As Egypt on Sunday celebrated its annual October 6 Victory Day, commemorating the 1973 Arab-Israeli war known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War, neighboring Syria drew attention across Arab media for a strikingly different move. President Ahmad al-Sharaa has issued a decree reshaping the country’s official calendar and abolishing several long-standing national holidays. The new order, announced in Damascus, eliminates four commemorations that had been observed under former President Bashar al-Assad. Among them are March 8 Revolution Day, Teachers’ Day, Martyrs’ Day, and 6 October’s Liberation War. The decision has drawn criticism from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which expressed “astonishment and deep regret” over the removal of 6 May, Martyrs’ Day, and 6 October, both of which, it said, hold “considerable national significance” as symbols of sacrifice and unity in modern Syrian history. In a statement, the Britain-based monitoring group warned that erasing these observances risks severing Syrians from a shared past that transcends politics. The legacy of the 1973 war with Israel, the group stated, does not belong to any one ruler or administration, but to all Syrians, from every region, community, and generation, who took…
