Joy and Apprehension in Syria

On December 12, at the Jaber Border Crossing in northwest Jordan, I watched a small crowd of Syrians hurry onto a bus that was taking them to their home country. There are more than a million Syrian refugees in Jordan. Four days after the toppling of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, there was no mass return, just a trickle of travelers, many of whom were headed back to visit relatives. Most Syrians, one man told me, are still “hesitant and afraid” to return. But doing so has suddenly become at least a possibility.

“We had one problem in Syria,” a young man declared with a grin as he turned to board the bus. “And his name was Bashar al-Assad.” I didn’t have time to ask him his name, but I’m sure he would have given it to me. This isn’t something that one could have imagined happening a week earlier, when many Syrians, even abroad, watched their words. Hanging over them was the threat of retaliation against their families in Syria or of deportation and arrest by Assad’s forces immediately upon their return. Now dissidents and activists are excitedly making plans to go back, and ordinary Syrians are watching with joy and apprehension.

No one is more stunned than Syrians themselves at the fall of the Assad regime. It lasted half a century, brutalized its own population beyond imagination, and toppled like a rotted-out tree in a sudden storm.

On December 8, the day that rebel groups entered Damascus and Assad boarded a plane for Russia, Mohamed al-Droubi was glued to a steady stream of news clips on his phone, along with video calls from friends and relatives. Droubi is a young Syrian cheesemaker who works in a shop in Amman. We’d had several long, friendly chats, and I knew he was a refugee from Homs. He fled to Jordan as a teenager with his family in 2011, the first year of the Syrian revolution, after he and his brother were nearly shot by an officer at a military checkpoint, and after they witnessed a massacre in which armed forces opened fire on a large peaceful demonstration near their house.

That morning Droubi was jubilant and close to tears. When he was a schoolboy, he told me, they used to teach him and his classmates that the rule of the Assad family was eternal. And now it’s finally over, he said, shaking his head in disbelief.

One of the videos on Droubi’s phone was of people breaking into the infamous Sednaya Prison outside Damascus—images that were widely shared across the region. In the videos, men shoot open the locks on doors, and shocked, scared, joyful, bedraggled detainees pour out. Some of the men in the videos were too injured to walk upright; one prisoner had entirely lost his memory.

In the days that followed, people continued to scour the facility, looking for clues to the whereabouts of their missing loved ones. A frantic search has taken place for prisoners believed to still be trapped in underground cells. The search-and-rescue teams of the Syrian volunteer organization the White Helmets joined the effort. So did members of the Association of Detainees and Missing Persons of Sednaya Prison, a collective of researchers and former prisoners and one of the many fearless Syrian civil society associations that have been working doggedly from exile to document the regime’s abuses. No more secret cells or detainees have been found, but rumors continue to circulate online, not just about Sednaya but about many other official and ad hoc detention and torture sites; people are now sharing for the first time their suspicions that they heard the cries of prisoners emanating from the basements and stairwells of buildings.

This sense that the country was built over a network of secret prisons is hardly surprising. Assad’s regime was based on terror. Its prisons weren’t just prisons; they were gulags, concentration camps, places of arbitrary and depraved cruelty. Years ago I read Mustafa Khalifa’s prison memoir The Shell. Khalifa was a political prisoner, held from 1982 to 1994 in the underground prison network, including the infamous Tadmor military prison. His beautiful and almost unbearable book (the kind of book that one finds difficult to recommend to anyone, so painful is the experience of reading it) is a nightmarish recounting of the horrors human beings are capable of inflicting on one another and capable of enduring.

The devastating truth is that most of the more than 100,000 Syrians who were disappeared during the country’s civil war have probably been killed. At Sednaya a hydraulic press was used to crush and more easily dispose of bodies. The regime was killing people up until its last days. One of them was Mazen al-Hamada, whose body, riddled with signs of torture, was found in a military hospital last week. Hamada was a well-known activist who was arrested and tortured and who fled to Europe in 2013, where he tried to raise awareness of the regime’s crimes by speaking often and publicly of what had been done to him and what he’d witnessed. Alienated, discouraged, and suffering from mental health issues in exile, he was persuaded to return to Syria in 2020 by the regime’s promises of forgiveness and threats against his family, only to be immediately arrested and disappeared again. On December 12 Hamada was given a hero’s public funeral in Damascus.

The fact that so many like Hamada suffered such agonies and did not live to see this day is a tragedy that Syria will long grapple with. For those who have survived, the relief is extraordinary.

The Assad regime felt like “a life sentence,” Karam Nachar, a writer and editor at the independent Syrian news site Al-Jumhuriya, told me in a phone conversation. “I had resigned myself to the notion that I would die with this man and his family in power.” Nachar was studying to become a historian at Princeton when the revolution in Syria broke out. He paused his studies to found Al-Jumhuriya. His father, Samir, is a dissident who went into hiding in 2011; he and his family eventually resettled in Istanbul. The family’s home in Aleppo, like those of so many people who fled to safety, was taken over by government thugs, and their property was confiscated. Now Nachar is making plans to go back. “I can’t wait,” he told me. “It feels unreal. The notion that now we have a house to go back to. You don’t have a sense of belonging anywhere but home.”

Al-Jumhuriya’s contributors who used to write under pen names for their safety are now signing their bylines for the first time. The editorial staff is already dreaming of opening an office in Damascus.

Yet no one is more aware than Syrians themselves of the dangers, pitfalls, and challenges that await them. “People are very conscious of all the bleak scenarios in which things could not improve much,” said Nachar.

And yet there is such a sense of possibility. There are millions of Syrians who are dying to serve their country, to run in elections, to have independent media organizations, to be involved, capitalize on this moment. Millions of Syrians are having this conversation. We know a democratic, secular Syria is not going to just materialize; we know it’s something we will have to fight for.

“There’s authoritarianism and then there’s the likes of Assad,” he went on.

The foundation of the state was terrorizing people. There was an entire machine engaged in killing civilians, dissidents. Now we have to face these demons, we have to wrestle with this. The people in power have to strike a very delicate balance to avoid sectarian retribution. There are all sorts of difficult questions: Do we engage in transitional justice? Do we hold people who engaged in torture responsible?

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that led the country’s liberation, has declared an amnesty for rank-and-file soldiers but said it will bring high-level torturers and war criminals—most of whom fled the country or went into hiding as Assad fell—to justice. It has also tried to reassure the country’s Christian and Alawite minorities that they will not be discriminated against or targeted, and so far, despite concerns, there have been few reports of violent reprisals.

The regime of Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad was based on the enforced loyalty of the Assads’ minority Alawite community, on stoking sectarian fears and hatreds, and on foreign alliances. It survived a grueling civil war with the military backing of Russia and Iran and regained control of most of the country by bombing its own cities to rubble, using chemical weapons, and driving more than six million Syrians abroad. As the Syrian uprising turned from a peaceful mass movement into a fully militarized conflict, the regime’s main adversaries became extremist Islamist groups. HTS is one such group and is currently designated a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. Now that it is the most powerful force in Syria’s new provisional government, Western powers are already clearly leaning toward reviewing that designation. Under its leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa—who used the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani—HTS broke its ties with al-Qaeda in 2016 and, as it administered the province of Idlib, tried to present itself as moderate, pragmatic, and responsive to people’s demands.

The Assad regime, on the other hand, after securing its own survival, did nothing to improve the lives of the people under its control. Reconstruction stalled, corruption and insecurity remained pervasive, and the economy, crippled by sanctions, floundered; the regime sustained itself partly through the production and smuggling of enormous amounts of the illicit drug Captagon.

After HTS forces took Aleppo on November 30 with surprising ease, Assad’s foreign backers didn’t have the resources or the inclination to support him anymore. The underpaid, underequipped, unmotivated Syrian army—avoiding conscription has been a major reason many young Syrian men fled the country—chose not to fight.

“Right now Syria is in terrible shape, it’s been devastated. It is starting from zero,” said Samar Yazbek, an award-winning Syrian writer.^* “The fall of Assad is the first step. It is just the beginning. We all need to go back and build Syria.” For Yazbek, who has been living in exile in France, that means going back as a writer, journalist, activist, and feminist and working with the networks she has been in touch with all along. She is originally from Latakia and, like the Assads, is a member of the Alawite community. This didn’t stop her from joining the revolution enthusiastically and risking her life to document it. She crossed into and traveled across areas of Syria clandestinely several times as the civil war raged.

Yazbek has observed HTS’s actions and statements so far with cautious optimism. The organization has issued directives not to try to impose a dress code on women. “It hasn’t taken decisions to limit people’s freedom,” she said.

It has issued instructions not to carry out acts of revenge and retaliation. This is important. This is a sign. They are more than a militia. They want to build a state.

She is more concerned about other extremist militias in the south and east of Syria, and above all about the meddling of foreign powers. “We don’t want the international community to interfere with Syria; I’m sure there is a plan for Syria, perhaps to divide Syria; please leave Syrians to handle their own affairs.” She notes that immediately upon Assad’s fall, Israel began bombing military targets across the country, wiping out its military capabilities. Israeli forces have pushed into the demilitarized zone between Syria and Israel in the Golan Heights and seized territory there.

And yet despite her misgivings and her sense of the long road ahead, Yazbek insists that Syrians also deserve to fully celebrate this moment. When we spoke, she told me she had barely slept in a week; her voice kept breaking with emotion. After all the worry and fear, she said, “let’s stay in this moment of joy. Let’s live this moment of freedom, and then we will see.”

Such patience and understanding have been in short supply on the part of Western governments, which have had no constructive policy on Syria for years. They have either defaulted to open-ended sanctions that abandoned ordinary Syrians to their fate or, as Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni did recently, pushed to ignore Assad’s crimes and reengage with him. Now they don’t hesitate to issue warnings and expound on the kind of transition and government the country should have.

At the same time, European countries have rushed with unseemly speed to suspend asylum applications for Syrians; right-wing governments and politicians have already begun clamoring for deportations. Yet clearly what the international community should be focusing on is lifting the sanctions on Syria, cautiously engaging with the new powers there, and supporting the country’s reconstruction. Most Syrian refugees are in neighboring countries in the region—three million in Turkey, almost a million in Lebanon, and more than a million in Jordan. Their circumstances and their legal status vary widely; some have rebuilt lives for themselves that they are understandably reluctant to abandon, while others have found it extremely difficult to integrate and find opportunities.

Droubi, the cheesemaker, has worked hard alongside his brothers to make a life for himself in Amman, while hoping his family could resettle in the West. Like all Syrian refugees in Jordan, he is barred from attending public universities, from working in many professions, even from getting a driver’s license.

When we meet again for coffee and a longer conversation, he talks of his hometown. “Homs is beautiful,” he says, then laughs. “Maybe everyone says their city is beautiful.” But the air in Homs, he tells me, is so clean; it’s cooled by the surrounding snowcapped mountains. He writes poems about Homs, he tells me, and copies one out for me. He shows me the exact location of his home on Google Maps. It’s a five-hour drive from Amman.

Still, he isn’t sure what he would be returning to now. The family house was looted and damaged in the civil war. Bored government soldiers stationed in nearby towers riddled it with gunfire. He won’t go back until he is sure that Syria is safe for his family and that they can support themselves there. In the meantime, he is celebrating, following the news, and speaking more freely than he ever has. “I feel that I’m a regular human being, that I have a country now. The way people look at us has changed. People realize what we have suffered.”

“Everyone needs to pay a price for freedom,” he said. “We’ve paid enough for it. We’ve earned our freedom.”

—December 19, 2024