Perhaps Abu Mohammed al-Julani will defy the grim precedent, maybe he will break away from Salafi jihadism and break the cycle that has consumed countless others.
Anyone who remembers the Arab Spring knows that things can always get worse. Especially when Islamists rise on the trailblaze of “freedom.”
Now that Bashar al-Assad’s regime has finally disintegrated, it’s appropriate to recognize that Baathism—its core ideological compass—has suffered a decisive blow. Baathism belonged to that class of sweeping mid-20th-century ideologies, cut from the same cloth as European fascism and communism, both of which deeply influenced its formation. It emerged tailored to the Arab world’s post-colonial yearnings and took root in both Syria and Iraq, leaving profound and often catastrophic legacies.
In Iraq, Baathist control endured for 35 years, most infamously under Saddam Hussein. His rule brought brutal campaigns of repression, including genocidal attacks on the Kurdish population. In Syria, Baathist dominance extended more than five decades. Though often less erratic than Saddam’s, its cruelty was no less severe. The result was a nation perpetually on the brink—wars with Israel, interventions in Jordan and Lebanon, internal massacres, and an entrenched system of state terror.
The intellectual architect of Baathism was Michel Aflaq, a Damascene thinker who conceived the movement in the early 1940s amid regional upheaval. In 1941, a pro-British Iraqi regime was overthrown in a coup that aligned Iraq with Nazi Germany. It was in this context of perceived Arab humiliation that Aflaq offered his ideological answer to the region’s crisis.
He mourned what he saw as a spiritual disintegration of Arab society:
“In the past, the Arab soul was unified—its thoughts aligned with its spirit, its private ethics in harmony with its public life. Today, we are scattered, impoverished, and incomplete. We must reconcile this disunity and return to wholeness.”
To restore that lost unity, Aflaq insisted on purging cultural stagnation:
“We must eliminate the stagnation and decay that impede us, so that the pure lineage of our blood may once again flow.”
That “pure lineage,” in his eyes, found its roots in the Prophet Muhammad’s divine mission. Baathism thus combined a reverence for Islamic origins with a secular, socialist project. It was a paradoxical hybrid: Islam-infused nationalism married to 20th-century totalitarian utopianism.
When the Baath Party seized power in Syria in 1963, it didn’t take long for the civilian intellectuals to be sidelined by the Military Committee. Aflaq, once the party’s central theorist, was pushed into exile. Power instead consolidated in the hands of the Alawite minority, specifically within the extended clan of Hafez al-Assad—the father of the now-deposed Bashar.
Today, the ruins of Baathism are etched into the battered geographies of Iraq and Syria. These are countries that might have flourished under different leadership but were instead hollowed out by Baathist despotism. What remains is more than rubble—it is ideological wreckage, sustained by aging Arab intellectuals who once believed this doctrine could spark a renaissance. In reality, it was deeply pathological. No single political movement in modern Arab history has spilled more Arab blood than the Baath Party.
As Baathism fades, its old competitors emerge more clearly—chief among them the Islamists, who now dominate the revolutionary imagination of many across the region. The post-colonial moment, it seems, was never resolved. The same existential dilemmas that Aflaq voiced in the 1940s continue to animate today’s Islamist ideologues—as if the intervening decades changed nothing.
As historian Simon Sebag Montefiore notes: “It has been impossible to watch the fall of the brutal tyranny of the House of Assad without feeling joy, but this is the Middle East. Anyone who remembers the Arab Spring knows that things can always get worse.” Especially when Islamists rise on the trailblaze of freedom.
What will be the future of Syria with Salafi Jihadist Ahmad al-Sharaa, better known as Abu Mohammad al-Julani, the leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), at the helm? Should he take power, it is too early to tell if Julani will keep his word and ensure the safety of minority religious groups under his rule. Previous examples of Islamists taking control of a country are hardly encouraging, and that is precisely because of the nature of Islamist governance.
In 2020, after the US withdrew from Afghanistan, the Taliban – much like HTS – promised to allow girls and women to attend schools and universities. Nearly four years later, girls are banned from attending school beyond the sixth grade, and women are no longer allowed to speak in public. The Islamist fanatics in Afghanistan, in other words, have sent Afghan women back to another dark age. None of this has stopped CNN from describing Julani’s journey as “from radical jihadist to a blazer-wearing ‘revolutionary.’” Let’s see about that.
You see, once you have come into power after spending years manning a machine gun on behalf of God and vowing resistance to the end, your ability to work up more thoughtful habits of mind is bound to become a little circumscribed. A capacity to weigh evidence, a feeling of curiosity about other people, and a spirit of tolerance are all the traits that are necessary for good governance and will always be absent in the mind of jihadists.
Perhaps Julani will defy the grim precedent, maybe he will break away from Salafi jihadism and break the cycle that has consumed countless others.
Or, maybe, the cult of resistance – a movement that thrives on perpetual hysteria – will, as it has so often done, devour the very adherents who carried it to power.