When Syrians Become Pawns in Others’ Games: No to Hate Speech…

When Syrians Become Pawns in Others’ Games: No to Hate Speech…
By Buraq Al-Nabhan

I have never carried within me a sectarian impulse, and I never will. I have never looked at my fellow citizens through the lens of sectarian or religious affiliation, but always through their humanity—first and foremost.

Throughout the course of the Syrian revolution, I was always aligned with the oppressed. The majority of them happened to be from the Sunni community—not out of sectarian considerations, but because they were the primary target of the machinery of repression and killing, and because they bore the heaviest toll of displacement, siege, starvation, and bombardment in one of the most horrific tragedies of this era.

My conviction has not changed: standing with the victim is a moral duty before it is a political stance. Dignity is indivisible, and justice does not discriminate between one sect and another.

Today, people are being driven into dividing lines drawn along sectarian and regional grounds, and their blood is being exploited for purposes that are not their own. This is why it is essential to refuse becoming pawns in a chess game moved by hidden hands. Whoever violates one community today will be violated tomorrow by another; whoever sows hatred today will reap its fire tomorrow. That fire cannot be extinguished by fanaticism, but only by truth, justice, and accountability.

All Syrians have now been reduced to nothing more than fuel for the battles of others. Every sect is used, every group is pushed onto the fields of blood, only to be left exhausted and alone. They are asked to kill and be killed, then made to bear the burden of the crime alone.

Beware of becoming firewood in a war that is not yours, or tools in the hands of those who see you as nothing more than a means. Beware of being the echo of a sedition that will return to burn your own homes before anyone else’s.

In civil wars, there are no winners—everyone loses. The killer and the killed are both victims.

Justice is the right of all the oppressed. Dignity is the right of all Syrians. And the homeland belongs to everyone who believes that blood has no sect, and that a person’s value lies in their humanity, not in their denomination.