Syria, a few months after the fall of the Assad dictatorship: well over 100,000 victims of regime kidnappings are still missing and new mass graves are discovered almost every day. Most of them tortured to death; at least the relatives of the disappeared must assume this. Tens of thousands of those involved in the torture and murder, enabling the “politicide”, are still at large. For “transitional justice” – be it court cases or truth tribunals – resources, strength, structures remain unavailable for the foreseeable future. Most of the population, oppressed and plundered by Assad for decades, lives in indescribable poverty. The West maintains its sanctions, and no one protests against Israel’s invasions and bombings in violation of international law. Assad supporters who have lost their privileges repeatedly carry out attacks on the new regime’s security forces. The new regime is unable or unwilling to prevent its own people and rival gangs from exacting revenge on the communities from which Assad’s supporters mainly come. And even if new massacres are stopped, a new genocide is looming on the horizon, this time against the Alawites.
Germany has offered refuge to over a million people from Syria, but Germans have no idea about the political situation in the country. They are quick to settle for the most convenient explanation: Syria being a multi-ethnic state in a civil war that is sometimes latent and sometimes open. After all, the Assad regime has allegedly long offered minorities a certain degree of protection, but now the Sunni majority is threatening Alawites, Christians and Druze in an “unprecedented Islamization”. This explanation fits with the justifications for Germany’s failed Syria policy, which as early as 2013 refused to take a stand against the murderous regime, pointing to “jihadists, terrorists and extremists in Syria” and how they are endangering “Alawites and Christians”.
But Syrian intellectuals and students who supported the democratic resistance against the Assad regime in 2011/12 and fled to Europe after 2013 tell a different, more complicated story; a story in which Europe and the USA have always been entangled. They speak of “sectarianism” and see the causes of it not, or at least not primarily, in the claim to dominance of Sunni Islam, but in the techniques of domination that the Assad regime has perfected over more than 50 years. These can be read in detail in a black book of Assad‘s regime, published in French in 2022.
These techniques of rule, based on division and repression, and the simultaneous instrumentalization of identities, were accompanied by systematic, inventive torture as a ubiquitous possibility. Since the early 1970s, torture had gradually taken hold of Syrian society in “Suriya al-Assad”, the totalitarian police state identified with Assad, and since the beginning of the revolution in 2011, it could affect anyone, including women and children. The embodied knowledge of torture and its omnipresent possibility, in the Assadian form, came to Germany with the mass exodus from Syria starting in 2013. When I had my first encounters with Syrian refugees in 2015, what most profoundly changed my view of the world – including my world in Germany and Europe – was the confrontation with the omnipresence of the possibility of torture in their stories and in their bodies. Syrian students told me nightmares that I will never forget. Film producer Orwa Nyrabia showed the documentary Silvered Water. Syria Self-Portrait, which uses countless cell phone recordings not only of bombings and war scenes, but also of prison torture, to create a work of art; at great personal risk to herself, Syrian-Kurdish documentary filmmaker Wiam Simav Bedirxan and the director of the film, Ossama Mohamed, who fled to Paris. Later, I read Mustafa Khalifa’s autobiographical novel The Shell House.
An outstanding witness and thinker of this state terror is the political author and journalist Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. In 2023, Matthes & Seitz published a German translation of his book about torture in Syria and its representation at a time when the Assad dictatorship, which called itself “eternal”, seemed to be more firmly in the saddle than ever. But the fact that Assad is now a thing of the past does not make the book any less relevant. The texts compiled into a unified work in the book had initially appeared in Arabic in different contexts. They show connections between torture, confessionalism and Salafism that are still in effect and also point to the so-called West. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh was himself tortured during his 16 years in prison (between 1980 and 1996, under the rule of Assad’s father), convicted of being a member of a communist party. The torture he was subjected to was not so severe as to cause irreversible damage; he was able to overcome it. But he witnessed the most terrible and horrific torture used to break the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood: torture from which no one can return to life.
The book offers nothing less than a political anthropology of torture. Saleh differentiates between torture that does not preclude survival and torture that inevitably results in death; death under torture and death by torture; torture committed against individuals and torture that affects a collective. The book is full of such distinctions, which allow for a systematic understanding of torture. Saleh probably developed the concepts and typologies during his detention and after his release in order to process his experiences from a political and social science perspective. He is a well-read autodidact who is not part of the academic community, but he is also not a journalist in the strict sense. His writing is not reporting or commenting, but always analytical, organizing, conceptual. He wants to encourage his readers to face the ubiquitous possibility of torture coolly and soberly and to understand it as an extreme manifestation of political violence that, through the collective implicit knowledge of it, sets in motion a cycle of destruction.
He distinguishes phenomenologically between three types of torture in terms of the boundaries they transgress and their intended effects: firstly, the classic investigative or interrogative torture, which transgresses the boundaries of the tortured in order to extort confessions or information. In this case, submission and betrayal help to end the torture. Secondly, there is humiliation and revenge torture, or deterrence torture, which is arbitrary and unpredictable, designed to teach an unforgettable lesson, aimed at society as a whole, to instill unconditional obedience and break any resistance. And thirdly, there is extermination torture, which not only crosses the boundaries of society, but also the boundaries of humanity, where there is no longer any room for discretion, and where an organized murder industry is required. For this kind of torture it is enough to be an offense that the tortured person even exists.
Saleh also differentiates between the various levels of torture: the level of the relationship between the torturer and the tortured, where the act of torture takes place; the level of the apparatus, the organisation required for the torture; the system level – torture as state and as economy; and finally the level of the world that allows the torture to happen, is aware of it and is destroyed by the torture. The intimate knowledge of how torture worked in Assad’s Syria and what it does is revealed in the book in numerous observations that vividly depict the horror of torture without ever going into gory details. Saleh describes the psychology of torture, where the fear of the tortured faces the hatred of the torturer. Both are dehumanized, with the torturer becoming God-like through his power over the body, while the tortured person becomes an object. In order for the torturer to stand firm in the torture relationship and to muster cold or hot hatred for the tortured person, he must accuse them of a crime, and that crime lies in deviating from the will of Assad. To deviate from the will of Assad, it is enough to be human. The torturer claims unconditional love for Assad, is totally identified with Assad and demands a submission that is never enough. Paradoxically, torture allevaites the guilt of the murderer; Saleh quotes Primo Levi: “Before the victim died, he had to be humiliated so that the murderer would not feel the weight of his guilt so much.”
The aim of destroying communities, making human lives dispensable, and destroying worldliness in general is a common feature of all genocidal regimes. Saleh describes Assad-Syria’s killing machines below an industrial level, a “manufacturing system”, not impersonal and systematic as under the Nazis, but carried out with devotion, creatively, requiring direct physical contact, combining routines and reinventions. While the Nazi death economy was capitalist and irrational, the Assad one, also highly bureaucratized, served the rentier economy of a family dictatorship, taken to its extreme consequence. Torture, including in the form of starvation and denial of access to essential goods, as well as in the form of aerial bombardment and the arbitrary infliction of pain through attacks directed against civilians, has a curious relationship with genocidal extermination. At first glance, extermination torture seems to be unnecessary, since the victims will die either way; its purpose is to make the community that is to be exterminated know that torture is worse than death. But it also recognizes that it is dealing with people who must first be dehumanized before they are killed. By contrast, torture was not a necessity for the Holocaust, even if it occurred frequently: “the Nazis felt no need to torture the Jews, since their racist theory asserted a priori that they knew the Jews’ malicious nature, thus excluding them from the outset from any equality and considering them ‘like lice’, so unequal and already dehumanized that they were not worth the trouble of torture, so to speak.”
Saleh also writes about the connection between torture and rape: Both give absolute power over the body. The torture of men in Syria was driven by the same chauvinism, took place in the same macho gender order as the rape of women, with an idea of masculinity that seeks to eliminate the male competitor through torture and to possess the woman without limits through rape. Rape is part of genocidal annihilation; it is intended to make the community incapable of reproduction, as a “deferred murder”. Saleh sees two variants of systematic rape in the IS and the Assad state: While in the IS, religiously veiled, one man owns and rapes many women, in the supposedly secular terrorist state many men assault one woman. (Whether these distinctions are always empirically tenable is another question; they must be understood as ideal types.) In any case, the gradual increase in the veiling of women in Syria since the 1970s is not only a concomitant of increasing Islamization, but also a reaction to the growing threat of rape in a state that practices torture.
Saleh sees the Syrian revolution in its early days as a struggle of the Syrians for the “dignity of their bodies”: to set limits to a state violence that was capable of violating the dignity of bodies in every way and then demonstrated precisely this in excess in its fight against the revolution.
The so-called West, North America and Europe, has largely stood idly by and watched the brutal suppression of the Syrian revolution. The “red lines” that Barack Obama drew in 2012 in the event of the use of chemical weapons were crossed in 2013 with the sarin attacks on Ghouta and with many other chemical attacks, without the US even setting up a no-fly zone over Syria. But the “West’s” role in creating and stabilizing the Assad regime goes far beyond merely standing by and watching war crimes. The destabilization of young democracies in the Middle East after the Second World War, came as a result of Western colonialist and imperialist power politics and wars. The Nakba, the successive mass refugee movements from Israel/Palestine, and the insistence on a confessionally bound Jewish state, which was allied with Western interests, undermined the legitimacy of the constitutional and democratic aspirations in the Arab countries. Since 1946, Syria had been a non-sectarian republic in both name and constitution. Sectarian affiliations and identities were denied and suppressed. It was precisely this alleged secularism that made Syria and its rulers acceptable in the West after the end of the Cold War. Since coming to power in 1970, the Assad family had filled the Syrian security apparatus and most important positions with loyal Alewites, systematically pitting the denominations against each other, fueling confessionalism and using it as a weapon. After the generational change from father to son Assad, it was precisely this form of “minority privilege” and the dual state that made the Assad regime under the London-trained Bashir al-Assad appear modern and potentially open to the West.
The “war on terror” since 9/11 gave the Assad regime’s fight against the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists a real boost. Even though it was Iran and Russia that provided the military support without which the regime would not have been able to hold out in 2013 and without which it promptly collapsed in December 2024: The anti-Muslim racism produced in the West helped the regime to establish and maintain the murderous kleptocracy. For kleptocracies, ethnicity, affiliation and religion are only a tool to divide the population and curry favor with external powers; a pretext for suppressing any stirrings of freedom and plundering the subjugated population. The Assad regime has done this through extortion, hostage-taking and robbery on an unprecedented scale. The kleptocratic regime was able to present itself to the outside world as a protector of minorities, that were privileged and, for this reason above all, hated by the Sunni majority, as intended from the outset. The anti-Muslim overtones of the fight against terrorism and the omnipresent racism in the Western world provided Assad with international legitimacy or at least tolerance for his crimes: as a well-shaven and well-dressed mass-murdering Bashar al-Assad with his pretty, English-educated wife still seems more “civilized” than a bearded Islamist, who can be heard shouting Allahu Akbar even without TV sound.
Yassin Al-Haj Saleh calls this the “confessional-racist complex”: “the world of identities and origins” that forms the environment for genocide. The book makes clear that the Assad state was not just an exceptional case, but has a “structural equivalent” in international relations. International law itself shows its asymmetrical side here, finding arrangements with dictatorships on the periphery of the powers that uphold it. The Assad regime’s tortures can flourish anywhere. These tortures are only the last consequence of a “modern” attitude that ruthlessly and predatorily enforces its own interests, and uses racism to do so. They are ultimately a new version of the torment and torture of colonialism, while the remaining ties to any notions of justice dissolve. Islamism reacts to this development by “salafizing” itself and forging its own confessional-racist complex. The history of the Assad torture state can teach those of us who do not – or not yet – have to fear torture to no longer externalize torture as the problem of others, but to understand it as the signature of a dysfunctional modern (nation) state that has been taken hostage by an “elite”/gang of robbers.
The last text in the book, and perhaps the most interesting, is devoted to the problem of representing torture and communicating pain. Only representation can make pain collectively, and thus politically, processable. Saleh understands representation as a “combination of expression (the axis of experience and ideas) and formation (the axis of tradition)”. Formation, or composition, formal creation, is not possible without a tradition in which it can be inscribed. But tradition itself cannot provide the new forms of representation needed to express new experiences. The “representation of the terrible” is dependent on existing forms of political-social thought on the one hand, but on the other hand it must creatively develop them further. How can contemporary Arab political thought achieve this? Saleh sees the real problem of Islamism here: like every traditionalist ideology, it is certainly capable of formation and composition, but its expression, its subjectivity, is limited to conflict and negation. It cannot give meaning or expression to the experience of suffering, of being tortured, of trauma, because that would challenge the Islamist understanding of tradition. Ideology demands that everything suffered must only be expressed within the framework of tradition, it is not allowed to go beyond the scope of that framework. Saleh quotes the Moroccan philosophers Mohammed Abed Al-Jabri and Abdallah Laroui: In Arabic thought, there is a special mechanism that always measures the “hidden”, the “unsolved”, the “problem” – all those things that makes one suffer – against a “proof”. “In Islamic jurisprudence, the ‘proof’ is a topic on which a religious judgment already exists.” This thinking in analogies validates all experience only on the basis of an existing, authoritative text. If there is no suitable text for an experience to be processed, the experience becomes a deviation and must be abandoned and marginalized. A “refusal to represent”; and Laroui had assumed that it “originates from a historical trauma perceived as unbearable.” Laroui speculated about a historical disaster dating back to pre-Islamic times, a “disgrace and humiliation” associated with the emergence of the Sunna itself. In Old Arabic, the Sunna is the customs, practices and norms that are supposed to hold the scattered Arab tribes together. Islam has given them a religious dimension: the “Sunna” of the Prophet is the second source of Islamic law after the Qur’an.
Saleh sees, in line with Laroui, the history of the Arab world as full of failed representations. He also sees his own adherence to communism, from which he only broke away during his imprisonment, as a case of this failure. And today? “It seems that we are once again confronted with enormously hurtful events, which this time are again causing strong defensive effects with the purpose of self-protection.” The Sunna is breaking apart once again. The collective identity of Sunni Muslims is only held together by an extremely violent ideology that ignores reality. All the suppressed experiences and events of generations are released in the break-up, “they emerge as formless beasts, demons and monsters, which in turn are not contained by any Sunna.”
What would it take for political thought in Germany and Europe to turn to this chain of traumas and crises of representation in the Arab world, caused also by Western influence, with love, listening, and humanity? And to stop contributing to its continuation through our racism? Saleh describes – without ever resorting to easy psychology – the psychological situation of Islamism as a hopeless state of amorphousness, “a naked, extremely painful existence”. He refers to Hannah Arendt’s reflections on thinking: only through the inner dialogue of the thinking individual with themselves, the creative thought process, the beginning of representation, can the self discipline itself and develop a conscience. In Sufism, Islam has developed traditions for this. At the other end of the scale of possibilities offered by Islam between humanity and inhumanity is the “extreme case” of “homo islamicus, that Islamists strive to mass-produce: a robot that does not think and whose operating system is called Sharia,” and that only finds expression in killing. Another extreme case is the Auschwitz invention of the “Muselman” tortured to death, who wastes away in Assad prison and who, in complete self-abandonment, “has nothing human left.”
At one point, Saleh does make a cultural comparison: ”The Arab cultural heritage offers fewer options for representation than Western modernism with its multilingualism and wealth of forms (…).” The extent to which the “West” offers ways out of the crisis of representation and the extent to which it is responsible for the suffering and the crisis of representation was hotly debated among the tortured and imprisoned in Mustafa Khalifa’s autobiographical novel. The betrayal that Muslims and Arabs who fled to Germany and Europe from Syria and other Arab countries have to endure in the West is all the more bitter. It is one thing to see the Western plans for the real estate “riviera” in Gaza, the helpless and dishonest hand-wringing, the Western support for and participation in the genocide of the Palestinians, and the unchallenged toleration of the invasions and bombing raids in Syria. But equally bad is the threat to the possibilities of representing this horror itself. The possibilities for representation and processing are being increasingly curtailed by political interference in science, art and culture and the failure of the public. The “shame and disgrace” and the “trauma perceived as unbearable” at the root of the crises of representation in the Arab and Muslim world do have their counterparts with us in the Western world – and perhaps, if we are serious about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, they are even more shameful and disgraceful than anything that could ever have happened in pre-Islamic or Islamic Arabia. Assad is gone – but the horror remains. We can learn from Yassin Al-Haj Saleh how to face it and remain human, or become human.