A brief history of Syrian nightmares

The day will come when future generations will read the history of Syria, and the present will be seen as the darkest and bloodiest period in the country's long history.

The people alive today, including us, will become figures of history, which is why it might be wise for history's sake to be honest at this point in order to avoid the distortion of events of our period.

News reports have revealed that the Islamist rebel group calling itself Jaish al-Islam, headed by Zahran Alloush, has used human shields in cages to protect against regime bombing.

The reports also reveal that the human shields are the mothers, sisters and children of officers an soldiers in the regime's army who are mostly from the Alawite sect to which the Syrian ruling elite belongs.

Many Syrian activists were enraged and condemned this behaviour, however the responses to the criticism were more brutal than the images of people in cages.

Therefore, one must wonder how Syrians reached this level five years after the start of an innocent revolution that called for freedom, justice and equality.

We create excuses for our violence and distinguish it from the violence of the enemy, but at the end of the day we do not really differ from the enemy.

How did this maniacal evil spread to all the actors on the Syrian scene?

Can we, as people who sympathise with the struggle of the Syrian people, in good conscience say that the sectarian and dictatorial regime of the Assad family bares the sole responsibility for all the evils that exist in Syria?

Can we say that the opposition groups on the ground, who now belong to the same regressive ideological school, are right to resort to any brutal method as long as it was used by the regime to suppress the population?

What is happening now can only be explained as madness, and according to Friedrich Nietzsche: "Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

How else can we explain the barbaric violence of the opposition?

We create excuses for our violence and distinguish it from the violence of the enemy, but at the end of the day we do not really differ from the enemy.

We justify violence against people perceived to be with the enemy in order to enjoy our acts of violence and make it more palatable.

Our violence against those captives unites our group and provides an outlet for our anger and frustration that makes us feel strong against the enemy.

However the problem is not with the violence, but with the lies that we create and tell people.

We claim that we have done nothing wrong, that we have tortured, insulted, slaughtered, killed, displaced and ignored the humanity of those people because they were violent to us; because they are immoral and they deserve it.

We claim that we are better than them because they have stolen our freedom, which is why they should all die, in the same manner that our enemy, to whom those people belong, wishes that we all die.

We think that striping them of their humanity and collectively killing them will save us from complete destruction.

Syria has become a nightmare in which all the actors contribute to the horrors, and it is up to the other Syrians inside and outside their country to wake up and end the nightmare.