus in the early 1990s.

For readers today, his writings serve as both historical record and moral reflection, tracing the dreams, failures, and perseverance of a generation that sought to define Iraq’s place in the modern world.

Baghdadi Memoirs can serve as a mirror of Iraq’s current fractures. In a country still reeling from foreign interventions, institutionally hollowed out and struggling to reclaim its sovereignty, his reflections acquire renewed urgency. He wrote with prescient clarity about prisons that would “bear the same shame” as Europe’s darkest camps—words hauntingly echoed when Abu Ghraib Prison re-entered global infamy under another occupation.

His intimate portrayals of Baghdad’s alleyways, cafés like the famed Shabandar Café (which he owned), and the political salons where “the people are one” despite difference, stand today as a counter-narrative to sectarian geography, splintered national identity, and institutional decay in Iraq. The fact that al-Shabandar was both insider and prisoner—diplomat, foreign minister, exile, and inmate allows his memoirs to speak simultaneously of ambition, hope, and the limits of power.

In Iraq’s present moment, where public trust is low, governance is weak, and debates about identity, sovereignty, and reform are urgent, his writings should challenge all of us to inquire: Are the structures of the state being rebuilt? Are citizens truly “under the roof of law and justice,” as he insisted? The book compels us to remember that the past was not simply a prologue but a living component of today’s political culture.

Thus, al-Shabandar’s voice remains vital. For Iraq to move beyond its cycles of interference and stagnation, it must engage with the lessons of a leader who chronicled not only the rise of a modern state, but its vulnerability when power is unaccountable and history is forgotten.

Musa al-Shabandar—the witty satirist, the exiled diplomat, the prisoner with a pen—remains one of Iraq’s most overlooked storytellers. From the confines of his cell, he wrote not merely to remember, but to ensure that Baghdad’s story, in all its pain and vitality, would be known, understood, and learned from by the generations to come.

In 2010, I cast my first vote in Iraq’s national elections. I voted for Ayad Allawi, the secular candidate who promised to break the stranglehold of sectarianism and reclaim Iraq’s sovereignty from the chaos that followed Saddam Hussein’s fall. That year, Allawi’s coalition actually won the most seats in parliament. And yet, he lost. The post-election maneuvering that returned Nouri al-Maliki to power taught me my first hard lesson in Iraqi democracy: in Iraq, victory at the ballot box does not necessarily translate to power.

That moment shattered much of my faith in the political process. But it did not extinguish the conviction that Iraq’s future cannot be outsourced, not to Tehran, not to any of its neighbors, and not to the networks of militias and party bosses who profit from our paralysis. Fifteen years later, as Iraq prepares for yet another election, the question is no longer whether Iraqis believe in democracy. It is whether democracy still believes in them.

The parliamentary elections are marketed as a democratic ritual, but the substance of power lies elsewhere. In an interview with journalist Imad al-Din Adib titled “Who Rules Iraq?” several Iraqis spoke bluntly about their disillusionment. “Every candidate wants office for the benefits, not for service,” one man said. Another added, “We have seen their programs. They have none.”

This sentiment captures the essence of Iraq’s modern predicament. The institutions exist: elections, a parliament, ministries, a judiciary, yet they function more as stages than as legitimate engines of governance. The actors change, but the script remains written in the language of factional loyalty and external influence.

Behind the scenes, Iran’s tentacles reach beyond its borders. Through a complex web of militias, political proxies, and economic networks, Tehran exerts decisive leverage over the country’s security and decision-making. The Quds Force (one of five branches of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) does not need to occupy Baghdad to rule it; influence has replaced invasion as the currency of control.

In another recent discussion, “Can Iraq and Iran Part Ways?” one analyst summed up the dilemma with brutal clarity: “Iran does not see Iraq as an equal. It sees it as strategic depth.” That statement echoes across Iraqi life, from the appointment of ministers to the distribution of contracts to the intimidation of journalists.

Iran’s presence in Iraq began as a security alliance in the war against ISIS, but it has metastasized into something more enduring. Iranian-backed militias now control checkpoints, border crossings, and entire neighborhoods. Their leaders wear suits instead of fatigues, sit in parliament, and negotiate cabinet positions.

And yet, Iran’s dominance is not absolute. The Iraqi public, especially the younger generation, increasingly sees Tehran not as a protector but as a parasite. Protests that erupted in 2019 under the slogan “Nureed Watan,” meaning “We want a country,” were driven by anger at a political order shaped more by foreign agendas than by public will.

The populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr captures this tension better than anyone. In a segment from “From the Last Episode,” al-Sadr warned that “selling the homeland,” meaning surrendering sovereignty, is the ultimate betrayal. But his own movement has at times empowered the very system he condemns. He mobilizes nationalist rhetoric, yet his fighters, too, have benefited from the same sectarian spoils that keep the country divided.

Al-Sadr’s shifts between confrontation and compromise reflect Iraq’s broader dilemma—a country torn between the desire for autonomy and the fear of instability. Each election becomes a test of how far people can push for change without risking collapse.

The people no longer believe their leaders represent them, and the leaders no longer pretend to care. Turnout in elections has steadily declined, and trust in institutions hovers near zero. The state has become an arena for negotiating power, not a framework for delivering justice.

In Who Rules Iraq?, one interviewee put it plainly: “We have a parliament, but no sovereignty.” That line captures a national tragedy, a republic whose form survives while its substance has been hollowed out.

But legitimacy can also be rebuilt. Iraq’s civil society and youth movements continue to push back, showing that Iran’s influence may be entrenched, but it isn’t absolute.

Iraq’s challenge is not to sever ties with Iran; geography and history make that impossible, but to redefine the relationship. Iraq must live with Iran as a neighbor, not as a master. That requires political courage, institutional integrity, and international support that strengthens Iraqi sovereignty rather than outsourcing it to another patron.

Foreign policymakers often treat Iraq as a footnote to Iran policy, a terrain on which to balance sanctions, energy interests, and counterterrorism priorities. But Iraq is its own actor. Ignoring that reality only empowers the militias and their sponsors. The international community should invest not in personalities or parties but in the infrastructure of independence, education, economic opportunity, and a functioning state that answers to its citizens, not its neighbors.

When I voted in 2010, I believed the ballot was our weapon against tyranny. Fifteen years later, I see it as a way of holding on—not to power, but to the idea that change is still possible. Voting in Iraq today is not an endorsement of the system; it is a protest against conceding what has the potential to be a thriving nation.

The next election will not produce a miracle. It will likely reproduce many of the same faces, slogans, and disappointments. But somewhere within that ritual lies a generation that refuses to let its country remain a satellite state.

Democracy in Iraq is precarious, distorted, and repeatedly betrayed. But it still exists, and that alone is worth defending. Iraq’s only real choice is perseverance.

Because while Iran’s influence may be entrenched, it is not eternal. And as long as Iraqis continue to demand a country —a real one —the promise of 2010 is not entirely lost.

We now find ourselves caught between moral absolutism and historical amnesia. As the world is once again debating the foundations of global order, some lament the erosion of liberal norms; others mock them as hypocritical inventions of the West. In this polarized climate, basic historical truths are buried beneath moral absolutism and ideological distortion. In what follows, I aim to offer a more nuanced perspective by revisiting how the modern international system emerged, why its norms remain tenuous, and what challenges confront them today. Some of this ground may feel familiar, but we retrace it in order to properly frame the analysis that follows in the second and third installments of this series.

The Long Shadow of Empire

For most of human history, expansion was the norm. From the Sumerians to the Romans, the Ottomans to European colonial powers, empires rose and fell—annexing territories, exploiting resources, and subjugating peoples. Conquest conferred legitimacy and glory, not moral shame. Grand narratives abounded: Islam’s promise to lift nations “from the darkness of religion to the justice of Islam,” or the European “civilizing mission” cloaked in the white man’s burden. But beneath these exalted slogans lay the raw pursuit of power.

Paradoxically, this violent story of empire enabled human survival. Had our ancestors not jostled out of Africa, dispersing and competing globally, a single pandemic might have eradicated the species. Likewise, technological diffusion—however brutal—was often a byproduct of conquest and war.

The principles we now take for granted—sovereignty, self-determination, human rights—are not timeless truths. They are recent human inventions, born of struggle, debate, and compromise. And they emerged largely through the philosophical, legal, and political traditions of the very Western powers so often demonized today. While their imperial crimes warrant scrutiny and critique, their intellectual contributions to global norms cannot be denied.

But this legacy should inspire responsibility, not supremacist nostalgia. Universal values are not expressions of civilizational destiny. They are fragile and contingent ideals that demand constant stewardship.

The Early Experiments of War and Innovation

These ideals didn’t emerge fully formed. Their first modern iteration, after World War I, was deeply flawed. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points called for self-determination, open diplomacy, arms reduction, and collective security via a new League of Nations. But in practice, the League sanctioned a mandate system that allowed Britain and France to expand their imperial possessions under the guise of trusteeship.

Arab hopes for independence were quickly betrayed. The Balfour Declaration, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and conflicting promises to the Hashemites stoked tensions that still reverberate. Yet to condemn these actions by today’s moral standards, however tempting, is historically naïve. The principle of national self-determination was embryonic; few statesmen viewed it as sacrosanct.

A more profound shift came only after World War II. The United Nations, created to replace the League, embedded human dignity and sovereign equality into its Charter. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights followed in 1948. Though the Charter avoided explicit references to democracy, its ethos—cooperation, dignity, and rights—marked a normative leap forward.

Still, the liberal order was never universal. The Cold War split the world into ideological camps.

Decolonization gave rise to fragile states, vulnerable to coups, insurgencies, and foreign manipulation. Not all regions experienced decolonization after World War II: the Soviet Union maintained and expanded its imperial holdings, while China embarked on its own colonizing ventures in Tibet, Xinjiang (East Turkistan), and Inner Mongolia. Even after 1991, with the apparent triumph of the liberal order, the seeds of today’s crises had already been sown.

The New Anarchy

By the 21st century, the liberal order faced mounting challenges—external and internal. Its core ideals are now under siege on multiple fronts:

• Authoritarian Resurgence: China and Russia reject liberal values, promoting stability and sovereignty over liberty and pluralism. Their assertiveness undermines multilateralism and empowers autocrats elsewhere. This is not just rhetorical: Russia has intervened militarily in Ukraine and Syria and operates through proxies and mercenaries across Sub-Saharan Africa. China, meanwhile, asserts imperial claims in the South China Sea, exerts growing influence across the Global South through infrastructure and debt diplomacy, has tightened authoritarian control over Hong Kong, and openly threatens democratic Taiwan. Together, they offer alternative models of order that normalize authoritarianism and transactional geopolitics.

• Democracy Backsliding: Even in established democracies, liberal values are under strain. Polarization fueled by identity politics, unchecked economic inequality, disinformation, and migration crises has eroded public trust in democratic institutions. Illiberal movements are gaining ground in Europe and the United States, often aided by external actors exploiting domestic divisions. The moral authority of democratic systems is thus weakening from within, making it harder to defend the liberal order abroad.

• Global Economic Inequality: Globalization lifted millions out of poverty—but also entrenched oligarchies and fueled populist rage.

• Climate Change: A planetary emergency demands collective action, yet national interests and institutional gridlock prevail.

• Cyber Insecurity & Disinformation: Digital interdependence creates new vulnerabilities—from election meddling to infrastructure sabotage.

• Geopolitical Fragmentation: U.S.-China rivalry, regional conflicts, and transactional diplomacy erode the cooperative spirit underpinning the liberal order.

• Pandemics & Migration: COVID-19 exposed global governance gaps; mass displacement strains both humanitarian norms and political institutions.

• Technological Disruption: AI, biotechnology, and automation outpace ethical and regulatory frameworks, raising profound dilemmas.

Overlaying all of this is a growing legitimacy crisis. Many now see the liberal order not as a universal project, but as a Western scheme serving Western interests. This perception, sharpened by historical grievances, undermines the moral credibility required to sustain global cooperation.

The Sovereignty Dilemma

A paradox lies at the heart of today’s turbulence: sovereignty is sacred and porous. States invoke it to shield themselves from interference, even as they outsource governance to supranational institutions or succumb to market dependencies. Humanitarian interventions, cyber operations, and economic sanctions further blur the boundaries between the domestic and the global.

Can sovereignty—as once imagined—survive in an era of climate breakdown, global pandemics, transnational terrorism, and digital warfare? Or must it evolve—preserved in principle but adapted to interdependence?

Why Historical Honesty Matters

Defending norms requires historical honesty. The global order we live under was not delivered from on high. It was forged, however imperfectly, within the political cultures of Western democracies, where the past is still debated openly, unlike in most autocracies. Even mature democracies like Japan and South Korea struggle with full reckoning. To ignore this asymmetry is to misread how norms are created and sustained.

Likewise, to romanticize the West’s role is folly. Its success was not foreordained, but rather the product of a messy convergence between Enlightenment ideals and imperial ambition—of moral progress entangled with material exploitation. That duality, still present today, should neither excuse nor erase—but help explain.

Between Arrogance and Amnesia

The liberal order’s survival hinges on humility and clarity. Humility requires recognition that its norms are not eternal or self-sustaining, and clarity requires resisting the creeping nihilism that treats all ideals as instruments of power.

Both extremes—nostalgic supremacism and cynical relativism—are recipes for disorder. The global norms we now invoke were won through centuries of struggle, revision, and compromise. They can neither be taken for granted nor weaponized indiscriminately. To forget this is to forget that history’s most brutal lesson is repetition.

Up Next: II. Between Victimhood and Supremacy

In the rubble of eastern Rafah, armed men in mismatched uniforms stop aid trucks at gunpoint. Their leader, Yasser Abu Shabab, an illiterate former drug trafficker who escaped a Hamas prison during an Israeli airstrike, now controls humanitarian routes using Israeli-supplied weapons. On November 16, 2024, his anti-Hamas militia, “Popular Forces,” raided 109 UN aid trucks, looting 98 of them while Israeli troops watched from posts just 500 yards away.

In Khan Yunis, another militia self-described as the “Counter-Terrorism Strike Force” is led by Hussam Al Astal, a man Hamas once sentenced to death, who patrols territory carved out with Israeli backing. To the north, in the ruins of Jabalia and Beit Lahia, Ashraf Al Mansi’s People’s Army (PA) controls checkpoints, warning Hamas forces to stay away from “their” areas.

This is Gaza in October 2025: a patchwork of competing militias—criminal gangs turned “security forces.” Whoever thinks that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is doing what he can to destroy these militias and stabilize the region is delusional. The case is quite the opposite. To understand the Israeli government’s stance on the militias operating in the Palestinian territories, one has to look carefully at the past.

Before ascending to power, Netanyahu made a promise to destroy Hamas and solidify Israel’s security. After all, Netanyahu assumed office after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s in opposition to the agreements, claiming they endangered Israel’s security and inciting against then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the deal.

Supporting Hamas Against the People’s Army (2012-2023)

In October 2012, under Netanyahu, Israel allowed Qatar to transfer $400 million to the Hamas government in Gaza, claiming the move would “stabilize Gaza” and “maintain quiet.”

A year later, Israeli officials, including members of Netanyahu’s National Security Council, formalized a policy known as “separation” (מדיניות ההפרדה), aimed at keeping Gaza and the West Bank divided to prevent the creation of a unified Palestinian political entity.

In 2018, Israel—again under Netanyahu—began formally allowing monthly Qatari cash transfers to Hamas, amounting to as much as $30 million per month, delivered in suitcases through the Erez crossing. The policy ignited controversy and led to the resignation of then–Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, who condemned it as “surrender to terrorism.” At a Likud Party meeting in March 2019, Netanyahu reportedly told members, “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state must support bolstering Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate Gaza from the West Bank.”

Netanyahu believed that supporting Hamas would weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the PA, effectively burying the prospect of a Palestinian state alive.

That policy collapsed on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched its devastating attack on Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and kidnapping over 250, most of them civilians. The money Netanyahu believed could buy Hamas’s silence was instead invested in an elaborate tunnel network, tens of thousands of rockets, and the training of the Nukhba Unit that carried out the assault. Whether intentional or not, Netanyahu’s strategy ultimately undermined Israel’s own security.

Supporting Anti-Hamas Militias (2024–2025)

After the deadliest attack on Jews since the Holocaust, who could still believe that militias provide security? Netanyahu could—and did.

On June 5, 2025, the prime minister confirmed reports of new anti-Hamas militias in a video posted on X (formerly Twitter), stating: “On the advice of security officials, we activated clans in Gaza that oppose Hamas. What’s wrong with that? It’s only good. It saves lives of IDF soldiers.”

Israeli support for these militias reportedly began in May 2024, during the offensive on Rafah.

The Popular Forces soon spread to other areas. In Khan Yunis, the Counter-Terrorism Strike Force was founded on August 21, 2025, led by Hussam Al Astal, a 50-year-old former Palestinian Authority officer who had worked in Israel before joining the PA. Hamas imprisoned him several times and even sentenced him to death for alleged involvement in the 2018 assassination of Palestinian scientist Fadi al-Batsh in Kuala Lumpur.

In northern Gaza, the PA emerged in Beit Lahia and Jabalia, led by Ashraf Al Mansi, while in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya neighborhood, the Khalas Clan Militia—led by Rami Khalas and Fatah Central Committee member Ahmad Khalas—claimed control.

Netanyahu’s rationale for arming and supporting these groups, despite their criminal reputations, mirrored his earlier justification for backing Hamas: they undermined his political rivals. Multiple reports have accused these militias of looting aid convoys.

Jonathan Whittall of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said such gangs were responsible for “the real theft of aid since the beginning of the war,” and acts carried out “under the watch of Israeli forces.” Nahed Sheheiber, head of Gaza’s private truckers’ union, said, “Our trucks were attacked many times by the Abu Shabab gang, and the occupation forces stood idle. They did nothing. The one who looted the aid is now the one protecting it.”

This logic—that militias can serve as tools against Hamas—echoes Netanyahu’s earlier argument that supporting Hamas would weaken the PA. His far-right coalition continues to view a Palestinian state as a greater threat to Israel’s security than the chaos of armed militias. In 2015, current Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared, “The Palestinian Authority is a burden, and Hamas is an asset.”

The consequences of this thinking have been catastrophic, not only for Palestinians but also for Israelis.

The current power vacuum in Gaza, as the sociologist Max Weber might note, represents the collapse of the state’s core function: the monopoly on legitimate use of force. Without it, there is no weak state—there is no state at all.

From U.S. support for the Afghan Mujahideen to India’s covert backing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), history offers repeated lessons: arming militias may yield short-term gains but breeds long-term disaster. Hamas’s October 7 attacks, the LTTE’s assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, and the regional chaos unleashed by the M23 all prove that proxy militias often outlive and outgun their sponsors.

Netanyahu and Israel’s right wing must confront the hard truth that a weak or fragmented state cannot produce security. Only a stable, moderate government—one that monopolizes legitimate force—can guarantee lasting peace.

One year ago today, Hassan Nasrallah, the former secretary-general of Hezbollah, was killed by an Israeli air force strike while inside the militant group’s war operations room. To truly dismantle his ideology and legacy, we have to confront his life and death with unflinching honesty. Only by critically examining the consequences of his leadership—both the allure of his defiance and the devastation of his choices—can we break the cycle of martyrdom and perpetual struggle that he so masterfully wove into his narrative. An honest reckoning will challenge the glorification of resistance for resistance’s sake and expose the cost of his vision: generations trapped in conflict, a nation in ruin, and dreams extinguished by the very ideology that promised liberation.

Growing up in Iraq, a country where Shia Islam is the majority, it was impossible to escape the presence and powerful speeches of Nasrallah. Even for those of us who were not raised with a Shia upbringing, his charisma was undeniable. Nasrallah’s voice reverberated across televisions and radios, his words infused with a vigor that captured the imagination of millions.

He spoke the language of the people, particularly resonating with the lower classes of southern Lebanon and Iraq. Yet, his appeal was not limited to the disenfranchised. He managed to instill confidence in the middle and upper classes, positioning himself as a populist in the truest sense. Energetic, eloquent, and exuding a certain vitality, Nasrallah had the rare ability to engage audiences across the social and political spectrum—even those who identified as secular found themselves drawn to his uncompromising vision.

Born in 1960 in the bustling, poverty-stricken neighborhood of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut, Nasrallah came of age during a tumultuous period in Lebanon’s history. After being displaced by the Lebanese Civil War, his family moved to the southern town of Bazourieh, where his exposure to Shia clerical teachings began. He would go on to study in Najaf, Iraq, where he was mentored by influential Shia scholars, including Muhammed Baqir al-Sadr, a prominent cleric who greatly shaped his ideological worldview. Baqir al-Sadr believed the state should be led by the most learned jurists from the Shi’a clerical establishment and should protect Islamic values, while also embracing some aspects of modernity.

Nasrallah’s ascent within Hezbollah, the militant group and political party founded in the early 1980s with Iranian backing, was swift. Following the assassination of Abbas al-Musawi in 1992, Nasrallah became the youngest leader of the terrorist organization. Under his command, Hezbollah evolved from a local militia into a formidable paramilitary force and was revered as a symbol of resistance against Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon.

What made Nasrallah particularly compelling was not just his oratory prowess or strategic acumen; it was his ability to tap into a collective psychological narrative—one characterized by a sense of historical failure and grievance. For many in the Arab world, he personified the fight against overwhelming odds, especially against Israel and Western power. This was not merely a matter of political struggle; it was about reclaiming one’s dignity. Even secular Arabs, who did not necessarily align with his religious ideology, found in him a champion who refused to bow to geopolitical realities.

Nasrallah’s rhetoric skillfully navigated this landscape of loss and longing. He offered a vision of resistance that felt empowering, even liberating. But there was a dark side to this narrative. His defiance often blurred into delusion, promising victories that were never fully realized, leading his followers down a path of perpetual struggle with no end in sight.

Nasrallah’s legacy took a dramatic turn with his decision to involve Hezbollah in the Syrian Civil War. What had once been a narrative of resistance against Israeli occupation—a cause that commanded near-universal support across the Arab and Muslim world—morphed into a sectarian conflict. By deploying his forces to support Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Nasrallah turned his weapons on fellow Arabs, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrians. Under his leadership, Hezbollah militants perpetrated unspeakable atrocities.

This strategic pivot revealed the extent of his allegiance to Iran. Rather than being an independent leader fighting for Lebanese or Arab interests, Nasrallah was now seen as an enforcer of Tehran’s regional ambitions. His credibility suffered immensely. Those who once viewed him as a hero of resistance began to see him as a pawn in a larger geopolitical chess game.

Under Nasrallah’s leadership, Hezbollah’s dominance in Lebanon has played a central role in the country’s decline. Once known as the “Paris of the Middle East,” Lebanon is now mired in economic collapse, political paralysis, and social decay. The nation has become a battleground for proxy wars, isolated internationally and burdened by financial ruin.

The mass exodus of Lebanon’s brightest minds speaks volumes. Engineers, doctors, artists, and entrepreneurs are fleeing a country that can no longer offer them security or opportunity. This collapse is a cultural and moral disintegration that has occurred under Nasrallah’s watch, not to mention the havoc it has wreaked on the economy.

Nasrallah embraced a culture of resistance for resistance’s sake, even when it led only to death and destruction. His worldview glorified martyrdom and eternal struggle, viewing life through the lens of historical victimhood and perpetual conflict. He valued death over life.

Nasrallah chose war over progress, death over life, and in the end, failure over the possibility of something better. His legacy is a tragic testament to what happens when resistance becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to a just and prosperous future.

Nasrallah will forever be remembered by those who loved him and those who hated him. To some, he is a heroic figure who stood up to Israel and the West. To others, he is a leader who betrayed his people, leading them into ruin for the sake of ideological purity and foreign interests. To those living in Israel and the United States, he is simply a terrorist.

One year ago today, he ultimately met his end in a fire that he flamed.

History will judge him, as it should. But for now, as Lebanon stands on the precipice of collapse and Syria remains a shattered nation, the weight of his choices are impossible to ignore. His defiance once inspired hope, but his legacy may well be remembered as a cautionary tale of ambition without vision, and resistance without reason.

Published in 2021 to mark the centenary of the Iraqi state, Faisal I of Iraq (فيصل الأول ملك العراق ) is more than a biography of the country’s first king. It lays bare Iraq’s troubled beginnings and is startlingly relevant to the crises the country faces a century later. Reading it today, one cannot help but feel that King Faisal I diagnosed Iraq’s ailments with painful clarity, leaving behind warnings that remain unheeded.

Faisal was no stranger to loss and disappointment. Ousted by the French from Damascus in 1920, he was placed on Iraq’s throne by the British the following year. But the book shows that he quickly realized his role could not simply be that of a compliant pawn. He needed to balance British interests with the yearning of Iraqis for independence, all while trying to forge unity among communities that shared little other than being under Ottoman rule. As he told his advisor Ameen al-Rihani: “Every day we have enough work for two days… If necessary, I work twelve hours a day.” This was the burden of trying to build a state from scratch.

Perhaps Faisal’s most famous reflection, captured in the book, was his admission that Iraq was not yet a nation at all. He knew the trajectory was unsustainable. He also recognized that Iraq’s diversity could only be an asset if it was woven into a national identity.

In Beirut, addressing Arab intellectuals, Faisal insisted: “Independence is not granted or taken simply… it is built on foundations we lay with our own hands. We must achieve our independence free from ambiguity.” This philosophy guided his rule in Baghdad: he knew that British promises meant little unless Iraqis themselves created the institutions of sovereignty.

When a poisonous booklet in 1933 claimed Iraq’s Shi’a were “heretics of Iranian origin,” Faisal’s response was to jail the author and denounce the booklet in a letter he wrote to Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Kashif al-Ghita. At a time when divisions were stark, the king defended the dignity of Shi’a citizens, understanding that such slanders threatened the cohesion of the state.

Unlike the pomp of other royal courts, Faisal’s palace impressed with its simplicity. The poet Mohammed Mahdi al-Jawahiri recalled: “King Faisal, the greatest king in the Arab lands at the time, lived in a court that was a court in name only… a simple room with a table, a carpet, and three chairs.” This modesty telegraphed that Faisal’s legitimacy was to be rooted in service and nation-building, not extravagance.

The book’s pages resonate with today’s Iraq. Sectarian divisions are still the country’s greatest weakness. Tribal and ethnic loyalties still eclipse civic ones. These divisions pit communities against each other in politics and society, often fueling conflict and mistrust.

Foreign powers continue to manipulate Iraq’s fate. Faisal understood this dynamic a century ago. The book recalls, “Faisal’s Arabist vision could not make sense unless it transcended the historical divisions between sects.” His insistence that Iraq’s future depended on unity, education, and inclusion is as urgent in 2025 as it was in 1921.

This is where the book should shame Iraq’s leaders. A century later, they are still repeating the same mistakes Faisal warned against. Iraq remains hostage to sectarianism, its politics reduced to bargains between clerics, warlords, and foreign patrons. Leaders talk of sovereignty while surrendering decision-making to Tehran. Protesters fill the streets shouting “We want a country!” because they live in one that still doesn’t function as one.

Faisal’s story is a reflection of the present and a rebuke to those in power today. He worked twelve-hour days to build a state. Politicians today spend their hours dividing its spoils. He jailed those who incited sectarian hatred. Elites today thrive on it, using it to their advantage whenever possible. He dreamed of an Iraq that could stand on its own, but they are content with Iraq as a pawn even as its citizens suffer because of it. If a century later, Iraqis are still quoting King Faisal, it is not only a testament to his vision, but to the catastrophic failure of those who came after him.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, members of the infamous Saraya al-Difa’ (Defense Brigades), led by the late President Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifaat, roamed Syria’s urban centers like a law unto themselves—ignoring social norms and traffic rules, stealing from street peddlers, harassing young women leaving school, and terrorizing civilians with impunity. No one dared intervene.

The overwhelming majority of these men were Alawites, including some Murshidis—a heterodox offshoot of Alawite Islam whose adherents carried a potent sense of historical grievance, particularly toward Syria’s Sunni majority. They blamed Sunnis for the 1946 execution of their founder, Salman al-Murshid, who was accused of treason and blasphemy soon after Syrian independence. The charges were clearly political: Murshid had agitated for an independent Alawite state along the coast, and though he later renounced the idea publicly, his popularity and unorthodox theology made him a threat not only to the new Sunni-dominated authorities in Damascus, but also to other Alawite elites.

In the eyes of Murshidis—and indeed many Alawites—the details of Murshid’s trial and execution mattered less than the identity of those they believed responsible. Sunnis bore the blame. This sectarian lens, reinforced by a long history of marginalization under Ottoman rule (which privileged Sunni Islam), shaped Alawite perceptions of power and vulnerability in the new republic. While much of Syria’s post-independence press and intellectual elite chose to ignore or downplay sectarian undercurrents, the cycles of military coups, counter-coups, and purges—particularly in the army and intelligence services—were often driven by sectarian and regional considerations.

The Muslim Brotherhood saw what others preferred to deny. Their own factional predilections made them adept at recognizing those same impulses in others. When Hafez al-Assad seized power in 1970 in a coup d’état he dubbed the Corrective Movement, the implications were unmistakable to them: a member of a historically persecuted minority had captured the levers of power in a Sunni-majority country. This was unacceptable to them. Since neither side was interested in leaving such decisions on governance to the ballot box, a violent showdown was inevitable.

By 1976, the Brotherhood’s agitations, sporadic terrorist attacks, and assassinations morphed into an armed insurgency, aided in part by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—another Ba’athist regime, but one where a Sunni leader now ruled over a Shia majority. Assad and Saddam despised and distrusted each other, and the Sunni–Shia/Alawite dynamic added another layer of animosity.

Meanwhile, peaceful opposition to Assad’s regime persisted among various leftist and civil society groups—but their struggle was quickly eclipsed by the violent confrontation with the Brotherhood. The regime framed the entire crisis as a war against “terrorists” aligned with the West and Zionism. In response to growing unrest, Assad unleashed the army, including the Defense Brigades. The conflict reached its brutal apex in 1982, when Brotherhood fighters barricaded themselves in the city of Hama. Government forces laid siege, bombarded the city, and ultimately stormed it—killing between 15,000 and 40,000 civilians, destroying much of the old architecture, and crushing the spirit of rebellion through mass executions, rape, and collective punishment.

From that point on, the Assad regime governed Syria not just through repression, but as a settler-occupier. It relied on Alawite officers and soldiers to police cities where tensions festered beneath the surface. Alawites, who had traditionally lived in coastal and mountain villages, were settled in newly built suburbs surrounding major cities—a demographic reshaping that further alienated them from local populations. Though most Alawites remained poor and dependent on the state, their overrepresentation in the military, intelligence services, and public sector—including scholarships and foreign study programs—fueled widespread resentment.

By the time the 2011 revolution erupted, the regime’s divisive tactics were tragically predictable. Many Alawites, across clans and class lines, rallied to Assad—not necessarily out of love and loyalty, but out of fear and fatalism. The regime’s propaganda found fertile ground among a community that had long been primed to believe that their survival depended on Assad’s rule.

The opposition’s early commitment to nonviolence, civic discourse, and inclusive citizenship was quickly overshadowed by the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood in its ranks—despite the irony that the Brotherhood had only recently been engaged in Turkish-sponsored dialogue with the regime itself. For Assad, holding quiet talks with the Brotherhood was a pragmatic move; for the opposition to include them openly was a liability that played straight into the regime’s narrative. The Brotherhood’s organizational strength and external support ensured their presence, and soon, they too had militias.

But the revolution’s trajectory was ultimately hijacked not just by the Brotherhood or the regime, but by an international free-for-all. Foreign powers, each pursuing their own interests, helped turn Syria into a battlefield for rival ideologies and agendas. In time, it was the Salafi jihadists—a religiopolitical Sunni Islamist ideology that seeks to establish a global caliphate through armed struggle—who emerged dominant across large swaths of territory.

Today, these fighters patrol the streets of cities they often don’t belong to—and where their presence is unwelcome, or no longer welcome, though few would dare say so. Many carry distorted, romanticized versions of history, shaped by ideology and trauma. They see themselves as liberators, entitled to recognition, obedience, and the spoils. Locals regard them with suspicion, if not fear. Most hail from Idlib province or from abroad—including Central Asia, the North Caucasus, and China’s Uyghur regions. All are Sunni. But even when patrolling Sunni-majority neighborhoods, their presence feels like that of an occupying force. Trauma runs deep, and appeals to pan-Sunni solidarity ring hollow. In this country, strangers rarely inspire feelings of safety—and everyone becomes a stranger the moment they leave their village or neighborhood.

Hyper-local belonging is a hallmark of deeply traditional societies. And beneath the layers of modernity and the ideological slogans of the Ba’ath Party and its political partners, Syrian society—indeed, Syrian societies—remain profoundly traditional. The idea of a shared Syrian homeland—where all are welcome and none are a stranger—remains a precarious, unfinished project.

And to many, it now feels like a failed one.

How could it not, when some parts of the country are treated like conquered lands, and others as lands yet to be conquered?

Swapping socialism for Islamism, or Alawite Shabbiha thugs for Sunni jihadist enforcers, may impose a semblance of order in some areas while provoking rebellion in others. But in every case, it cannot heal, endure, or rebuild. Only a genuine sense of patriotism, anchored in equality, accountability, and the rule of law, can offer a sustainable future.

The Assad regime’s decades-long survival depended on geopolitics that no longer apply. The world itself is changing. In this emerging global order, even powerful actors are no longer shy about using chaos and violence to get their way. Assad’s old tactic—threatening regional instability if he is challenged—has lost its edge. Syria’s new rulers should make a note of that as they ponder their options. Chaos is now a currency traded by all.

If Syria is to avoid perpetual collapse—if the project of building a shared homeland is to succeed—it must adopt a new structural paradigm rooted in inclusivity, decentralization, and genuine power-sharing. Nothing less will do.

Can liberal ideas take root in the Middle East? The history of the European Enlightenment offers hope that even widely unpopular liberal ideas can eventually take hold. It is often claimed that liberalism is uniquely Western. But the West itself once rejected these ideas, and when they first emerged, political and religious authorities regarded them as dangerous and heretical. The triumph of liberalism in Europe was not the inevitable outgrowth of Christianity or local traditions—it was a hard-won achievement. This history holds lessons for advocates of the Enlightenment in the Middle East today.

The Enlightenment's core legacy was a broader shift toward reason, individualism, and a skepticism of traditional authority. But the path there was slow and bloody. Post-Reformation Europe was consumed by sectarian conflict: France bled for decades in the Wars of Religion, culminating in a massacre of Protestants; the Thirty Years’ War devastated the German lands, killing perhaps a fifth of the population; and mid-seventeenth-century England was torn apart by civil wars that ended with the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649. In these societies, Christian conviction did not foster toleration; instead, religion drove princes, parliaments, and preachers alike to violence. Religious freedom, like any idea, had to be discovered and fought for.

At first, European rulers followed St. Augustine’s command to compel nonbelievers into the church. Compulsion, Augustine argued, would lead to eventual assent: “Let compulsion be found outside, the will will arise within.” A Presbyterian clergyman expressed the mainstream clerical view when he warned that “To let men serve God according to the persuasion of their own consciences was to cast out one devil that seven worse might enter.” What mattered was the profession of the right beliefs—whether by reason or fear of violence was irrelevant.

It was necessity, not principle, that first gave rise to religious toleration. Rival sects, unable to annihilate one another, were forced to coexist. Protestants in France, for example, were granted limited freedoms only after both sides recognized they could not destroy each other. Even England’s Toleration Act of 1689 excluded Catholics, atheists, and anyone who denied the Holy Trinity.

It was a radical minority of intellectuals who ultimately broke this cycle of persecution. Thinkers like Locke, Voltaire, and the lesser-known Pierre Bayle offered a way out of religious violence by emphasizing the individual’s judgment and conscience. Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary challenged dogmas and superstitions, teaching readers to evaluate popular views critically. Banned in both Protestant and Catholic countries, it nevertheless shaped the next generation of thinkers, including Voltaire and Hume.

For Enlightenment thinkers, the key was not only what people believed but how they reached their beliefs. Fanatics, Locke argued, mistook intensity of conviction for evidence of truth and divine inspiration. Voltaire warned: “Whoever has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.” The solution was to discipline the mind: to believe only what reason could justify. Gradually, political and intellectual elites came to insist that conviction must rest on judgment rather than compulsion or passion. This principle, articulated by Bayle and Locke, later found political expression in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As Jefferson proudly noted in a letter written to James Madison, “it is honorable for us to have produced the first legislature who has had the courage to declare that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions.”

Religious freedom opened the door to other liberties. For centuries, premarital sex was treated as a crime across Europe, punishable by fines, whipping, or even death. As historian of sex, Faramerz Dabhoiwala explains:

“Though the details varied from place to place, every European society promoted the ideal of sexual discipline and punished people for consensual non-marital sex. So did their colonial off-shoots, in North America and elsewhere. This was a central feature of Christian civilization, one that had steadily grown in importance since the early Middle Ages. In Britain alone by the early seventeenth century, thousands of men and women suffered the consequences every year. Sometimes, as we shall see, they were even put to death. Nowadays we regard such practices with repugnance. We associate them with the Taliban, with Sharia law, with people far away and alien in outlook. Yet until quite recently, until the Enlightenment, our own culture was like this too.”

This was a natural, if hard-won, evolution: if individuals should be free to choose their religion, why not also their personal choices? Critics worried about where this reasoning might lead. Anglican clergyman Jonas Proast warned that if conscience were free, “perhaps other men may think it as reasonable to except some other things [from state control], which they have a kindness for. For instance: some perhaps may except arbitrary divorcing, others polygamy, others concubinacy, others simple fornication.” In the end, he was right—freedom of conscience gradually encouraged greater personal freedoms, making it untenable to claim that people should control their souls but not their bodies.

The same pattern held in art, science, agriculture, and trade: progress came not from inevitability but from the activism of dedicated heterodox minorities. Liberty takes root not because it is native to a culture but because individuals insist that conscience cannot be coerced and reason can be trusted. Europe did not begin with this conviction—it acquired it painfully, through war, persecution, and the persistence of those who refused to bow to dogma. The Middle East is not exempt from this pattern. If freedom could emerge from Europe’s wars of religion, it can rise as well from the region's own struggles, so long as there are voices with the courage to insist that conscience is beyond coercion and that reason may be trusted to form its own judgments.

But the history of Europe also warns us that such a transformation is neither swift nor certain. Progress required generations of conflict, setbacks, and the persistence of small minorities who refused to surrender their principles even when they paid for it with exile, imprisonment, or death. The same will be true in the Middle East: liberal ideas will not triumph by inevitability or outside intervention, but only through the long and painful work of those who defend them against overwhelming odds. The path is slow, the resistance formidable, and the outcome never guaranteed. Yet if history shows anything, it is that what begins as dangerous heresy can, through struggle and sacrifice, one day become accepted as common sense.

The question facing the Middle East, then, is not whether liberalism is foreign, but whether its advocates can sustain their case until what is now seen as dangerous novelty becomes accepted principle.

The late Iraqi anthropologist Faleh Abdul Jabar argued that the nation-state is less an organic product of history than an invention of 19th-century industrial capitalism. Before then, “nation” in European usage referred not to the mass political community we recognize today, but to smaller groups, often minorities. In his book Defeated Modernity, Abdul Jabar recounts an episode from the French Revolution: a fleeing nobleman, hearing a mob cry “Long live the nation!” after days of shouting “Long live the king!”, asked, “What is the nation?” The crowd admitted they did not know. For Abdul Jabar, this ambiguity illustrates that nations are not timeless entities but political and economic constructs that matured in the 19th and 20th centuries.

From this perspective, one may ask: Were Iraq’s Shia deliberately excluded from the creation of the modern Iraqi state? Was there a formal plan to build a nation without them? The answer is no. Yet structural factors, combined with the political choices of both British authorities and Shia leaders, marginalized the Shia in Iraq’s formative years.

The Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920 was a decisive moment. Shia clerics, led by Sayyid Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi, were among the uprising’s most prominent figures. But its suppression left behind a deep-seated mistrust. The clerical establishment saw Britain as an occupying enemy; Britain viewed the clerics as obstacles to state-building. While Shia clerics did not issue blanket religious prohibitions against political participation, many distanced themselves from the emerging political order.

Shirazi died in August 1920, just six weeks after the revolt began, depriving the movement of its unifying figure. His successor, Sayyid Abu al-Hasan al-Isfahani, declined to recognize the new state or send representatives to parliament, though he did not explicitly ban participation. Sheikh Muhammad Hussein al-Na’ini, author of The Awakening of the Nation, supported constitutionalism (the political philosophy and practice of establishing and maintaining a government whose power is derived from and limited by a body of fundamental law) but refused to recognize King Faisal’s legitimacy.

These positions deepened Shia political isolation without formally codifying it.

King Faisal I sought to integrate Shia leaders into the nascent state, but their limited participation was also a function of structural disadvantage. Four centuries of Ottoman neglect left the Shia with little experience in administration, education, or the military.

Nonetheless, Faisal made symbolic efforts:

• In 1922, Ja’far Abu al-Timman was appointed Minister of Commerce and Economy.

• In 1923, Abdul Mahdi al-Muntafiki, a tribal figure more than a bureaucrat, became Minister of Education.

But these gestures could not overcome the broader imbalance in political experience and opportunity.

The case of poet Mohammed Mahdi al-Jawahiri revealed the sectarian sensitivities of the era. In 1926, as a school supervisor, he penned a poem praising Iran. Baghdad’s education chief, Sati’ al-Husri, dismissed him for “anti-national” sentiment. The affair risked inflaming sectarian tensions until Faisal himself intervened, appointing al-Jawahiri to the royal court. The episode exposed both the fragility of Iraq’s national identity and the persistent undercurrents of sectarian rivalry.

Despite his origins in Hijaz, Faisal embraced an Iraqi identity and worked to foster a sense of unity. He expanded Shia educational opportunities and sponsored students to study abroad. Yet privately, he despaired. In a confidential memorandum of March 7, 1932, he wrote:

“I say with a heart full of sorrow that there is still no Iraqi people. There are only human masses devoid of national spirit, saturated with religious traditions and myths, without any unifying bond, dominated by sectarian differences.”

Faisal’s sudden death in 1933 ended unification efforts. Under his son Ghazi, sectarian representation dwindled to little more than token appointments.

By the late 1930s, sectarianism gave way to ideological struggles. Arab nationalism and communism supplanted religious identity as organizing principles. Shia politicians rose to prominence—Salih Jabr (prime minister in 1947), Muhammad al-Sadr (1948), and Fadhil al-Jamali (1953)—as politics became less explicitly sectarian.

The 1958 revolution brought Abdul Karim Qasim to power. Of mixed Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish heritage, Qasim championed a secular nationalism that sought to transcend divisions. He elevated Shia representation in the military and bureaucracy, aligned with leftist and communist forces, and pursued social reform. Yet his rejection of Arab nationalism alienated powerful opponents, leading to his overthrow and execution in 1963.

Qasim’s embrace of communists alarmed the Shia religious establishment. By 1960, communist rallies in Najaf and Karbala dwarfed the numbers at religious gatherings such as the Arbaeen pilgrimage. Alarmed clerics, including Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and Mohsen al-Hakim, responded forcefully. Al-Hakim’s fatwa—issued due to his “Communism is atheism and unbelief”—provided justification for a crackdown after the Ba'athist coup of 1963.

The 1963 coup brought Arab nationalists to power, dominated by the Sunni elite. Sectarian language diminished, but Shia society remained ideologically distant from Arab nationalism. Under Abdul Salam Arif, communists were suppressed, and the regime cooperated selectively with Shia clerics.

Religious revival persisted at the popular level. In 1962, the Shah of Iran donated a golden grille for Imam Hussein’s shrine, carried in a mass procession across Iraq in a vivid display of Shia religious identity.

By the late 1960s, the Arab world was reeling from the 1967 defeat by Israel. Secular nationalism was discredited, and political Islam surged. In Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party and other Shia Islamist groups joined Sunni movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood in offering an alternative. Clerical institutions, flush with resources, fueled this revival.

The Ba'athist coup of 1968 set the stage for a prolonged confrontation between the secular nationalist state and Islamist movements. This conflict would dominate Iraqi politics in the decades that followed.

The history of Iraq’s Shia—from reluctant revolutionaries in 1920 to sidelined partners in the formative decades of the state—lays bare the fragility of national unity when sectarian mistrust and structural inequality go unaddressed. A century later, those same questions haunt Iraq. The protests of 2019, led largely by disenfranchised Shia youth in Baghdad and the south, echoed the frustrations of earlier generations who found themselves excluded from meaningful political participation despite their demographic weight. Today, as Iraq grapples with corruption, foreign influence, and the challenge of building inclusive institutions, the legacy of these “forgotten founders” endures as a defining legacy.

King Faisal’s lament in 1932 that there was “still no Iraqi people” but only sectarian and tribal masses remains a warning. While Iraq has weathered dictatorship, foreign occupation, and civil war, the task of forging a truly shared identity remains unfinished. The Shia, once marginalized and later ascendant after 2003, now face their own crisis of legitimacy as ordinary Iraqis demand a politics that transcends sect and delivers justice, opportunity, and dignity. In this sense, the story of Iraq’s Shia is not simply one of exclusion, but of an ongoing struggle to turn sacrifice into citizenship and revolution into a durable national project.

This past Friday in Washington, D.C., the South Lawn of the White House became an unlikely venue for reconciliation. Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, adversaries for more than three decades, signed a peace agreement brokered by President Donald Trump.

For most Americans busy with the concerns of everyday life and far from the world of foreign policy, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is either a far-off, complicated dispute or something they’ve never heard of at all. For policymakers in Washington, Brussels, and Ankara, the agreement represents a significant shift in regional dynamics. The deal carries far-reaching implications, promising opportunities for cooperation as well as new sources of tension. Beyond ending an entrenched dispute, it initiates a strategic infrastructure project with the potential to reconfigure trade routes, realign alliances, and place Western influence deeper into a region historically dominated by Russia and Iran.

At the center of the agreement is the Zangezur Corridor, a 27-mile stretch of southern Armenia. Under the deal, Armenia will lease the corridor to the United States for 99 years, and Washington will sublease it to a private consortium. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) will combine highways, rail lines, pipelines, and fiber-optic cables to connect Azerbaijan to its Nakhchivan exclave, Turkey, and onward to European and NATO markets.

Though billed as a commercial project, the corridor has strategic importance. It skirts both Russia and Iran, forges a direct link between the South Caucasus and Western markets, and, for the first time, positions U.S.-aligned figures—whether in government or the private sector—along Iran’s northern frontier.

The Armenia–Azerbaijan rivalry dates back to the early 20th century and escalated during the final years of the Soviet Union. Nagorno-Karabakh, a majority-Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan, became the focal point of two wars that left tens of thousands dead and displaced. Moscow dominated mediation efforts for decades, mainly through the OSCE Minsk Group, using the process to maintain leverage over both capitals.

Russia’s war in Ukraine, combined with its diminished regional standing, made this possible. Trump approached the negotiations in line with his transactional style, framing peace as a shared economic opportunity. Aliyev, attuned to pragmatic deals, was willing to explore the proposal. Pashinyan, increasingly disillusioned with Russia’s security commitments, calculated that a Western-brokered agreement might deliver better results. Putin unwittingly opened the door, and Trump walked right through it.

Zangezur has been a strategic hinge between the Caspian and Black Sea basins for a long time. Under TRIPP, Armenian sovereignty over the land is maintained, but development and management will fall to a U.S.-backed consortium. The project envisions:

• A four-lane highway linking Baku to Kars in Turkey

• A parallel railway

• Pipelines for oil and gas transit

• Fiber-optic cables, with potential for high-voltage transmission lines
  

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The move promises major economic ripple effects. Azerbaijan would gain a secure and direct link to Turkey and European markets and strengthen its role as an energy supplier to the West. Armenia would gain diversified trade routes and reduce economic dependence on Russia. For Turkey, the corridor fulfills a long-sought-after direct land connection to Azerbaijan and Central Asia’s Turkic states.

European stakeholders see an opportunity to bolster energy security in the post-Ukraine landscape, with Caspian gas moving through NATO territory rather than Russian-controlled routes.

The agreement indicates a deliberate move by both Armenia and Azerbaijan to expand ties with the West. Armenia has already suspended participation in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and is now hosting a U.S.-facilitated project of significant scope. Azerbaijan continues to maintain working relations with Moscow but is deepening links with NATO members, particularly Turkey and the United States.

For Russia, the development is a setback. It loses both mediation authority and the prospect of overseeing a key transit route. The Kremlin’s subdued response reflects its reduced influence.

Iran regards its border with Armenia as one of its few overland connections to Eurasia not under the control of adversaries. The corridor’s alignment cuts Tehran out of a northward trade route to Russia and introduces U.S.-aligned infrastructure on its doorstep. Iranian officials are not happy, to say the least, and have threatened to turn the area into "a graveyard of the mercenaries of Donald Trump.” They have voiced concern that the project could be leveraged to limit trade and expand Western intelligence capabilities in the region. State media have described the agreement as a “Western infiltration plan,” though Tehran’s options for direct counteraction are limited.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei characterized the agreement to build the Zangezur corridor as “a great betrayal” and cautioned that it “must not go unanswered” by the Islamic Republic.

Iran International reported that on Sunday, The Daily wrote: “Iran should use the levers at its disposal to confront them and, as a first step, can invoke the Geneva and Jamaica conventions to ban the passage of US- and Israeli-affiliated vessels through the Strait of Hormuz.” What Iran can and will follow through on is unclear.

Outside the Caucasus, TRIPP has the potential to link NATO infrastructure directly to Central Asia. Rail and road routes from Turkey through Azerbaijan and across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan would create an alternative to China’s Belt and Road network. The region’s reserves of hydrocarbons, rare earth metals, and uranium make it highly valuable for Western economies seeking secure supply chains.

The U.S. government has stated (and the agreement prohibits) that it will not station combat forces along the corridor. However, the involvement of an American-led venture suggests private security contractors will operate there. Many are likely to have prior military backgrounds, effectively placing U.S.-aligned personnel close to Iranian territory without establishing a formal base.

Such arrangements allow Washington to maintain a presence, secure the route, and monitor regional developments at relatively low cost.

Europe gains a more secure energy corridor. The United States extends its strategic reach into a region where it has traditionally had a limited footprint. Turkey strengthens its role as a trans-Eurasian connector. Armenia and Azerbaijan open new economic channels while reducing their reliance on Moscow.

In Armenia, some critics argue the lease could set a precedent that undermines sovereignty. Unresolved humanitarian and political issues—such as the status of displaced Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, the release of detainees, and cultural site protections—are contentious. There is also concern about the corridor becoming a target for sabotage, particularly from actors aligned with Iran or other states opposed to the project.

If TRIPP is successfully implemented, it would integrate the South Caucasus into Western economic and security structures in a way not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The corridor would alter regional trade flows, reduce the geopolitical leverage of Russia and Iran, and create new pathways for cooperation between NATO members and Central Asian states.

Infrastructure alone cannot resolve the underlying political and ethnic disputes of the region, but the agreement demonstrates how strategic connectivity projects can influence long-term alignments. Whether the Zangezur Corridor becomes a lasting success will depend on sustained political will, effective management, and the ability to navigate the geopolitical frictions it is sure to provoke.

Sectarianism in Iraq is often mischaracterized as a long-standing divide that has always shaped Iraqi society—an ancient animosity embedded in the nation’s social fabric. But this narrative obscures a more accurate history. The sectarian divisions that define modern Iraq are not indigenous or inevitable; instead, they are the legacy of foreign interventions that weaponized identity to entrench power. Far from being the natural outcome of internal dynamics, sectarianism in Iraq was manufactured over centuries through imperial manipulation, deliberate marginalization, and externally imposed conflict.

Until the early modern era, sectarian affiliation in Iraq was a matter of private belief rather than political alignment. Communal life was shaped more by tribal, familial, and local affiliations than by whether one was Sunni or Shia. Urban centers like Baghdad, Najaf, and Kufa flourished as hubs of cultural and religious pluralism, home to Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Jews, Christians, and Muslims of varying sects.

Theological distinctions certainly existed, but they did not manifest as political fault lines. The concept of "sectarianism" (ta’ifiya)—the division of society and politics along religious or sect-based lines—had little relevance to governance or social hierarchy in pre-modern Iraq. Religious institutions operated autonomously, tribal networks remained inclusive, and identity was fluid, negotiable, and often irrelevant to one’s public standing.

This fragile equilibrium was upended in the 16th century with the emergence of the Safavid Empire in Persia. Shah Ismail I declared Twelver Shi’ism the state religion and launched an aggressive campaign to impose it across Iraq beginning in 1508. Sectarian identity, for the first time, became a tool of statecraft, imposed through coercion, forced conversions, and purges of Sunni clerics.

The Ottoman Empire, perceiving Safavid expansion as a geopolitical and religious threat, seized Baghdad in 1534 and reasserted Sunni Hanafi orthodoxy. The Ottomans institutionalized Shi’a exclusion: they were barred from the military, judiciary, and educational systems. Over the following centuries, Iraq’s Shi’a population was sidelined through the calculated policies of empires bent on securing their rule.

In the 19th century, Iran’s Qajar dynasty recalibrated the role of the Shi’a religious hierarchy to advance its regional interests, projecting influence over Iraq’s holy cities. This period also marked a transformative moment in Shi’a political agency. In 1891, when the Qajar monarchy granted a British monopoly over Iran’s tobacco industry, Grand Ayatollah Mirza Shirazi—based in Iraq—issued a fatwa prohibiting tobacco use. The resulting mass protest forced the Qajar king to revoke the concession.

It was a watershed moment: a cleric had mobilized a grassroots revolt against foreign influence. The marja’iyya, previously a theological institution, had now become a political force, capable of shaping public life and resisting imperial designs.

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of British rule in 1917 marked yet another turning point. Inheriting a fractured administrative system, the British chose to govern Iraq through a narrow Sunni elite, sidelining the Shi’a majority who had already been denied access to education and military advancement under Ottoman rule.

Unlike in Lebanon, Britain did not formalize sectarianism in Iraq’s legal code. Yet in practice, the colonial administration entrenched Sunni dominance in state institutions while reinforcing Shi’a exclusion. It was classic imperial strategy: govern by division.

King Faisal I, installed by the British, understood the perils of sectarian fragmentation. He attempted to integrate Shi’a voices into the nascent state. Figures like Rustum Haidar, a Shi’a intellectual and close advisor to Faisal, worked to bridge the divisions. But their efforts were undermined by British policy and resistance from entrenched Sunni elites. Haidar’s assassination in 1940 signaled the demise of an early vision for a unified Iraqi polity.

The historical record leaves little room for ambiguity: Iraq’s sectarianism was not an organic development. It was engineered. The Safavids, Ottomans, Qajars, and British each exploited religious identity for imperial ends, transforming Iraqis into proxies in broader geopolitical contests. The consequences of these developments have haunted Iraq ever since.

This legacy planted deep roots of mistrust, institutionalized inequality, and fractured the national consciousness. It embedded the notion that identity must be political, and that politics must be sectarian.

The forces that have benefited from this systematic fragmentation—whether regional powers or internal actors—remain active. Yet the country’s own history offers a blueprint for renewal. Iraq was once a society where sectarian identity did not govern political life, where coexistence was the norm rather than the exception.

Rebuilding a cohesive Iraqi state requires constitutional reforms and electoral adjustments, yes. But it also demands a cultural and political repudiation of the sectarian narratives imposed from abroad. A strong Iraq must be anchored in a national identity that transcends religious, ethnic, and tribal boundaries.

Sectarianism doesn’t have to be Iraq’s fate. It is an imported construct—one that can be unmade.

For more than half a century, Syrian cinema has operated under competing forces of control—first through the ideological machinery of Ba’athist authoritarianism, and now in the shadow of religious extremism. Filmmaking in Syria has rarely been a neutral or independent pursuit; it has been conscripted into larger narratives about identity, loyalty, and power. Artists have long been forced to navigate not just technical or financial obstacles, but the deeper constraints of what can be publicly imagined, questioned, or remembered.

For decades, the Syrian state under Hafez al-Assad, and later his son Bashar, mastered the art of spectacle. While the regime loudly proclaimed its allegiance to unity, freedom, and socialism, its actual project was one of total ideological capture. Nowhere was this contradiction more vivid than in the cinema.

The Ministry of Culture, through its National Film Organization, exerted firm control over the screen. All film production had to serve the interests of the state. Ba’athist ideals—pan-Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism, and unwavering loyalty to the regime—were not themes to explore, but mandates to obey. Under Hafez, the image of the ideal Syrian was constructed: a soldier in the service of the state, a socialist peasant in the grip of collectivism, a citizen whose existence was defined by devotion.

Yet, film, like all great arts, has a tendency to slip through the cracks.

Within this tightly controlled ecosystem, a cadre of filmmakers managed to craft works of startling insight and subtle rebellion. Through allegory, fragmented narratives, and stark realism, they told stories not of state glory but of human struggle and moral ambiguity:

• Omar Amiralay, once a supporter of the regime, became one of its most incisive critics. In The Chickens (1977), he used a seemingly simple story about agricultural reform to expose bureaucratic absurdities. His later work, A Flood in Baath Country (2003), offered a devastating post-mortem on the Ba’athist experiment, so pointed that it was effectively banned.

• Mohammad Malas, whose Dreams of the City (1984) and The Night (1992) excavated personal and collective trauma, used the coming-of-age narrative to depict life under repression without ever naming the system explicitly.

• Ossama Mohammed’s Stars in Broad Daylight (1988) was a furious, hallucinatory portrait of a society gripped by violence and conformity—a film so confrontational it was never screened in Syria.

• Abdellatif Abdelhamid, with works like Nights of the Jackals (1992), depicted rural Syria with poetic realism, subtly exploring the fractures beneath the surface of state-imposed order.

These directors did not defy censorship directly; they outwitted it. But such clever subversions were always at risk, subject to being misread or punished. The cost of dissent was high. Exile, blacklisting, or silence became the price of truth telling.

When Syria’s uprising began in 2011, there was hope that a new cultural renaissance might rise from the ashes of dictatorship. But the collapse of state control did not automatically translate into creative freedom. In fact, the vacuum left by the state was quickly filled—not by liberal democracy, but by competing visions of domination.

In areas controlled by Islamist factions, a different kind of censorship has emerged, one rooted not in nationalism but in religious dogma. Filmmakers report facing pressure to conform to Islamic codes of morality, avoid images or themes deemed "blasphemous," and submit to local clerical authority. The once iron-fisted grip of Ba’athist propaganda has been replaced, in some places, by the veiled fist of religious orthodoxy.

Cultural expression is now subject to the judgment of sheikhs instead of ministers. The threat has changed costume but not character.

This raises a troubling question: Is Syrian cinema simply trading one form of repression for another?

Under Ba’athist ideology, the camera was meant to glorify the state. Under rising religious conservatism, it may now be expected to glorify virtue, modesty, or piety. In both cases, cinema is reduced to a tool of compliance rather than a medium of challenge.

For artists, the danger is not just censorship—it is the narrowing of the imagination. When what is permissible becomes a function of what is ideologically or theologically acceptable, the capacity to dream diminishes. And when a nation can no longer dream freely, it cannot truly heal.

Many Syrian filmmakers now work in exile—in Beirut, Berlin, Istanbul, and Paris. There, they find greater freedom to tell the stories that are unwelcome at home. Films like Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait (2014), co-directed by Ossama Mohammed and Wiam Simav Bedirxan, offer raw, unsparing accounts of the Syrian civil war, smuggled out of the country and assembled in diaspora.

This cinema of exile is a cinema of witness—testifying not only to the atrocities committed, but to the resilience of a people trying to reclaim their voice.

The ultimate question Syrian filmmakers now face is not just what they can show, but who gets to define the national narrative. Is it the state? The mosque? Or the artist?

Cinema is more than entertainment; it is a mirror, a battleground, and sometimes, a blueprint for the future. If Syria is to become a society that embraces pluralism and freedom, its filmmakers must be allowed to imagine it so. Not just in private, and not just from exile, but openly and unapologetically.

The battle over Syrian cinema is, at heart, a battle over who gets to tell Syria’s story. Until that story can be told in full without fear, coercion, or compromise, the revolution remains unfinished.

Since its inception in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has built much of its foreign policy on a lie: that it is fighting for Palestine. In reality, “liberating Jerusalem” has served less as a guiding principle and more as a propaganda tool—justification for proxy militias, regional destabilization, and brutal sectarian warfare. Tehran’s support for the Palestinian cause has never been about solidarity. It’s always been about power.

The Iranian regime likes to portray itself as the vanguard of resistance. But the revolution that toppled the Shah was not a theocratic uprising—it was a broad coalition of liberals, secularists, nationalists, and leftists. Ayatollah Khomeini hijacked it. Within weeks, dissenting voices were silenced. Political opponents were executed. A new constitution enshrined not only clerical rule but an explicit mandate to “export the revolution.”

That export wasn’t medical aid or educational missions—it was militias. From Hezbollah in Lebanon to Shiite death squads in Iraq, to the Houthis in Yemen and pro-Assad forces in Syria, Iran built an empire of armed proxies. The banner was always “resistance,” but the result has been consistent: collapsed states, deepened sectarianism, and millions of displaced civilians. After four decades of this strategy, Iran has gained influence in four Arab capitals—Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sana’a—but has done nothing to bring Palestinians closer to statehood.

Tehran’s supposed commitment to Palestine rings especially hollow when you look at what its proxies have done to Palestinians themselves.

Take Iraq. Under Saddam Hussein, more than 50,000 Palestinian refugees lived uneasily but protected in Baghdad. After the 2003 U.S. invasion, Iran-backed Shiite militias unleashed a wave of ethnic cleansing. Palestinian neighborhoods were raided, families abducted, and Sunni clerics assassinated. Human rights groups documented systematic violence. By 2006, the Palestinian presence in Iraq was nearly erased. Iran, which controlled many of these militias, did nothing to stop it.

Or consider Syria, where Iran invested billions to keep Bashar al-Assad in power. From the earliest days of peaceful protests, Tehran deployed Hezbollah fighters and Quds Force commanders to crush dissent. The regime used barrel bombs and chemical weapons, with Iranian support. Millions were displaced. Among them: Palestinian refugees who had lived in Syria for generations.

Iran’s foreign policy is riddled with contradictions. Its constitution declares support for “the just struggles of the oppressed,” but its actions say otherwise. It arms Marxist militias like the PKK in Turkey, not out of solidarity with Kurds, but to undermine a rival Muslim-majority power. It fuels sectarian conflict across the region while claiming to champion Islamic unity. It chants “Death to America” while sending diplomats to secret nuclear negotiations in Vienna and Geneva.

The Islamic Republic is an opportunistic regime. When the Houthis in Yemen began disrupting Red Sea shipping lanes in late 2023, it was Iran that quietly pressured them to stand down, not to protect civilians, but to revive backchannel talks with Washington. When Iran’s economy is crumbling, it pauses “jihad” in exchange for sanctions relief. The strategy is quiet desperation.

Hezbollah began as a militia resisting Israeli occupation in southern Lebanon. Today, it is a parallel state, propped up by Iranian money and firepower, dominating Lebanese politics and silencing its critics. In Iraq, groups like Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and Kata’ib Hizbollah operate as mafia-style militias, extorting communities they once claimed to protect.

In Yemen, the Houthis fly Iranian flags and chant Tehran’s slogans while plunging the country into famine and ruin. In Syria, Iran backed one of the 21st century’s most brutal regimes. All of this, we’re told, is in the name of Palestine.

But what have Palestinians gained from Iran’s decades of “resistance”? No state. No peace. No dignity. Just another foreign power exploiting their tragedy. And now, even that power is cracking under the weight of its contradictions.

Today, Iran’s empire is not just faltering—it’s on fire.

The Islamic Republic is now engaged in its most direct and devastating war with Israel to date. What began as a series of proxy maneuvers has erupted into open conflict. On June 13, 2025, Israel launched a sweeping campaign of airstrikes on Iranian territory, targeting military infrastructure and nuclear sites. In response, Tehran unleashed a barrage of missiles and drones on Israeli cities. Civilian casualties are mounting on both sides. Iranian cities are facing fuel shortages and mass displacement. Tehran is under lockdown.

The regime that spent decades fighting its wars through others now finds itself bleeding at home.

It is no longer just Baghdad or Damascus or Sana’a paying the price; it’s Isfahan, Natanz, and Tehran. Iranian civilians are fleeing. Hospitals are overwhelmed. For the first time, the consequences of Tehran’s adventurism are not abstract—they are visible in the bombed-out remains of its own cities. The slogans of “resistance” sound emptier than ever.

In Iraq, Iran’s proxies are fractured. Among younger Shiites, once sympathetic to “resistance” rhetoric, there is rising anger over corruption, unemployment, and subservience to Tehran. Iran-backed militias are increasingly seen as occupiers rather than protectors. In Lebanon, Hezbollah, long the crown jewel of Iran’s proxy empire, is politically isolated and militarily weakened. The death of Hassan Nasrallah in 2024 and ongoing Israeli pressure have left the group reeling.

In Syria, Iran’s influence was gutted after Bashar al-Assad’s regime finally collapsed in late 2024. A brutal investment, paid in blood and treasure, ended in failure. In Yemen, the Houthis—once Tehran’s most disruptive proxy—agreed to a ceasefire in May 2025 under intense global pressure. Iranian leverage in the Gulf is waning.

The so-called Axis of Resistance now resembles a wounded hydra: scarred, scattered, and leaderless.

Inside Iran, the situation is no better. The regime’s internal legitimacy had already been crumbling since the 2022 women-led uprising. “Woman, Life, Freedom” remains a living indictment. Youth unemployment is rampant. The rial has nosedived. The Revolutionary Guard has become a bloated cartel, more focused on monopolizing industry than defending the republic. What’s left of public trust is evaporating.

In the face of war, economic collapse, and international isolation, Iranian leaders still invoke the Palestinian cause as justification. Not out of conviction, but out of desperation. The more Tehran loses grip at home, the more loudly it claims to be defending Palestinians. It’s a sleight of hand. If there is an enemy abroad, there’s an excuse for tyranny at home.

But that excuse is wearing thin. Iran’s decades-long project of exporting “resistance” has collapsed into strategic failure and moral bankruptcy.

It lost Syria. Its militias are discredited across Iraq. Hezbollah is weakened. The Houthis are retreating. And in Gaza, its weapons have delivered only destruction, not progress. After years of exporting chaos, the war has come home. Iranian cities now face the same devastation once inflicted by its proxies.

This conflict has exposed the regime’s core delusion: that it stood for justice. In reality, it stood for power, repression, and survival. The myth of revolutionary solidarity has collapsed under the weight of civilian casualties, economic ruin, and growing public dissent.

For decades, Tehran used the Palestinian cause to justify its actions and mask its failures. That mask is gone. What remains is a regime out of breath, out of allies, and increasingly out of time.