The news from Syria is grim. The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has accused Government forces of killing at least 745 Alawite civilians in the coastal regions of Latakia and Tartous. So far, there are reports of about 30 massacres. Former President Bashar al-Assad and his family were Alawites, an offshoot of Shiism that makes up around 10% of Syria’s population. It looks a lot like payback.

More than 1,000 people have reportedly died in the past 48 hours, making it the worst violence in Syria since Assad fell last December. The BBC reports that the death toll also includes 125 security forces loyal to the Islamist-led government and 148 former regime loyalists, who have clashed for several days.

The extreme violence poses a serious threat to the stability of the nascent Syrian state, especially as regards confidence in former al-Qaeda leader-turned-Islamist-turned-statesman Ahmed al-Sharaa. When I visited Syria a few weeks ago, Damascus bore the clear signs of 13 years of war and decades of autocracy. But the people were also positive; they hoped for a better future.

And so, tentatively, did the watching world. No Western politician or diplomat I spoke to thought that the end of Assad meant that things would now be rosy for Syria. But they felt they had to give things a chance. Talk of lifting sanctions began — a vital necessity if the new government is to have any chance at all of rebuilding the shattered country.

The US decided to lift the $10 million bounty it had on Sharaa’s head (albeit under his previous nom de guerre, al-Jolani). The general feeling was that Sharaa is sincere in his desire to govern fairly and in his abandonment of Jihad (even if only for pragmatic reasons — he’s intelligent enough to understand that it doesn’t lead anywhere good). The question was always of course whether those around him felt the same.

Perhaps that question is now starting to be answered.

Yesterday I spoke to an Alawite on the ground. “In the city of Banias alone, which is 12 km from my village, about 100 civilians were killed yesterday, including about 30 women, children and elderly people,” he told me. “Today we hear about the names of other dead. In other areas, the numbers are greater. No movement is allowed. Any Alawite who moves is executed, and it is forbidden to remove the bodies or treat the wounded. Civilian hospitals are reserved only for the attackers.”

Reports are surfacing online that much of the violence is from pro-Assad loyalists determined to undermine the regime. But even if true, no one denies the massacres of civilians, including children, and at any rate the footage online (while some of it may well be old masquerading as new) confirm the extent of the incontinent murder.

Apart from the pointless waste of life and the return of the worst type of brutality to a country that has had its fill, the violence is instructive. Syria is a multi-ethnic and religious state. Beyond the Sunni majority, it has large numbers of Christians, Alawite and Kurds. Any settlement that seeks to impose a hegemony, be it Sunni, Alawite, Christian or Kurd, will end in violence. Syria’s future must be, if not an avowed federation, then a settlement based around compromise that accommodates all. And the (understandable) desire for revenge must be stamped out.

If not, then the violence we are seeing will become the norm, and the country will return to the chaos of Assad, only this time it will be worse. Alongside the horrors will be the pain of a missed opportunity that, had it been approached correctly, might well have led to real change.

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David Patrikarakos is UnHerd‘s foreign correspondent. His latest book is War in 140 characters: how social media is reshaping conflict in the 21st century. (Hachette)

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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