Alaa Alkhatib
4 September 2026
Originally published by the Syrian Constitutional Party
The fall of the Assad regime offered Syrians a rare opportunity to emerge not only from an authoritarian political system, but also from the heavy social and psychological legacy left by decades of dictatorship and fourteen years of war. Yet perhaps the greatest danger was the one that does not appear in GDP figures or maps of destruction: the deep vertical fractures within Syrian society itself—between Sunnis and Alawites, Arabs and Kurds, the centre and the periphery, Islamists and secularists, the victors and those who fear the victors.
In a society emerging from tragedy with a shattered state, weakened institutions, and distorted concepts and values, the media is neither a luxury nor merely a vehicle for news. It is part of the process of rebuilding the state itself. Reconstruction does not mean restoring institutions and enacting laws alone; it also means rebuilding an understanding of the state, the rule of law, citizenship and human rights, and developing a political and social culture capable of sustaining a modern state. Alongside education, the media therefore becomes one of the most important tools for rebuilding this civic consciousness.
This task is especially difficult in Syria because of the sectarian, ethnic, political and regional fragmentation left by years of authoritarianism and war. The media should therefore have taken the initiative in dismantling hate speech, helping Syrians understand one another’s fears, and moving them from the question “Who won?” to the far more difficult one: How are we going to live together? Yet in crucial respects, the opposite has happened. The interim authorities have continued to exploit these fractures and competing narratives of victimhood to consolidate their power.
The Authorities’ Media: From Building a Social Contract to Managing Division
The new authorities led by Ahmed al-Sharaa understood the importance of image early on. Their communications skills are clearly visible in the message directed abroad: the image of a statesman, international meetings, and the language of stability and investment. The problem lies not there, but in the gap between the message addressed to the outside world and the one heard at home.
At a time when Syria needs, more than ever, a discourse capable of reassuring its different communities, political and media rhetoric has spread that once again divides Syrians into victors and defeated, patriots and “remnants” of the former regime, and at times presents Assad’s fall not as the liberation of Syrians, but as one community reclaiming what it sees as its right to rule.
In this context, expressions such as “the alliance of minorities” are more dangerous than a verbal slip. They imply a conception of the state itself as the prize of a victorious group rather than a contract among equal citizens. The danger grows when such language comes from figures close to the authorities, such as Hassan al-Dughaim, who publicly rejects sectarian power-sharing while repeatedly invoking the idea of an “alliance of minorities.”
The paradox matters. The problem is not merely the official position that is publicly declared, but the discursive environment that allows a sectarian message to coexist with the rhetoric of national unity. A modern studio is not enough when the political content remains deeply driven by identity and instinct.
When “Alternative Media” Becomes a Parallel Army
More troubling still, the machinery of influence does not stop with official media. The meaning of media itself has changed. In a moment of crisis, a Syrian influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers may wield more influence than an entire television station, while algorithms reward not the most accurate voice but the one most capable of keeping an audience on the screen. Rumour thus travels faster than correction, and a clipped video can carry more weight than an investigation.
This is why the case of a video attributed to a Druze sheikh accused of insulting the Prophet, together with allegations that the video had been fabricated, should not be treated merely as a passing social-media scandal. It points to a broader approach that the authorities sometimes tolerate and even endorse. Anas al-Habra, who published the video, was himself welcomed by the Minister of Culture at a “Code of Conduct” conference ostensibly devoted to combating hate speech.
The issue is not whether prominent voices associated with sectarian or nationalist rhetoric, such as Mousa al-Omar and Ahmad Kamel, should be allowed to speak. The problem begins when state-linked institutions provide a platform to inciters without a clear policy for confronting incitement itself. A democratic state does not fight hate speech with counter-hate speech, nor by choosing the inciters who happen to suit its political identity.
Freer Than Under Assad—but Not Yet a Free Media Environment
It would be unfair to deny that Syria’s media environment is now considerably freer than it was under Assad. Syria rose 36 places in Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index, from 177th to 141st. Yet the organisation still classifies the situation for journalism as “very serious” and describes the new freedom as fragile.
That distinction matters if criticism of the current authorities is not to become a false comparison with the past: escaping Assad’s media system cannot be the standard by which the media of a new Syria is judged. In January 2026, the Committee to Protect Journalists documented the detention of three journalists and restrictions on independent coverage in Aleppo’s Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh neighbourhoods, describing the selective admission of certain journalists as an attempt to control the narrative. In March, the Ministry of Information barred the platforms Hashtag, Jusoor News and Al-Dalil from operating on licensing grounds—an illustration of the power media bureaucracy now holds to decide who may work and who may not.
The problem is not that every form of media regulation is repression; direct incitement is not press freedom. The real questions are: Who sets the boundaries? Under what law? Subject to what independent judiciary? And are the same rules applied to supporters and opponents alike? Without such safeguards, censorship simply moves from the security officer to the licensing official.
The Opposition Has Also Lost the Battle for the Screen
But placing all responsibility on the authorities would be an incomplete reading. Faced with a powerful pro-government media machine, no organised political opposition has succeeded in building a compelling national counter-narrative. Worse, some of the most visible opposition voices offer not a national alternative but a reverse sectarianism: a discourse that treats Sunni Arabs as an Islamist bloc and a natural incubator of extremism, while reducing other communities to equally simplistic categories.
The ethnic divide is no less dangerous. “Small media”—independent pages, channels and personalities with substantial digital reach—has become an arena for reciprocal mobilisation between Arabic and Kurdish narratives. An exclusionary Arab discourse reduces Kurdish rights to “separatist projects,” while a Kurdish discourse can invoke historical grievance to legitimise abuses on the ground and stereotype Arabs as an incubator of extremism.
This division threatens not only civil peace in areas of contact such as Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor. It also leaves Syrians facing two bitter alternatives: an exclusionary centralist nationalism, or a sectarian-ethnic federalism emptied of citizenship. Syrians are thus confronted with two distorted mirrors: one tells them that minorities are conspiring against the majority; the other suggests that the majority itself is the problem. Both destroy the same idea: citizenship.
The Battle That Has Yet to Begin
Syria does not need “neutral media” in the naïve sense. There is no media without editorial choices and no journalist without values. What Syria needs is media that sides with the state rather than the authorities, with the citizen rather than the sect, and with the truth even when it unsettles victor and defeated alike.
Syria does not suffer from a shortage of narratives; it has an excess of them. What it lacks is a public sphere in which Syrians can disagree without turning those who differ from them into existential enemies—a space that helps build a shared civic understanding of the state, citizenship and coexistence.
The greatest responsibility rests with the authorities, not because they alone produce hate speech or contribute to entrenching division and distorting the meaning of statehood and citizenship, but because they alone control the institutions of the state, the tools of regulation, and the capacity to establish a long-term national policy.
Assad’s fall could have marked the beginning of rebuilding a Syrian national consciousness and dismantling the fractures his rule had fed and deepened. Exploiting those fractures to consolidate power may deliver short-term gains, but it risks leaving Syria an even more fragile state. Those in power may win the battle of the narrative for a time, but no state can be built from citizens who fear one another.
