Hisham writes, the rebels who captured the city from regime forces were directionless. The Free Syrian Army was a loose coalition of different groups and they were incapable of defending the land against Islamist attacks. “Islamists didn’t have to exert much effort to hijack the revolution — it was easily given up by the politically uneducated crowds who had started it.” The revolution which he believed in had now become “an arena of jihad, divided into halves, with believers versus unbelievers on one side, and nationalist believers versus takfiri mercenaries on the other.”
Brothers of the Gun doesn’t offer any analysis of the geopolitical complexities of the Syrian war. It doesn’t say much on how the anti-regime protests turned violent, where do money and weapons come from for the rebels. But the book is a helpless Syrian’s story to the world. He describes with pain how the country was destroyed, neglected and abandoned. Hisham doesn’t make a moral distinction between various actors of the war. The regime comes and bombs the city. The Americans, the French and the Russians all come and bomb the city. The IS, which he says “committed a historic blasphemy against our future,” occupies the city. Raqqans, he says, are at the receiving end. Hisham is not angry. Rather he’s anguished at his own plight and that of his fellow Syrians. “We became believers just when we most needed scepticism. We squabbled when we needed solidarity. In the words of the hadith, “As we were, we were governed,” he writes.
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