The Fiction of Collective Innocence
As Syria begins to reckon with its past, its public vocabulary still evades the one step that makes accountability possible: saying “we did this.”
In the last week of April 2026, two performances unfolded on opposite ends of the Mediterranean. In the Ghab Plain of rural Hama, Syrian security forces arrested Amjad Yusuf, the warrant officer who personally executed bound civilians at the edge of a pit in the Tadamon district of Damascus in April 2013, and who was filmed doing it. His sisters appeared on camera shortly afterward, defending him. He was poor, they said. He was of low rank. The real criminal was Assad. The videos—forty-one murders by his hand, recorded in his own voice, time-stamped—did not enter the frame.
Across Syria and its diaspora, different audiences are repeating a familiar, flawed framework in response—a collective “we” stripped of responsibility and an absent “other” made to carry the blame.
In the same week, a song called Dounana, or “Without Us”, released in early 2024 by the Berlin-based Syrian artist Siba Alkhiami, returned to virality across German social media. Its closing line, addressed to an unnamed “you,” declares: “Who would you be without us? You would not be without us.” The song catalogs injuries—uprooted, demolished, criminalized, falsified, slaughtered, demonized, colonized—without ever specifying their author. The “you” is structurally absent. So is any “we” that ever did anything but suffer.
Two stages, one week, bound together into a single ritual aimed at manufacturing innocence.
Read the lyrics of Dounana carefully, and a strange vocabulary surfaces. Every verb of agency is conjugated to “you”: you uprooted, demolished, criminalized, falsified, separated, slaughtered. Every “we” is a moral object: our roots, homes, existence, origins, loved ones, children. There is no “we” that acted. No “we” that aligned with Soviet patrons, embraced Ba’athist or jihadist ideologies, sustained sectarian violence, applauded autocrats, or exiled its own dissenters. The “we” of Dounana is innocent by construction.
The addressee is also a construction. Siba has described the song in interviews as indicting “white supremacists” and the West, and calling for “Global South” unity. But within the lyrics themselves, the “you” is never named. The song requires this absence. An interlocutor who could answer back would dissolve the ritual at the first verse. The Russians who bombed Aleppo, the Iranians who organized the militias, the Syrian officers who staffed the prisons—all are unavailable to the song’s grammar, because naming them would force the “we” to admit the proximity of the hands that did most of the killing. The “you” must remain abstract. The geography must remain global. Otherwise, the room gets too small.
Note also what produced the song. Dounana was co-written with Felix Spitta of Germany. Felix Spitta, often known as Monkyman, is a German musician, producer, and filmmaker based in Berlin. He is known for his work in downtempo/electronic music, his collaborations with Amselcom, and his work as part of the production duo Spittbrothers. The song was produced in Berlin, distributed through European indie infrastructure, and amplified by a public sphere that tolerates Arabic-language indictment of Western power.
Siba herself lives in Berlin because Damascus would not have her. The song is, in every material sense, a product of the entanglement it forecloses. It exists because the “you” it addresses shelters the “we” it performs.
The televised performance by Amjad’s sisters in Hama runs the same playbook in a tighter radius. They do not deny the videos exactly; they redirect them. He was a low-rank conscript. He was poor. The real criminal was Bashar Al-Assad and his top lieutenants. Each clause is a transfer of moral mass—out of Amjad, into an abstract, absent other. Assad is in Moscow. Moscow is indifferent to what is claimed in Hama. The transfer is therefore meaningless. Whatever guilt the family carries can be poured into the unanswerable void, and what remains in the room is a poor village boy, a victim of forces beyond his control.
The video evidence does not interrupt this. It cannot. The ritual does not run on evidence, the way the song, Dounana, does not run on history. Both run on the construction of an unanswerable other into whom guilt can be displaced, leaving behind a “we” purified by the displacement. In Berlin, the “you” is white supremacy; in Hama, it is the deposed dictator. In both cases, the addressee is chosen specifically because of its unavailability. Presence would dissolve the ritual.
What the sisters performed on camera is what the song performs on the stereo. Siba’s ritual extends across continents because her audience cannot puncture it. The sisters’ ritual contracts to a brother because their audience—Sunni neighbors with lists, journalists with footage, a transitional government building case files—would puncture anything wider.
The flat “we” travels in only one direction. It assembles at a distance and dissolves on contact with its claimed constituents. Siba can sing on behalf of a “we” that stretches from Damascus to Caracas because her Berlin audience will not produce a Yazidi woman to ask where her solidarity was when an Arab Islamist Sunni movement enslaved her grandmother and sister in Sinjar. No Palestinian from Tadamon will remind her of the fate of his brother, killed by Amjad Yusuf. No Kurd from Afrin will rise to ask about the Arab nationalist project that displaced him. No Druze from Suweida will interrupt to ask about the massacres of recent months.
The sisters in Hama cannot escape what their brother did because their audience is right there—neighbors, officials, journalists, all within reach. Any “we” they invoke has to survive that proximity, so they shrink it to something defensible: one brother, one village, one uniform. The closer the audience, the smaller the “we.”
That’s why the broad, innocent “we” only works at a distance. It depends on audiences far removed from the events in places where no one can challenge it. Back home, where people remember who did what, it falls apart.
Both cases are less about truth than positioning. Each is trying to secure standing within a system that rewards blame and excuses. Neither asks what comes after, nor how anything gets built.
Despite their radical tone, both gestures are ultimately conservative in that they aim to preserve a broken system. Real change would mean rejecting the framework that trades suffering for moral exemption—and refusing the idea that any community must defend its worst members as “ours.” Instead, both work within that system, asking for a better position inside it. Siba seeks recognition as a witness; the sisters seek leniency for their brother. Neither asks what it would take to build something different.
Grievance stops at the demand. It can expose, accuse, even disrupt—but it cannot build. Building requires admitting that what you inherit, and who you inherit it from, implicates you.
Durayd ibn al-Simma, the pre-Islamic poet, wrote a line about his tribe, Ghaziyyah, that has become proverbial: “I can only belong to Ghaziyyah, if she errs, I err with her, if she finds the right path, I will walk it with her.”
The line is usually read today as a confession of moral cowardice—I follow my tribe whether right or wrong. That reading misses what Durayd actually says. He does not say he will defend Ghaziyya when it errs. He says he will err with it. The grammar is fate-sharing, not justification. He cannot purchase private rectitude while his people are in error; his moral condition is not separable from theirs. He refuses the exit that says I am personally enlightened, my people are backward, therefore I am clean. He stays inside the implicated “we” because leaving it would be a lie about what he actually is.
The sisters in Hama want Durayd’s belonging without his implication—the warmth of the plural without its weight. What is missing in both performances, and what the modern Arab public sphere has largely lost the capacity to acknowledge, is the move that would complete Durayd: stay inside the “we,” and then atone for what the “we” did. The Yom Kippur liturgy and the Anglican confession both perform this move in the plural—we have sinned, we have betrayed, said by the entire congregation, including those who personally did none of these things. Membership in a community implicates one in the community’s sins, and the public acknowledgment of this implication is the precondition of any community that intends to outlast its worst chapters.
A line I have been mulling over for some time names the alternative with brutal economy: man yubarrir yukarrir, or, he who justifies, repeats. Justification paves the road to repetition, because every justification establishes that this kind of act, under conditions like these, is permissible, which means the next time conditions are even loosely like these, the act is pre-authorized. The Alawite defense of Amjad is not only about Amjad. It licenses every future Amjad. Siba’s indictment of an unanswerable West is not only about Gaza. It licenses every future displacement of Arab guilt onto a foreign address. Atonement breaks the cycle.
The representative this moment requires is not a speaker for grievance but a speaker for accountability. Someone willing to atone. The cleanest modern instance is Willy Brandt kneeling at the memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970—a German chancellor personally innocent of Nazi crimes, an actual anti-Nazi who had fled to Norway during the war, on his knees atoning on behalf of a people he belonged to. He demanded nothing of his addressee. It accomplished what no negotiation could.
Such figures are largely absent from Arab and Muslim public life. The available religious vocabularies emphasize private istighfar, the Islamic practice of seeking individual forgiveness, over communal confession. Authoritarian legacies trained generations to read concession as defeat. A young woman in Berlin blames “white supremacists” because the script for the harder address—to her own community, on behalf of her own community—barely exists in living Arab memory. She is improvising in the only register her culture left her.
This essay is not an attack on Siba or on Amjad’s sisters. It is aimed at the absent figures who could model a different approach and have not. It is a caution from within the implicated “we.”
Grievance politics did not protect the Alawite community; it made it usable, first by Assad, and likely by whoever comes next. And Berlin did not take Siba from Damascus; it gave her refuge from a regime that would have silenced her. Her platform exists because of institutions that do not exist in the region.
In a country that witnessed a long civil war, no community—Sunni, Alawite, Christian, Druze, Kurdish, Ismaili, none—can claim innocence, and all need to accept their role in history. In a country where identity is still defined by sectarian and ethnic belonging, we all become complicit in actions committed in the name of our communities, even if we did not participate, even if we reject the narrow belonging itself. This is the burden we carry. This is the true nature of our inheritance. There is no clean slate in the moral sphere.
The same week that saw Amjad Yusuf arrested in the Ghab Plain and Dounana return to virality across German social media saw something else, in Damascus: the opening of the first public trial of Assad-era officials. Atef Najib—the former head of Political Security in Daraa, the man under whose watch the teenage graffiti-writers were tortured into becoming the catalyst for the 2011 uprising—sat in the defendants’ cage at the Palace of Justice while families of victims filled the hall. This is what legal accountability looks like, and it is necessary. But trials punish individuals; they do not heal communities. A verdict against Najib will not produce a single Alawite voice speaking publicly on behalf of an Alawite community implicated in what Najib did. A conviction of Amjad will not produce a single Syrian artist with Siba’s platform turning her microphone toward the regime that drove her into exile, on behalf of those still inside. The institutions are beginning to do their part. The atoners must do theirs.
The window for this work is narrow. Late April 2026 is a hinge. Syria is still malleable, still re-forming, still capable of being shaped by the approach its public figures choose. Six months from now, the patterns will be set. The atoners who do not appear by autumn may not appear at all. This essay is a summons—not to the women on the cameras, who are speaking the only languages they were given, but to the figures not yet on screen and who could be: religious leaders, intellectuals, artists with standing, judges, journalists, the few across all communities who could break the hostage cycle by stepping into the role no one has rewarded them for stepping into. The market for manufactured innocence is enormous. The market for atonement does not yet exist.
Someone must make it. Someone must be first.
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