A Terror in Search of Its Double — and Syria Remains Far Greater

By Samir al-Taqi

The Masyaf Massacre: A Crime That Is Not Isolated

On the evening of September 30, near the Masyaf bridge, masked men in the uniform of Syrian security stopped a minibus carrying young engineers and workers from a plastics factory. The gunmen inspected the passengers’ IDs, then opened fire on them, leaving seven of our people dead and four wounded in the mountains of the Alawites. As usual, the internal-security commander in Homs promised that the crime “would not pass without punishment.” I can almost swear that the masked men did not tremble for a single moment at that threat.

The Masyaf massacre was no isolated incident. The systematic, unrestrained hounding of every Syrian component that differs from takfiri jihadism goes on—covertly at times, openly at others. Before it, gunmen coming from Qalaat al-Madiq stormed the town of al-Suqaylabiyah, home to our Christian people in the Hama countryside, and fired on houses, shops, and cars, as if baiting a reaction to justify a fresh massacre.

A Headless Terror in Search of an Enemy

This terror needs no unified command to set the country ablaze, nor public statements to rally its supporters. It is enough that there exists this diffuse, hybrid spectrum of jihadists, armed to the teeth with weapons and takfir, forever in search of an enemy to justify its existence. The danger in Syria is not a particular organization, nor the return of ISIS, nor Iran’s networks alone; it lies in:

•   the failed game of denial;

•   a terror that labors to generate its double;

•   and a West that looks away, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Worse still, the danger lies not in the armed cells alone, but in the pamphlets, the messages, and the sermons that cook up a totalitarian order—one in which proximity to the centers of power becomes conditional on escalating hatred and vengeance.

At Masyaf, the killers impersonated security; at al-Suqaylabiyah, the protesters chanted: “We want Islamic freedom, not secular freedom.” And when conscripts are subjected to three weeks of religious instruction, in an environment that counts democracy as unbelief, the question becomes legitimate: is the army to be built on the doctrine of “the community of believers,” or on the doctrine of citizenship? This is no longer an administrative detail.

A Tested Recipe: From Samarra to the “Monstrous Double”

The region has tried this recipe again and again. In 2004, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi wrote to bin Laden that the shortest road to mobilizing Iraq’s Sunnis was to strike the Shiites and drag them into a sectarian war. The al-Askari shrine in Samarra was bombed, death squads were unleashed in Baghdad, and the loyalist militias and Hezbollah raised the slogan “Zaynab will not be taken captive twice.” As a friend wrote after the Homs bombing: if Sunnis and Alawites pray together, the jihadist groups lose their narrative that they are enemies who cannot be reconciled.

This is what René Girard called the “monstrous double”: the moment at which the combatants collude to make the conflict eternal, so that each becomes a copy of his enemy. At that point impunity becomes a winning strategy for everyone: if others trust the state, the hardliners gain time under its cover; if they do not trust it, the takfiris gain their pretext.

As for Iran and ISIS, they await their chance with longing whenever Syria draws near a new civil war—indeed, they time their strikes to every diplomatic breakthrough with Israel or the Gulf, and to every attempt at reconciliation inside the country. Fear spreads faster than violence, and then fear in turn becomes the fuel of violence. Washington will soon change its calculations with Tehran. Tehran, for its part, remains present and ready to re-arm its proxies—and the evidence of that is abundant.

Lessons Washington Has Not Learned

This terror is not born in a vacuum, nor does it grow without patrons who deliberately look away. In 1998, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur asked Zbigniew Brzezinski whether he regretted arming the Afghan mujahideen. He answered angrily: What is more important in world history, the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? “A few stirred-up Muslims” or the liberation of Central Europe? But three years later, the answer came to him in the skies of New York.

Washington then repeated the lesson in Iraq at a higher cost: Bremer dissolved the army and uprooted the state, Camp Bucca became a university for jihadists, and America withdrew, leaving its refuse behind it—the Iran-aligned loyalist factions and their takfiri-jihadist opposite. After that, following Abu Nuwas’s logic of “cure me with the very thing that was the disease,” General Petraeus launched the “Awakening” experiment in 2007, but it soon collapsed when it turned into a blank check without accountability.

American circles know all of this well—indeed, they paid its price in their own soldiers’ blood. So why repeat the attempt in Syria? From the very same school, there are those in Washington who project the same reading onto Syria after the fall of the Assad family: let the jihadists fight the jihadists, and let the Syrian melon crack itself open. In this light we understand the perfume of the White House, the constant pressure to drag Damascus into Lebanon, and the attempts to keep the Syrian front with Israel beyond resolution—under the custody of Tom Barrack.

This is not pragmatism. Unless the Americans actually possess a magic “Elon Musk” chip to implant in the jihadists’ brains, we cannot understand how thousands of takfiris are to be cleansed by tempting them with positions of power. And if they do have such a chip, let them tell us—by God, we will buy millions of them. But God knows best what new mission awaits these men—indeed, perhaps we know exactly what they want. Beyond that, we will work to end the long march of the Syrians’ suffering.

As this Western game nears its final moments, Masyaf becomes a decisive test; for terror, like a mirror, exists only with two faces.

And Syria Remains Far Greater

But no—whoever imagines that Syria holds nothing but the two faces of terror’s mirror is mistaken. Syria is longer-lived than its killers, wider than its sects, and older than every project that tried to reduce it. Syria has always been a marketplace for every sect and ethnicity—Arabs, Persians, Christians, Jews, and Franks—and indeed, whenever Syria became a barracks for one sect, it was ruined and debased.

Civilization is not relics in a museum; it is a living political memory founded on the logic of “religion is for God, and the homeland is for all.” In the spring of 2011, before the regime drowned the country in blood and spawned its jihadist mirror, Syrians chanted in the streets: “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.” This civic maturity is no romantic nostalgia; it is a social and historical capital, borne by all the Syria that sees in the state a contract, not a spoil.

The passengers on that bus were not remnants, nor men returning from a sectarian battlefront, but from a factory that produces goods. That is the Syria that will prevail. And until it prevails, every Syrian, on every bus and at every checkpoint, will keep asking: Whose uniform is this? Whose rifle is that? Is Syria a homeland for all—or for terror? Article link https://annah.ar/354458