Syria Can’t Be Rebuilt on the Myths of Its Diaspora
Each Syrian community in exile carries its own frozen image of the homeland. But the country cannot move forward unless its people begin negotiating a shared reality instead of competing myths.
Every Syrian community in exile carries its own idea of Syria, frozen largely as it was when they left. It’s as if there’s an innate inability, or unwillingness, to allow the place you left to keep living without you, to keep accumulating complexity, contradiction, and culpability that your absence exempts you from sharing.
The nostalgia that sustains diaspora communities is epistemological and carries a claim about what Syria was and, therefore, what it must become again. And it is built on a foundational distortion. Ask the generation that left Syria in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s about sectarianism, and many will tell you: we never asked about religious background. It was impolite to do so. In our time, it did not matter.
The leap from “we did not discuss it” to “it did not matter” is enormous, and it is unfounded. Syria’s communities did not discuss their differences publicly because the political and social culture of the time treated such discussion as a provocation, a vulgarity, and a threat to the national myth of unity. But the silence was evidence of avoidance, not harmony. The sectarian, tribal, regional, and ethnic dynamics were always there, shaping political behavior from the first days of Syria’s independence: in the coups, the factional alignments, the unspoken calculus of who got which ministry, which military appointment, or which business license.
The fact that Syrians resisted the French attempt to divide the country into sectarian statelets was a genuine national achievement, but it was not evidence that communities truly understood each other as equals, had developed mechanisms to manage their differences, or grasped what citizenship actually requires. It meant, at most, that the nationalist sentiment was stronger than the sectarian one at that particular moment. The two were never mutually exclusive, and history proved it.
What the diaspora inherited from that era was the habit of treating silence as harmony, and harmony as a sufficient substitute for justice. In exile, deprived of the lived friction that might have challenged the myth, that evasion calcified into identity. The Syria that did not discuss its divisions became, in memory, a Syria that had none at all. And that Syria—serene, cosmopolitan, tolerant, wronged—became the icon that the diaspora now defends, demands, and insists upon as the template for what must be rebuilt.
It is a beautiful Syria. But it never quite existed. And not only because the tolerance was shallower than memory allows. It never existed because no single Syria ever did. Each community, each sect, each ethnic group conceived of the country in a way that corresponded to its own particular concerns, fears, and sense of what it was owed and what it could afford to concede.
The Sunni Arab majority imagined a Syria that was theirs, with room for others, but contingent on perceived loyalty and good behavior. The minorities imagined a Syria that protected them, guaranteed their place, and did not require them to dissolve into a majority culture they did not fully trust. The Kurds imagined a Syria that acknowledged what had been denied them—rights, culture, identity—while many also dreamt of Kurdistan, the imagined homeland that cuts across Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, and to which any Syrian solution was always merely a way station.
None of these Syrias made serious room for what the others wanted or needed or required their holders to reckon honestly with the fears and grievances of communities other than their own. They coexisted through the mutual suppression of the conversation that might have forced it, not mutual understanding.
And when they went into exile, they took those partial, self-serving maps with them, and promptly stopped updating them. More tellingly, most continued to insist on the myth of a unified Syrian identity as the proper framework for the country they had left, even as they organized their lives abroad along the very communal lines they claimed did not define Syria. The Christian Syrian gravitated toward the Christian Syrian community. The Alawite toward the Alawite. The Druze toward the Druze. The Kurd toward the Kurd. The unity they demanded of Syria at home was a demand they made of others, not a practice they maintained themselves. It was, in this sense, the purest expression of the pathology: a standard applied outward, never inward.
Then the revolution came, and what remained of the myth imploded. Each community experienced the uprising, the civil war, and its aftermath through its own communal prism, and what it saw there confirmed what it had always privately believed. The barriers that politeness and nationalism had kept formally invisible became explicit, load-bearing, and in many cases insurmountable. Old suspicions hardened into convictions, and old grievances acquired new, bloodier evidence. The revolution did not create the divisions, but it gave every community permission to stop pretending they did not exist, and fresh reasons to dig deeper into them.
In exile, the effect was amplified: each community’s diaspora closed ranks around its own narrative of the war, its own account of who had suffered most and who bore the most responsibility. The partial maps became battle maps. And the distance from Syria, rather than providing perspective, provided impunity and the freedom to hold the most extreme version of your community’s position without having to live alongside the people it was directed against.
This is where the pathology acquires its most damaging political dimension. The positions formed in exile, hardened by distance and untempered by the friction of actual coexistence, flow back into Syria through money, media, and the emotional authority that the homeland instinctively grants to those who left and kept faith. Local leaders who might be inclined toward accommodation find themselves outflanked by diaspora voices that have no stake in the consequences. Communities that might be edging toward pragmatic negotiation are pulled back by the weight of their exiled members’ expectations. The diaspora sets temperatures it will never have to live in.
And the homeland, still dependent on the diaspora’s resources and validation, too often defers to them. What began as a failure of imagination becomes a feedback loop: exile distorts, distortion transmits, transmission hardens what was already rigid, and the cycle repeats.
There were dissidents within each community who refused the communal narrative, tried to maintain cross-communal solidarities, and criticized their own camp as readily as they criticized others. They existed, and they matter as evidence that the pathology was neither inevitable nor universal, nor the only possible response to the circumstances. But they were too few, and the revolutionary moment—rather than vindicating them—isolated them further. The closing of communal ranks left little room for those who refused to close ranks, and the emotional and social cost of dissent within one’s own community proved, for most, too high to sustain.
I call this compound condition Syriosis. It is not a single condition but a cluster, and its components reinforce each other in ways that make the whole more resistant to treatment than any individual symptom:
The first component is the frozen clock: the inability to allow the country you left to keep changing without you, combined with the insistence that your frozen image of it is the authoritative one.
The second is the distortion that accompanies the freezing: the selective memory that smooths over contradictions, elevates the tolerable moments into golden ages, and suppresses the evidence that complicates the myth.
The third is the conversion of that distorted memory into a moral claim—not merely “this is how Syria was” but “this is how Syria should be,” and by extension, “those who disagree with my vision of it are betraying it.”
The fourth, and perhaps most corrosive, is the substitution of litany for introspection: the endless rehearsal of contributions made and wrongs suffered, presented as self-knowledge, when it is in fact its precise opposite.
What makes Syriosis particularly hard to treat is that its symptoms present as virtues. Fidelity to the homeland looks like loyalty. Refusal to compromise looks like a principle. The rehearsal of grievance looks like bearing witness. Amplifying one’s own community’s position looks like advocacy. From the inside, the pathology is indistinguishable from commitment and devotion. That is why it persists across generations, and why the dissenters within each community—those who question the myth, insist on complexity, and refuse the communal narrative—are experienced not as honest voices but as traitors.
Syriosis is self-sealing. It has built-in antibodies against the only things that could cure it.
When the fall of Assad came, unexpectedly swift and disorienting, it brought a moment of hope. But hope for what, precisely? For each community, it was a hope for the effortless realization of the Syria it had been carrying in its fantasies. The Sunni Arab majority hoped for the Syria that was, finally and legitimately, theirs. The religious minorities hoped for a Syria that would protect them, restore them, and treat them as equal victims of the Assad regime, irrespective of their actual sympathies at the time or now. When clashes and massacres struck the coastal mountains and Sweida province, those hopes curdled and were followed by calls for an autonomous or independent Alawite enclave along the coast, and for a Druze homeland in Sweida.
The Alawite and Druze diaspora, previously more subdued, galvanized rapidly, forming active lobbies in Western capitals alongside the Christian diaspora organizations that had long been calling for international protection against what they described as Islamist Arab Sunni rule.
The Kurds, for their part, hoped that the fall of Assad would finally open the door to formal autonomy in the areas they called Rojava—or Western Kurdistan. That project, however, encompassed not only Kurdish-majority areas but also territories home to Assyrian and Chaldean communities, as well as Arab towns and cities that had come under Kurdish control during the fight against the Islamic State. Those populations had tolerated Kurdish governance reluctantly while Assad remained a threat; with his removal, their reasons for acquiescence disappeared. The Kurdish political investment in Syria was, as always, conditional—a tactical position within a larger dream that Syria’s borders alone could never satisfy.
What all these projects shared was a foundational misreading of what had been lost. They were hopes for the reconstruction of something that, in the form imagined, had never actually existed.
And that is the deepest problem. When you believe the task is to reconstruct a lost reality, you can at least argue about how faithfully to reproduce it. But when the reality you are trying to reconstruct was always an illusion, the reconstruction project is doomed before it begins. It is not nostalgia for a place. It is nostalgia for a fantasy. And fantasies, however sincerely held, cannot serve as blueprints.
The actual challenge Syria faces—the one almost no community in the country or the diaspora has been willing to name—is not reconstruction but construction: the building of a shared reality among communities that have never truly negotiated what living together actually requires. That is a harder task, a longer one, and one for which the diaspora, as currently constituted, is almost entirely unequipped to undertake. Though in fairness, the country they left behind appears no more ready to undertake it.
Before anyone pushes for a particular project, whether it be autonomy, separatism, federalism, democracy, or Islamism, what is needed first is a different kind of conversation: an honest reckoning with who we are, how we came to be, and the geopolitical realities within which we all have to live. Only from that foundation can Syrians develop a clearer sense of the limits of the possible—and begin, at last, to work within them.
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