Origins and History of Arab Third Positionism

by Zoltanous

In the early 1930s, as colonial resistance and nationalist fervor surged across Syria, Fakhri al Baroudi stood at the operational core of the National Bloc’s Damascus apparatus, a central organizer in the struggle against French mandate rule. Born in 1889 into a prominent Damascene family, he was no idle aristocrat but a polymath figure: poet, journalist, politician, Ottoman army veteran of the Great War, and adviser to King Faisal I during Syria’s brief interwar independence. He joined the National Bloc in 1928, shortly after its founding at the Beirut Conference of October 1927, injecting organizational energy that transformed the Bloc from an elite negotiating circle into a movement with genuine mass reach. Drawing on connections to local notables, intellectuals, and student networks centered around institutions such as the Preparation School and the Anbar bureau, Baroudi fused cultural authority with street-level mobilization, carrying nationalist politics out of salons and into Damascus’s public squares.

The steel shirts

Baroudi’s tactical strength lay in his ability to consolidate momentum. In October 1934, he spearheaded the creation of the Arab Office for Advertising and Publishing, an organization that both financed the Bloc and embedded nationalist messaging into everyday life. This was not episodic protest but sustained political conditioning, designed to normalize nationalist participation and expand an insider network into a popular cause. His residence in Qanawat became a revolutionary hub, drawing writers, intellectuals, and organizers into a space that bridged ideological production and direct action. These gatherings reinforced the Bloc’s standing among Damascus’s educated classes while laying the groundwork for mass mobilization when confrontation became unavoidable.

His influence extended well beyond elites. Baroudi orchestrated strikes that shut down markets and paralyzed commerce, demonstrating the Bloc’s capacity to disrupt colonial governance. More importantly, he cultivated youth participation through unconventional channels: football clubs, theatrical performances, and scouting organizations such as the Umayyad Troop, which he supported to instill discipline and patriotic fervor. Alongside prominent lawyer Munir al Ajlani, the author of key nationalist charters, Baroudi co-founded the National Youth organization in 1929. Aligned with the Bloc, this group targeted university students and urban athletes over the age of eighteen, presenting itself as the nucleus of a future Syrian fighting force. Training under former Ottoman officers and veterans of Faisal’s army combined drills, marches, and ideological instruction, not merely to energize participants but to inculcate obedience, unity, and readiness for confrontation. By 1936, the National Youth had expanded into branches across Homs, Aleppo, Latakia, and Tartous, claiming roughly 15.000 members who animated holidays, elections, and anti-French demonstrations while suppressing rival groups. This expansion was as psychological as it was organizational, revealing how a modern ideology could impose order on urban unrest.

“The level of group solidarity, the seeming ability of a modern ideology to motivate young men and boys.”

— Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern In The Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and The Arab Middle Class

Baroudi’s program combined economic and cultural initiatives to construct a resilient nationalist base. He established what is often described as the Arab world’s first employment bureau in Damascus, offering free assistance to students and professionals to promote self-reliance and productivity against the extractive logic of the mandate. He also supported the creation of Damascus Radio and Syrian Television as vehicles for nationalist messaging and economic independence, countering the mandate’s control over information and resources.

The transformation of the National Youth into the Steel Shirts (al-Qumsan al-Hadidiyya) on January 10, 1936, precisely forty days after the death of nationalist icon Ibrahim Hanano, marked a decisive escalation. The organization became an armed, disciplined paramilitary operating under the Bloc’s political umbrella, designed to suppress rivals and enforce nationalist authority. Modeled explicitly on European fascist formations such as Italy’s Blackshirts and Germany’s Brownshirts, the Steel Shirts projected order, strength, and inevitability. They adopted hierarchical command structures, staged mass rallies (haflat), and conducted public drills under former Ottoman officers, turning civic space into a militarized spectacle intended to mobilize youth and intimidate opposition.

This development was not anomalous. It reflected an era in which fascism had demonstrated how mass politics could be weaponized, youth molded into instruments of control, and public life transformed into a theater of authority and menace. Syrian nationalists framed these practices in anti-colonial rhetoric, but the methods themselves were directly inherited from fascist precedents. This was not superficial mimicry but a deliberate appropriation of organizational techniques designed to convert diffuse resentment into disciplined force.

“Within days of the strike’s conclusion, in an apparent effort to capture some of the energy of the strikers, the Damascus leaders of the National Bloc formed an organization known as the Steel Shirts.”

“Underwritten by Fakhrī al-Bārūdī and led by a young nationalist firebrand, Munīr al-Ajlanī, the group adopted the basic uniform of European fascist groups.”

— Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern In The Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and The Arab Middle Class

The Steel Shirts’ visual language fused military discipline with local symbolism. Middle-class effendiyya members wore steel-gray tunics, trousers, and pith helmets reminiscent of the Faisal-era forces, evoking Syria’s short-lived post-war independence. Working-class recruits of the Hanano Brigade donned red abayas, black sharwals, and embroidered sleeves modeled on qabaday traditions. Their emblem, a clenched fist gripping a torch, signified awakening and defiance, a softened echo of more ominous fascist iconography. Their salute, an outstretched arm with flattened palm, mirrored the Roman salute adopted by Italian Fascists and Nazis, though it was locally reframed as a symbol of Arab unity rather than racial supremacy. Marches through Damascus and Aleppo functioned simultaneously as assertions of power and claims to historical legitimacy, presenting the Steel Shirts as heirs to Faisal’s dissolved army.

In Aleppo, where they operated as the National Guard, the Steel Shirts aspired to create a new nationalist type: disciplined, educated, physically capable, and ideologically committed. In practice, their methods were coercive. They enforced Bloc directives by intimidating merchants during strikes, extracting funds, patrolling commercial districts, and disciplining middle-class dissenters, while simultaneously indoctrinating both members and bystanders. Although their ideological content was inconsistent, their organizational logic was unmistakably fascist.

“The formation of the Steel Shirts and the White Badge in Aleppo, while representing a successful interpolation of the language of fascist paramilitary organization, did not necessarily carry with it an engagement with the ideology itself.”

— Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern In The Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and The Arab Middle Class

This distinction obscures the deeper continuity. Fascism operates not only as doctrine but as method: the staging of discipline, the sanctification of hierarchy, the militarization of youth, and the normalization of coercion within civic life. By adopting these tools, the Steel Shirts reshaped Syrian political culture regardless of ideological substitutions. Baroudi himself underscored youth’s revolutionary potential in a speech at a Steel Shirts camp in al Zabadani, explicitly likening their mobilization to the forces that propelled Mussolini and Hitler to power. Leaders such as Naseeb al Bakri and Saif al Din al Mamun emphasized absolute obedience, framing discipline and unity as prerequisites for national survival. Camps, parades, and rallies closely resembled European fascist youth formations, including the Hitler Youth’s emphasis on physical conditioning and ideological molding, adapted to a pan-Arab nationalist framework. These overt similarities provoked suspicion and resistance, culminating in violent confrontations such as the October 12, 1936 clash at Aleppo’s Sunday Market (Suq al Ahad), where Steel Shirts fought the Christian White Badge over extortion activities.

“By the end of the day five Aleppines died and the numbers of wounded was staggering, reaching into the hundreds.”

— Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern In The Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and The Arab Middle Class

Initially, French authorities tolerated nationalist militias insofar as they fragmented opposition and preserved order. That tolerance ended once these forces threatened mandate authority directly. In 1939, the French dissolved the Steel Shirts, confiscated their weapons, and erased their formal presence. By 1938, remnants had been reduced to a football club as the Bloc retreated under anti-fascist pressure:

“By the end of that year, all that was left of the Aleppo Steel Shirts was a soccer team.”

— Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern In The Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and The Arab Middle Class

The organization’s dissolution did not erase its influence. Its tactics and aesthetics reappeared in later movements, including the SSNP, which similarly mobilized youth through authoritarian spectacle and Greater Syria ideology, often accompanied by explicit antisemitism. The SSNP’s founder articulated a worldview portraying Jews as parasitic enclaves incapable of genuine social integration, reinforcing exclusionary and hierarchical conceptions of national belonging. These coercive practices also penetrated electoral politics, reducing democratic processes to managed performances.

“Inviting, with an insistence to which it is not usual to resist, the electors to vote for” the Bloc sanctioned candidate.”

— Keith David Watenpaugh, Being Modern In The Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and The Arab Middle Class

Here lie the early seeds of Syrian totalitarianism: force masquerading as governance, elections as choreographed rituals, and public institutions subordinated to intimidation. The French bombardment of Damascus on May 29, 1945, marked the apex of colonial repression. Following nationalist demonstrations and French troop deployments earlier that month, de Gaulle’s forces shelled Damascus, destroying Parliament, ministries, and residential districts, with spillover into Aleppo, Hama, and Homs. The objective was to decapitate nationalist leadership in defiance of emerging international norms.

“French troops to-day blasted their way into the Syrian Parliament House after blowing up the front gate with a shell from a shell from a 75.”

— UK Parliament, House of Commons Debates (Hansard), 30 May 1945.

An American diplomatic report detailed the casualties:

“The French have shelled or bombed by plane several populated centers of Syria, including Damascus; that several hundred Syrians have been killed and a number wounded.”

— United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1945, vol. VIII

Amid the fighting, Baroudi took up arms, coordinating with gendarmes and volunteers during the defense of the Citadel. Wounded by shrapnel, he continued evacuating casualties to the English Hospital in al Qassaa, where treatment proceeded by candlelight following French power cuts. His actions earned him Syria’s highest Merit Medal and honorary army rank. He later continued advocating cooperatives and vocational training to insulate the economy from foreign control.

The Steel Shirts’ legacy fed directly into the evolution of Ba’athism. Their synthesis of nationalism, militarization, youth mobilization, and hierarchical organization provided a template later adapted by the League of National Action and ultimately the ba’ath party, founded in Damascus in 1943 by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, with its constitution formalized in 1947. Early ba’ath thinkers such as Zaki al Arsuzi drew on European racial theories, including those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, advancing notions of Arab purity and hierarchy that diverged sharply from Marxism. Aflaq read Nazi texts such as Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of The Twentieth Century and participated in Arabizing Mein Kampf.

“Whoever has lived during this period in Damascus will appreciate the inclination of the Arab people to Nazism, for Nazism was the power which could serve as its champion, and he who is defeated will by nature love the victor.”

“We were racialists, admiring Nazism, reading its books and the source of its thought, particularly Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation and H.S. Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century which revolves on the race. We were the first to think of translating Mein Kampf.”

— Sami al-Jundi quoted in National Socialism In The Arab Near East between 1933 and 1939 by Stefan Wild

Ba’ath symbolism deliberately mirrored fascist aesthetics, with emblems designed to excite youth and project vitality. The party’s ascent culminated in the March 8, 1963 coup, entrenching rule through militarization and loyalty enforcement. Youth indoctrination programs such as the Revolutionary Youth Union echoed Steel Shirts practices, institutionalizing ideological training and regime veneration. Corporatist economic control followed, folding unions, guilds, and professional associations into state-supervised structures under Arab socialist rhetoric. Under Hafez and Bashar al Assad, this system oscillated between state control and selective liberalization, producing a state bourgeoisie bound to regime loyalty. The reported presence of Nazi fugitive Alois Brunner in Damascus, and the SSNP’s alliance with the Assad regime during the civil war, underscored lingering ideological affinities.

“Bashar al-Assad announced, at the June 2005 Ba’ath Party Congress, the transformation of Syria into a ‘social market economy’ and the coming of a new era of economic prosperity.”

— Leila Vignal, Syria: Anatomy of a Revolution

The war economy that followed entrenched smuggling, racketeering, and elite capture:

“The pre-uprising government, which had a mandate to effect a transition to a social market economy, but it had made limited headway by 2011.”

“The ‘war economy’ has in effect been grafted on to pre-conflict smuggling and racketeering networks.”

— David Butter, Syria’s Economy: Picking Up The Pieces

In Iraq, Ba’athism took a far more explicit and personalized fascistic form under Saddam Hussein, whose admiration for Hitler shaped not only regime aesthetics but the internal logic of power itself. Saddam did not merely borrow authoritarian techniques; he consciously modeled leadership on the Nazi ideal of the infallible, omnipresent Führer. His rise consolidated a cult of personality built on omnipresent portraits, choreographed mass rallies, ritualized pledges of loyalty, and a narrative of historical destiny in which the leader embodied the nation’s will. School curricula, youth organizations, and state media portrayed Saddam as warrior, philosopher, and father of the nation, collapsing the distinction between state, party, and individual in a manner strikingly consistent with fascist precedents.

This personalization of power was reinforced through racialized ideology. Influenced by the views of his uncle and mentor Khairallah Talfah, a participant in the 1941 pro-Nazi Rashid Ali revolt, Saddam absorbed hierarchical conceptions of ethnicity that framed Arabs as a civilizational elite and cast minorities, especially Jews, Kurds, and Shi‘a dissidents, as dirt or as internal enemies. These beliefs translated into policy through demographic engineering, forced displacement, mass surveillance, and spectacular violence designed to terrorize rather than merely punish. The 1969 public hanging of Iraqi Jews in Baghdad’s Liberation Square, broadcast as a celebration of sovereignty, exemplified the regime’s use of ritualized brutality to fuse popular participation with repression, echoing fascist practices of communalized violence.

The Iraqi Ba’ath state also pushed fascist corporatism further than its Syrian counterpart due to Marxist Leninist tendencies. Economic life was subordinated to regime loyalty through party-controlled unions, professional associations, and military-industrial patronage networks that rewarded obedience and punished deviation. The security apparatus operated as both enforcer and ideological guardian, blurring policing, intelligence, and political education. Loyalty to Saddam superseded loyalty to institutions, law, or even party doctrine, producing a system where fear, spectacle, and ritual affirmation maintained cohesion.

“There will probably never again be a reproduction of the Third Reich, but Saddam Hussein has come closer than any other dictator since 1945.”

— Stanley Payne quoted in Newsweek, March 17, 2003, in coverage discussing Saddam Hussein and historical fascist regimes

Under Saddam, Ba’athism ceased to function primarily as a pan-Arab nationalist ideology and instead hardened into a personalist fascism, one in which the leader’s image, will, and survival became synonymous with the nation itself. Violence was not an aberration but a formative tool, used continuously to recreate obedience and suppress the emergence of alternative political identities. This trajectory demonstrates how fascist organizational methods, once fused with unchecked personal rule, can evolve from structured autocracy into a totalizing system of domination centered on an absolute cult of personality.

Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt also mattered as a regional accelerant for these same governing methods, even when the ideological packaging differed. Long before 1952, Nasser’s political formation occurred in an environment shaped by admiration for the Axis Powers. As a young officer, he moved within nationalist circles that viewed Nazi Germany as a model of discipline, revival, and anti-imperial force, including being a member of with fascist-leaning movements such as Young Egypt’s Green shirts, whom openly borrowed European fascist aesthetics and rhetoric. This early exposure did not vanish with independence. After taking power, Nasser’s regime quietly employed former Nazi officers and intelligence figures, including Otto Ernst Remer, for expertise in security organization, mass mobilization, and regime protection. After 1952, Nasserism demonstrated how post-colonial nationalism could be fused to a single-leader myth, choreographed mass spectacle, disciplined mobilization, and state-supervised participation through unions and syndicates, all amplified through radio and tightly controlled public culture. For Syrian and Iraqi Ba’athists, Egypt functioned simultaneously as inspiration and rival: proof that Arab unity rhetoric could be operationalized through centralized authority, a dominant security apparatus, and a managed civic sphere in which organizations existed only within regime-defined boundaries. The point is not that Nasser simply equals fascism. It is that the same political methods, youth mobilization, public choreography, enforced unity, and corporatist containment hardened into a regional common sense of power, a transferable toolkit that Ba’ath parties would later intensify and weaponize as they moved from movement to state. Where Nasser institutionalized authoritarian mass politics, Saddam personalized and radicalized it, converting spectacle into permanent terror and loyalty into existential submission.

Green Shirts of the Young Egypt party including future President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1930s

The attraction of European neo-fascist networks to the Assad regime did not emerge in a vacuum. These same milieus had long expressed admiration for earlier similar nationalist rulers in the Middle East, most notably Nasser and Saddam, whom they viewed as embodiments of sovereign power unencumbered by liberal constraints. Nasser’s centralized rule, mass mobilization, cult of leadership, and defiance of Western dominance were celebrated within European nationalist discourse during the Cold War as proof that modern states could forge unity through discipline rather than pluralism. His defeat in 1967 and the gradual exhaustion of Nasserism exposed the fragility beneath this spectacle, marking the first major collapse of an Arab nationalist project that had once captivated admirers far beyond the region. Saddam’s Iraq inherited and intensified this appeal. European neo-fascist circles portrayed Saddam as a ruler who fused militarism, ethnic hierarchy, and absolute command into a coherent state project, presenting him as a counter-model to liberal democracy and globalized norms.

The admiration later extended to Assad followed this same pattern. Groups affiliated with Golden Dawn and CasaPound Italia openly framed Assad as the last standing exemplar of a nationalist lineage that had once included Nasser and Saddam. These actors were not endorsing Ba’athist ideology or Arab nationalism in substance. They were endorsing a political tendency. What they admired was the architecture of domination: centralized command, militarized citizenship, cultic leadership, suppression of pluralism, and the conversion of violence into legitimacy. Assad appeared, in this imaginary, as the final custodian of a model already extinguished in Cairo and Baghdad.

Jean-Marie Le Pen meeting Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, November 1990

The June 1967 issue of The Thunderbolt, the official newspaper of the neo-fascist, white nationalist National States Rights party, advanced ann interpretation of the mounting crisis in the Middle East. The publication claimed that Israel and the Soviet Union had entered into a secret understanding designed to draw the United States into a war against the Arab states, thereby enabling Israel to expand its territorial boundaries while simultaneously driving the Arab world into the orbit of international communism. Appearing before open hostilities erupted, the issue expressed confidence that Israel would not initiate war absent firm assurances that American forces would ultimately bear the burden of combat. In the same issue, the newspaper announced that it was expediting the publication of a pamphlet entitled Jewish Crimes and Atrocities Against The Arab People, framing its position as part of a broader campaign to mobilize Arab sentiment within the United States.

“It is no secret that The Thunderbolt has taken a strong Arab stand against the brutal aggression of Israel. It is therefore natural that our newspaper should appeal to Arab people living in America. Because of our stand a considerable growth in our Arab readership has been noted in recent months.”

“There are some 2,000,000 people of Arab descent living in America. We are very much interested in helping to unite them to obtain JUSTICE for the Arab people.”

— The Thunderbolt, April 1969

This posture was not unique to the various American neo-fascist organizations, but reflected a broader pattern in which segments of the European neo-fascist milieu aligned themselves with Arab nationalist and Palestinian movements under a shared anti-liberalism, anti-Zionism, and opposition to American global power. At a moment when most French nationalist currents expressed support for Israel, François Duprat advanced a contrary position, arguing that revolutionary nationalism required solidarity with the Arab world. Backed by figures such as Maurice Bardèche, Pierre Sidos, Henry Coston, and Ploncard d’Assac, Duprat framed Israel as an extension of Western imperialism rather than a legitimate national project. In July 1967, he authored a special issue of Defense of The West titled The Israeli Aggression, and simultaneously helped establish a Rally for the Liberation of Palestine, which maintained contacts with both the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Syrian Social Nationalist party.

Taken together, these cases illustrate how elements of European and American neo-fascism converged with Arab Third Position movements, not out of pure humanitarian concern, but through a shared ideological rejection of liberal democracy, pluralism, Western hegemony, and anti-Zionism. This convergence persisted into later decades, culminating in overt gestures of cooperation, including the invitation extended to David Duke to travel to Syria and deliver a speech in support of the Palestinian cause, symbolizing the durable and transnational nature of this alignment.

David Duke speech in Damascus, Syria

Before the collapse of the Syrian state can be understood, it is necessary to account for the dense ecosystem of nationalist parties and movements that historically underpinned Ba’athist rule. Organizations such as the Syrian Social Nationalist party, alongside Ba’athist cadres and allied pan Arab formations, were not peripheral actors but ideological shock troops of the regime. Their function was to fuse Arab nationalism, secularism, and state authority into a single political identity that rejected liberal pluralism, sectarian Islamism, and Western political models alike. These parties supplied the regime with disciplined networks, street mobilization, and an ideological justification for cohesion, framing Assad’s rule not as personal dictatorship but as the institutional guardian of Arab sovereignty and civilizational continuity. As long as these nationalist structures remained intact, the state possessed an internal immune system capable of suppressing fragmentation. Once war, sanctions, and external intervention eroded their organizational coherence and legitimacy, the collapse of central authority followed not as an accident, but as the predictable consequence of dismantling the very forces designed to prevent sectarian and jihadist takeover.

“The Parti Populaire Syrien represents the most authentically fascist tendency of the Arab nationalist movement, and this since its foundation.”

— François Duprat, Cahiers Européens

Assad’s regime collapsed on December 8, 2024, dismantling the corporatist scaffolding that had sustained Ba’ath rule for decades. As in Iraq after 2003, this collapse was not the result of spontaneous popular revolt or organic institutional failure alone, but of sustained external pressure led by the United States. Military intervention, intelligence coordination, diplomatic isolation, and above all economic warfare through sanctions systematically eroded the Syrian state’s capacity to function. Sanctions accelerated capital flight, destroyed currency stability, severed state-managed production networks, and hollowed out basic administrative governance, replicating the same structural conditions imposed on Saddam’s Iraq. In both cases, regime survival was made economically impossible before it was made militarily untenable.

With the fall of the state came the deliberate dismantling of its ideological infrastructure. Nationalist parties that had functioned as auxiliary pillars of Ba’athist authority, including the Syrian Social Nationalist party and allied pan-Arab formations, were banned or forcibly neutralized. Their youth movements, propaganda organs, and disciplined mass networks were dismantled precisely because they represented secular nationalist authority capable of resisting sectarian takeover. This was not a transition to pluralism. It was the removal of secular competitors to clear space for a new ruling ideology. The forces that filled this vacuum were not indigenous democratic movements but American-backed Islamist formations whose legitimacy derived from insurgency, foreign sponsorship, and religious absolutism. As in Iraq, radical Islamist actors previously contained or suppressed by the state were elevated into governing positions through regime-change mechanics. The head of the new Syrian government was not a neutral administrator but a figure with a documented terrorist background whose rise mirrored the post-Saddam empowerment of jihadist militias and sectarian elites. Where Ba’athism fused nationalism and state authority, the new regime fused governance with radical Islamic ideology, redefining sovereignty in confessional rather than civic terms.

“In the end, Damascus fell and Syria unfortunately also ended up in the hands of radical Islamism. Many these days, especially in the Western media, define the one who was the legitimate Syrian president, that is, Assad, ‘a dictator’. Yet, his pan-Arab national socialism was the only credible dam against the danger of jihadist extremism, just like that of Gaddafi in Libya, a country that has been living in total chaos since 2011, as will probably happen in Syria.”

— Fortezza Europa, editorial commentary on Syria and Libya, post-2011

Roberto Fiore’s assessment situates this outcome within a longer historical pattern of Western-enabled Islamist empowerment following the destruction of secular nationalist regimes.

“To understand the problem of the Islamists, we must consider that already in the past it emerged with a certain clarity that the one who pushed fundamentalism from the very beginning has always been Israel. If we think of the Arab world of the 1950s and 1960s we see that all the countries were anti-Zionist and were governed by political formations of Nasserists, or Ba’athists, or Social Nationalists who had the characteristic of strong respect for Christian communities.”

— Roberto Fiore, interviews and essays published in Italian nationalist outlets affiliated with Forza Nuova, late 2000s to early 2010s

The banning of nationalist parties after 2024 therefore marked the final destruction of the secular political immune system that had historically prevented jihadist capture. The result was not liberation but substitution. The trajectory mirrors Iraq with near-perfect symmetry: U.S.-driven economic collapse, regime decapitation, elimination of nationalist institutions, and the installation of radical Islamist actors as de facto rulers under the cover of transitional governance. The arc from the Steel Shirts to Ba’ath rule shows how fascist organizational methods migrate across ideologies. The post-2024 Syrian state demonstrates something more dangerous still. Those same methods now persist under a religious framework that sanctifies domination rather than merely enforcing it. Assad’s fall did not resolve the fractures the regime contained. It reproduced them in a more absolutist and less governable form, exactly as occurred after Saddam and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya.

Bashar al-Assad and his wife in Russia after fleeing Syria