Outsourcing Repression
Delegation, Regulation, and Control in the "New Syria"
This article was published in Al-Jumhuriye in Arabic. You can find the original article here.
Since the fall of the Assad regime, we have been trying to decipher the mechanics of repression in the “New Syria.” How are public spaces governed? How are political and human rights protests regulated? What is the nature of the self-censorship that the new authority is attempting to instill within us? And what shape does the fear take that might ultimately limit our capacity for dissent?
What we knew for certain was that the new authority would not be able to replicate Assad’s brutal model of repression; doing so would impose an unsustainable political burden, and Assad’s institutions themselves are no longer replicable. Consequently, new forms of control were required—mechanisms that allow security apparatuses to dominate public spaces without appearing overtly and crudely dictatorial.
Over the past year, Damascus has witnessed multiple assaults on peaceful demonstrations, ranging from verbal abuse and physical beatings to threats and character assassination. These incidents occurred without any visible intervention or serious accountability from official state institutions. Among these was a silent vigil in front of the parliament, protesting the escalating violence in Suwayda and rejecting Israeli airstrikes on Damascus. Despite clear documentation of these assaults, protesters were left to face the immediate consequences of violence, intimidation, and defamation in an environment that fosters a quasi-official climate of fear.
Within this context, the new authority has managed to become a partner in repression without its official apparatuses engaging in direct confrontation with protesters. It achieves this by enabling an environment of intimidation, securing an indirect role for loyalist civilians who contribute to reproducing symbolic—and occasionally physical—violence. Furthermore, it counters rights-based demands on social media with campaigns of defamation, stigmatization, and accusation. This effectively dilutes the political efficacy of protests and exhausts demonstrators, forcing them to defend their character rather than advance their demands.
Deciphering the “Delegation of Repression”
Since the beginning of 2026, Damascus has witnessed two sit-ins that raised human rights and living-standard demands, intersecting with critical political questions regarding public freedoms and the limits of the transitional authority’s powers.
The first occurred last March, when the Governorate of Damascus issued a decree restricting the sale of alcoholic beverages. On the surface, the decision appeared regulatory; in practice, however, it geographically redistributed this right, confining it to specific areas—mostly Christian-majority neighborhoods—in an attempt to partition the city along sectarian lines.
The second was the April 17 sit-in, called for by a group of Syrian activists in Al-Muhafaza Square under the slogans “We Want to Live” and the “Law and Dignity Sit-in.” Their demands centered on establishing the rule of law and safeguarding the dignity and livelihoods of citizens.
In both instances, protesters attempted to exercise their right to dissent and appear in the public sphere. Yet, the handling of both demonstrations offered clear indicators of what can be termed the “delegation of repression”—the outsourcing of intimidation and pressure to tools that bypass overt security confrontations.
During the Bab Touma square sit-in, dozens of Syrians gathered in a silent vigil. Its core was not the issue of alcohol itself, but rather a rejection of the logic of urban segregation, the restriction of personal freedoms, and the unilateral redefinition of who holds the right to dictate lifestyle choices in public spaces. Participants raised slogans emphasizing individual rights, refusing to reduce Damascene society to a monolithic identity that erases its pluralistic history. In a striking moment, veiled women participated in defending a freedom that did not directly affect them, signaling that the debate was not about lifestyles, but about a fundamental principle: Who decides the terms of coexistence?
The backlash was swift, but it did not come from the security forces. Instead, it materialized through a parallel, equally potent avenue: the recharacterization of the event itself. In pro-authority discourse, participants were instantly reduced to a single label: “Sukarjiyeh” (drunkards). With this single word, the debate was weaponized—shifted from the realm of rights to morals, and from political dissent to an individual vice, condemned by many before it was even understood.
This strategy extended far beyond language. Digitally altered images of the protesters’ banners flooded the internet, manipulated to look as though they were calling for “drunkenness” or “moral depravity.” This was a calculated move to strip the act of its civic and rights-based character, transforming it into fodder for mockery and moral condemnation.
This reliance on visual disinformation to recreate the narrative aims to hollow out the political substance of the sit-in. It reframes the event into a ready-made narrative that places the protester in the position of a defendant threatening societal values, rather than a participant in a legal and rights-based debate. Thus, the specific targeting of women was no passing detail; it was an attempt to dismantle political agency and present the sit-in as a threat to the “social order.”
Furthermore, the defamation faced by protesters in Bab Touma was not merely an organic aberration in social media discourse; it was an intrinsic element of the incitement tools deployed by decision-makers within the authority itself. Inaccurate information and doctored images were circulated to enable and amplify intimidation, before some of this content was later deleted.
The case of Abou Al-Yusr Baraa (Baraa Osman) publishing misleading images from the Bab Touma sit-in serves as a prime example of this official incitement and the blurring lines between state institutions and “outsourced repression.” Osman is an executive board member and Secretary of Public Relations and Communication at the Syrian Journalists Union, Director of International Cooperation at the General Organization for Radio and TV, and a co-author of the professional Code of Conduct.
His position embodies a stark contradiction between discourse and practice. While the Code of Conduct is presented as a framework to protect journalists from disinformation and incitement, one of its own architects published doctored photos of the Bab Touma sit-in, manipulating banners and orchestrating direct character assassination against a female participant by publishing her full name. Although the posts were later deleted, they successfully fulfilled their function: establishing the initial, inflammatory narrative.
This begs the question: How does “professional discourse” transform into a tool of repression? This is not a matter of individual error or a harmless mistake corrected by a post-facto deletion. Rather, it reveals a growing enmeshment between an allegedly professional lexicon and an inflammatory, state-aligned discourse—especially when issued by figures within official or quasi-official institutions whose primary mandate should be upholding professional standards, not spearheading their violation.
This reality underscores an organized effort to dilute political protests in the total absence of legal deterrents and accountability. This systemic impunity leaves the door wide open not only for incitement, but for the weaponization of disinformation and terror.
Outsource Repression on the Streets
While the Bab Touma protesters faced defamation and stigmatization without it translating into immediate physical crackdowns on the ground, the assaults during the Al-Muhafaza Square sit-in exposed a much more visceral form of outsourced street repression. There, repression mutated into actual physical friction—verbal abuse, beatings, and direct threats. This violence is managed outside official security apparatuses, yet it adopts the rhetoric of defending them in the streets, utilizing violence to suppress political and rights-based questions by converting them into pretexts for assault and treason charges.
The night before the “Law and Dignity... We Want to Live” sit-in, the groundwork for this outsourced repression was already being laid through rhetoric that preemptively stripped the protest of its legitimacy. Most notable was a video statement by Sheikh Abdul Rahman Kouki, a member of the parliamentary election committee. Speaking from in front of the Damascus Sword monument in Umayyad Square, Kouki framed the upcoming sit-in as tied to “Zionist-American agendas” and orchestrated by “remnants of the former regime,” labeling the participants as “traitors and agents” working against what he termed the “State of the Great Conquest” (in reference to the New Syria).
Despite this heavy incitement, hundreds of Syrian men and women gathered in Al-Muhafaza Square, raising livelihood and civil liberty slogans, including: “No to empowering tyranny, no to recycling corruption,” “My bill is higher than my salary,” and “Positions for the competent, not the well-connected.” The crowd included men, women, and children, presenting a civic, peaceful gathering attempting to reclaim public space and remind the authority of the people’s survival priorities.
It did not take long before counter-groups began encroaching upon the perimeter. Verbal altercations rapidly escalated into physical confrontations and direct assaults. These counter-groups assumed the form of a pro-authority march—consisting exclusively of men—raising slogans backing the leadership. The scene quickly deteriorated into the beating, cursing, and threatening of protesters, accompanied by religious chanting, takbeers, and sectarian flags.
According to a report by the Justice for All organization, these assaults resulted in five protesters sustaining injuries and bleeding due to beatings with fists and batons, alongside an attempted vehicular ramming. Journalists were not spared; reporter Miral Abu Shanab was physically assaulted, and her mobile phone was smashed while she was covering the event. This transpired despite the presence of law enforcement forces (Qat’at Hifz al-Nizam), whose intervention was limited to merely trying to contain the escalation rather than arresting the perpetrators.
A Distributed System of Subversion
Between the Bab Touma square vigil and the “Law and Dignity” sit-in, unfolding events demonstrate that repression is now managed via a complex, distributed network. It encompasses media discourse, narrative manipulation, digital defamation, and the unspoken delegation of social factions to act as deterrents.
This evolution does not mean the state is absent from the scene; rather, it indicates a redistribution of the tools of control, rendering them less visible, highly deniable, yet far more insidious. Public spaces are no longer policed solely through direct bans, but through the arbitrary redefinition of what is “acceptable” versus “subversive,” and who has the right to speak—and at what cost.
Protest is not merely suppressed; its discourse is systematically diluted. Its demands are dismantled and reframed within narratives of treason and suspicion, morphing a negotiable political discourse into a criminalized stigma. Thus, the voice is not silenced by a bullet as much as it is hollowed out of meaning, exhausting the dissenters in defending their very right to protest before they can even articulate their demands.
Media Platforms and Laws in the Service of Tyranny
In the latest evolution of these repressive tactics, the Syria Shift platform provided a glaring example of how defamation networks, character assassination, and the targeting of activists and journalists intersect. In one of its broadcasted videos, the platform targeted the Sharia (Street) platform and journalist Qusay Amameh using explicitly xenophobic and discriminatory rhetoric, attempting to redefine his identity entirely outside his professional journalistic output.
The attack did not engage with the content of his published investigative report (“The Qasioun Journey”); instead, it weaponized his identity as a Palestinian-Syrian to question his right to cover Syrian affairs. This marks a transparent shift from criticizing journalism to assassinating the character of the journalist.
Just as in the Bab Touma and Al-Muhafaza sit-ins, authoritarian discourse does not engage with what is said, but seeks to terrorize who is saying it. This process successfully evacuates content of its political weight—this time via a media platform rather than street mobs or state officials—raising serious questions regarding the platform’s proximity to the Ministry of Information and the transitional authorities.
What these collective cases reveal is that repression in the “New Syria” is being run as a decentralized, multi-layered system, where distinct roles are outsourced to suppress socio-economic and political grievances. We are not necessarily facing a crack-down executed via a singular, direct command, but rather a form of repression that is practiced and legitimized simultaneously within an ecosystem that permits and reproduces it. This makes its boundaries fluid, its accountability easily deniable, and its psychological toll profoundly deeper for anyone engaged in public affairs.
This reality is perfectly mirrored in the legislative framework regulating assembly, recently issued via a decree by the Ministry of Interior. Although packaged as a bureaucratic measure to organize the right to protest, its structure relies on a convoluted procedural labyrinth requiring multiple security clearances, ultimately leaving the final decision entirely at the discretion of the state.
Even if a permit is secured, the law provides no guarantees protecting the demonstration from outsourced crackdowns or dispersal, containing vague clauses that allow its termination under the pretext of preventing an “infraction of public order.” Conversely, protesting without a permit is instantly criminalized, carrying prison sentences ranging from one month to two years. Furthermore, the statute leaves vast room for interpretation regarding the content of slogans and the objectives of the protest, granting the state a paternalistic guardianship over defining what is “permissible” within the public square.
In this sense, the law does not exist in isolation from these extrajudicial repressive practices; it complements them. The law sets the legal boundaries to choke dissent in advance, while the other instruments—incitement, media defamation, and outsourced street violence—operate seamlessly within or outside these “legal” boundaries as necessity dictates.
Ultimately, the most critical questions remain: Who owns the power to define what constitutes a political act? Who draws its boundaries? When will the law act as the ultimate deterrent against incitement and state-sponsored violence—and when will it remain its primary sponsor?