Impossible Revolution by Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Author:Yassin al-Haj Saleh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2017-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

8

AN IMAGE, TWO FLAGS, AND A BANNER

DOUMA, JULY 2013

From the outbreak of the Syrian revolution until close to the end of 2011, rebels waved the official Syrian flag. The flag consists of a horizontal red stripe on top; a white stripe with two green stars in the middle; and a black stripe at the bottom. This generally coincided with the phase of peaceful demonstrations and other protest activities by Syrians. The flag implied that the rebels were speaking for a Syria that had been seized by the regime, and that it was the symbol of a rising Syrian nation. By contrast, the images of Bashar and his father, which were fervently reviled by the rebels since the early stages of the revolution, were symbols of a privatized Syria, one that had been appropriated: ‘Assad’s Syria’. Raising the flag at a demonstration where the crowd chanted in favour of toppling the regime established a popular correspondence between this flag and ‘the people’ who have demands, and simultaneously served to disassociate the flag from the two presidential images and the ‘regime’ to be overthrown. During major demonstrations in Hama in July 2011, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators formed a human tapestry of the flag’s three stripes and its two stars.

After this phase, the ‘flag of independence’ re-emerged, the official Syrian flag that was used from the late 1920s through the Egyptian-Syrian Unity (1958–1961), and that was also the flag of ‘the separatist period’ (1961–1963). This flag was also used for some time at the beginning of the Baathist era (1963 onward). This flag is composed of a horizontal green stripe at the top; a white stripe with three red stars in the middle; and a black stripe at the bottom. In 2012, this flag became the symbol of the revolution and a sign of the deepening Syrian struggle. It indicated a will to bypass the Baathist chapter of Syria’s history. The Syrian Revolution was dragging on in comparison to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. The Libyan example, which was built on both military and symbolic ruptures with the regime, inspired broader sectors of Syrians to turn gradually to armed resistance.

In the summer of 2012, a black flag began to appear with remarkable frequency. It was emblazoned with words in white: ‘There is no god but God, Muhammad is the messenger of God,’ i.e. the Islamic shahada (declaration of faith). There were other variations, one of which had a white circle displaying the same shahada written in black. This is the flag of the Nusra Front, or rather its ‘banner,’ as those folks prefer to call it (a version that was later adopted by ISIS, while al-Nusra’s banner became a black oblong that displays the shahada in black and, beneath it, the words ‘al-Nusra Front’). The Nusra Front was formed in early 2012, and announced its affiliation with al-Qaeda in April 2013. (It pledged allegiance to Ayman al-Zawahiri in what could be interpreted as a struggle with Daesh for al-Qaeda legitimacy, so to speak).

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