For me, Syria is not an abstract news country, not just a crisis concept in the headlines. I have been following this country - from a distance, but continuously - for around twenty years. Not out of political activism, but out of genuine interest. For me, Syria has always been an example of how the world is more complicated than simple good-and-evil narratives. A country in the Middle East that was secularly organized, relatively stable and socially much more modern than many would have expected.
An additional point that aroused my interest early on was the person of Bashar al-Assad himself. A man who had studied in Switzerland, trained as an ophthalmologist, knew the realities of life in the West - and then stood at the head of a Middle Eastern state. That didn't fit the usual mold. It was all the more irritating for me to observe how quickly public perception narrowed, how a complex state became a pure symbol of violence, flight and moral simplification within just a few years. The shock for me was not so much that Syria ended up in a war - history knows many such ruptures - but how little room there was left for differentiation afterwards. This article is therefore also an attempt to bring order back to a topic that is often only presented as chaos in the media.
