In the fight for a new Syria, the country’s musicians are watching the Islamist rebel leadership with alarm and hoping to build on the hard-won gains made during the nearly 14-year civil war.

The conflict injected energy and focus into the emerging heavy metal music scene.

As the fighting subsides, the electronic music and dance performance industries have boomed, and Syria’s nightlife has revived.

Now, its members are preparing to engage with the government led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group with roots in Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. HTS says it broke with past extremism years ago.

“We had to organize ourselves before we went to them because they were so well organized,” DJ and musician Maher Green said. “We were willing to talk to them with logic. We were willing to talk to them with real advice. chat.”

Green said electronic music organizers found a way to talk to security services working for the former president.

“They don’t understand that 50 boys and girls get together and dance in such a stupid way,” he said. “We’ve built a relationship with them over the years to do it in a good, peaceful way.”

The Assad regime was less tolerant of the heavy metal rockers who started underground bands in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

They view it as a subversive Western subculture associated with Satanism.

“I went to the intelligence service about three times just because I sold this music,” said Nair Hadidi, who owns a music store. “They made me sign some papers saying I wouldn’t do it again.”

When the Syrian democratic revolution was brutally suppressed and a bloody civil war erupted, the focus changed.

“Before the war, even if you had long hair and wore a black T-shirt, a metallic dance T-shirt, security would take you away. They suspected you were a Satanist or something,” Hadidi said.

“After the war started, they were too busy to dig like this. They were more afraid of political issues.”

This opened up space for the emergence of a vibrant heavy metal scene, which was the subject of Monzer Darwish’s documentary Syrian Metal Is War.

The war may have energized Metallica, but it ultimately led to the exodus of musicians who felt the country no longer had a future.

“Ninety percent of my friends are now in Europe, the Netherlands and Germany,” Hadidi said, shaking his head.

One musician who remained was Wajd Khair, who quit the music industry in 2011 when the killings began.

“It seemed like any lyrics I wrote didn’t express what was really going on, there were no words that could express what was going on,” he told me.

Just last year, Khair finally started playing and recording again. Now he wonders what Islamic leadership means for creative freedom.

Asked whether he would keep a low profile until the situation became clearer, he said: “We have to be bolder.”

“We have to be heard. We have to let everyone know that we are here. We exist. This is not just the Islamic Front and the Islamic State. I don’t think it does anyone any good to keep a low profile in this situation”.

Kyle was encouraged by the pragmatism shown by the rebels in the days following the takeover. “The indicators are that we want to do better,” he said.

But as he speaks, we hear that HTS has closed the opera house. Kyle exclaimed that, if true, “that’s not a good sign.”

We rushed to the venue, only to be told by officials outside that this was a false alarm and that the venerable institution would be opened along with other public buildings a week after the rebel victory.

HTS is of course committed to respecting rights and freedoms. It seems sensitive to Damascus’s cosmopolitan culture. State television began broadcasting Islamic chants last week but withdrew them in less than 24 hours as protests erupted on social media.

In the square outside the opera house, Safana Bakleh was trying to perform revolutionary songs with the choir she directed. Accompanied by enthusiastic young people, she handed over her drum and let them chant.

“It’s probably not going to be an easy road,” she said. “Maybe we will encounter some new obstacles, but we used to have corruption, we used to have dictatorships, we used to have secret police. We are still hopeful for the future… because we have a very, very large group of them The opposition, the artists, the actors, the musicians and the composers, and the future of Syria.”

But Hadidi says they don’t want to trade political authoritarianism for religious fundamentalism.

“I hope HTS sticks to their word about freedom because we don’t want to be another Afghanistan or another country ruled by a particular party or ruler who forces you to (obey) some rules.”

Determined to be part of Syria’s future, Green said it was important for the arts community to act quickly.

“In the first week of liberating Syria, (HTS) seemed unwilling to ask for help culturally. They had a lot of problems, they were looking at the economy, looking at forming a new government,” he said.

“We’re trying to organize before they start looking at culture. That way we can get there first, (and we have to) be consistent in our opinions.”

Like others here, Green has been experimenting with mixing traditional Arabic music with electronic beats.

The culture of Islamist insurgents, he said, “is religious songs and nothing more.”

“It’s a little backward for us. We were in Syria before the war, and we experimented a lot in Syria during the war. We evolved a lot. We had a lot of mixed cultures.”

Syria’s music scene revived and even thrived during the civil war—and now it faces new, unexpected tests.