u/Aromatic-Ant-5020

The Mandate came as another form of colonialism, and according to the French, peoples like the Syrians aren't ready to govern themselves. Were they right? Looking at the situation today, I think they were right. We can't govern ourselves.

What the French did: They built factories, introduced cotton cultivation, and built the city of Qamishli/Qamishlo. They introduced secular education through the Mission Laïque Française to spread Enlightenment values, established the University of Damascus with teaching mainly in Arabic, gave the Alawites autonomy on the coast with their own state and the Druze in the south their own autonomous state. They built roads, improved urban amenities, reformed land tenure, and encouraged agriculture especially in the north east region. And if we had remained under their rule, the situation would have been much better. You could travel to France easily, university students go on scholarships to France, clean streets, security, neutral non-sectarian French government, and no terrorism or chaos.

But we pushed them out, and look what we did with that independence: decades of coups to end up with the Assadist Tankie dictatorship, and today an Islamist sectarian dictatorship.

I know many might disagree. The French Mandate wasn't perfect but compared to what came after It was a golden age.

Let’s start with Mr president," Ahmed al-Sharaa, better known by his terrorist nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Julani. ‎Born in Riyadh in 1982 to a Syrian family, he grew up in Damascus. In 2003 when the US toppled the sectarian supremacist dictator Saddam, at 21, he joined the flood of jihadists pouring into Iraq to fight the Americans. Bashar al-Assad regime itself facilitated this transit of jihadists toward Iraq, playing a double game that would eventually backfire. ‎Julani joined al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His specialty was planting IEDs and targeting US troops and Iraqi civilians. ‎Captured in 2006, the Americans threw him into detention. He spent 5 years in Camp Bucca, the infamous jihadist incubator. Here, he networked with the future ISIS leaders like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself, When he was released in 2011, he walked out with a blueprint for jihad in Syria.

‎Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi personally dispatched Julani to Syria with $50,000 in cash and a handful of fighters. ‎By January 2012, al-Julani officially formed Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda. Within a year, he commanded 5,000 jihadists, funding his operations through kidnappings, looting, and extortion.

Crimes Against Minorities

‎Julani’s history with minorities isn’t a recent accident; it is foundational to his islamist ideology.

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• The Druze (2015): In the Jabal al-Summaq region of Idlib, Jabhat al-Nusra cornered roughly 18,000 Druze across 18 villages. The choice was simple: convert or die. In 2015, they forced the Druze to sign an agreement to destroy their holy shrines, dig up the tombs of their saints, impose gender segregation in schools, and force women into Islamic clothing. ‎

• The Alawites: Long before taking Damascus, al-Julani’s group openly described Alawites as "Nusayri infidels," standard takfiri rhetoric used to justify the slaughter of civilians. Rebel factions in the Damascus countryside systematically used civilian men, women, and children as human shields in cages. ‎

• The Afrin Ethnic Cleansing (2018): Following the Turkish invasion of Afrin (Operation Olive Branch) in January 2018, al-Julani and allied factions initiated a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds, Afrin was 97% Kurdish. After the invasion, Turkish-backed forces resettled Arabs and Turkmens, into stolen Kurdish homes. The UN documented rampant looting, confiscations, and kidnapping. In towns like Rajo, the Kurdish population plummeted from nearly 100% to a tiny fraction, replaced entirely by settlers. Women were targeted for sexual harassment, and olive trees were chopped down to prevent Kurdish farmers from returning.

‎The War Criminals in the Cabinet: Abu Amsha

‎Abu Amsha leads the Suleiman Shah Brigade. He is a mercenary exporter who sent Syrian fighters to Libya and Azerbaijan as guns for hire. ‎

• Sanctions: The US Treasury explicitly sanctioned him in August 2023 for severe human rights abuses in Afrin, including rape, extortion, and mass kidnapping for ransom. In 2025 the EU also sanctioned him for his central role in the massacre of Alawite civilians. Because of his extensive war crimes, Abu Amsha now holds a respectable position in al-Julani's new government military.

‎**The Rebranding and the Lightning Offensive**

• The (PR Campaign): In 2017, al-Julani changed Nusra's name to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), put on a western suit, and claimed he "severed ties" with al-Qaeda on paper. Western media outlets eagerly ran soft-focus PR pieces calling his Idlib mafia an "experiment in local government", fully aware they were whitewashing a designated terrorist organization. ‎

• The Takeover: In December 2024, al-Julani launched his offensive. In just 11 days, the Assad regime collapsed, and Bashar fled to Moscow. The populist masses cheered the terrorist as a liberating hero, blindly swallowing the narrative of this rapid, illogical battlefield advance without asking logical questions.

‎The Hypocrisy of Western Backers and the Epstein Orbit

• The $10 Million (Bounty): The US government had a $10 million bounty on al-Julani's head. But by late 2025, after he seized power, the US quickly dropped the bounty. By September 2025, this former al-Qaeda terrorist was speaking at the UN General Assembly in New York, and shortly after, he was welcomed into Donald Trump's Office. ‎

• Gulf Finances: The regime is heavily propped up by Qatari and Saudi propaganda (Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya), Trump mocked Mohammed bin Salman at a Miami investment summit saying "didn't think he would be kissing my ass", and al-Julani's supporters, who depend heavily on Saudi and Gulf financing, said nothing. They couldn't. Their entire political project depends on the patronage of the very people Trump publicly humiliates. ‎

• The Epstein Files: The Epstein files revealed al-Julani's key supporters and financiers are networked directly into the Jeffrey Epstein orbit.

‎Tom Barrack: US Ambassador to Turkey and Special Envoy to Syria, maintained close contact with Epstein for years after Epstein's 2008 conviction for sex crimes involving a 14-year-old girl. The emails are disgusting: in March 2016, Epstein wrote to Barrack, "Send photos of you and child. Make me smile". Barrack was later charged with illegal foreign lobbying for the UAE, this is Turkey's obedient lapdog is the man now praising al-Julani, facilitating the terrorist's international legitimacy while his own emails with a convicted sex trafficker remain public record.

‎Epstein cultivated extensive ties across the Islamic oil monarchies, including Qatar's Sheikh Jabor Yousuf Jassim Al Thani and Emirati figures. Sacred Kaaba cloth was shipped from Saudi Arabia to Epstein's private residence.

‎The First-Year Massacres (2025)

‎The moment al-Julani took power, the mask slipped. His first year was defined by horrific sectarian massacres:

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• The Alawite Slaughter (March 2025): Between March 6 and March 10, 2025, the new government committed mass atrocities in Latakia and Tartus. Reports confirmed bodies piled outside buildings and point-blank executions. Activists and independent monitors reported that up to 2000 Alawite civilians were slaughtered. The EU explicitly sanctioned Abu Amsha's factions for their role in this massacre. ‎

• The Druze (Summer 2025): Al-Julani’s forces, sporting ISIS patches and backed by tribal Bedouin mobs, turned their sights on the Druze in Suwayda, launching a campaign of murder and abduction. The violence only paused when Israel intervened, launching strikes across 160 targets and bombing the Damascus terrorist headquarters in July 2025 to force the Islamists to back off.

• War Against the (SDF): In January 2026, al-Julani's forces turned their military weight against the Kurdish neighborhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyeh in Aleppo. The Syrian Arab army declared all SDF positions in these districts "legitimate military targets." What followed was a campaign that Kurdish internal security forces described as a deliberate attempt at "extermination" and permanent demographic alteration, forces affiliated with the "Interim Government" detained more than 300 civilians in Sheikh Maqsoud, holding them under "severe conditions" with their dignity "systematically violated", Gunmen approached civilians in a "very bad manner," inflicting severe racist insults upon Kurdish residents "in an apparent attempt to humiliate them". The fate of hundreds of women and children remains unknown. Footage circulated online showing Damascus-affiliated militants throwing the body of a Kurdish female fighter from a high-floor building in Sheikh Maqsoud while soldiers shouted "Allahu akbar" and hurled insults at her corpse, The UN expressed deep concern, with spokesperson Stephane Dujarric calling the footage "extremely disturbing, to say the least" and demanding accountability.

‎Sectarian Hatred as State Policy

‎Sectarian polarization has skyrocketed. Extremist populist factions actively stoke hatred against Alawite, Druze, and Kurdish minorities, all while the international community remains conveniently silent.

‎The situation is far from over. Kidnappings of Alawite girls persist, women are forced to convert to Sunni Islam and wear afghan style niqab, and Christians face an existential threat in an increasingly radicalized state, hate speech against Kurds continues.

‎Al-Julani milked the media for PR by "opening" Assad's prisons, but what about the other victims? His so-called transitional authority has completely ignored the fate of over 177,000 forcibly disappeared Syrians.

‎Al-Julani recently declared: "I am proud of my history and I am not ashamed of any historical period I went through."

‎He is not ashamed of being a tool of Assad. He is not ashamed of being an al-Qaeda terrorist. He is not ashamed of being a mass murderer or a mercenary. Not ashamed at all.

The Syriac language is being taught as an elective in Qamishli, in the Kurdish-majority Hasaka province in northeast Syria (Rojava). Following a January decree by Syrian interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa recognizing Kurdish as a national language, other ethnic and religious groups have also been encouraged to seek broader recognition of their own languages.