Reconstructing narratives: The politics of heritage in contemporary Syria

Introduction

The physical traces of war and violence may be likened to a disfiguring scar after an accident. They can be removed or disguised using surgery for the sake of forgetting. Conversely, such scars can be preserved for the sake of remembering and openly displayed as a badge of honor that shows evidence of the endured trauma. In the context of the Middle East, the decisions to forget or remember dark wartime crimes and atrocities are most often controlled by state authorities that take responsibility for curating and promoting public memories and cultural heritage as part of national identities.

The Arab Spring movements that started in 2010 in Tunisia are characterized by the destruction of cultural heritage sites, monuments, and facilities. Cultural heritage destruction in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region infuriated and saddened local people and Western observers, academics, and organizations. Consequently, the international community rapidly responded to the destruction of cultural heritage in the Arab region, including Aleppo, Palmyra, Sana’a, and Mosul. For the most part, these responses aimed to generate funds to rebuild what war and violence had destroyed, including plans to rebuild the al-Nuri Mosque and other buildings in Old Mosul and historic buildings in the Ancient City of Aleppo.

The reconstruction of cultural heritage is a long-term process. The physical reconstruction of material heritage and monuments is just one of the first steps in this process. An ill-conceived reconstruction can be as harmful as an act of destruction, and such reconstructions can divide communities and prolong conflict and violence long after wartime hostilities have ceased. This paper explores cultural heritage politics in colonial and pre-war Syria and examines how Ba’athism has used the narratives and remnants of the past in the present. I hypothesize that the ongoing reconstruction works in Syria, such as rebuilding the Great Umayyad Mosque and its famous minaret in the Ancient City of Aleppo (see Figure 1), are freighted with cultural meaning and are primarily intended to bolster the power and authority of the ruling regime. In an effort to contextualize these reconstructions, I investigate how political developments have influenced Syrian heritage management in the MENA region since the colonial period and how Syria’s government used the public histories and memories of contemporary Syria to produce and promote counter-narratives in the aftermath of Syria’s unfinished conflict.OPEN IN VIEWER

This article provides an overview of the various regime/government-led reconstruction projects in Syria. Continuous efforts by those in power to formulate war narratives can be seen as active endeavors of history-in-making with the purpose of re-writing the story of Syria’s conflict. This article goes beyond and highlights processes of the memorialization of elite figures taking place in public spaces in Syria as a part of post-conflict reconstruction projects, such as (re)building statues representing Hafez and Basel Al-Assad. I provide different examples of tangible and intangible heritage reconstructions to understand post-conflict heritage practices and uses in Syria, such as rebuilding monumental buildings, oral history production, and selective wartime memory preservation. History has proved that heritage is always political and plays a key role in processes related to the memorialization of particular contested historical narratives in post-conflict contexts. Hence, I argue that heritage practices, uses, and abuses in Syria since the colonial period have produced a politicized, one-sided (hi)story. This argument can be explicated in the continuous efforts of governments, regimes, and state authorities that are eager to start the reconstruction of war-damaged cultural heritage to (a) legitimize their role or bring back lost legitimacy, (b) remove or add elements to the national identity, (c) evoke or produce wartime memories, and (d) commemorate actors who participated in the war in media, school textbooks, banknotes, and public and urban spaces.

Heritage, politics, and colonialism in Syria

Western archaeologists have for generations characterized the MENA region as an area that is rich in antiquities and have mounted numerous campaigns to uncover the deeply stratified hidden layers of history (Sandes, 2010). In his seminal book Orientalism (2003), the Palestinian philosopher Edward Said famously observed that the practice of archaeology, operating within a colonial framework, had resulted in an incomplete contribution of the East in the contemporary process of theorizing the discourses of heritage and archaeology (see also Exell and Rico, 2013). Recent works by Chiara De Cesari (2015) and other prominent scholars in the field of critical heritage studies re-iterate Said’s view that the work of Western archaeologists in the Middle East is deeply embedded in colonialism and that the common desire to unearth evidence of the classical and biblical pasts is motivated by the desire to appropriate these pasts as the cornerstones of European culture (Meskell, 2002b; Pollock and Bernbeck, 2009). Colonial interests in the archaeological heritage of the MENA region are unambiguous in their continuous attempts to learn about the “Other” while simultaneously exercising power and control over the people and their lands (Gillot, 2010).

The second half of the 19th century saw a growing interest in the antiquities of the MENA region as Western European nations scrambled to obtain ancient artifacts from the ailing Ottoman Empire. This interest grew over time, hand-in-hand with colonial expansion. By the end of the 19th century, it was common for Ottoman regional governors to make increasingly irate complaints to their Sultans about illegal excavations, looting, and the trafficking of cultural goods by European explorers and archaeologists eager to supply looted antiquities to their respective national museums.

This phenomenon is well-known in postcolonial studies, where archaeology, as a discourse, has been likened to a “stepchild” of colonialism whose work enables colonial powers to claim that the “discovered” monuments are their property, thereby appropriating their meanings and values for their own purposes (Bahrani, 1998). In addition to bolstering the dominant narratives about the origins of the colonial powers, the appropriation of MENA cultural heritage also enabled archaeologists to construct social evolutionary taxonomies where the “Orient” was seen as the opposite of the more advanced and civilized European societies of the 19th and 20th centuries (Said, 2003).

The role of archaeology in settler colonialism has recently been reviewed by Schneider and Hayes (2020), who claim that by its very nature, archaeological practice is a form of “epistemicide” that eradicates other ways of knowing. Thus, by excavating in the MENA region, colonial archaeologists produced valuable information that was later used in the aftermath of the First World War by Britain and France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 to exercise control over the territories of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine-Israel, and Lebanon, which had formerly been under Ottoman control from 1516 to 1918.

Following the collapse of Ottoman rule, the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon commenced in 1920 and lasted until 1946. France divided Syria into different regions by implementing a “Divide and Rule” strategy (Morrock, 1973). The strategy was only possible due to information provided by European archaeological missions on the different ethnoreligious, cultural, linguistic, and tribal mosaics of Syria.

By excavating the Syrian territories and disregarding the previous owner of the cultural heritage they uncovered, European archaeological missions further fragmented the region according to the stylistic attributes and supposed cultural affinities of the archaeological materials they unearthed. Such attempts by culture–historical archaeologists to link the stylistic attributes of the artifacts they uncovered to ancient “peoples” or “cultures” were later used to establish new nation-state identities in the Middle East and ultimately resulted in the creation of national symbols that served to legitimize the political existence of foreign invaders. As a consequence of this process of elimination, all previous identities that had flourished and led intellectual life for much of living memory were neglected, forgotten, and later demonized. Ironically, these abandoned identities were based on religious doctrines that, to a large extent, respected the rights and practices of multi-ethnoreligious minorities and were part and parcel of an Islamic identity unifying the MENA region for more than 1200 years under the rule of successive historical dynasties, such as Umayyad (661–750 AD in Damascus and 756–1031 AD in Islamic Spain), Abbasid (750–1258 AD), Fatimid (909–1171 AD), and Ottoman (1299–1918 AD).

The French authorities subdivided Syria into six political territories comprising different ethnic and religious groups: (1) the Jabal al-Druze region, including As-Suwayda city; (2) the state of Damascus, including the main cities of Homs and Damascus; (3) the state of Aleppo, including Aleppo city and the Al-Jazira region, where an abundance of archaeological sites are situated; (4) the state of Greater Lebanon, including Beirut, Tripoli, Tyre, and Sidon cities; (5) the Alawite state (Latakia Sanjak), including Latakia city; and (6) Alexandretta Sanjak, annexed by Turkey in 1939 after a referendum was conducted in 1938 (Khoury, 2014; Polk, 2013).

The ethnoreligious division of Syria under the French Mandate had the objective of preventing any Muslim or pan-Arab-oriented ideology movements from spreading throughout Syria and sparking revolts against the French colonial regime and its agenda for the MENA region. In this sense, the French colonial partition of Syria’s territories was a calculated attempt to force people to forget about the Islamic identity that had hitherto unified the MENA region for generations. However, it can also be argued that the colonial practices and ethnoreligious division of the MENA region can be considered one of the catalysts that triggered the establishment of several postcolonial political movements in response to colonial strategies, such as pan-Arabism, nationalism, and Nasserism.

The large-scale European archaeological excavations of the 19th century continued during the French Mandate over Syria and Lebanon. Moreover, the French colonial grip over Syrian and Lebanese cultural heritage was tightened when European conceptions of monumental architecture were used to link Syrian antiquities to the Greco-Roman civilizations and thus to France (Soufan, 2015).

The application of Western concepts to categorize the archaeological heritage of Syria demonstrates that since the beginning of the French Mandate, the methods of protecting and conserving past remains were established according to Eurocentric heritage discourses that connected heritage to national identity. Thus, archaeological research in Syria widely flourished under France’s colonial support, establishing several cultural institutions concerned with Syria’s archaeological heritage, including the Islamic Institute of Art and Archaeology (Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie Islamique) in 1918, the Permanent Archaeological Commission (Mission Archéologique Permanente) and the Department of Antiquities (Service des Antiquités) in 1919, and the French Institute of Arabic Studies of Damascus (Institut Français des Études Arabes de Damas) in 1930 (Gillot, 2010). These institutions ran the mechanisms through which the contemporary history of Syria was written according to the European point of view while simultaneously undermining and eliminating local identity narratives and collective memories of Syria’s past.

To sum up, during the French Mandate, Syrian heritage was institutionalized, regulated, and managed by non-Syrians, such as Claude Schaeffer, André Parrot, and other archaeologists, who contributed to framing archaeology as a colonial science (Gillot, 2010). This colonial structure of managing heritage that constantly explored and researched the origins of Western civilizations in Syrian territory served to justify France’s occupation in Syria by implicitly claiming that Syrians were not intellectually capable of taking care of their heritage or even able to understand it. Accordingly, Syrian heritage was better appreciated in the colonial context, that is, in museums like the Paris Louvre, where Syrian heritage is still displayed today.

By excavating, categorizing, and managing the Syrian past, French archaeologists not only set up the foundations of contemporary Syrian heritage management, but the colonial regime also crafted the foundations of a personality cult that flourished under the Ba’ath party’s influence, privileging some representations of the Syrian past over others, to pursue governmental agendas. For instance, Hafez al-Assad, the former president of Syria (1971–2000), worked hard to use Syria’s past to promote his image and endorse his regime’s legitimacy (Wedeen, 2015). Today, archaeological heritage in Syria is managed by the state through the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM)—the executive tool of the Ba’athist regime that oversees the management, conservation, and protection of Syria’s heritage.

The politics of heritage in pre-war Syria

Syria declared its independence from the French Mandate on 17 April 1946. The period that followed independence was marked by political instability and witnessed a series of military coups. Following the French colonial model, successive Syrian regimes continued to use archaeology for political domination. For example, the Ba’ath party, ruling Iraq between 1963 and 2003 and Syria from 1963 to the present, actively deployed archaeological narratives to create a stable ground for maintaining its leader as state sovereign and supporting its pan-Arab secular nationalist identity (González Zarandona and Munawar, 2020). Two of several coups d'état have shaped Syria’s political map in the last 60 years. The first coup d’état, on 8 March 1963, was led by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party (Fildis, 2012; Ginat, 2000; Pipes, 1992; Talhamy, 2009). A second coup, led by the Minister of Defense, Hafez al-Assad, overthrew the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party government in November 1970 in the name of the self-styled “Corrective Movement.” Hafez al-Assad became the president of Syria in 1971, and his succession brought an end to the coups that had destabilized Syria since its independence (Be’eri, 1982; Seale, 2000).

As soon as Hafez al-Assad came to power in Syria, he worked with his regime to consolidate his rule and legitimize the authority of the Ba’athist political agenda by selecting and promoting particular narratives, legends, and historical events from Syria’s past. In the intervening years since 1971, the Ba’athists of Syria have consistently worked to link material culture representations and symbols of the past with Arab nationalism. Their politicization of the past is particularly conspicuous in their endeavors to adjust the educational curriculum of schools and manipulate images used on banknotes and in cultural institutions to align their party with Ba’ath pan-Arab and nationalist narratives (Munawar, 2019). For example, the Roman Emperor Marcus Julius Philippus (244–249 AD) is portrayed on Syrian banknotes and celebrated as an Arab hero who ascended the throne of Rome and was promoted as “Philip the Arab.” Conversely, Queen Zenobia (270–272 AD), who led the rebellion of Palmyra against Roman imperialism, is also portrayed on Syrian banknotes and upheld as an Arab hero. The irony here is that the Ba’athists of Syria selected two figures from Syria’s past, a Roman emperor and a queen of Palmyra, who effectively fought each other. Nevertheless, they see no drawback in using both individuals to promote their grand narratives of pan-Arabism and nationalism.

The destruction of cultural heritage conducted in Syria since the armed conflict began in March 2011 is not the only time that Syria has witnessed significant damage and threats to its cultural patrimony. Syria’s heritage has experienced several human-made and natural disasters that have affected cultural heritage sites and monuments over the past decades. For example, in 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood uprising erupted against the Assad–Ba’athist regime (Fisk, 2010; Talhamy, 2009). This uprising mainly centered on Hama city and resulted in the destruction of the city’s historic al-Kilaniyyeh and al-Baroudiyyeh districts.

According to Western reports, about 1000 people were killed due to the Hama city hostilities, while the Syrian Human Rights Committee (2006) indicated that the human casualties reached about 40,000 (Syrian Human Rights Committee, 2006). An idea to reconstruct the devastated districts of Hama city was devised by the Municipal Council of Hama in 2005 (Nanaa, 2017), almost 23 years after the destruction occurred.

Soufan (2015) indicates that the local inhabitants participated in the rebuilding process with a sincere will to aid in reconstructing their wounded city; locals provided documents, photographs, and archives that helped reconstruct Hama’s destroyed historic districts. The parties participating in the reconstruction opted to preserve religious buildings and retain their functions as they had been prior to their destruction. In this way, the reconstruction plan for Hama’s historic buildings aimed to overcome the Muslim Brotherhood riots of the 1980s and erase the evidence of the uprising from the collective Syrian memory. The Municipal Council envisioned its plans for the reconstruction of Hama as a way to revive the cultural heritage of an intentionally neglected city that had been forced to suffer for almost three decades. However, the fact that the Municipal Council’s desire to start rebuilding the city of Hama was only permitted in 2005, five years after the death of Hafez al-Assad, could be taken to suggest that the prolonged delay in rebuilding the destroyed districts of Hama was perhaps a consequence of the Ba’athist desire to punish the city where an uprising against their regime had broken out.

The approach used in the reconstruction of Hama was similar to the one used to reconstruct the replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph monument in 2016, although that project was faster, albeit conducted during an ongoing conflict (for further discussion on the reconstruction of Palmyra, see Munawar, 2017; Kamash, 2017). These reconstruction projects clearly aimed to erase tangible elements of the collective “dark” memories of conflicts and violence. In this respect, the reconstruction of historic Hama was undoubtedly intended by the ruling Ba’athists to encourage an active process of forgetting an unwanted episode in Syria’s troubled recent past.

Colonizing post-war Syria

Post-war reconstruction initiatives have shifted to embrace humanitarian agendas in the 21st century. In his book Reconstructing Post-Saddam Iraq (2013), Barakat describes how the international community’s actions have increased and shifted focus to place more emphasis on the management of post-war reconstruction plans. As a result, most post-conflict reconstruction plans now feature strategies to establish security, fight poverty, and create stability.

Between 2012 and 2016, the war in Syria damaged 90% of the Ancient City of Aleppo’s fabric, displacing more than 50% of the population (Munawar, 2018). By the end of 2016, when the international community was apprehensive about the election of US President Donald Trump, Palmyra was re-occupied by Daesh, and Aleppo was re-captured by Syrian government troops backed by Russian and Iranian forces. The Syrian government press agency media promoted reuniting Aleppo as Syria’s triumph over “terrorism.” The plans to reconstruct the Ancient City of Aleppo started immediately, and the destruction debris was cleared away. In time, the focus of the reconstruction plans changed to prioritizing what should be rebuilt and what should be left in ruin.

The rebuilding of the Ancient City of Aleppo is a good example of a highly politicized post-war reconstruction plan full of embodied meanings. Mindful of international scrutiny and to promote an image of cultural persistence and stability, Aleppo’s reconstruction is currently focused on high-profile heritage sites that can be used in media propaganda, such as the perimeter of Aleppo Citadel (see Figure 2), the least damaged souks of Aleppo (see Figure 3) (al-Saqatiya Souk, reconstructed by Agha Khan Trust for Culture), and the Great Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo, which has been part of a World Heritage site since 1986. In 2018, a Syrian TV series produced and broadcast by the Syrian national television service, Rozana, tried to show that the streets of Aleppo are now safe to encourage displaced people to return home. This series, episode 20, shows a young and prosperous Syrian couple taking a selfie in front of Aleppo Citadel after “liberation” with the citadel surrounded by images of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad. The subliminal message is that the Ba’ath party and Assadist regime are the protectors and saviors of Syria’s heritage (Munawar, 2019; RozanaSeries TV, 2018).OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 3.

Destruction of the historic souks of Aleppo. Taken by Louay Dakhel (2017).

In another example, the reconstruction of Aleppo’s Great Umayyad Mosque, funded by the Chechen government, is another way to legitimize the power of Syria’s regime and prove to the international community and donors that the Assad regime is committed to rebuilding and conserving the country’s monumental heritage when the war is over. Unfortunately, the current reconstruction plans for Aleppo neglect the devastated areas of Eastern Aleppo (opposition-controlled areas) where many displaced residents lived. Amr Al-Azm, an associate professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio and former director of Scientific and Conservation Laboratories at the General Department of Antiquities and Museums in Syria (1999–2004), suggested that neglecting Eastern Aleppo is another cynical attempt by the Assad regime to bolster support and crush dissent. In his view, the regime has two primary interests in the reconstruction plans: “One, as a means to reward those areas and individuals that were loyal to it. Two, for the regime’s coterie to enrich itself” (Deknatel, 2019).

In light of such remarks, it would seem that the post-war reconstruction of Syria has become a highly politicized process orchestrated by the regime that simply serves the interests of the people in power and prolongs poverty and violence in areas where support for the regime is thin or absent. Walid al-Muallem, Syria’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates (2011–2020), explained the rationale behind his regime’s approach to post-war reconstruction in a statement to the United Nations General Assembly:

We welcome any assistance with reconstruction from those countries that were not part of the aggression on Syria … The countries that offer only conditional assistance or continue to support terrorism, they are neither invited nor welcome to help. (Reuters, 2018)

A growing body of research supports the idea that the management of cultural heritage resources can play an important role in peacebuilding and reconstruction in post-conflict contexts (Isakhan and Meskell, 2019; Lostal and Cunliffe, 2016; Meskell, 2018; Munawar, 2018). However, as I argued above, the reconstruction of Aleppo’s cultural heritage sites might be seen as a politically motivated process to maintain the Assad regime’s dominance. Of course, it could be said that given the long history of political instability in postcolonial Syria, a robust or even aggressive stance is only to be expected from a regime that has, after all, held on to power for more than 50 years. However, taking the broader view that post-conflict reconstruction must embrace humanitarian aims and include an active reconciliation process, it should be clear that ill-conceived reconstructions can be as damaging as an act of wartime destruction and have the capacity to become the wheel that maintains ongoing conflict.

The unfallen statues and urban spaces

The action of defacing, destroying, or looting public statuary has been a recurring feature of wars and urban civil unrest for millennia. In recent years, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement has stimulated a new wave of destruction of urban statues as a form of anti-colonial socio-political action. The “fallism” tactic came to prominence in March 2015, when students at the University of Cape Town unleashed the “Rhodes must fall” movement, and gained global media attention in 2020, when the statue of Edward Colston, a former merchant and slave trader, was torn down in Bristol and dumped in the harbor (Bauer, 2021; Frank and Ristic, 2020). However, as Dan Hicks reminded us in response to the Colston toppling, fallism has been a feature of postcolonial struggles since at least 1962, when Algeria gained independence and the French military evacuated more than 100 statues facing destruction so they could be re-erected in towns and cities in France (Hicks, 2021).

Of course, using statues as expressions of power and control is still a prominent feature of many authoritarian regimes, and statues continue to be used as a way to inspire and rally the population around leaders in North Korea, the former Soviet Union, and several Central Asian republics (Dagher, 2019). In the case of Syria, Bashar al-Assad’s regime has invested in a new rebuilding project to restore the statues of Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s former president, that were damaged or toppled by opponents during the war. Statues of Hafez al-Assad have been re-instated in cities like Hama and Homs, while others have been replaced and rehabilitated, such as the re-erection of Hafez al-Assad’s statue in Aleppo, one of the biggest statues situated in Aleppo’s center, next to its historic walls. The plans to rebuild the damaged statues of Hafez al-Assad have introduced new terminology portraying Hafez al-Assad as the “Founding Leader” instead of the “Immortal Leader” (González Zarandona and Munawar, 2020). This attempt to re-engrave the memory of al-Assad’s family in public urban spaces and post-war Syria can be considered an active, if somewhat heavy-handed, attempt to create a positive post-war narrative. The re-erection of statues represents a new narrative of post-war Syria. The desire to present Hafez al-Assad as the “Founding Leader” resembles the endeavor of North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un, to strengthen his rule over North Korea by calling his grandfather, Kim Il-sung (1948–1994), the founding leader who established the dynasty that built modern-day North Korea. It is clear that amidst the destruction, the al-Assad family aims to establish a similar dynasty to maintain Syrian rule.

An uncompromising expression of dynastic power can also be seen in the presentation of Bashar al-Assad’s son, Hafez al-Assad Jr, as a bright young man who participated in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Romania in 2018, and a much-loved citizen who openly walks around the streets of Damascus and will eventually rule Syria, following his father (Romania Journal, 2018). In addition, new statues and busts have been erected at the Jobar tunnels in Damascus and the cities and areas where Assad’s statues were either destroyed or toppled, such as Hama and Homs cities.

Similarly, this rebuilding project brings back to life statues of Syria’s former leader, Hafez al-Assad, and revives figures glorified in Syria’s pre-war periods, such as Basel al-Assad, brother of the current president of Syria. It was planned that Basel al-Assad, who died in 1994, would inherit his father’s legacy as president of Syria, and he is one of the two figures that post-war Syria reconstruction plans began to commemorate and portray in 3D bust statues. In April 2019, during the annual celebration of the foundation of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, a new statue of Basel al-Assad was inaugurated in Deir ez-Zur city, one of the last Daesh strongholds in Eastern Syria.

The carefully coordinated campaign of statue-raising and billboard propaganda has been likened by one American journalist to an act of triumphalism: Bashir Assad’s way of taunting his once-rebellious opponents that his family has prevailed. According to Steven Heydemann, Director of the Middle East studies program at Smith College, the monuments convey a simple message: “We are back” (Dagher, 2019). However, this is also a calculated act of “presencing.” The gigantic statues of bronze and stone that tower over city streets and squares are meant to instill fear; their brooding menace is a stark reminder that resistance is futile and that the regime will always prevail.

Disputed memories, oral history, and media

Cultural heritage sites contain many memories and values deemed necessary to preserve for the future, regardless of whether those memories are negative—concentration camps, bombing locations, battlefields, damaged memorial monuments—or positive: statues, religious buildings, or monumental structures. Holtorf and Burström (2019) indicate that present societies effortlessly provide ideological and political importance to stories of the past, particularly when there is a need to legitimize and encourage or de-legitimize and discourage specific ideological facts, narratives, or political objectives. By the same token, constructing national narratives is often conducted by selecting particular historical incidents from the past and contemporary events to represent and foster the nation’s resilience and cultural identity (De Cesari, 2010; De Cesari and Herzfeld, 2015; Holtorf, 2018).

From a post-conflict perspective, the (re-)production and promotion of memories can potentially shape the future heritage of a nation. At the same time, scholars emphasize the profound significance of acknowledging the intangibility of cultural heritage (Isakhan and Shahab, 2019; Pocock et al., 2015; Smith and Akagawa, 2009), in particular when it is related to post-conflict heritage reconstruction. For example, George Santayana, the Spanish philosopher, warned of the consequence of not remembering by saying, “The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again” (Gomez-Pomar and Finnegan, 2018; Greenhill and Whitehead, 2011).

In Syria, the state tightly controls the presentation of stories of the past and present and the preservation or eradication of the ongoing war’s memory. The case of the White Helmets offers some valuable insights here. The White Helmets civil organization, also known as the Syria Civil Defense, was established in 2014 by volunteers operating in the opposition-controlled areas of Syria. The White Helmets volunteers have been accused of spreading disinformation by Bashar al-Assad and many media campaigns and propaganda sponsored by Syria’s allies: Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, China, and Russia. In the summer of 2019, the White Helmets were harmfully portrayed in the production of Syrian popular culture. That year, the Syrian government took the extraordinary step of producing and broadcasting a TV comedy series, “Kontak” “كونتاك,” during Ramadan, which mocked the victims of chemical attacks in Syria. The series claimed that the attacks were fabricated by White Helmets volunteers who filmed the victims as a part of a “cosmic” conspiracy to give Syria prominence at the 89th Academy Awards (the Oscars), where a bona fide White Helmets short film had been awarded the best documentary prize (The New Arab, 2019).

Generally, using wartime memories and contested heritage in contemporary times shows how memories and heritage are far from innocent discourses about the past. Harvey (2001) believes that every society deals with its past differently; some societies decide to ignore their history, while others try to understand the nature and meaning of people’s stories about the past, such as what to remember, forget, memorialize, or even fake. For instance, when reconstructing the past is a state-sponsored product, the replica of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph can be seen as an unblemished example, signifying how the reconstruction of Syria’s damaged monuments encourages people to forget wartime memories and re-set everything to its pre-war status. It is worth stating that erecting the replica of Palmyra’s Arch did not consider the opinions of local people inside Syria or displaced Syrians (Munawar, 2017).

Clearly, heritage reconstruction plans in Syria are not limited to physically reconstructing monumental buildings and archaeological heritage. These particular plans have been extended to include reconstruction strategies for Syria’s oral history from 2011 until today. In a nutshell, the narrative of Syria’s war is still being formulated. A new non-governmental and non-profit organization, called “Wathiqat-Wattan organization,” was established in Damascus in the summer of 2016 to document the oral history of Syria’s war and preserve its national memory. The foundation is led by Dr Buthaina Shaaban, political and media adviser to Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. In November 2017, Shaaban indicated in a special interview with the Syrian News Agency that “Our goal is to document the oral historical message to be a reference to the written history” (General Organization of Radio and TV–Syria, 2017). The project aims to document the memory of Syria’s unfinished war. Üngör, a Dutch-Turkish professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Amsterdam, suggests that the legitimacy of such state-sponsored history is negated by the “Soviet-style post-war silence and censorship” undertaken by Syria’s government (Üngör, 2019). Such an initiative to (re-)write Syria’s contemporary history could be as dangerous as the deliberate destruction of Syria’s patrimony since it allows one party of the conflict to present, document, and commemorate the contested memories and narratives of war.

As already noted, several scholars argue that in the aftermath of a conflict, the reconstruction of cultural heritage sites can heal war-damaged societies (Lostal and Cunliffe, 2016; Meskell and Scheermeyer, 2008). Along the same lines, efforts to help communities overcome their war traumas in post-conflict contexts can include processes related to commemorating the conflict’s dark memories in a way that allows the recognition of heritage loss by willfully preserving scars of war (Giblin, 2014; Isakhan and Shahab, 2019; Logan and Reeves, 2008; Winter 2007) or making a new heritage of the conflict (Munawar, 2019). Such post-war practices can re-create harmony and reconciliation among the affected communities, particularly in conflicts that result in massive waves of displacement and social division, as in the case of Syria. Conversely, post-war reconstruction plans can produce new waves of societal division and violence, mainly when post-war reconstruction is not focused on stabilizing and reconciling the fractured community and, most importantly, reintegrating displaced locals in the post-conflict society. Hence, achieving an inclusive and just post-war reconstruction of Syria will require a focus on human agency and an emphasis on the psychological, ideological, and social rebuilding of local people connected to the cultural heritage sites. Taking an example from elsewhere, the plan for rebuilding Timbuktu’s damaged mausoleums and mosques aimed to restore and sustain peace in Mali by including the locals in rebuilding their destroyed cultural heritage (Munawar, 2018). The project re-established the connection with cultural identities and notably linked the material culture of the past with their present and future. This post-war reconstruction project demonstrates how heritage and culture, in general, can be deployed to counter terrorism, uproot radicalism, and rebuild communities in the aftermath of armed conflicts.

Conclusion

The destruction and looting of archaeological heritage sites and monuments are by no means recent phenomena and have been taking place in war zones for centuries. However, the ongoing war in Syria and the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (Daesh/ISIS/ISIL) has undoubtedly placed a spotlight on the impact of destruction and reconstruction of cultural heritage in 21^st-century Syria, and the destruction of historical monuments has angered many people in the region, as well as Western observers. The enormous public outcry in the West toward the destruction of heritage is related to the fact that the monuments are seen as being of international significance. In light of the establishment of safe zones by the Turkish army in Northern Syria (2016–2020), the rich areas of Syria’s past, Manbej, Raqqa, and Hasaka, under Kurdish militia control and protected by US forces, have suffered from heavy-handed illegal excavation attempts (Adra, 2018). Illegal excavations have been reported by local sources and the Syrian authorities, accusing and condemning the American and French excavation teams conducting organized excavations and looting of Syria’s patrimony. Social media platforms were flooded with images of uncovered mosaics and artifacts from Northern Syria under the supervision of specialized Western archaeological teams.

The war in Syria will eventually come to an end, while reconstruction works have already started in areas like the Ancient City of Aleppo. Simultaneously, no official or state authority has yet bothered to consider or examine how the attitudes of Syrians toward the destruction and reconstruction of their heritage differ at local, regional, or national levels, within Syria or among displaced Syrians, or even between the different social or religious groups. Hence, the wounded Syrians at home and displaced people outside Syria should be directly consulted about how their heritage should be restored, for which historical period the reconstruction should happen, and to what extent reconstruction should be undertaken. As Lowenthal (1996) cites, “The point of heritage is not that the public should learn something, but they should become something,” a statement that should be taken into consideration when the time for reconstruction arrives, especially if history continues to be written by the victorious (Sweeney 2011), particularly in the context of heritage reconstruction in the aftermath of civil wars.

Deconstructing the conflict on a social level should be based on mutual cultural values and acknowledge the remembrance of dark memories that could later become “negative heritage” sites that could transform the future. As Meskell (2002a) explains, negative heritage sites require comprehensive re-structuring to memorialize dark memories adequately. In social terms, as a memory site, negative heritage has two roles: (1) to serve as a positive, didactic tool for healing purposes, such as the Hiroshima memorial or the World Trade Center; or (2) to be erased if it is not possible to make it a “culturally rehabilitated” site, resisting the incorporation of such a site in the national memory (Meskell, 2002a), such as the de-Ba’athification of Iraq in the post-Saddam Hussein era (Isakhan, 2015) and de-Nazification of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War. Including dark and “unwanted” memories and heritage and the war narratives of different actors who participated in the conflict would help create a shared vision of Syria’s contemporary history. Moreover, the inclusivity of writing history would ultimately enhance the cultural identity and enrich the collective memory of the region and Syria in particular. Such a step would decolonize writing the history of a contested region like the MENA.

I have aimed to clarify that the deeper the understanding of heritage and its historical construction, destruction, and reconstruction lifecycle, the more heritage will engage with historical narrative formations, national identity (re-)construction or maintenance, and memory preservation and production. For instance, the main aim behind heritagizing and commemorating dark memories and mass killing incidents like multiple uses of chemical weapons, such as in Ghouta in 2013, during Syria’s civil war, is to remember this tragic incident, commemorating the victims of weapons of mass destruction. Consequently, such unprecedented warfare activities would not happen again. It is a “not forgetting” process to remember the incident in society’s collective memory. In this way, the memory of innocents will stay alive; otherwise, such unparalleled inhuman actions might be repeated in different circumstances and times. When the commemoration of war victims is conducted in an inclusive, open-minded, just, and objective way, not only does the dark memory stay alive, but it helps construct stability and sustainable peace that could stop the war from being prolonged on another level.