When the leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed last month, my social media lights up with images and videos from Syria, my country of origin. In some areas, notably in Idlib and the suburbs of Aleppo, residents celebrated late into the night, playing loud music and holding banners calling for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, be next. People were handing out candy; celebratory messages, memes and phone calls flooded my WhatsApp. But news channels broadcast just across the border picked up something else: a wave of grief sweeping across southern Lebanon.

The jubilation on one side of the line and the mourning on the other reflect the deep complexity of our region. For several years, Hezbollah ravaged the Syrian opposition in the name of Assad’s autocratic government. His intervention left deep scars: displacement, destruction and trauma, particularly in the suburbs of Damascus and Homs, besieged by Hezbollah. The Syrians who welcomed Nasrallah’s assassination weren’t exactly celebrating the Israelis who carried it out. But many of us felt that, for once, the world had tilted in our favor.

Assad – and his father, the dictator Hafez al-Assad, before him – had made Syria the crucial geographic and political link between Iran and Hezbollah. The Lebanese Shiite militia could not have survived without the weapons, fighters and funds provided by Tehran via Syria. But in 2011, circumstances in Syria threatened this arrangement. Peaceful protests challenged the country’s autocracy; Assad greeted them brutally and the country’s opposition turned into armed rebellion. Nasrallah had no choice but to defend his supply line and political network. Hezbollah justified the intervention as a war against extremists, a fight against chaos and a defense of Syria’s sovereignty against Western-backed militants. But on the ground, Hezbollah was not only fighting armed factions; he was waging a war against the Syrian people.

Read: The madness of Nasrallah

Madaya, a small town near the Lebanese border, lies along Hezbollah’s supply route to Syria. Armed rebel fighters reached this town in 2015 and Hezbollah, along with Assad’s forces, surrounded it, cutting off food and medical supplies. Within weeks, the inhabitants of Madaya were dying of hunger. A border town that once housed markets for contraband electronics and clothing, transformed into a fortress of suffering. Some civilians began eating leaves, grass or stray animals. People searching for food were shot by snipers or killed by landmines. At least 23 people, including six babies under the age of one, died of starvation in Madaya in just over a month, in December 2015 and January 2016. The international outcry did not prevent Hezbollah from continuing to impose its siege.

Syrians have tried to denounce these horrors by posting stories and photos of Madaya on social media. But soon after, supporters of Hezbollah and the Syrian government sadistically adopted the hashtag “in solidarity with the siege of Madaya” and posted photos of tables laden with grilled meat and fish, as well as selfies in front of overloaded refrigerators. Despite reports from many human rights groups to the contrary, the government and Hezbollah have claimed that the famine photos are fake and that there are no civilians left in Madaya anyway – just foreign agents and traitors whose death was necessary to save Syria.

Madaya remained under blockade until 2017, when Qatar, representing rebel forces, and Iran, representing the Syrian government, negotiated an evacuation deal transferring survivors of the siege to opposition-held areas, like Idlib. Worn out by hunger and bombing, the evacuees were asked to pack only one small bag each and leave everything else behind.

Hezbollah has not been kinder to other Syrian cities. In Aleppo, a relentless bombing campaign, carried out jointly by the Syrian government, Russian forces and Hezbollah, has destroyed neighborhoods, killed thousands of people and destroyed infrastructure. Nasrallah called the contest for Aleppo the “biggest battle” of the Syrian war. He deployed additional fighters there to strengthen the regime’s hold. Civilians were forced to evacuate – and as they did so, Hosein Mortada, one of the founders of the Iranian news channel Al-Alam and an embedded Hezbollah propagandist, stood by them and mocked them .

Mortada was already infamous among Syrians for turning media coverage into a weapon of psychological warfare. With his thick Lebanese accent and brutal live broadcasts from the battlefield, Mortada applauded the missile strikes and called opposition figures “sheep.” In a YouTube video, he sits in a big bulldozer and touts its power, then squats in the dirt with a toy truck, happily saying, “This bulldozer is better for some of you, because you don’t have nothing. »

Mall those who endured the siege from their cities, only to see Hezbollah agents mock and question their suffering before the eyes of the international community, have little ambivalence about celebrating Nasrallah’s death. They view the fate of the Hezbollah leader with a sense of tragic justice: Finally, someone whose hands were stained with blood and who seemed untouchable was killed.

But as prominent Syrian intellectual and dissident Yassin Al Haj Saleh has often reminded us, looking at the world solely through the Syrian prism only isolates us. For many of us Syrians who participated in the uprising and now live in exile, this warning has resonated since Nasrallah’s death. Both on social media and in our private conversations, we wonder whether the justice felt in the wake of Nasrallah’s disappearance should be tempered by concern for broader regional suffering. We ask ourselves: is it moral to welcome the assassination of Nasrallah if the price to pay is the destruction of Lebanon, a country already shaken by economic collapse, political mismanagement and the Beirut port explosion two years ago? just a few years old? Nasrallah is dead, but for many Syrians opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza, which killed thousands of civilians, the manner in which he died made the event difficult to celebrate. Dara Abdallah, a Syrian writer and poet exiled in Berlin, wrote on social media that he could not condone Nasrallah’s assassination because the means used – what appears to have been several 2,000-pound bombs rather than, say , a sniper’s bullet – demonstrated that “Israel has no problem eliminating an entire group of people just to kill one person.” »

Read: How Beirut reacts to the death of Hassan Nasrallah

I fear that once the parties, memes and platters of treats are over, Syria will be even more isolated. Our country’s anguish has been relegated to the margins of global consciousness. His regime committed atrocities detailed in thousands of pages of documents that resulted in only distant and largely symbolic trials in European courts. To experience all of this is to understand, in the deepest sense, that the moral compass of the world does not always point to justice.

When news of Nasrallah’s death broke, many Syrians felt, for a brief moment, that an elusive dream had taken shape: that the elimination of a figure like Nasrallah would bring us closer in some way. or another of peace, of reparation for the wrongs that have been done to us. But Lebanon’s rising death toll also suggests a bitter truth. It reminds me of other moments in our region’s history – the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, for example – that initially seemed to deliver justice but only perpetuated the cycle of violence.

In our region, we sometimes feel like accountability is destined to be followed by more destruction and bloodshed – as if we can never say that the scales have tipped in our favor without questioning the cost.