When Geography Whispers to Reason: Reflections on a Homeland Haunted by Ghosts and Threatened by Fractures

In the storm-laden winds sweeping through the ruins of the Syrian state, the agreement between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Hay at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) flickered like a brief lightning flash—only to vanish into a sky already heavy with clouds. The recent Qamishlo conference, with its veiled expressions and silences louder than its speeches, revealed the tremors beneath the surface. What lies between the lines spoke truer than the final communiqué. The land whispers what podiums refuse to utter, and history pens what lips dare not pronounce.

To brandish the sword of war against the Kurds´-or-the SDF is not just a tactical blunder—it is an existential wager, one that can only hasten the unraveling of Syria’s already fraying fabric. Wounding your own flank while your body bleeds from a thousand gashes is hardly the strategy of a nation seeking healing. Syrian blood—be it Kurdish´-or-Arab, Christian´-or-Muslim, Sunni, Druze,´-or-Alawite—has bled too much already. This land can no longer bear to be a theatre for those who claim to protect it while they pull the trigger.

There is no balm for this accumulating pain but dialogue. No bridge between sects and communities but the humble, honest word—one born of a collective awareness that survival lies in unity, and that the homeland is neither inheritance for a sect nor a prize for a prince. Negotiation is not a luxury-;- it is the very condition of existence. To exclude the other is not to build legitimacy but to summon collapse.

The tragedy deepens when one man imagines himself the state, and his voice the only echo in a valley where all others have been silenced. When Ahmad al-Shar’a makes decisions alone, flanked by the hardened core of HTS and backed by regional patrons who see Syria as a pawn´-or-a shield for their own calamities, what we face is not national leadership but fractured mirrors reflecting foreign desires, not Syrian dreams. Those who offer him support today have wrought no good in their own lands—how could they bestow any upon ours? Had they known justice, it would have bloomed first among their own impoverished and fearful people.

This monopoly on power brings neither justice nor restitution—it only deepens the wound. The problem lies not only in the fraying ties with non-Sunni communities, but within the Sunni component itself, whose voice was stolen, whose will was seized, and who was then told: “You are the legitimate representative!” How can one be represented without being asked? How can a voice express itself when it has been turned into an echo?

The solution does not lie in carnivalesque conferences where words are adorned like stage props, nor in recommendations crafted only to be forgotten. The so-called National Dialogue Conference prepared by al-Sharaa was little more than a theater to justify centralized control, not a forum for collective decision-making. It resembled the banquet of a sultan, where guests are summoned not to shape legitimacy—but to validate a forged one.

Syria will not be reborn unless its sons and daughters—of all sects, beliefs, wounds, and hopes—gather around a single table to forge, from the ashes, a new national covenant. A true national conference—not dominated by one flag over another, nor one tongue at the expense of another. One that yields a binding charter, not anaesthetic slogans. One rooted in the wisdom of history, not the haste of the moment. In the spirit of partnership, not the logic of domination.

The road to such a gathering will not be easy. And yes, those addicted to veiled tyranny may drown this call in noise and suspicion. Yet it remains the only path toward the Syria we dream of: a state not ruled in the name of a sect, nor managed with the mind of a militia—but pulsing with diversity and built upon the rubble of exclusion, not the rubble of cities.

So, let those who seek to carry a national project plant its seeds in the soil of understanding, not the minefields of force. Let them lean on the memory of the people, not the surplus of arms. Let them listen to the voice of the people before falling for the flattery of their inner circles. Thrones built on sand are many—what remains of them once the winds of history rise, is precious little.

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