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Abir Hajibrahim So, you know, how you are speaking to everyone, the killers and to the criminals, but if nobody spoke to them, how they will stop killing people? Someone have to do this job. So the concept on peacebuilding is hardly known inside the Syrian community. (......)
Sanam That's Abir Haj Ibrahim, co-founder of the Mubadroun Network of Syria. (.) Hi, everyone. Welcome to If You Were in Charge with me, Sanam Naraghi Anderlini. The show is brought to you by the Bijan Reisar Foundation and my organization, ICANN, where for 20 years, we've been working with women peacebuilders on stopping wars and violence around the world. Each week, I talk with other doers and imaginers about the tough issues they tackle. And this week in particular was very close to home because Abir is one of my longstanding partners at ICANN. We have been collaborating, supporting their work in Syria since 2011. And back in 2011, Syria was one of the countries where they joined the Arab revolutions. People were out on the streets demonstrating against the dictatorship of Assad. And of course, like everywhere else, to begin with, it was peaceful. But the government cracked down heavily and then got very, very violent. And as a result, there was also an armed uprising, which then got funded and supported by the West and by Turkey and by Saudi Arabia and in various forms. And out of it emerged ISIS. And I remember talking to my Syrian colleagues, including Abir, early on, and they were saying things like, we're going to see extremists coming out of the displacement camps over the next six weeks or because they were already seeing textbooks from Saudi Arabia with a very virulent kind of Wahhabi version of Islam being sent into these places and food and other basic goods coming in from places where extremist ideologies were fervent. So, it's been an ongoing problem. And then as the conflict sort of expanded and the government became more violent and there, at some point, there were something like 4,000 different militia groups in the country. In 2015, the Russians and the Iranians got heavily involved and then the violence got even worse. So, this went on. Finally, ISIS at some point was pushed back. There was a collaborative effort, including Iran, in partnership with the U.S. and others to contain ISIS. And the Assad regime basically returned to, you know, it seemed as if all the death and destruction was for nothing and that the regime was being, had not been toppled and it was being rehabilitated almost into the international community. And then almost out of the blue, in terms of, you know, people who were watching the story, back in December of 2024, we saw a reconfiguration of one of the militia movements, one of the extremist movements, entering the country and basically sweeping through and effectively toppling the Assad regime. Clearly, behind the scenes, there had been some disagreements being made between the Turks and the Iranians and the Russians and so forth in terms of enabling this to happen for the army to stand down and so forth. But it was quite extraordinary for Syrians to observe the HTS movement, as it's known, to come into place with the leader who had been originally an Al-Qaeda supporter and then he had a bounty on his head and has now, again, been rehabilitated and was shaking hands with Mr. Trump a couple of weeks ago. So, HTS comes in and part of what surprised many people was that the levels of violence were actually not that high, you know, within areas and communities. And so, in my conversations with Abir at the time, she was telling me that their partners and other networks like theirs, often led by women, who in the last 10, 11 years had been doing a lot of community dialogue and reconciliation and trying to teach people how to live together despite political differences. So, you know, let's talk, not kill, essentially, like, as a simple framing. Those networks of individuals, often women, kicked in and were able to do a lot of the mitigation and mediation to calm down violence and to actually allow the transition to be relatively peaceful. So, this work is ongoing. There have, of course, been moments of violence in different areas and they're very worried about community violence flaring up and kind of the country exploding. There's a lot of poverty, there's a lot of revenge and demand for retributive justice and so forth, which needs to be addressed. So, like, there needs to be, the peace needs to be built, the trust needs to be re-woven in a way. I wouldn't even say re-woven because over the last 50 years, people were polarized and there was a lot of fear because of the regime. So, they are reshaping or recreating or creating a new country and it's being done from the ground up with women in the lead, even though now with HDS and power, they are pushing women out of governmental offices. Women judges have been sidelined and so forth. So, there are different dynamics at play. It's a moment of opportunity. There's, on the one hand, a lot of optimism about what could happen. On the other hand, it's very, very fragile. You have remnants of the former regime still in place. You've got conflicts between the different communities ongoing. Israel continues to bomb different areas. Sanctions relief has come about to allow the economy to kickstart, but it's coming with so many conditions that people are now saying that it's not really taking effect. So, fragile, but with some hope and optimism. And people like Abir and her community and her organization and all her colleagues are really at the forefront of not only re-imagining or imagining the new future, but really trying to build it piece by piece, person by person, community by community. And it's a privilege to support her work, but also to have her as a colleague and a friend and to be able to host her on the podcast. So, I hope you find the conversation interesting as well. And as always, I have Sole with her reflections and her thoughts. Always fun and always interesting to talk to her as well. Thank you so much and I look forward to hearing from you soon. As always, if you have any ideas for topics, issues, let us know by email, info at icanpeacework.org. Follow our newsletter, sign up to the podcast and share it with anyone else who might be interested in having a little bit of inspiration, despite all the bad news around us. (....)
Abir Hajibrahim Thank you, Sana. Now, yes, I'm a little bit busy, but still I have time to speak with someone like you, a great international woman peacebuilder, actually.
Sanam Well, thank you for that. Abir, can you tell us a little bit about what it means to be a peacebuilder? What is it that you do? Because people just don't know that people like you exist.
Abir Hajibrahim At this critical moment of Syria, it is very essential for us as a peacebuilder to have less violence and to help the country to do the transition that you are aiming to from a conflict zone country to a stable, more peaceful country. We don't aim to have, like, we are aiming to have small steps to do this transition, but it means a lot to me that I don't want to see my neighbors, my families, the people of Syria, killing each other, hating each other, and not be able to live with each other. So it's essential to me to see less women are involved in conflict, less children are displaced or refugees, or even zero refugees and displacement for the people, more ability to have a stable life, joyful life, like every nation around the globe.
Sanam And tell me your journey of how you came to do peacebuilding and what does that look like? What is that work?
Abir Hajibrahim Hello, you know, I was, like, in commercial oil business for a long period of time, and so I started to see how we could improve our communities. That was before the revolution in Syria, and we tried to build as a movement to have, like, a social change, but that kind of activism, it was forbidden, and we cannot do hardly anything. Then when the revolution came, we said, this is a perfect moment to see how things could be changed in our communities, and how Syria could change to a better country. But unfortunately, things went out of hands, and there was, like, a bloodshed everywhere, and people began to fight. And I was, like, so surprised to see that even the members in the same family, they get into conflict, and in some families, there were people taking their sisters or brothers to be detained. So I was, like, so I was, like, you know, why all this hatred came up? So I thought that I need, we need to be involved, and we were, like, around 400 social activists from all over Syria. And I do know that the divisions at that time, it came also inside our network. So me and my colleagues, we said that if nobody's talking and working on peacebuilding, and everyone is talking about how we could fight each other, I think we need to get decent knowledge on how we could live with each other and start our internal dialogues. Especially when Syria became like a huge attention to the whole world, Syria was a proxy war, many international forces intervening in the country. So we started to build our own capacities as peace actors on the ground, and to solve our internal divisions inside the network first. And then we have transferred to do the work with the community, to reduce the level of violence, help to reduce the level of divisions between communities.
Sanam So in 2011, when the revolution broke out, which was originally peaceful, right, people were out on the streets, there was, they did not come forward with violence. What was the demand that people were asking for at that time from the Assad regime, right at the beginning? What were they sort of calling for at that time? (.)
Abir Hajibrahim You can hear two main words, freedom and dignity. Also the equality and the justice. So human rights values. (..)
Sanam And then the violence broke out in terms of the state trying to oppress and suppress people and arresting the protesters. Is that, was that, was that the sort of initial wave of violence that you experienced and witnessed? (.)
Abir Hajibrahim Yes. There was like a huge wave of peaceful protesters in the streets. And armed groups from the government, they came and they took people, they detained lots of people. There was like a lots of recruitment for, for people who could do reports against each other. It was like a hyperactive security branches all over. And they had a lots of reports against the people. They detained people from houses even. So it wasn't only the ones who were in the streets. It's reached out everyone who talked over the social media, who talked in a general or public meetings, who talked on, on even at the level of families, you know. So, so, so that, they are the huge wave of detaining people. It came everywhere. It's not, it wasn't only with the people who went into the street.
Sanam It was everywhere. When did the violence from the other side start? Or when, when did people start, you know, arguably defending themselves or actually picking up arms to fight back against the state? And where did those arms come from?
Abir Hajibrahim Eventually, people want to defend themselves because the army went inside the cities. There was, like, bombing. I was in Aleppo in summer 2012. And they were bombing the Syrian army at that time. So the people want to defend themselves. From where they got the weapon, this is like a whole analysis. Actually, I don't have a specific answer for that. But I do know that people want to defend their country, their life.
Sanam In 2012, we were together and you were telling people, and this was, I think we were in the States. We were talking to people at the UN and international community and others. And you said something really profound at the time, which was, you said, everybody is helping us kill each other. No one is helping us talk to each other. Is that a sentiment that you feel now also? Was that, is that something that has been consistent in the last 12, 13 years that you've been working?
Abir Hajibrahim Actually, it, it went into several stages. And the reason of the people helping us, killing each other, one of them is the ignorance of the international community, of the long history of culture inside the Syrian communities. And secondly, is the Syrians themselves. We did not have the culture of talking and dialogue. We only have known years the culture of fighting and conflict. So, there was, like, two main factors. And in all of our life, I did not participate in any of dialogue sessions. It was only someone who was giving orders and we are following the orders, even at school level.
Sanam You start off with this incredibly polarized, incredibly mistrustful society deep in families, right? And you said this culture that you don't even know how to have a dialogue that is an exchange. As an Iranian, I sometimes say we're very good at parallel monologues. You know, you sit in a room and one person speaks and nobody's listening. They're just waiting for their own turn to, to come and speak. You know, so there's, it's almost like you're not really listening and engaging. It's just people shouting at each other or starting that sometimes in Persian settings. Exactly. People will just start with saying, no, you don't understand. And then they repeat the same thing that the other guy has just said because, right? Because they're not listening. So, here you are, people like you, right? That you said you used to work in the oil industry and, you know, you were not a political actor. You were not necessarily even doing some social work or anything like that. But the war pushes you into trying to help others in your community and with the war, this kind of expands. And then all of a sudden you're in dialogues with UN officials and government officials by proxy in some way, right? Like your message is going to them, to the government, about major security issues like ceasefires and the release of detainees. I mean, these are big security issues, which, again, in the jargon of our field, we say these are confidence building measures, right? You want to do something, there's got to, you know, to build the trust, tell us where you've taken people. But these can be incredibly scary things to be dealing with, right? As, I mean, did you ever feel, you know, who was protecting you? Where did you get a sense of safety and courage to do the kind of work you were doing, even bringing people for dialogue in your communities? You know, did you ever worry that there are going to be informants there and they're going to come arrest you? Like, you know, how do you go to sleep and wake up in the morning to do this work? (..)
Abir Hajibrahim First, I was outside Syria. From 2013, I left. But the people who we were working with, most of them, they stayed inside. And they put their lives in danger because of what they were doing. But we were believing that we are doing the right thing. And someone needs to do these peace-building issues inside the country. And reduce violence, taking teenagers from the front lines and on a checkpoint back to schools. We have done a lot of the peace-builders inside Syria, a lot of excellent things which help people to have a better resilience for the situation. But you know something? Peace-builders does not count risks. (.) This is only for program and project and international. Peace-builders are the ones who think that they know what to do and they have to do it, whatever it takes. I didn't, in the whole of my life, think about what will happen to me after the ex-regime released a statement to detain us. And after, I couldn't go inside Syria. So, this is the moment that I realized that I did something wrong on the eyes of a dictatorship regime. But at the end of the day, you don't count risks.
Sanam Often, when we speak in public or, you know, at events, I'm sure you've had this many times as well, that people will say, Oh my goodness, you're so courageous. That's so brave to do this or to say, you know, to do this work. And as, at least in my experience, I've always sat there thinking, why is it brave to speak out the truth? But you're, you're making this point that as a peace builder, whether you're on, whether in terms of the language or the issues that you raise or the kind of work that you do, you just think that this is the right thing to do.
Abir Hajibrahim Actually, actually, Sanam, I don't consider myself a brave woman. No, not at all. Because if you compare what you have done with the others, you will feel that you've done nothing and you are not even brave enough. There were people who were brave enough to raise voices even higher in front of a missiles.
Sanam This is what, what is brave or courageous people. So, exactly. Yeah. You were forced into exile because you, you understood that they were going to detain you probably if they found you, but.
Abir Hajibrahim Not probably, Annie. It was like a clear signal, Annie. It was obvious. Yeah.
Sanam And as you said, you, you're sitting outside helping and doing your work both externally and, and with your network inside. And you're, you know that you have colleagues in, inside the country who are doing extraordinary work and, and you get to sleep safely at night, right? Like, I mean, that, that's the benchmark of what is brave and what is courageous for those of us in this field is very different to, to those who are absolutely, you know, removed from it and, and don't understand what peacebuilding work is. I think, I think that, that's what it comes down to because it's, it's, it's also different to humanitarian work, right?
Abir Hajibrahim Well, for me, yes, it is, uh, more risky and, uh, you get this blaming and shaming. The, the most challenging issue in peacebuilding inside Syria that no one's have the enough knowledge what doesn't mean to be a peacebuilder. How you are, like, against the violation which is taking place from so many actors and, in the same time, when you are opening dialogue, you are inviting them. So, you know, how you are speaking to everyone, the killers and to the criminals, but if nobody spoke to them, how they will stop killing people? Someone have to do this, this job. So the, the concept is, on peacebuilding is hardly known inside the Syrian community. And peacebuilding was related in the mindset of the Syrian as a peace agreements with other countries. not as, like, a social reconciliation, community dialogue to solve, uh, conflict, building trust among communities. Because we, we did have, like, uh, like, uh, inside ourselves, inside the community, a huge hatred against each other. But it float only on the surface where, when there was a conflict. So the concept of peacebuilding itself as a mandate, it didn't have so much people who will support it. Less people supported it because they did not understand what doesn't mean to put all people on a one table so you will reduce the level of violence and vulnerability inside the community. All they, they, they know that humanitarian is how to deliver an equal, uh, based on human rights, uh, principles, equal aid to the people. But at the end of the day, that is not peacebuilding.
Sanam That's, so, so, so, so, just, just giving people food or medicine or shelter. It will not solve anything. It's not going to solve anything, right? And often it can actually cause even more problems because everybody's always thinking, oh, the community over there is getting more food than us or more shelter than us or, you know, more tents or whatever. So, so, so, so this idea of, on the one hand, Syrians, and, and not just Syrians, I think, I think it's in many countries where people say, oh, well, we, we're a mixed society, you know, we've always had, you know, people from different ethnic groups or religious groups, or we've all lived together for 5,000 years, there's no problem. And then you have a conflict which just really exacerbates and, and creates really deep divisions. And that goes on for 10, 12 years and all of a sudden, or maybe not all of a sudden, but in December of 2024, so just a few months ago, you see combination of some of the militias, reformed, transformed, maybe more sophisticated, but they come into the country and from the outside world, we observed that they swept in and the Assad regime, which seemed so strong, suddenly disappears. What was that moment like for you? When you think back to December, what are the sort of key moments where you were surprised or you thought, I can't believe what is happening in my country right now? What, what was that like for you? (...)
Abir Hajibrahim Frankly speaking, in the last three to four years, we all knew that the regime is becoming so weak. It was so clear in lots of areas. I do remember the moments of the freedom of Syria. For us, most of the Syrians, you will see that there was so mixed feeling between crying from happiness, joyful moments, fearless moments, not knowing what will happen next. And as a peacebuilder, I did have a huge fear of escalating in violence and killing, sectarianism-wise. But in the same time, I could not calm down the huge feelings of joyful, of the falling of this regime, which have done a lot of crimes in decades. It's not only in the last 13 years. So it was for me, like, at the end, you know, change will come. But it's happened. Change comes. And if people come together to do it, it will come somehow.
Sanam And Abir, so we see this militia coming or this group, this armed group coming. And as you say, the regime was weakened because of the conflict, because of sanctions and economics and so forth. Your network of peacebuilders, people who you had trained over the last 10-15 years in creating spaces for dialogue and mediation work, what were they doing? You know, again, we saw from the outside world that the, you know, the HTS movement came through and everything was largely peaceful. There were very few reports of initial violence back in December, January. Do you know how that happened?
Abir Hajibrahim We opened, like, huge and big, wide initiatives on the ground in initiating local peace committees who are from the community themselves, non-formal settings of local peace committees, which could talk to people, calm them down, especially in the areas which was, like, a powerful area for the ex-regime. We tried our best to do as much tackling the fairness inside the communities about the coming new authorization. And in the same time, we were trying to have a lot of local mediation in this period of time directly with the people who were holding weapons of ex-regime and asked them not to fight and deliver their weapon. And it's happened. And to start immediately the process of social reconciliation towards the transitional justice phase. So we do see that we need a transitional justice to be in place. It's essential for the transitional phase in Syria. But before getting into any kind of formal structure for the transitional justice, we need to do a preparation phase, which we called the social reconciliation. On 16 December, I was inside Syria for the first time after 13 years. I just took the car over the Lebanese border and went inside. And we started the work immediately. Because we did not have the chance to speak about identity, belonging, and the culture, diversity which we have inside our Syrian community. And how we all could restore our humanity because we have, you know, the same equal rights to have identities and belonging. And we started the dialogue immediately. Also, we spoke about the past, the history. And the suffering came up. And the trauma came up on these dialogues.
Sanam So you talk a lot about the idea of design, right? That these things, these dialogue settings, the substance of who you, what you talk about, how you hold a conversation, how you deal with trauma. This doesn't just happen accidentally, right? These are all skills that you have acquired over the last, you know, maybe you had them before. But certainly in the last 12, 15 years of doing this work, these are things that you've learned along the way, right?
Abir Hajibrahim Yes. How to design the dialogue which the society and the community needs. This is essential. We have identified two main thematic area that need to accompany us in the community dialogue. The psychologist, and we have, like, a network of psychologists who are intervening and attending the dialogue and doing the referral system if needed for some cases. And the media, false news, hatred, speech, working on emotions to be more violent behaviors against the others. So now we are, like, opening a partnership with the media sector and with the support of psychologists. So you work with the community because you are from them, Sanam. And this is what is not understandable from the international. When they come to us and say, oh, we need to have conflict sensitivity, we need to have conflict analysis, we need to do all this assessment. We said, but we know because we are the community. We speak our language. We speak the Syrian local community language because we are from there. At the end of the day, when we do conflict sensitivity, we do it with the community. We said together, we know what to do.
Sanam And it's interesting because it's about genuine, active citizenship, right? It's about enabling people to come in and think about whatever the challenges are that they're facing, but also to be prodded, if you want, or given the space, to think about their own solutions so that there's a level of sort of taking responsibility for what the future can look like, as opposed to thinking the regime or the government has to solve everything. Like, as if, you know, sometimes I say in dictatorships, people don't have rights, but they also don't have responsibility. You know, if you have no rights and you have no agency, then you have no responsibility for dealing with whether it's the rubbish in the street or anything else. And you're weaving this sense of responsibility into local communities. You're not doing it in theory. You're actually doing it in practice with them.
Abir Hajibrahim Yes, yes. Actually, we are promoting for the citizenship. And this is the phase three. So the phase one is social reconciliation as a preparation for transition justice. They deal with the past. They speak and build a trust when they speak about identity, culture, and belonging. Then they come together to design their citizenship and to be a citizen inside the country, which is now practicing the freedom wave for the first time in 15 years. So it's like moving from one change to another change so they can hold their transitional phase in a stable peace conditions, not in a violent conflict conditions.
Sanam And again, it's interesting because you talk about transitional justice. And, you know, in our field, we know the transitional justice has been framed in all sorts of ways. But often it's framed as, oh, we have to bring the, you know, people who committed crimes or who were perpetrators of the actions in the conflict or the dictatorship of the past. We have to bring them to justice. But there is a reconciliation element to it as well, because it's about the past and the future. How are we going to live together? And I remember in Iraq, people would say to me, but we have little Saddam Husseins in every village. And it's not just enough to go to think about the cabinet or the top officials of the country. You need to understand and deal with the fact that at the local village, the mayor was involved in disappearing, you know, my son, and I don't know what's happened to my son. I need information about how his life ended and so forth. So this community anchoring of how you deal with justice and reconciliation and memorialization is really critical for the future of Syria, right? Or any country coming out of dictatorship.
Abir Hajibrahim It is essential, actually. And the community need to be involved in putting it in framework. But at the end, yes, it's true. The mindset of the ex-regime, it's deeply rooted inside the community. For that reason, we need the community to heal. So you see that even the hatred speech is not coming from the authorities. It's coming from the community, unfortunately. So we are blaming and shaming and accusing each other and doing, like, revenge actions on the ground. As you mentioned, we have lots of ex-regime in our heads, and we need to get rid of it. For that reason, the transitional phase, it's need to have a full, inclusive engagement for everyone. It cannot be led by a group or by the authority by itself.
Sanam And it can't be led by outsiders, right? Definitely. That's all. So, Avira, it's a few questions that I need to ask you. So one is, are the majority of the people that you have engaged with, I mean, again, over the last 15 years, when you talk about the women or the people who are, I don't know whether it's just women, but, you know, that they're dealing with missiles dropping or the ones that are dealing with detainees. Has that been a space for Syrian women, or do you see it as a mixed space? And if it is a lot of women, you know, how did that happen?
Abir Hajibrahim There was a space for the Syrian women during the revolution phase and even during the last 13 years to be engaged. The tracks, we have the Women Advisory Board. We have lots of NGOs led, initiated by women. We have a full women engagement everywhere. But I do have a lot of worrying issues around women participation, not only in political level and even in the social level. There are less women in positions now. And even there was some incident that there was, like, some women managers in some of the directorate belongs to the government. They were removed. And there was, like, lots of news about not letting the women entering some areas like the legal system. Actually, this is a quite worrying issue. And it's not, I don't think it's only related to the religious background. I think it's always happening everywhere. In a post-conflict country, everywhere, women were put aside. So I do think now we have two main challenges. How men dominate power everywhere and they don't share responsibilities with the women. And also the leaning or religious background to say this is why we are doing that. So I have these stories in my mind. And, but in the same time, I do know that the Syrian women are so powerful. (.) So they are so courageous.
Sanam You, me, many of the people that we know, we start doing this work because of our beliefs, because of our values. And over time, we realize that in many ways, when you start to compare across countries, that as women, we have a certain way of facilitating or creating spaces for this inclusive process or, or using our words, right? Using, you know, what's our power? Our power is the power of ideas and the power of communication, right? We don't have guns. (.) Instinct.
Abir Hajibrahim Yeah, yeah. And we have, we have a clear instinct to what should be done properly. Right.
Sanam So, again, the irony that for all these years throughout the war, while others were fighting, or while politicians were sitting behind their desks far away from the country, sending young men, mainly young men, to go and fight each other, or they were dropping bombs from the sky. The courageous work that was going on was the local community engagement, whether it was creating space for dialogue, or whether it was, as you say, bringing the file and saying, where are our children? They've gone, you know, the detainees that have gone missing, and constantly trying to sort of weave that social fabric. And yet, at this critical moment in, you know, in 2025, when we're thinking about the future of Syria, you're saying that women like you and others in that social activist space that have been doing dialogue, and you guys are being excluded from the actual future design and framing of the country. Like, all your skill set and everything that you've done is, is being ignored right now? Yes.
Abir Hajibrahim Over 128 persons. None of them were engaged into the national dialogue or any kind of official or formal peacebuilding processes. None of them. 128.
Sanam They have the experience of 13 years. 13 years, yeah. //S01: Yes.// And then your volunteers, it's in the thousands, right?
Abir Hajibrahim Yes. None of them, you know. They even did not invite them to the local dialogue, which happened by the national community. Nothing. By ignoring the work and the hard work of more than 128 local mediators over the 13 years, and not taking advantage of their skills to putting them in the right setting, I think this is not going to make it a successful approach.
Sanam This is the sort of hardcore full-time mediators who've trained so many others that you've worked with. Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. How many of them are women?
Abir Hajibrahim More than 60%. More than 60% are women.
Sanam And it's, you know, it's funny because sometimes when we talk to the high, you know, international, the envoys and others, they'll be like, oh, well, we have one woman and she is, you know, and they tick box the ethnic or the religious or whatever. And they're like, in this one woman, you have everybody. Like, the whole community is, you know, represented through this one woman. But to me, my argument with them isn't about the question of whether this is a woman or not. My argument is, are you bringing people who have the right skill set and professional experience, right? And that's what you're saying. It happens that most of your network are women, but it's the skill set that the country is missing out on or the international community is ignoring now.
Abir Hajibrahim We need a moderator for a session is not necessarily a mediator of a dialogue. What they brought, they brought moderators for sessions. They did not brought peace builders who know how to mediate.
Sanam It might sound very theoretical for people, but it's, but what you're pointing is the fact that this is a vocation and a skill set, a really detailed skill set that we take for granted. (.) Abir, so a couple more questions on this one. So you've been doing all this work with your network. You see the problems, you're coming up with solutions right now at the local level. If you were in charge, what would you do now and put in place for Syria right now?
Abir Hajibrahim Set a mechanism of a participatory planning with all the current ministers. The people need to be engaged. So they will learn how to engage together. At least do the proper consultation before you take a decision. At least. This is one. Second, open the space for media to be officially inside the country. All the media, let them work officially. And third thing, open the political forum. (.) We need to open the political participation as much as we could. Because once the people are engaged in politics, they will leave the violence and they will leave the military.
Sanam Things like local councils where people can come and air their grievances or their challenges.
Abir Hajibrahim Yes, the political, even political parties. Open the space. Open up the space. So as much as we engage and open up the space to everyone to contribute, as much as we have a soft transitional face.
Sanam So it's been 13 years that you've been building your network at Mubadirun. At ICANN, it's been 12, 13 years that we've been trying to support your work in different ways. (.) With funding from different countries and foundations and so forth. And yet, right now, when this work is so critical and all that investment is coming to fruition. I mean, you've said, you know, they're working at the... All of a sudden now, that funding... They throw out. It's finished, right? It's like there's no money. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Abir Hajibrahim Yeah, yeah, yeah. They draw back. Some of them, not all of them. And, you know, the sudden change in Syria made everyone, like, in a chaos. So they now need to have a new plan, a new strategy, a new approach. You know, why the hell you are taking all of this effort to do all of that? You have a trusted partner. You developed entities inside the country and in the neighboring country for the last 13 years. Take their consultation into immediate action. There have to be emergency, quick response to what is needed inside. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost.
Sanam If you don't do the peace building, then the refugees that left Syria will remain outside. And if you don't do the peace building and more conflict breaks out, more people will leave. So it's all very logical. But as you say, we're talking to bureaucrats who don't understand or there's this now move towards militarization and as if militarization is going to give security to people. So, Abir, so my second question really, you know, it's a follow on to all of this, is if you were the billionaire right now, what would you be doing? Where would you put your money? What would you be investing in? And I think you've given me the answer, but I'm going to ask you directly, you know, you were the billionaire or you were Mr. Musk or Mr. Gates or Mr. all these misters or McKinsey Bezos, who's the former wife of Mr. Bezos. (.) You know, what would you say to them about the importance of where you think funding should go in Syria, but also as you've worked internationally when you think about peace building?
Abir Hajibrahim It's need to go for both the governmental and the civil society sectors. The governmental sector, it's need to build the capacity of the new officials who are taking responsibility and working, especially when it comes to how to engage with the community and how to engage with the people that they are serving. The second hand, the civil society, mainly peace builders, they need to have more empowerment, not only building their institutions as much as building the youth and supporting youth and women movement, which is leading to peace building and recovery period for the community. That's, I think that's, I think that says, it says it all.
Sanam And Abir, again, you're, we're 2025, Syria is having a really pivotal moment in its history and we can be optimistic and we need to be optimistic. At the same time, you are also very, very conscious of the things that could go wrong. And we've seen in other countries, you know, Sudan had a period of, this window of an opportunity to go towards a peaceful transition and then it fell back. When you look at Syria right now, what gives you hope for the future? (..)
Abir Hajibrahim I have hope with women political movement, which is happening. And I have hope because there were great women that they struggle for our rights, for me to speak now from over 30 years ago. It's not a new thing. I have a hope because I have this courageous women all around, working so hard, forming institution and putting everything in place for human rights and justice. This is giving me a huge hope because there are lots of people who want to be engaged in the current period for Syria. And even I see Syrian business persons are also putting all their effort to be inside the country, to engage and to help and to support. The willingness from most of the Syrians to have a successful period is huge. For that reason, I get all this hope from them, actually, and from the people, from the Syrians themselves.
Sanam Thank you, Abir. That was wonderful. It was a long conversation, but so important because all these years you've been doing peacebuilding from so many different angles for Syrians inside and outside the country. So thank you very much for this interview, and we will carry on our work together, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
Abir Hajibrahim Yeah. Thank you, Salam. Looking forward. Bye-bye.
Sanam Ciao. (.......)
Soleh Hello. //S03: I'm good.//
Sanam Tell me something. What are you up to and what have you been up to? Has term started?
Soleh Term has started a couple weeks ago. All the undergrads have exams, so they're kind of, I don't know, doing God knows what.
Sanam And do I dare ask you about your research or do we not talk about that anymore? (..)
Soleh There's just no updates that are interesting to share.
Sanam Now, bringing it back to our conversation today, Syria and Abir's work. Just, first of all, let me ask you, have you thought about Syria in the past? Did you know that I worked on issues to do with Syria from probably when you were nine, ten years old? Has it sort of been on your radar in any way?
Soleh I think it has. I think, obviously, it came on everyone's radar again relatively recently, though I'm not sure that a lot of people in my generation would actually be able to tell you what really happened. But just that something, like, good, I guess, happened.
Sanam Well, something has happened, yeah, which could be good.
Soleh Something that's being, something that's being shown as good in, like, Western media.
Sanam Yeah.
Soleh I remember trying to convince Junjun to go to Egypt for Christmas vacation by first pitching Aleppo as the...
Sanam As an alternative. Well, honestly, I wish we had gone many years ago before the war and I hope we can go again because it is pretty, it's a pretty spectacular place given its history. But yeah, I mean, it's been devastated over the last, by the war. I think one aspect of it that, from a generational standpoint, if I wanted to talk to you about it, is that it's probably the first conflict that we saw happening in real time on our phones. So, like, you know, on Twitter and so forth and YouTube. And I remember meeting a young Syrian undergraduate student. She'd just finished her degree in English literature from Aleppo University. And she'd found me on the internet. And she was the one who told me about this. She said that, you know, the image of the bomb dropping into their university building and killing her classmates, you know, her sort of cohort of students, was an image that was on YouTube. And it was something that they would keep, you kind of, it's almost like addictive in terms of the kids who'd survived watching it and re-watching it. And she was telling me, this is going back a few years, she was saying that this was one of the ways in which many people got radicalized to go off and become fighters against Assad and then joining some of these Islamist movements and so forth. Whereas for her, it was the way that she, it kind of radicalized her to actually fight for peace and find, try and look for another way of resolving the issues. And then she dug around on the internet and she'd found me and a couple of other people. But the idea of these moments being petrally or eternally alive on the internet and for the people that were affected to be able to keep drawing them up and repeatedly viewing them, I think that level of trauma is something that I don't think anyone has really dug into to understand and, you know, study in terms of its long-term effect. But it's like a generational shift that is now something that's playing out in Gaza, I guess, and in Palestine. So, yeah, strange things that we don't think about when we see, when we think about the technology around us.
Soleh Yeah, that is interesting. I mean, it's kind of also from my generation's perspective, I suppose. The phones and stuff are so, like, widespread and we do, like, we're so used to seeing everything physically, like videos and all that all the time, but then it's something that you don't really think about, like, the long, the lasting effects and also how it makes it easier probably to, like, skew, I mean, easier and maybe also harder. I don't know, to skew the image and what people are seeing and kind of tell a story through that rather than through, like, traditional war reporters and whatever they would, whatever //S03: it would be.//
Sanam Yeah, I mean, yeah, and sort of having the news kind of frame it or edit it or, you know, give you a curated story because that's also obviously a narrative. But, you know, when I think about it from my own history, it's like we would see incidents and then it was on the news and then it would disappear. You didn't repeatedly see the same horrific thing, especially when it's in your own context. I mean, I, you know, I just, it's like a wound that doesn't get healed in a way. That's what I'm sort of, it's a strange thing that, as I say, we don't really, we haven't really tackled, I think. Yeah, so that's one heavy thought. But listening to the interview with Abir, what was your take on it and any reflections?
Soleh I mean, it's always kind of interesting and nice in a way to hear from these people who somehow, like, continue to be so, and I've probably said this in, like, every episode, but they, like, continue to be so optimistic and have been doing this work through, probably, (..) like, through enough difficulty and one step forward, two steps back kind of thing that most people would have quit, like, long ago, but, you know, they haven't and that's always kind of nice to see that there are people who are like, you know, she's, she at some point says that she's not, she says she's not brave or courageous or something and I found that kind of, you know, shocking. It's like, well, of course. (..)
Sanam It's kind of relative in a way. I mean, I, you know, as you know, these are, these are, Abir is one of my long standing partners in our, in our work and at ICANN and, and I've always sort of, I always feel as if I'm working with superheroes. It's like, literally, I, you know, I'm like, these are, these are superheroes in plain clothing. People just don't see them. We need other people to see them because they're so inspirational. And, and yeah, they, they show you things that are possible in a very practical way in situations that seem really impossible. But when you talk to them themselves, they don't think that they're being brave or there's something really in a way mundane about it. Right. Yeah.
Soleh I thought it was interesting, like your conversation also about like the idea of like peace builder as a skill set and not just like as a vocation and not just kind of slightly up in the air. What does it really mean thing? Which, you know, it is the name peace builder is kind of a bit, what does that mean? Obviously you're not building, you're not a physical builder, like you're not building a house. Yeah. So kind of hearing like the, the whole conversation of like mediators versus moderators and how there are specific skills that are associated with, you know, doing what she does and what you can bring to these kinds of conversations.
Sanam That's, that's such an interesting point because it's exactly what we struggle with in many ways that, you know, how do we, what's the word to describe this, whether you want to call it profession or vocation, but this skill set that is acquired and that, that people use. And, and, and it's, it's the ability to, it's a combination of factors, like it's the ability to, to hold different truths, to try and see a sort of a, a focus on the future if you want, but how do you weave the conversation to enable people to talk to each other across differences, to find lines of commonality, to hold the trauma while also not letting the trauma, you know, define, uh, everything that's going forward. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's really complex and it's, it is the work that, you know, my colleagues around the world are doing in, in different ways. And, and in my work, I do it as well. Um, but we haven't been able to come up with a good sort of, yeah, label if you want, because, because you're absolutely right. It's sort of, it's like, we're building, we're building relationships. We're building, you know, we like the human social architecture, um, in places where it's been frayed or, you know, broken. Um, I don't know whether it's like, you know, you know, peacemaker is, is, is, is what is another way of thinking about it, but that's sort of, it's almost as though you make it and then it's done. I, I, but it's a skillset and it's a, it takes certain personality types to be able to like hold these spaces. Definitely.
Soleh Yeah. And it kind of, I guess also goes with what she was saying in response to the, if you were in charge question, like she didn't want to decide for anybody, basically was what she was saying, but it was the idea of kind of setting like mechanisms for engagement and just like opening the political forum and, and things like that, that is, I don't know, I thought that was very telling.
Sanam Yeah. It's, it's kind of the idea of co-creating and, and giving people the space and the opportunity and in many ways, the responsibility to think about the future and to think about what they want to do. And, and, and again, what I find is, is that when you've lived through dictatorship, you don't have any rights, but you also don't have any responsibilities and democracy in a way is about advanced active citizenship. If you want to create something for the future, you have to go fight for it, whether it's environmental or peace or security or, you know, the rights of your community or collecting trash or, or something. And it, it takes a lot of work actually. And, and a lot of people don't necessarily want that, want to be that engaged. And what she enables is creating the space to allow people to participate. And yeah. And then, and then once they take that first step, they, they become more and more engaged and, and become more and more kind of self-empowered to feel that they have a say in, in what should be done. And then what does it mean to create democracy? //S03: Yeah.//
Soleh To create something that's like sustainable. Like, I mean, yeah. Which is, I mean, peace builder versus maker. Kind of, it's a bit semantic, I suppose. But, um, yeah, I guess, I mean, the term, it is, it is kind of an interesting one. That's difficult. Who came up with it? You didn't come up with it.
Sanam Well, we, we've been, I mean, in our community, we talk about these, these terms and, you know, the minute you use one, it becomes kind of, well, you know, for example, peacemaker has more of a connotation of negotiation. Builder has more of a holistic approach. And then, and then of course there's peacekeeping, which has a more militaristic, it's like the, you know, the blue berets of the UN. //S00: That's kind of, yeah.// Keep the peace, you know, it's like once a ceasefire agreement.
Soleh Also very like Hunger Games.
Sanam Aren't they called peacekeepers? Are they called peacekeepers in the Hunger Games?
Soleh They are called peacekeepers, which I'm sure was on purpose, so. (.)
Sanam Yeah. That is a bit, that's, that's, that's a bit depressing. Okay, so, so, well, thanks so much for that. That was, that was, as always, interesting. And I'm glad you picked up both on the terminology and just this idea of, you know, the complexity of the kind of work. When she describes it, you realize how valuable it is, right? Yeah. But it's hard to explain in one or two words, I guess.
Soleh Yeah, well, I think even after listening, you know, to the interview, you're still kind of left with, like, you're given answers, but then also left with so many more, at least I am, like, practical questions of, like, I don't know, I'm like, I want, like, a day in the life, like, you know, YouTube vlog or something.
Sanam That's so funny, and I, actually, it's such a good point, because I, when, when we get together with our partners for, for our forum every two years with, with ICANN, you know, partners, a lot of it is experiential. And, and that's one of the reasons why I invite people. I'm like, come and see for yourselves and experience for yourself. It's, it's experiential. It's hard to describe it just in words, but a day in the life of Abir, that's a, that's a very good, good idea. Actually, we could do that for a lot of our partners.
Soleh Yeah, I think that'd be a good YouTube series or something.
Sanam Day in the life of a peace builder. Fantastic. Thank you. So that's, that's lovely. All right, my love. I hope you have a good rest of the week and the Cambridge Balls soon as well. //S00: Oh, yeah.// It's a little secret that everybody knows who goes to Oxbridge, but the rest of the world doesn't know about. Okay, thanks. //S02: Okay. Bye.// Bye.
My thanks to the Bijan Reisar Foundation, my own organization, ICANN, and Africa Digital Audio for making these podcasts possible. If you have ideas for topics or for people that I should invite and have a conversation with, please let me know at info at icanpeacework.org. Info at icanpeacework.org. You can also follow the events on our newsletter, which is on the ICANN website, same address. I really hope that the conversations, the ideas, the solutions, the hope and the inspiration that you've heard in these conversations keep you going over the next week and that you join us again. So stay well and see you soon. And I hope to hear from you. Thank you. Bye bye.