A year after the fall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, has Syria truly become a thriving utopia of peace, prosperity, freedom of expression, and tolerance under a one-hundred-percent Islamic democratic rule? This is the question Mohamed Saad Khiralla investigates.

On December 8, 2025, the first anniversary of the fall of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was observed a man who rained barrel bombs on his people, deployed chemical weapons, and ruled with his father a brutal family regime for half a century, a rule marked by killings, starvation, and forced displacement.

On that day, “Abu Muhammad al-Jolani “officially introduced as Ahmad al-Shar’ and his associates from Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham entered Damascus. The scene was neither spontaneous nor purely revolutionary; it was the result of overt international and regional arrangements, later marketed as a “political transition.”

Yet, the anniversary did not throw me back a single year; it hurled me centuries into the past, into the logic of the Umayyad state: rule by force, legitimacy by the sword, obedience claimed from the heavens, not the people. In Syria, history does not die it is recycled.

The choice of platform was no coincidence. As al-Shar’ first appeared after entering Damascus, he returned a year later to celebrate from the Umayyad Mosque, clad in military uniform, presenting himself as the “Transitional Syrian President,” delivering his defining statement:

“O Syrians, obey me as I have obeyed God in you…”........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)