Syria: harsh reality after the euphoria, by Emmanuel Haddad (Le Monde diplomatique

Three-month-old Aram wriggled in his father’s arms, swept up in the contagious joy of the crowd that assembled before the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, high above Damascus, on the night of 3 July. Beams of light from a vast stage cut through the darkness in the build-up to the unveiling of a new visual identity for the new Syria.

The simple fact of being able to gather so near the presidential palace without fear of arrest revived the incredulous excitement of the first days of liberation, after the fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad on 8 December and his flight to Moscow. ‘Nothing lasts forever, Bashar has fallen,’ a group of young people chanted. They clustered around Aram, a symbol of a generation of Syrians who would no longer have to bow their heads before power.

That, at least, is the promise of the new unofficial anthem they enthusiastically began singing: ‘Hold your head high, you are a free Syrian.’ Two days earlier, Damascus and other major cities had celebrated the US’s announcement that it was effectively lifting sanctions on the country, removing a major obstacle to reconstruction after 14 years of war, devastation and plunder.

The new national emblem is a golden eagle on a green background, surmounted by three stars. The country’s transitional president, Ahmed al-Sharaa said, ‘The [new visual] identity we are launching today expresses a Syria that does not accept division or partition. Cultural and ethnic diversity,’ he added, ‘is a factor of enrichment, not division or conflict.’

Three days later, the US announced that the Islamist group from which Damascus’s new strongman came, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS, Levant Liberation Committee, formerly the Al-Nusra Front), was being removed from its list of foreign terrorist organisations. But in a country only just emerging from a long night, a single spark is all it takes to trip the fuses and plunge it back into darkness.

Such a spark came on 11 July, when armed Bedouin groups (…)

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