Damascus - Almost two years on from the fall of Assad’s regime in 2024, continued violence targeting Syria’s ethnic minorities is placing the country’s post-war recovery under strain as the government struggles to manage persistent sectarian tensions.
Earlier this month, pro-government demonstrators gathered in Kurdish areas of Hasakeh and Raqqa, vandalising Kurdish symbols and calling for the government to take full control of the region.
This comes amid the ongoing integration of the Kurdish-led SDF into the Syrian state.
The unrest followed a series of mob attacks and acts of vandalism targeting Christian homes, vehicles and shops in Al-Suqaylabiyah, a predominantly Greek Orthodox town in Hama province.
These are not isolated incidents. Post-Assad Syria has seen “several minority communities that have feared systemic discrimination and unfair treatment - particularly the Kurdish, Druze and Alawite communities,” Caroline Rose, a senior director at the Soufan Center, tells The New Arab.
Al-Suqaylabiyah has already experienced a previous spate of mob violence over the past year, while Syria continues to witness sectarian killings on an almost daily basis.
The country’s post-war recovery was also blighted by a series of massacres targeting Syria’s Alawite and Druze minorities in 2025.
Syria’s decade-long civil war deepened sectarian hostility. Assad sought to frame the conflict as a sectarian war between Syria’s minority communities and Sunni “Islamists” and “terrorists”.
As the revolution progressed, opposition to Assad became increasingly Islamist and sectarian in nature. During the conflict, communities on all sides were targeted, with many villages and neighbourhoods suffering killings and displacement.
The collapse of the regime saw many displaced communities return to their destroyed homes, in many cases living alongside those they believed had destroyed them in the first place.
While the government has repeatedly moved to clamp down on outbreaks of violence, two years into Syria’s “transitional period”, it has struggled to address many of the underlying grievances that allow disputes to escalate into communal violence.
It is this legacy of civil war grievances that allows disputes, often rooted in personal conflicts or criminal activity, to escalate into communal violence. The recent violence in Al-Suqaylabiyah began with a fight between two men, one of whom returned to his village to rally a mob.
Although Damascus has made efforts to deploy its security services to quell unrest, in many parts of Syria this does not necessarily create a greater sense of security among local communities.
“Local officials and security chiefs come mainly from the networks that toppled Assad, often recruited for their loyalty. Minority recruitment into the security forces remains limited,” explains Dr Nanar Hawach, an independent expert specialising in Syria, to The New Arab.
“The already few minority recruits mostly hold desk or traffic jobs, and the armed patrols in their areas are often drawn from elsewhere,” he adds.
“As a result, many ethnic minority residents hesitate to report threats to the officers who patrol their streets, who they may not trust.”
Over the past two years, although the government has made significant strides in filling the security vacuum that emerged after the collapse of the regime, the Interior Ministry remains understaffed according to analysts.
One way to address this, alongside the communal sense of distrust, would be to encourage the recruitment and active deployment of security personnel from minority backgrounds, particularly in areas where minorities make up a substantial proportion of the local population.
However, Gregory Waters, an independent researcher and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, cautions against establishing a system of local communal policing on ethnic or religious lines which he believes in the long run may serve to “solidify sectarian divisions” by clearly demarcating that “this is a Christian town with Christian police, and that is a Sunni town with Sunni police”.
He argues that alongside more personnel, the local security services need to improve their coordination with local communities, in order to be quickly made aware of and pre-emptively halt sectarian mobilisations before they become violent.
However, analysts agree that establishing civil peace requires more than simply securitising the issue.
Local disputes have long been common in many of these communities, although they have taken on a more sectarian character in post-Assad Syria because of grievances that emerged during the civil war.
“For many of those people returning home, seeing their hometowns destroyed has a very visceral impact,” says Waters.
He suggests that this sense of grievance manifests as anger stemming from the perception that “the people responsible were let off the hook”. Those affected perceive a lack of genuine transitional justice.
The Syrian government has begun the long and complicated process of trying those responsible for crimes committed during the civil war. In August, Bashar Al-Assad and several senior regime figures were sentenced to death in absentia.
Despite this, many lower-level figures have not yet been arrested. According to Waters, this gives aggrieved communities “an excuse to cause problems”, even when those targeted by retaliatory violence were not actually responsible for the original crimes.
However, many within minority communities are sensitive to perceived state overreach. Genuine arrests linked to transitional justice can also be misrepresented, with such actions “often get[ting] blown up and distorted through misinformation and fake news”, explains Waters.
The arrests “become construed as the government targeting ethnic minorities – which can aggravate these communities further”.
Waters suggests that building genuine civil peace requires more than simply imposing justice. Instead, he argues, there needs to be “a systemic whole-of-sector approach, that brings together local leadership, revolutionary figures, security chiefs, and most importantly, those who are causing the civil disturbances”.
Governance disputes appear to be a driving force behind much of the recent violence in northeast Syria.
The integration of the SDF into the government is “sparking fears amongst Kurdish communities about the loss of Kurdish political autonomy, Kurdish language rights and security control in the region,” says Rose.
“These fears have been exacerbated by increasing fuel prices and the general cost of living, which have also contributed to public demonstrations.”
Meanwhile, Arab communities in the northeast are frustrated by the slow pace of integration. Reflecting long-standing grievances over what they perceive as corruption and discrimination under SDF rule, some want Damascus to take a more direct role in governing the region.
There is an economic dimension to this issue. The risk of violence erupting is heightened by the lack of real livelihoods for young men, and the sense that material support remains scant.
“You have unemployed young men, angry that their homes and workplaces are destroyed with nowhere else to channel their frustration,” says Waters. “These are the types that are sparking incidents.”
Alongside economics, part of the frustration is rooted in the sense that “communities have limited influence over how their areas are governed,” Hawach explains to The New Arab.
“Alongside security officials, local civilian leaders are often recruited from opposition networks. Minority candidates may be viewed with a degree of distrust, particularly Alawites, given their association with the former regime.”
Hawach suggests that the authorities could address these concerns by giving local communities more meaningful decision-making powers. He points to the Ismaili Council in the town of Salamiyah as a key example.
The Ismaili Council, which represents Syria’s Ismaili community, established contact with HTS before the fall of the regime and helped facilitate the city’s handover to advancing opposition forces.
Since then, the council has worked closely with local security chiefs and community leaders to ensure that occasional incidents of violence do not spiral into broader communal conflict.
“Syria could develop these local bodies with genuine authority over local services, public employment and disputes,” suggests Hawach.
Ultimately, ensuring civil peace in Syria will require the Syrian government to not only develop its security architecture but also address the grievances that cause local disputes to escalate.
Without meaningful accountability, economic development and greater local representation, efforts to restore stability risk leaving the underlying causes of communal tension unresolved.
Cian Ward is a journalist based in Damascus, covering conflict, migration, and humanitarian issues
Follow him on X: @CP__Ward
Edited by Charlie Hoyle
France’s violent protests have exposed a vulnerability in European security that conventional policing cannot easily address: the ability of foreign information networks to exploit domestic political crises, amplify social divisions and transform legitimate grievances into instruments of geopolitical pressure.
President Emmanuel Macron has acknowledged foreign manipulation of information surrounding the disturbances of 17–18 October but insists there is no evidence that foreign actors organised the violence itself. His assessment reflects the evidence currently available, although new investigations indicate that Russian-linked networks were actively exploiting the protest movement weeks before the worst disorder began.
On 24 October, France deployed approximately 70,000 police officers and gendarmes to prevent further violence. Yet the security operation addresses only the physical consequences of a crisis whose online dimension extends across national borders.
An investigation published on 22 October by Alliance4Europe provides evidence that Russian-linked information networks were exploiting French discontent well before the disturbances.
Researchers examined 547,471 posts and articles across nine languages. They identified 639 coordinated messages attributed with high confidence to Russia’s Doppelgänger operation, generating approximately 7.4 million views in the six weeks preceding 17 October.
The campaign used genuine concerns about living costs and public expenditure to promote a particular political argument: money allocated to Ukraine was being taken from European citizens.
This was not a random selection of grievances. France’s budget difficulties, public-service pressures and disagreements over defence expenditure provided material through which Moscow could seek to weaken support for Kyiv.
The researchers found that the operation targeted pro-European and pro-Ukraine politicians across the political spectrum. It praised selected proposals associated with Jean-Luc Mélenchon while also promoting nationalist narratives, illustrating a strategy driven less by ideological consistency than by opposition to existing European policies.
An earlier investigation by EK Strategies, published on 8 October, identified an additional development.
Russian-linked channels were not merely commenting on existing demonstrations. They were circulating protest dates, identifying organisers and encouraging French audiences to follow the example of demonstrators in Germany.
On 28 September, the International Reporters network published an appeal urging French audiences to take to the streets. Other channels subsequently reproduced information about planned school blockades and demonstrations.
In one instance, a channel identified as Gavroche published rhetoric encouraging an attack on France’s Education Ministry.
Such activity goes beyond retrospective propaganda. It attempts to influence participation and behaviour while events are developing. Nevertheless, evidence that a network encouraged protests does not establish that it controlled the organisers or directed subsequent violence.
The original demonstrations arose from domestic grievances over schools, prices and government policy. The significance of the foreign activity lies in attempts to redirect and intensify an existing movement.
Once violence erupted, the information campaign acquired an international audience.
Alliance4Europe found that claims blaming migrants or Islam for the disturbances appeared in approximately one in 33 French-language posts, compared with nearly one in five English-language posts.
False allegations that immigrants had burned Limoges town hall circulated substantially more frequently in English than in French.
The same report identified 1,018 articles distributed through 28 websites associated with the Russian Pravda network. Their rapid republication across languages enabled a common narrative to reach audiences far beyond France.
The operation also presents a longer-term technological problem. Repeated publication of manipulated accounts can contaminate material subsequently retrieved or reproduced by artificial-intelligence systems, allowing false narratives to persist beyond the original campaign.
The political effects were visible when President Donald Trump and other foreign leaders portrayed France’s unrest principally through immigration and cultural conflict.
Speaking in Qatar on 21 October, Macron rejected these portrayals and criticised the circulation of fabricated AI-generated images. His remarks identified foreign manipulation after the riots but stopped short of alleging foreign responsibility for their organisation.
The transcript raises a more substantial allegation: that the American Heritage Foundation and Russia’s FSB have participated in a coordinated effort to destabilise France.
There are documented connections between the Heritage Foundation and political institutions associated with Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán.
A 2026 investigation into Hungarian-funded international influence networks established that the Danube Institute had channelled substantial public funding towards foreign researchers and commentators. The institute also maintained a formal relationship with Heritage.
Heritage has acknowledged its cooperation with Hungarian conservative institutions but denied receiving funding or direction from foreign governments.
These relationships demonstrate the development of transatlantic political networks capable of circulating common ideas about sovereignty, migration and European integration.
They do not establish operational cooperation with Russian intelligence. Nor has credible evidence emerged connecting Heritage to the organisation or financing of France’s October riots. Ideological convergence, institutional cooperation and participation in a clandestine operation require separate evidential assessments.
The European Union’s response has exposed a regulatory problem.
Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, major online platforms must address systemic risks arising from their services, including the amplification of illegal content and threats to public security.
On 23 October, the French government announced enhanced cooperation with digital platforms. More than 100 priority reports had been submitted ahead of the weekend demonstrations, approximately half resulting in account suspensions.
These measures targeted unlawful online activity, particularly incitement to violence and looting. They did not constitute findings that the suspended accounts belonged to foreign intelligence networks.
The European Commission has likewise refrained from activating emergency measures under the Digital Services Act without sufficient evidence connecting foreign manipulation to the violence.
The broader security concern is that foreign operations can exploit the interval between the emergence of social unrest and the establishment of reliable information about its causes.
Russia need not organise an entire protest movement to advance its strategic interests. By amplifying domestic grievances, promoting hostility towards support for Ukraine and circulating distorted accounts internationally, it can attempt to convert France’s internal political difficulties into pressure on European policy.
With France approaching its 2027 presidential election, these operations warrant continuing scrutiny. The central investigative question is no longer simply whether foreign networks spread false information after violence occurred, but whether their activities before and during demonstrations materially influenced mobilisation, radicalisation or political responses.
The evidence currently demonstrates organised manipulation and attempts at amplification. Establishing direct responsibility for violence would require a further evidential step, involving financial records, communications, operational instructions or connections with identifiable perpetrators.
France’s experience illustrates how contemporary information warfare can operate within a democratic society without necessarily directing events on the ground. Its immediate objective may be to alter the political interpretation of a crisis; its longer-term consequence may be to influence the policies adopted in response.
Stefanie Keenan/Oscars/Getty Images for Academy Museum Foundation
The stage was set for Taylor Swift to sing her way back into critics' hearts — and back onto the country charts — with nostalgic twang and another picture to burn.
Instead, the curtains raised to reveal a rare strategic misstep.
This week is the 20th anniversary of Swift's debut album, "Taylor Swift." For much of this year, fans had been expecting Swift to mark the occasion by releasing "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" and reclaiming her place in the country-star pantheon — especially after "I Knew It, I Knew You," her cowgirl-inspired single for the "Toy Story 5" soundtrack, became a crossover hit in June, topping the Billboard Hot 100 and Hot Country Songs simultaneously and finishing at No. 2 on the Songs of the Summer chart for 2026.
"I Knew It, I Knew You" suggested an imminent return to Swift's country beginnings, one that would be welcomed with open arms by longtime listeners and Nashville gatekeepers alike. The charm offensive was well underway: Swift gave interviews and exclusive snippets to country radio stations and publicly gushed about honoring her "country roots." Even the song's lyrics seemed to play like a sly Swiftian in-joke, the kind of marketing wink that she's famous for weaving into her work: "I remembered I loved you / Came back when it mattered."
But the "Taylor Swift" 20th anniversary celebration has been interrupted by a flashier, less prudent version of its titular author.
In late September, Swift surprised fans by unveiling the deluxe edition of her 12th album. "The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore" features four new songs Swift said she wrote in an excitable creative burst last year, shortly after the original album's release.
Commercially, this unexpected move has paid off. One of the new "Showgirl" tracks, "Patient Zero," has been No. 1 on the Hot 100 for three consecutive weeks, making "Showgirl" one of just a handful of albums throughout history to yield three chart-topping hits. The album also returned to No. 1, adding hundreds of thousands of additional sales to its already eye-popping total.
Strategically, however, revisiting "Showgirl" in lieu of "Taylor Swift" is far from savvy — especially for a self-described mastermind who is seldom caught in the middle of a PR campaign with a domino out of place. Swift had seemingly arranged her country-music homecoming with care, precision, and pitch-perfect anticipation. Now, that momentum is gone.
After two decades of Swift's solo-written anthems and high-pressure reinventions, the 2025 arrival of "Showgirl" was uniquely disenchanting. Swift had recently wrapped the highest-grossing tour in history, reunited with two of the music industry's most revered producers, and promised the album would contain "the best ideas we've ever had." This was positioned to be her pop opus.
Alas, "Showgirl" was overhyped and underbaked, peppered with ham-handed imagery and corny puns. Critics tempered their disappointment with justifications: Swift is too famous and too successful to disappear into her work; her public persona has grown too distracting and unwieldy; she's likely experiencing professional burnout.
This year's deluxe album was received with much less mercy, earning a 39 out of 100 on Metacritic, a 40-point drop from the original's score. When Swift brought "Showgirl" back to the fore, its shortcomings shifted focus away from the goodwill she'd spent all summer cultivating with "I Knew It, I Knew You."
Even worse, the new batch of "Showgirl" tracks included "Cleveland!" — an egregious attempted kiss-off that indulges all of Swift's worst impulses. Social media exploded with derisive glee, with some going so far as to say Swift had ruined her own songwriting legacy. Even fans who defended the song called it "rage bait" and "not that deep."
Even if the other deluxe tracks are catchy, polished, and well-structured, they were unleashed at a far too precarious time to receive the general public's benefit of the doubt.
Indeed, many assumed that Swift, ever the tactician, would move on from the "Showgirl" era with haste — and what better way to course-correct than by reminding us how she became a household name?
Back in 2006, critics were charmed by the precocious lyrics and banjo-laden hooks that populate Swift's debut, from "Tim McGraw" and "Our Song" to "Should've Said No" and "Picture to Burn." At 16, Swift had already penned indelible zingers like "You said the way my blue eyes shine put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said, 'That's a lie.'"
Twenty years later, the highlights on "Taylor Swift" stand as peak examples of Nashville-honed storytelling — the kind that helped pave the way for a new wave of country stars like Ella Langley to dominate the charts.
Of course, Swift may still release "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)." It could arrive tomorrow, next week, or years from now. While the "Taylor's Version" project was made redundant when Swift bought back her masters last year, she had already rerecorded her debut by the time the purchase went through. "I really love how it sounds now," she told fans, saying it would be released "when the time is right."
But it's hard to imagine a better window than the one Swift just squandered. If "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" does end up closely following "The Encore," it will no longer live in its own moment, but in the shadow of a critical flop. The triumphant return-to-country narrative has been muddled. Plus, with "Patient Zero" still performing well on the charts, it doesn't make economic sense to release another album that would siphon away attention and streams.
So why did Swift decide this time wasn't right for her debut to reemerge? We can only speculate, though it's possible that Swift's talent for brand management has distracted us from her primary drive, the very thing that made "Taylor Swift" a sensation in the first place: She's a creative, an artist, a songwriter with something to say. Perhaps this was not a calculated choice, but a personal one. Perhaps she simply wrote new songs and decided to share them. Perhaps she anticipated "The Encore" would face more pushback than "Taylor Swift (Taylor's Version)" and decided to do it anyway.
Swift's lyrics offer clues to this effect. "Babylon," the final deluxe track on "The Encore," warns against "using nostalgia as a weapon to hurt yourself" and "missing all the best parts" of the present day. The story is not told from Swift's first-person perspective, but, when read as a meta-narrative, it seems to forestall critiques just like this one — asking listeners not to romanticize the past precisely as she declines the most obvious opportunity to monetize her own.
"Babylon" doubles as a preemptive epilogue to the embattled "Showgirl" era. Swift has recently been accused of devolving, of failing to live up to the heights of her past work — as if her now-beloved albums like "Red" and "Reputation" were never dismissed or ridiculed upon release.
Will "Showgirl" receive the same revaluation? Only time will tell, but it sounds like Swift is feeling optimistic.
"You hate this song," she sings, "but you wake up on the train with your headphones gone / Now that melody is all you want."
Sixteen days before Election Day, Abdul El-Sayed is sitting at the dinette of a bus that has his face plastered all over it.
I had just played him a clip on my iPad. It was of Tashawna Gill, a Detroit organizer he knows well and who was one of his earliest supporters, describing an alarming trend in what she and her canvassers were hearing from Black voters in the city’s retirement communities.
“They’re skipping that part of the ballot,” Gill said. “We do the senior home tour, and they’re not interested. They skipped that on the ballot. They have returned their absentees, and some of them have shared that they’ve returned their absentees without checking the box for anything for the Senate race.”
In the tight space on the bus, the clip finishes, and El-Sayed says: “I hope more folks will fill out that part of the ballot. This one’s for all the marbles.”
How did it feel, I asked? Hearing that his story, his message isn’t landing with people in a community he has long served, people he needs if he wants to become Michigan’s next senator?
El-Sayed has a reputation of being pretty sure of himself. Unflappable, quick on his feet, someone who leans into the “don’t let ’em see you sweat” brand of politics.
For a second, that drops.
”Obviously, it’s heartbreaking. I’ve spent most of my career serving exactly those communities,” he says. “But I also get that campaigns are complicated.”
He blames the tens of millions of dollars in PAC money for the tepidness within the Black community toward his attempt to hold Michigan’s open Senate seat for Democrats, and for “destroying trust” he built with the Black community in his time as a public health official in Detroit.
“Rebuilding it takes a long time, so I’ve got work to do to rebuild trust, but I’ve been serving those communities for a long time,” he said. “I’m confident in the work I have done and confident in the work that I will do. And I hope I get the opportunity to do it.”
He notes that he’s not sure, either, just how widespread the sentiment Gill related is among his would-be constituents.
And just like that, the self-assuredness is back.
It’s clear, though, that he’s hurt that the work he has done in Detroit is being misconstrued or discounted, or that folks just don’t know about it. And he’s running out of time to spread the word.
The clip that I had El-Sayed respond to was from a walk I took with Gill on a quiet street back in Detroit.
She wanted me to see the lawns on Greenview Avenue in North Rosedale Park. It’s a neighborhood of brick houses on Detroit’s northwest side that she calls one of the most educated, highest-turnout precincts in the city. And she would know — her office is one block over.
Gill is a well-known organizer who chairs the Michigan Democratic Party’s Grassroots caucus, founded the African American Leadership Institute, helped get Gretchen Whitmer elected governor and was an early endorser of El-Sayed’s Senate campaign when most of the party establishment — including Whitmer — was behind U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens. Every day, Gill’s office sends out about 70 canvassers across Wayne County.
She knows of what she speaks, especially when it comes to Black voters.
“If you look down here, do you see any yard signs? Look left and right,” she says. I do, and it’s … empty. “It doesn’t even look like it’s an election going on anywhere,” she said.
Typically, Gill said, the streets are pretty lined with them. That they aren’t now, so close to the election, “is scary to me.”
Yard signs are not votes, but they are a sign of enthusiasm and of a campaign that is working hard to get those signs stuck in lawns.
Detroit is 75% Black, according to census data, the largest majority-Black big city in the country. And the Democratic playbook for winning statewide has not changed in a lifetime: run up the score in Wayne and Genesee counties, then hang on everywhere else.
When Detroit doesn’t turn out, Democrats lose. Two years ago, when Elissa Slotkin narrowly held Michigan’s other Senate seat, she won 86% of the Black vote compared with Republican Mike Rogers’ 12%. Recent polling shows El-Sayed hovering below 80% of the Black vote.
The concerns aren’t new. Back in the primary in August, El-Sayed eked out a 1-point win against Stevens. He won the college towns and progressive strongholds. He lost Detroit by 28 points.
El-Sayed seems well aware that the tepidness exists. The campaign says it and party entities have spent nearly $14.3 million in paid media specifically for the Detroit and Flint markets.
They’ve invited the equivalent of the Black political Avengers to endorse and campaign with him in the state, including former Vice President Kamala Harris, Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock and Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts. Former President Barack Obama is stumping with El-Sayed in Detroit this weekend.
The campaign says it has been to 45 Black churches and had more than 125 meetings and roundtables with Black elected officials, faith leaders and community organizations.
It’s not something that’s been lost on his opponent either; they see an opening. The Rogers campaign opened a storefront office on Livernois Avenue in Detroit while we were there, and a group calling itself Democrats for Mike Rogers has been campaigning for him. A recent ad features Black voters saying they felt El-Sayed cared more about Palestine than Detroit.
“If you’re from Detroit, you know no Republican will be going through Detroit like they’re going through Detroit. They are in places a Republican would never be,” Gill said. “So I’m scared that a slice of that, just a little bit, will go to them.”
A Rogers campaign spokesperson touted their outreach, saying they are the first Republican to open a Detroit office, have visited a dozen Black churches and visited Flint and Pontiac “multiple times.” And multiple Democrats in Michigan have told me that Rogers is showing up in places in Detroit that haven’t seen a statewide GOP candidate in years.
Nearly every person I talked to on the ground in Detroit pointed to three reasons why El-Sayed is underperforming with Black voters.
The first one is uncomfortable to talk about: historic tensions between Black and Arab Michiganders. Dearborn sits right on the edge of Detroit, and today Arab Americans are estimated to make up the majority of that city’s 105,000 residents. Older Black voters know the long, violent history between the two communities. In 1980 an Iraqi immigrant store owner shot a Black customer he suspected of stealing soda. In 2023 a clerk at a gas station locked customers inside with an armed man after a card used to purchase less than $4 was declined. One of them was killed. A crash this fall reignited the fight.
Gill puts it in plain terms: “African Americans, especially seniors, feel like they were treated disrespectful, targeted, kicked out of the stores in Dearborn. So our seniors and our parents, when they see Abdul, they blame him for all of that.”
He wasn’t there, I point out. She knows that but says that trauma is unfairly being taken out on his candidacy.
Former Obama administration official Portia Roberson is CEO of Focus: HOPE, a civil rights organization in Detroit founded in 1968. She put those tensions this way:
“It has seemingly been that Arab people have been able to move to Detroit in this area and find ways to be successful, whether that is owning gas stations, whether that is owning party stores, and that Blacks who have been here have been locked out of those places,” she said.
I asked El-Sayed about the tension.
“I’ll be honest with you, I understand. I’ve worked in the city of Detroit. You walk into one of these party stores, you walk into a gas station and you’ve got somebody that looks like me behind bulletproof glass, and you look at the way that they’re treating customers. The number of times that people have been denied a bathroom or their kid gets sold a loosie cigarette out of the back or they’re catcalling a woman in the community. That’s deeply inappropriate. It’s wrong and I’ve never been one of those guys,” he said, “even if I look like one of those guys.”
While he was health director in Wayne County, he said, he led a conversation with “those guys” about why that behavior was inappropriate, adding, “You can’t just take money out and not invest in the local community. You can’t just deny local contractors opportunities to service your business and think that’s OK.”
That second reason? The Uncommitted movement in 2024. In February of that year, more than 101,000 Michigan Democrats, about 13%, voted “uncommitted” in the presidential primary to protest President Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza. El-Sayed publicly announced that he was one of them. Nine months later, Harris lost the state as Black voters watched a party they had carried for decades fail to show up for the first Black woman at the top of the presidential ticket.
When it comes to the Black community, El-Sayed leans hard on his track record. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan’s mandate to him when he hired him back in 2015 to run a health department that had been gutted: “rebuild it.” In his first year, the department restarted lead screenings for children and helped pay for them in Detroit schools. The department also partnered with a nonprofit to offer free eye exams and glasses to thousands of students. After his failed run for governor in 2018, El-Sayed became director of Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services.
His stance on Uncommitted is overshadowing all of that.
Roberson has voted consistently her entire adult life, and that movement still stings.
“As a Black woman, I’ve never had the luxury of voting on one issue. I’ve never had that luxury. I’ve never been able to walk into a polling booth and say, this is my one issue and if it doesn’t correlate with my one issue, I’m willing to throw the rest of it away,” she said. “We knew all of the things that have now happened to us, and you still decided to be uncommitted because of your issue.”
El-Sayed endorsed Harris the day after she became the nominee; Uncommitted largely was about the primary for him. And Harris came to Detroit just last month to endorse and campaign with El-Sayed. She has gotten over his criticism of the Biden-Harris policies.
“But a lot of folks haven’t,” Roberson said, laying out the very kind of single-issue objections she had just disavowed. “And I have friends who are very politically astute, and they have said, ‘I will never forgive that.’ It got so big so quickly that they couldn’t pull it back when it was time to coalesce around Kamala Harris, and now we are here.”
At the doors Gill’s team knocks on, the version that seniors are sharing is harsher than what actually happened and full of wrong information, she said.
They tell her teams, “‘He didn’t vote for Kamala. He didn’t help her get in.’ That’s the No. 1 thing,” she said. So the message from his campaign to set the record straight “needs to be louder.”
The third reason is largely ideology, and in some ways reflects the maneuvering between progressives and mainstream Democrats within the larger party. Older Black voters in Detroit are more likely to be politically moderate. El-Sayed is running on Medicare for All, and Rogers has spent the fall telling anyone who will listen that Detroit is about to elect a socialist. For the record, El-Sayed says he is a capitalist.
The campaign’s answer to older Black voters has largely been to head to the Black church, the Old Faithful of politics. His team says he has been to 45 Black churches during this election season.
Last Sunday he visited two churches in Flint. His message was, yes, political and full of references to a shared God between his Muslim and their Christian faith. But one of his biggest applause lines was his promise to be back as Sen. El-Sayed.
“This is not my first time in communities like these,” he said from the front of the stage. “I’ve been showing up to do this work for the better part of a decade, and I hope that I can show up for you in the United States Senate. If you give me that honor, I promise you this will not be the last time you see me, and the next time I come, God willing, I’m bringing resources and I’m taking your pain and your purpose with me to the halls of power.”
The bridge he’s trying to build is a difficult one. A 2024 poll from AARP found that among Black Michaganders, only 29% called themselves “liberal.”
El-Sayed’s bet is that a different Black voter can come and make up the difference. “There’s a generational divide, and even if there are some seniors who might say, ‘You know what, we’re going to leave this blank because we’ve seen all the ads,’ there are a lot of young Black voters who are like, ‘This is the first time I’ve ever voted,’” he said.
The candidate isn’t blind to the tensions. On the contrary, he seems very aware of them and how hard they may be to overcome. But he’s also running out of time.
I asked Roberson if she thinks he has done enough in the short period he has been the nominee to get the Black vote where it really needs to be.
“That’s tough. Probably not,” she said. “I think there’s more he could have done. And listen, I’m giving grace to the fact that he had a contentious primary. But I do think there were more voters out there, and there are still more voters out there that he could be talking to.”
Her larger point is that it’s less about effort and more about translation. That in a lot of his ads, his platform sound great to the voters who follow politics closely, and who maybe aren’t affected by those three points of tension.
She’s also pretty hopeful. That when Detroit’s most reliable voters wake up on Election Day, they will do what they’ve always done.
”We know what we’re going to get if he doesn’t win,” she said. “So what are we so afraid of that we’re going to get if he does win?”
Nobody on Greenview Avenue has answered that yet. The lawns are still empty.
“Detroit just needs to be waking up. It needs to be waking up because it is asleep,” Gill said. “That is my fear, that Detroit has not woken up.”
El-Sayed says he’ll keep coming back either way.
“At the end of the day, whether folks vote for me or they don’t vote for me, I intend to serve in the same way that I showed up to serve back in 2015 when I came to Detroit to rebuild the health department.”
MS NOW producer Alexander Trowbridge contributed to this report.
The post The signs for El-Sayed in Detroit — and the lack of them — are setting off alarm bells appeared first on MS NOW.
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