In Conversation with Loubna Mrie

Loubna Mrie hails from the highlands of the Syrian coast, home to the majority of the country’s Alewites — the sect of the Assad family. In her new memoir Defiance, she recounts her political awakening at a 2011 protest in Damascus, her decision to join the revolution as a video journalist, and the waves of loss and exile that followed. In addition to depicting the callous violence of the Assad government, which fired live rounds at unarmed protesters and reduced entire cities to rubble, killing hundreds of thousands, Mrie describes how extremist elements within the revolution coopted the struggle and carried out their own share of atrocities against ordinary Syrians. 

After the fall of the Assad regime on December 8, 2024, the country’s new government headed by President Ahmad Al-Sharaa failed to subject the former regime’s war criminals to due process hearings and to provide protection for Alewites and other minorities, who began to experience abductions and extrajudicial killings. Last March, a group of Alewite former soldiers fired directly at the new government’s security forces on the Syrian coast, setting off a wave of collective punishment in which approximately 1,400 people — predominantly Alewite civilians — were killed. 

I sat down with Mrie to discuss her new book and its connections to the political events that followed the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. —Lylla Younes

LYLLA YOUNES Your book reads to me as an intervention into the memorialization of the Syrian revolution. You’re showing the reader what it was like for you to be catapulted into this struggle as a young person without a clear politics, and to emerge having witnessed both the power of collective struggle and its terrible pitfalls.  

LOUBNA MRIE I wanted to show people that uprisings are not perfect. I think that’s my issue with many narratives about the Syrian revolution; it’s painted as this beautiful struggle full of the purest people. I met incredible people when I joined the revolution, but I also encountered extreme violence from within the opposition. I became part of a group of people that documented the atrocities of the regime, but also downplayed the structures of oppression that were fortifying on the other side. Yes, Assad was horrible, but that does not mean anyone who was anti-Assad was great. I think the revolution eventually ate itself from within. 

LY The book opens on the Syrian coast, where Alewite youth were raised to fear existential violence without the protection of the Assad family. How did that narrative shape the community’s relationship to the regime during and after the war?

LM The Assad regime was so good at using historical tragedies [like the Ottoman-era Alewite massacres] to justify the collective punishment of the other. Towards 2018 and 2019, when the government assumed that they won the war, they neglected all these Alewite families that had lost their children and men fighting. I think that’s a big part of why the government was overthrown; when Assad needed them, the Alewites were like, “no, we’re not going to make this mistake again,” and they put down their weapons. That was such a good moment in history, and my anger with the current government in Syria is that they did not take advantage of that moment. Instead, they allowed vigilante and sectarian violence to take root in the Alewite areas. People trusted the new government to hold former regime officials accountable for their war crimes and when that didn’t happen, there was so much anger and rage within the population, it had to explode somewhere. And it did, during the March massacres on the Syrian coast.

LY Why do you think the new government is not interested in holding those old regime officials accountable? They’re even working with some of them. They’re painting over the prison walls that contain evidence of the former regime’s crimes. President Ahmad Al-Sharaa is going to Russia to strike up deals with Putin, who carpet-bombed Syria during the war.

LM Because this new government does not represent the Syrian uprising. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham [the group that overthrew the former regime] is one of the forces that, alongside Assad, alongside Russia, crushed the Syrian uprising. Look at what happened in Idlib: people who fled, who survived Assad for so many years, were eventually killed by HTS. So it is understandable why someone like Ahmed Al-Sharaa, who used to lead HTS, would not be interested in the dignity of the Syrian people. He wants to rehabilitate his image on the international stage. He wants to come to the U.S. and get perfumed by Donald Trump and prove to the world that he is not the terrorist he was. 

LY He seems to want to remake Syria in the image of the Emirates.

LM I think he is really inspired by Saudi, even probably inspired by Trump, this image of the strong man. I also want to make it clear that I don’t think he’s as bad as Assad — absolutely not. However, it’s important to note that what is allowing him to take on this strong man persona is the people themselves. The psyche of the Syrian people is so rooted in this mentality that obedience means safety — that if I align myself with you, if I deny the massacres that you committed, I might be safe. 

LY When the regime fell, people immediately began changing their profile pictures to his photo. Some tried to put up posters of him in the streets. Interestingly, he stopped them; he told them that there will be no more images of the president in the capital. 

LM Yes, this was very smart. It also shows you the difference between places that rebelled [during the revolution] and those that remained under government control. Nowhere in Idlib would you see a poster of Ahmad Al-Sharaa because those people rebelled. Those people changed their relationship to power. They now understand that they can curse the president if they’re not happy with him. On the other hand, places that have never been outside of government control, like Damascus or the coastal region, just adapted to the new man in charge. 

LY You recently attended an event where members of the Syrian diaspora were invited to meet Al-Sharaa and ask him questions. What did you take away from that encounter?

LM People were dressed up as if they were going to a graduation party or a wedding. It was at the Oriental in Columbus Circle. People I spoke to told me they flew overnight because they got the invitation the day before. Some flew from Canada, Seattle, Los Angeles. It felt like a Taylor Swift concert. When he walked in, people cheered “habibi” and “oh, liberator.” He eventually had to tell people to stop clapping. 

During Q&A, one person told Al-Sharaa that he should cancel the parliamentary elections and personally choose the representatives because that would be the only way to guarantee that the elections were not infiltrated. Another guy told him that they need a direct line between him and investors. I felt like I was watching How to Make Someone a Dictator 101. He did not mention anything about the Alawites. He did not say anything about the fact that 1,400 people were killed on the coast in the spring, some of them even opposed to Assad. At that point, the Suwaida massacres were already happening, and Israel was bombing the country’s South. Instead of letting the new leader of Syria know that we are going to hold him accountable, we gave him all this praise. 

LY One of my favorite scenes in the book is when you see a protest sign in Amuda with the Lorca quote: “What is a human being without freedom, Mariana? Tell me! How can I love you if I am not free? Can I give you my heart if it is not mine?” It’s easy to become so focused on a political goal that we forget the importance of dismantling the other structures of oppression that undergird fascism: classism, patriarchy, sectarianism. How can we nurture our struggles so that they remain in pursuit of a totality of freedom?

LM When people talk about the Arab Spring from outside the region, they often describe it as a failure. But many of us who took part in these uprisings experienced a rupture in political awareness even if the end goal was not met. So many people realized that the political system is not just outside of the house; it also seeps into the family dynamic. A lot of women realized that you cannot stand against a dictator if you have a miniature dictator in your house. I truly believe that the first revolution is within, that it starts at home. If you are not able to stand against the patriarchal and sectarian dynamics holding up a fascist regime, how are you going to topple it?

I think it was naive to believe that the only problem was Assad and that if he were gone, we’d be in a better place — or that if someone better than Al-Sharaa came along, we’d be in a better place. I don’t think it’s fair to put everything on the person who is ruling the country. It’s also on the people to realize that criticism is necessary and that obedience does not mean safety. 

LY Do you see any parallels with that kind of groupthink mentality in the U.S.? 

LM Definitely. After coming to the United States, I started to realize how authoritarianism doesn’t always need to be wearing a uniform or sitting in a government chamber. Sometimes, it’s the mechanism of setting social expectations. For example: rejecting abortion because “women don’t know what’s good for them” —the idea that someone would oppress you for your own protection. 

After the death of Charlie Kirk, I saw how the informant mentality started to become very normalized: People would feel the need to call out others talking shit about him online. Or with the war on Gaza, where if you say anything anti-Israel, you might be reported to your boss. That’s what really scares me about this political moment in the United States. You start to see those early signs of how dictatorship starts to seep into the collective psyche of the nation. It’s driven by social media, this mentality that if you see anything online that does not align with what your leader says, you should go report that person. It’s very hard to unlearn. It’s vital to fight back against it before it’s too late.