What does war feel like? What does martial violence do to a person’s senses and sensibilities? How does it practically perform actual injury on human bodies, within which socio-political landscapes, through which materialities and technologies, amid which processes? How do these mangled bodies, themselves, sense and make sense of this injury? How do they give expression to this war-experience: to living through – and with – wounding, stench-retching, marching, pliers, thumbscrews, spit hoods, prison cells, boats with starboard seats reserved for corpses, bombed-out neighbourhoods, mushroom farming in tunnel-playgrounds… to experiencing violence with such brutal intimacy across every mode of being (be it corporeal, sensory, aesthetic, affective, material, semiotic, social, and/or spacio-temporal)? And what can we learn about war, i.e., what kind of war-knowledges can we generate, if we begin our war-stories from within these articulations of embodied experiences of the martial? These are the questions that drive this text. To grapple with them, I propose an experiment in “empirical philosophy” (Mol, 2010) across two stages. First, we – Omar Imam, Khaled Barakeh, Ayham Jabr, Sulafa Hijazi, Malu Halasa and Zaher Omareen, Syrian artists and critics whose martial experiences, works, ideas, positionalities, and worldings are the very substratum of this manuscript and I – show you what actively ‘living’ and ‘being’ in violence feels like, collaging and naming as many dimensions of this embodied experience as we could. In/ From/ Through/ With this (first) moment of translation, of translating lived Syrial ‘war-experience’ into a grounded Syrial ‘war-knowledge’, we see that a given instantiation of martial violence can (potentially) be intimately, flesh-ly, sense-ly, experienced as being (I) processual, (II) embodied, (III) multiple, (IV) plural and (V) partially connected, constantly but not consistently, to other violent worldings, i.e., martial violence can be experienced as Surreal. Or rather, in this case, as Syrial. Second, to test the hypothesis that this Syriality can be operationalized as an “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” (Barad, 2007) that could (potentially) allow us to generate a form of war-knowledge that can capture the (i) complex processuality of “war’s incessant becoming” (Bousquet et al., 2020) & (ii) “pull the bodies and experiences of war out of the entombments created by (IR) theories… into the open as crucial elements of war” (Sylvester, 2012) by bringing focus to (iii) the actual machinations of the “enactment of injury” – “war’s primary task” (Scarry, 1987) – and it’s (iv) lived experience, I invite you to witness the ‘on-life’ (Della Ratta, 2018) of Khaled al-Assad’s beheading in Palmyra-Tadmur, and globally, with me. I map how this beheading can be (a) Syrialy sensed and made sensible teasing out the granular details of the ‘doing’ of injury here, (b) of the martial politics this beheading is Syrialy entangled with, (c) of how it Syrialy affects our socio-political worldings, and (d) trace hiccupped Syrial “refrains” (Deleuze, 1994) of these sensibilities, aesthetics, politics, affects and other entanglements – of this beheading’s Syrial rhythms – across both, the “small world” (Austin, 2017) of beheadings at large, and through other violent worlds. In/ From /Through /With this (second) moment of translation, of translating grounded Syrial war-knowledge into Syrial war-knowledge about beheadings, I learn that “critically reimagining” (Mhurchú & Shindo, 2016) a martial violence through Syrialism – i.e., writing about different martial violences by Syrialy reimagining them from within ‘injury’ – makes room for us to tell “a different kind of war-story” (Nordstrom, 1997) than the ones that came before it: an affective kind. It crafts a possibility for us to sense/make sensible the different affective politics that occupy our “pluriverse” (Blaney & Tickner, 2017), martially or otherwise, rhizomatic-ly participating in the emergence of seemingly unentangled violent worlds and instantiations. In the case of Khaled al-Assad’s beheading this takes the shape of a war-story about an affective politics of “ruination” (Stoler, 2008). And because this is an experiment, I fail. A lot, and often. I try to make sense of the ‘meaning-less-ness’ of political violence. And fail, succeeding only in making it sensible. Barely. I try to make it sensible by working from within the intimacies of self-declaration: of working from within my interlocutors’ own works, words, and experiences and mine. And fail, succeeding only in translating fragmented articulations of these embodied experiences. I try to make it sensible by designing this text to mimic the cadence of this Syrial experience of violence without conceding ethical ground. And fail, succeeding only in vaguely reproducing the overwhelming affect of a reality “twisted” (Hirsch, 2014) through violence’s world-“unmaking” (Scarry, 1987) and ‘remaking’ rhythms. Again, barely. And in trying to make the very moments of surviving such injuries sensible, and to make sense of them, from within the survivors’ own worldings– my way of honouring them by “staying with the trouble” (Haraway, 2016) of taking them ‘seriously’ – I fail, unwittingly but irrefutably, at not leaving any room to truly honour their resilience, succeeding only in letting the concluding pages of this text stand in solidarity with them there. Barely. So, when I encounter these failings in the manuscript, I “name them and sit with them” (Lopes et al., 2021), wrestle with them, and chart alternative pathways that could have led elsewhere, and/but (more importantly perhaps) through it all, keep trying to make space “for more (/other Syrial) stories” (ibid). Because that is the sole desire of this text: “speculation” (Lisle, 2021). This dissertation, my interlocutors’ works and lived experiences, our collaborative concept-work, the story itself, none of it are in any way, shape or form an ‘explanation’ for/ of martial violence, or beheadings, or a ‘theory’ about ‘embodied experience’ of the ‘martial’, or a thesis on ‘political violence’ in Syria, or a manual for conducting Syrial research, or an example of working with/ through violence’s relational ontologies. This text is a description. It is a performance. It is a translation of an anthology of epistolary stories, journal entries, (un)reliable narrations. An exercise in critical re-imagination and world-building. All it asks is that you float through it – surrender a little to the current of its aesthetics – and allow it to take you to places where you can affectively experience what the injured bodies living within these pages have to say. “Rip, Cut and Stitch” (Choi et al., 2023) this war-story through your own injured bodies and their drives, as you read it, making sense of it all, as you see fit. Just buy into our Syrialism – my interlocutors’, our injured bodies’, and mine – for a first encounter and if, and/or when, something resonates with you, take a piece of our injuries, our war-stories, and our Syrial sensibilities, with you. Allow this text to be a portal to ‘experiencing’ martial violence, intimately, as a “dimension of living” (Nordstrom & Robben, 1995).