Source: House of Commons
Origin: Commons Social Criticism is a left-wing Ukrainian media outlet dealing with economic, political, historical, and cultural topics, founded in 2009. It is distinguished from other Ukrainian media by its focus on the structural causes of social problems and materialist views. Its editorial office holds egalitarian and anti-capitalist views. That's why the media often discusses how to change society so that exploitation, inequality, and discrimination no longer exist.
With an area of just 71,498 square miles and a population of less than 24 million, Syria is home to two global superpowers (the United States and the Russian Federation) and three of the largest regional powers (Iran, Turkey, and Israel). Israel had occupied the Syrian Golan Heights since 1967 and was now invading Syrian airspace. Centuries ago, before the heyday of imperialism in Europe and Russia, Iran and Turkey were also hegemonic empires. While it is debatable whether they still qualify as imperialist powers, they have never abandoned their geopolitical imperialist ambitions. One way to understand them from a regional perspective can be "sub-imperialism": expansion and intervention, including military intervention, in neighboring countries.
The United States and Russia have a well-known history of expansion and domination over other peoples and territories, and imperialism is the key to their strength. For centuries, Russia's "Mandate of Heaven" has been to expand into the neighboring regions of Central Asia and Eastern Europe, but Moscow, for its part, has established its first overseas outpost in Syria. I will return to this key fact later in the article.
In Syria, the influx of imperial and sub-imperial forces into a small country – some of them to protect this murderous and brutal regime – all of which have eliminated any desire of the Syrian people to participate independently in politics, divided between themselves and their satellites, and deprived Syrians of the promise of a different future.
This unique situation is made possible by a combination of domestic and foreign structures and dynamics involving the five major participating powers: the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Israel. The key internal factor is the colonial nature of the Assad family's rule and what I call the "conquered imperialists", the Salafist jihadist Islamists, who played a central role in the Syrian tragedy and bear enormous responsibility for derailing the people's struggle and diverting it from earlier aspirations for liberation.
Bashar al-Assad inspects the positions of the Syrian army in the Eastern Ghouta district of Damascus province in March 2018. Photo: press service of the President of Syria Telegram
More than half a century of colonial rule by the Assad family, as well as the "conquered imperialism" of the Islamists, have brought together international and regional imperialist forces in a strange way in an unprecedented way in a single country, and this is what I call "liquid imperialism" (in tribute to the late Polish sociologist Zygmunt Baumann).
In a series of influential studies, including the landmark Liquid Modernity (1999), Bauman theorized the modern state as a state of extreme instability, "unable to maintain any form or direction for long" and "not seeing the 'final state'". He wrote: "Under the shelter of 'liquid' modernity, the status of all norms... will be severely shaken and become vulnerable. "Liquids are never soft, think of big waves, floods or bursting banks," he stresses. ”
Syria has been washed, submerged and washed out by imperialist and sub-imperialist countries. After 2011, the influx of forces into Syria has effectively turned the country into a container of liquid imperialism, transforming and destroying the place in profound and far-reaching ways, with no end in sight.
Iran's ideological smokescreen
The Islamic Republic of Iran has sided with the Assad regime since the beginning of the 2011 uprising, which was of course inspired by other Arab uprisings in the Arab Spring. Since its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been exhibiting expansionist tendencies, first in the form of "exporting revolution" and then transforming itself into the vanguard of the so-called "axis of resistance", an ideological smokescreen that uses anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify brutal authoritarian regimes and their authoritarian agendas.
After Israel occupied Lebanon in 1982 and expelled Palestinian fighters from Lebanon, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) established what became Allah, a sectarian armed force created in a country that does not border Iran. After the illegal invasion of Iraq by the United States in 2003, Iran also became the de facto dominant force in Iraq, opening up the long passage from Tehran to Beirut via Baghdad and Damascus.
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps fighters in training, December 2018. Photo: Reuters
In his essay "Another Regional Counter-Revolution: Iran's Role in the Transformation of the Middle East Political Landscape," Danny Postel, political editor of Another Regional Counter-Revolution: A New Front, details the Islamic Republic's reactionary response to the uprisings of the people of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, a reality that directly disproves the common narrative that Iran is at the vanguard of the region's "axis of resistance" in the "revolutionary" states. Iranian officials claim to control "the capitals of four Arab states" (Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, and Sana'a). In all four countries, Iran has been exerting sectarian influence, funding and arming Shiite groups, and investing in the Shiitization of other communities. This is especially true in Syria, where Shiites have always been a minority (about 0.5% of the population). This sectarian policy is a ploy by which the Iranian regime seeks to consolidate its regional power, and it has predictably led to bloodshed and atrocities in four Arab countries, all of which are now decaying states.
These regional policies are an extension of the approach adopted by the Islamic Republic in Iran. Exploiting ethnic and religious divisions is one of the regime's usual tactics and brutal tactics against those who resist. Since the "Women, Life, Freedom" uprising, which began in the fall of 2022, this logic of repression has been on full display. Iran's imperialist counter-revolutionary role in the region is an extension of its war at home against the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people.
In Syria, the Iranian regime recruits Shiite militias from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as the main sponsors and supporters of the Syrian uprising. At the international level, the legitimizing ideology behind Iran's expansionist-sectarian complex is a boycott of Israel and the United States, but the Islamic Republic's destructive role in Syria and elsewhere far exceeds the so-called boycott.
Russia "Palestinizes" Syria
Since October 2011, Russia has used its veto in the UN Security Council as a weapon to protect the Assad regime. In March 2012, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced that Russia would not allow "Sunni rule" in Syria. (Before the uprising began in March 2011, Sunnis made up about 70% of Syria's population.) This is an extremely nasty, imperialist, racist and Islamophobic statement, but Lavrov can expect that it will not be condemned by the Western powers, the United Nations or the Western left, because this thinking has been implicit in the essentialist logic of the "(Islamic) war on terror" since the 90s of the 20th century. Lavrov expressed this logic unusually bluntly in the international arena.
Sergey Lavrov. Photo: Sergey Lavrov Mikhailo Tereshchenko / TASS
In September 2015, Russia intervened directly militarily in Syria at the request of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' overseas operations unit. Russia operates the Khmeimim military airbase in western Syria and in 2019 leased a naval facility in Syria's Tartus seaport for 49 years. As an outpost of Russia, Syria was not part of the direct expansion of the Russian Empire, but now Syria is Russia's first overseas satellite.
Russia killed nearly 24,000 Syrian civilians in the first six years of its intervention in Syria, according to Airwars, which investigates civilian casualties in conflicts around the world. In September 2022, Russia carried out more than 360 massacres in Syria using illegal phosphorus bombs and cluster munitions, according to the Syrian Human Rights Network. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu boasted of testing "all the latest Russian weapons" in Syria. President Putin himself claims that "more than 85% of the commanders of the Russian army gained combat experience in Syria." Sergei Chemezov, CEO of Russian arms giant Rostec, claims that in 2018 and 2019, Russia received orders for weapons worth more than $100 billion from Middle Eastern countries.
Russia has exercised its veto 18 times to protect the Assad regime from international condemnation, and Russia's relations with Syria can be seen as parallel to those of the United States and Israel. So we can say that the Syrian people are being "Palestinized" through massacres, dispossession of property and ethnic cleansing.
The United States is aiding and abetting
Structurally, despite its geographical distance, the United States has been a great power in the Middle East since the end of World War II. Every decade since, there has been a large-scale war in the region with the United States or Israel as the protagonists. Look at 1956 (Suez Canal War), 1967 (Six-Day War), 1973 (October War), 1982 (Israeli invasion of Lebanon), 1991 (Gulf War), 2003 (U.S. invasion of Iraq), 2006 (Israel-Allah War), and Israel's regular "mowing" operations in Gaza, Jenin and elsewhere. All of these conflicts have been geopolitically sheltered by successive US administrations. In the joint exceptional actions of the United States and Israel, the two countries have flouted international law and become outliers in the international community on the question of Palestine.
US troops in Syria, photo: AFP
Since the beginning of 2013, Washington has been looking at the situation in Syria from the perspective of the "war on terror". Essentialist claims that conflict is reduced to eternal, transhistorical forces or expressions of "ancient sectarian hatred," which provides a convenient shortcut for Western policymakers and scholars of various ideologies. There is only one option before us: war by a country with decisive military superiority.
In the eyes of American policymakers, "terrorism" overshadows wars of aggression, brutal repression of tyranny and even acts of genocide and, in the words of the Polish Jewish jurist Rafael Lemkin (coined the term during World War II), "terrorism is the crime of all crimes", the greatest evil in the world. So in 2015, the United States developed a plan to arm and train Syrian rebels, the key condition being that they could only fight ISIS groups, not the Assad regime (which they both oppose and are already fighting ISIS). The results of this "training and equipping" program are dismal. Only 65 people accepted the terms of the plan, and they were captured by the jihadists before they could fire a single shot.
The Guta chemical massacre in August 2013 crossed US President Barack Obama's famous red line. Less than three weeks later, however, the United States and Russia reached an agreement to dismantle the Assad regime's chemical arsenal and shield it from punishment under international law. The agreement gives Assad the freedom to continue to use other weapons to kill indiscriminately, in fact, the same chemical weapons that he supposedly decommissioned. (According to the Berlin-based Institute for Global Public Policy, the vast majority of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, 311 out of a total of 349 occurred after the agreement was reached.) The justice and truth of the world were sacrificed by imperialism along with the 1,466 victims of the Holocaust. The Holocaust and what followed was also a gift to the forces of Islamic nihilism who exploited this injustice (and its impunity) in their narratives.
The bodies of adults and children killed by nerve gas in the Tengku area on August 21, 2013. Image: Getty Images
In 2014, the United States intervened against the Islamic State and Al-Nusrah Front (later renamed Tahrir al-Sham). Previously, in Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington had fueled the imperialism and nihilism of these Islamist militant groups. The United States also controls large swathes of eastern and northeastern Syria through its Kurdish allies, and the Kurds have chosen not to fight the Assad regime because their main enemy is Turkey.
According to an April 2019 report by international human rights organizations, more than 1,600 civilians were killed by American-led coalition forces in the "war on terror" in my home city of Raqqa.
Turkey brought a new war and more refugees
In 2016, Turkey, like four other major powers, intervened in Syria in the name of "counterterrorism." But the "terrorists" targeted by Turkey are Syrian Kurds affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, a Kurdish nationalist party that has been engaged in armed struggle with Ankara since the 80s of the 20th century. The Syrian branch of the party (PYD) played an important role in US intervention in the fight against ISIS. This geopolitical fact has created considerable friction between Washington and Ankara. But the Donald Trump administration betrayed the Kurds in 2018, accepting Turkey's expansion into PKK-controlled areas and the occupation of Afrin, and in 2019 Turkish forces captured Ras al· Ain betrayed the Kurds again. Afrin and Ras al-Ain are two Kurdish-majority towns located in northwestern and northeastern Syria, respectively. Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) exported their civil war to Syria, which was and is engaged in its own civil war.
It is often said that the Syrian conflict, whether out of anger or laziness, is "complicated". It's complicated indeed. With so many state and sub-national actors involved, how can it not be complicated?
Turkey has been hosting about 3.7 million Syrian refugees, just over half of all refugees (nearly 7 million). But since 2016, the mobility of Syrians within Turkey has been severely restricted: refugees need to obtain special permits to travel elsewhere from the communities they are registered in. The measure, which follows the signing of an agreement between Turkey and the EU in February 2016, aims to prevent Syrian (and non-Syrian) refugees from arriving in Europe.
Syrian refugees travel to Turkey on June 14, 2015, after breaking through a border fence. Photo: AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis
In Turkey, the scapegoating of Syrian refugees has intensified, and recently reached hysteria with calls for forced repatriation. Refugees are blamed for Turkey's economic problems: populists and demagogues such as Umit Ozdag, leader of Turkey's far-right ultra-nationalist Victory Party, have racialized and demonized refugees. For election reasons, the Turkish government announced a plan for the voluntary return of refugees to Syria, and President Erdogan announced that as of early October 2022, 526,000 refugees had returned. Recently, he said that 1 million refugees had voluntarily returned to Syria. We are unable to verify this figure from independent sources. However, it is likely that the Turkish government is using this plan as a pretext to settle non-Kurdish Syrians in certain Kurdish-majority areas in order to solve its own "problems" (which will cause big problems for Syria in the future). Of course, population engineering has always been one of the powerful tools of imperialism.
Israel, a colonial power
The State of Israel was built on the basis of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and expansion. The Ashkenazi leaders of Ishuf (Jews living in Palestine before 1948) established friendly relations with the colonialist elites of the major Western powers, who began a program of dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinian people in the so-called "War of Independence". We cannot deny that Israel is a colonial country, even a settler colonial nation. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 declared British support for "the building of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine," which was incorporated into the British colonial mandate for Palestine in 1922.
In 1956, after President Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, Israel, in cooperation with the Anglo-French invaders, briefly occupied Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. Under strong pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union, which were then the centers of global empires, the three colonial powers had to withdraw. In 1967, Israel (this time with the full support of the United States) reoccupied the Sinai Peninsula as well as the rest of Palestine (the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip) and the Syrian Golan Heights.
United Nations peacekeepers in the Arab-Israeli conflict zone, 1967. Photo: Mondadori Portfolio/Contributor/Getty Images
Israel then fought several wars in Lebanon with the Palestine Liberation Organization and Allah. Israel has launched numerous military operations against refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. All of this has been justified as "fighting terror" (i.e., any Palestinian resistance) and meeting Israel's seemingly insatiable security needs. Israel had denied the Palestinian people their right to self-determination and had refused to recognize the Palestinian people as equal citizens of one State. This persistent situation has been a source of Palestinian violence and regional instability.
Beginning in 2013, in response to Iran's intervention in support of the Assad regime after the Syrian uprising, Israel regularly sent planes to bomb Syrian territory, mainly targeting Iranian military installations. Behind the brazenness of these air strikes is the logic of impunity and the internationally normalized Israeli exceptionalism.
Since the 70s of the twentieth century, the Israeli state and society have been drifting to the right, and its trajectory is similar to that of colonialism, apartheid and particularism, which can be traced back to the founding of the country.
The Assad regime rotten to the bone
To quote pro-regime slogans, the family autocracy that ruled Syria for 53 years has reduced Syria to a protectorate of Iran and Russia, maintaining its rule "forever". In order to achieve this eternal rule, it relied on sectarian security institutions and equally sectarian military formations with security functions.
Bashar al-Assad visits Russia in March 2023, photo: Mykhailo Tereshchenko/TASS
Since the 70s of the 20th century, what we call "sectarianism" in Syria (and the wider Middle East) no longer refers only to irrational forces in the political and social spheres, nor is it the colonialist "divide and rule" strategy adopted by the "national" elites that later replaced the European colonizers. It also points more dangerously to the growing possibility of civil war and genocide. The fusion of the Assad family's decades of rule in Syria with the colonial paradigm is reflected not only in its own "divide and rule" strategy, but also in its use of a permanent state of emergency. The state of emergency has been in effect since March 1963, when military officers seized power under the name of the Ba'ath Party, but since 2011 the justification has shifted from a war with Israel's colonial enemies to a war on terror. For 60 years, the country's laws have been at a standstill, and the civil war has hovered between the cold war and the red heat.
Under such a dynastic rule, Syria is a state from the inside out, dealing with social issues internally according to a single logic of sovereignty, Syria must be one, indivisible, everywhere, and there can be no different views or aspirations. This country treats its people from the inside out like a disciplined, order-following army, devoid of pluralism and spontaneity... Externally, at the same time, it cooperates with the great powers of the region and around the world according to a logic of pluralism, in which there is always a political solution to the problem. The only treaties that the regime adheres to are those with influential powers, including Israel: the Golan Heights have been remarkably calm since the 1974 ceasefire agreement reached in October 1973 following the Arab-Israeli war.
What we have seen in Syria since the 70s of the 20th century is the continuation of colonial rule through other means. The French Empire brutally occupied Syria between the end of World War I and the end of World War II. But French colonial rule is far less brutal than the Assad regime, under which Syria has experienced two civil wars on the scale of genocide: tens of thousands of deaths in the 1979-1982 civil war, hundreds of thousands in the civil war since 2011, and about 7 million refugees in 127 countries (nearly 30% of the population, according to a 2022 report by Human Rights Watch).
A Christmas tree in the city of Aleppo, Syria, in December 2022. Photo: Getty Images
The concept of the "coloniality of power", proposed by the late Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano, emphasizes the enduring impact of colonial rule on the exercise of power in modern society. Inviting Iran and Russia to protect the Assad regime fundamentally fulfills the colonial logic of the Assad regime. The imperialist war on terror has only cemented the colonial and murderous nature of the Assad regime.
One of the slogans of the recent protests that erupted in the southern city of Suweida on August 20, 2023, speaks directly to the colonial sentiment of the empire that controls Syria:
We want the seaport, we want the land (another way of saying oil), give us back the airport!
The seaport is Tartus, which, as already mentioned, has been leased to Russia. The land was divided among the five occupying powers. Damascus International Airport has been widely believed to be under Iran's de facto control for several years. Thus, the protesters in Suweida linked their economic woes to the colonial relationship between the regime and its Russian and Iranian protectors. In the version of the slogan that mentions oil, it means that oil has been usurped by another imperialist country, the United States.
The protests in Suweida revived the slogans of the 2011 revolution, including an important call to action: "The people want to overthrow the regime". The Assad regime has long claimed (as the French colonizers did in Syria) that it is the protector of Syria's minority against the Sunni majority, and has so far failed to suppress protests (Suweida is predominantly Druze-populated). But no one should expect this uprising to be tolerated for long. The regime is unlikely to respond in the form of chemical pogroms or barrel bombs; instead, it is likely to wipe out the movement by assassinating or dismissing movement leaders and other activists.
Jihadists
In discussing the liquefaction of imperialism to which Syria has suffered, one cannot ignore those "conquered imperialists", that is, adherents of Salafist jihadist Islamism, which has become a global phenomenon since its rise in Afghanistan in the early 80s of the last century. The political imagination of Salafist jihadist Islamists is one of conquest, expansion, empire and control. Their worldview is derived from Islam, a monotheistic religion with a strong ecumenical outlook, but they are associated with only one tradition of Islam, namely conquest, power, and strict observance of Sharia law.
They have never connected themselves to other traditions—rational, spiritual, Sufi, or popular. Their violent control of the people's bodies, especially women's bodies, has a distinctly fascist character. They are highly elitist when it comes to the ordinary life of this world, and extreme nihilists when it comes to the worldly Xi customs, laws, and institutions of this world.
In 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan met with leaders of the Afghan Mujahideen Group in the Oval Office. Photo: Wikimedia
It seems counterintuitive to say that they are elite. Let me explain. They believe that only a very small number of people are true believers, on the right path, and that power should be in the hands of one person, surrounded by a small group of influential people. The immoral nature of great power politics that ignores international law and discriminates against Muslims is actually good news for jihadists, because it justifies their denial of the corrupt, unjust and anti-Islamic nature of the world. Their nihilism is a self-actualizing and self-perpetuating nihilism.
This radical Islamism has been at war with Western imperialism and, to a certain extent, with Russian imperialism. But its own imperialist logic, and the extraordinary narcissism of its pawns, eliminate any possible emancipatory factor in their struggle. Their elitist terrorist methods have been weakening ordinary Muslims under their rule. Under their control, my hometown of Raqqa was divided into three parts: the ruling elite consisting mainly of non-Syrian Muhajiri (immigrants); Women are not allowed to go out unless they are dressed in black.
imperialism
Lenin's argument that imperialism represented "the highest stage of capitalism" led many to believe that imperialism was embodied in a very small number of capitalist powers. According to this logic, there has been only one imperialism since World War II: Western imperialism, centered on the United States, with NATO militarily arming it. Many leftists do not consider the Soviet Union to be imperialist: not after World War II, not after the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and even after the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Similarly, Putin's Russia is not universally understood as imperialism, even after Crimea in 2014 and intervention in Syria in 2015. For the majority of the so-called anti-imperialist left, even a full-scale war in February 2022 will not be enough.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley holds a photograph of a victim of a chemical weapons attack in Syria during a meeting of the United Nations Security Council at United Nations headquarters in New York on April 5, 2017. Photo: Getty Images
This notion of imperialism must be questioned. The situation in Syria requires us to shift the paradigm of understanding imperialism and theorize about new practices and phenomena associated with it.
Ultra-nationalism, expansion, disregard for international law, exceptionalism, imperial imagination are the characteristics of many great powers in the era of the war on terror. Since "terror" has been recognized as the world's leading political evil, any country that joins this so-called war can gain international legitimacy, even those that have committed war crimes and mass murders. This has dealt a huge blow to the rule of law, both locally and internationally. It fosters the politics of security, fuels the atrocities of political elites, and weakens democracy and popular movements everywhere. Imperialism has penetrated into the practice of power in many countries, and Syria is arguably the most unfortunate of them all, with no less than five imperialist forces on its territory.
The concept of liquid imperialism attempts to illustrate the fact that five different powers penetrate into a small one. But it also illustrates a lack of solidity or coherence in the strategies, practices, visions and commitments of these major powers. Unlike past imperial projects, there is no such thing as a "civilizing mission" in Syria. Natural resources are not the main motive (although the intervening countries have seized everything they can get, from oil and phosphate to seaports and airports to water and real estate). Rather, it is a battle for control of the country's future.
There was also a fluid side to the relationship between the five colonial powers. In rhetoric (especially at the beginning of the uprising), Moscow and Washington seem to be on opposite sides: the Kremlin supports Assad, while the White House condemns Assad. Operationally, however, Russia and the United States are practically on the same side, especially after the emergence of the Islamic State and its emergence as the core of the US strategy in Syria. Since then, Moscow and Washington have been on the same front: the two great powers closely coordinate the "de-conflict", and their military personnel are on the phone every day to avoid planes flying at the same altitude in the same place and to ensure that air strikes do not hit each other's "friendly forces". Despite Washington's hype about "regime change" in Syria, the opposite is true. Researcher Michael Carakis has demonstrated that US policy in Syria is clearly about "maintaining regime."
In another rhetorical smokescreen, Iran claims that its ideology is "resistance," but in Syria, Iran intervened to crush resistance and save the authoritarian regime.
This situation is also liquid in the sense that we lack proper conceptualization tools. Syria is a unique case of misunderstanding and disbelief. As several observers have noted, Syria is perhaps the most documented war in history, with millions of pictures, videos, and social media posts documenting every aspect of the conflict.
However, along with the extensive documentation, there is also a debate about the meaning of the document. Every claim of truth has a corresponding refutation, every assertion is denied, and conspiracy theories abound. Not only has the overwhelming documentary evidence failed to reach a consensus on the war, but as political scientist Lisa Vedion argues in her 2019 book Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria, the overwhelming material has instead led to an "atmosphere of suspicion" that has sparked widespread confusion and disorientation. Paradoxically, Vedion points out that "too much information can create uncertainty, and the purpose of disseminating information is precisely to eliminate that uncertainty".
A particular doctrine in a large country becomes a source of legitimacy for absolute power, and absolute power betrays this ideal, leading to subsequent repression and massacres. If we take into account that historically, imperialism has been characterized by the expansion of one or a few imperialist centers into vast regions and continents by force, and the situation here in Syria is that many imperialist and sub-imperialist forces converge into one country, and the emergence of so many imperialist forces in a small country is a rather novel situation, it is like a few thugs abusing a child, and this child has only a very small chance of surviving. This is an unforgivable crime that should be condemned by the whole world.
In the political theorist Hannah Arendt, "worldlessness" refers to the fact that we no longer share a common system or system of meaning with others. In the words of the philosopher Theoban Cartago, it is "like a desert that dries up the space between people". Syria's "worldlessness" has alienated it from the common system of the world, and at the same time, many countries of the world have appeared in Syria, and many parts of Syria have been thrown to every corner of the world, which is also an ominous omen for an increasingly Syrianized world, in which the tragedy of engulfing and destroying Syria is not contained, but is becoming a catastrophe without borders.
Author: Yassin Haji Saleh