Aftermath of the Mar Elias Church Bombing:

 

The recent attacks on the Church of Mar Elias in Al-Dweilaa on June 22, 2025 during Divine Liturgy left at least 25 dead and 63 injured. Perhaps Syrians have become accustomed to hearing such tragedy in the news, for every month a new story of blood, violence, and climbing death tolls appears, the massacres on the Syrian coast still a fresh wound on top of the losses suffered in Al-Dweilaa. Abeer Dagher Esber’s impassioned response to the attacks in her essay, “A Prophet of Fire… Consumed by Our Zero-Sum Conflicts,”* is an unflinching criticism of Syria’s problems. The attack on the Church of Mar Elias is a "wound to the spiritual memory of Syria and to the symbolism of the saint whose name the church bears," she writes, adding, "It is a bloody irony that the place named after the ‘one who raised the dead’ should be blown up by someone who worships death, sees the Other as heresy, and life as merely a path toward a delusional glory."

 

Dagher Esber does not disguise her exasperation, frustration, and anger, firstly over the fact that these violent attacks continue unabated and secondly that faith-based and sectarian conflicts within the country are fixated on ‘zero-sum’ logic; there must always be an aggressor and a victim, a victor and the vanquished, with no possibility of camaraderie, coexistence, or compromise. She points out the flaws in jihadist ideology, likening it to childish behavior with deadly costs: “Jihadists cloaked in the stubbornness, cruelty, and despair of adolescents who, if denied exactly what they want, would rather commit suicide; not just to die, but to blow themselves up and take you with them."

 

Syria’s myriad problems stem from several sources, one of the most concerning of which is its lack of a true national unity, according to Dagher Esber. She compares Syria to a chessboard “without a single king,” a country lacking in unity where “every pawn fights for its own story, mourns its martyrs alone, demands justice alone, and brands anyone who doesn't pray for its wounds a traitor." National identity, she states, has become “mere bureaucratic necessity.”

 

This environment has allowed ISIS-style thinking and jihadist ideology to spread its roots and grow rampant. By their logic, there is no room for coexistence or the Other, and the Other must be eliminated. These groups view the Other only as rivals in the “battle of memory,” never acknowledging them as victims, which Dagher Esber warns will trap the country in a never-ending “curse of contesting who has the right to mourn.”

 

However, the problem is not only those who follow and perpetuate ‘zero-sum’ logic, but also that the gray ideological tolerance of this logic exacerbates it. Dagher Esber suggests that silence, equivocation, and the countless justifications under the guise of “understanding motives” or “reading context” have morally acquitted perpetrators and retrospectively blamed the victims.

 

She mainly pinpoints this issue in another essay reflecting on the bombing of Mar Elias Church, published in The New Arab, entitled “Syria and the Tales of Misery.”** In her words, “What is no longer acceptable is to manage all of this in frightened silence, or with euphemistic language that sterilizes pain and smooths sharp edges…faith-based and sectarian conflicts have always been violent, bloody, and rationalized in the name of truth. What we need now is to declare our awareness of this, to reject its exploitation, to speak of it without shame.”

 

Dagher Esber identifies the attack on Mar Elias Church and the massacres along the Syrian coast as symptoms of “a long continuum of Syrian collapse, of systematic erasure of the memory of coexistence, and of the growing tide of hate speech and the sectarianization of blood.” These bloody tragedies are efforts to deepen division, revive sectarian rifts, and “capitalize on fragile loyalties,” she writes.

 

The author’s criticisms in “A Prophet of Fire” reaffirm her stance. The bombing of Mar Elias Church has served to reinforce ideas that only those sharing identical religions and beliefs may coexist, a blatant attack on Syrian togetherness. Syria, as it is now, is characterized only by its fragmentation and divisions.

 

As Dagher Esber aptly puts it, “The most dangerous thing facing Syria today is not just violence, but indifference to it.” The country's complacent handling of the recent and ongoing violence enables its repetition. Desensitization allows these long lists of victims to remain overlooked, forgotten, and added to with no real repercussion to the perpetrators.

 

Moreover, she specifies that the absence of transparency around these crimes allows them to pass without credible or fair accountability, or even coherent narratives, as if the victims “were not worthy of a story.” The country’s lax justice and obfuscated truths have cultivated a sense of fear and despair that these events will continue to repeat and, like before, be swept under the rug. 

 

The bitter irony, writes Dagher Esber, is that this complacent silence around such massacres has fertilized the ground for their recurrence not only geographically, but ideologically. Her essay, “A Prophet of Fire… Consumed by Our Zero-Sum Conflicts,” is a call for diversity in religions, ethnicities, and dialects, urging us to step out of the narrow-minded and destructive rejection of anything different from ourselves. Dagher Esber refuses to cower from the truth, but hopes to pull the wool out from over the eyes of Syrians who have grown complacent in the face of the country’s escalating religious violence and conflict. She does not overstate the importance of addressing the country’s issues, which she emphasizes further in “Syria and the Tales of Misery.” Dagher Esber warns, “Syria today emerges from ancient ruin, from layers of collapse suspended by a web of fragile but devious threads.”