Syrians on all sides oppose the conception that the ongoing civil war is a sectarian one between the Sunni majority and the Alawite minority. Even though seven years of the Syrian civil war costed four times in terms of casualties than the fifteen years of Lebanese Civil War, the ghosts of sectarian killings based on religious affiliations and the sectarian “self-security” and sectarian militias as well as the Lebanese overt sectarian political system of post-war Lebanon are the reference point for defining sectarianism to most of my interviewees. Based on a year of ethnographic field work in Lebanon and Syria, which included participant observation, informal discussions, academic talks and seventy interviews with Syrians currently living in Syria and Syrian refugees in the Beqaa Valley, I argue that the Lebanese sectarian model and the Lebanese sectarian civil war occupy a large part of the Syrian sectarian imagination. I argue that the legacy of the Lebanese civil war’s sectarian violence is at the core of the meaning making of sectarianism for many Syrians. Furthermore, when sectarianism becomes Lebanese, discourses and narratives describing the war along social, economic, and human rights based arguments on all sides become salient and obscure the workings of sectarianism and sectarian violence that took and are taking place during the war. Narratives such as “ISIS and Al-Nusra are foreign to the Syrian Social fabric” take hold and become possible, based on the conception that “Syrians are not sectarian” when compared to the Lebanese experience. In this paper, I argue that the implications of such a conception of sectarianism have impacted the political and social aspirations of ordinary Syrians and in turn opens the space for ideological and discursive manipulation of the war from elites on all sides.