Tens of millions of Syrians are feeling hope for the primary time in years.
The authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad fell on Dec. 8, 2024, after a 12-day insurgent offensive.
Most commentaries on this beautiful reversal of a battle seemingly frozen since 2020 emphasize shifts in geopolitics and steadiness of energy. Some analysts hint how Assad’s primary backers – Iran, Hezbollah and Russia – turned too weakened or preoccupied to return to his help as up to now. Different commentators contemplate how rebels ready and professionalized, whereas the regime decayed, resulting in the latter’s collapse.
These components assist clarify the pace and timing of the collapse of one of many Center East’s longest and most brutal dictatorships. However these components shouldn’t overshadow the human significance of Assad’s overthrow.
Folks in Damascus have fun the tip of Syria’s brutal Assad regime on Dec. 9, 2024.
Murat Sengul/Anadolu through Getty Photographs
Assad’s fall in its revolutionary context
In the course of the previous two weeks, Syrians have rejoiced as symbols of Assad domination got here down and the revolutionary flag went up. They held their breath as rebels freed captives from the regime’s infamous prisons. They shed tears as displaced individuals returned and households reunited after years of separation.
After which, lastly, Syrians all over the world poured into the streets to have fun the tip of 54 years of tyranny.
To understand the magnitude of this achievement requires historic context, one which I’ve documented in two books primarily based on interviews with greater than 500 Syrian refugees over the previous 12 years.
My first e book begins with tales of the suffocating repression, surveillance and indignities that characterised on a regular basis life within the single-party safety state that Hafez al-Assad established in 1970, and his son Bashar inherited within the yr 2000.
It conveys tentative optimism as uprisings unfold throughout the Arab world in 2011, blooming into exhilaration when thousands and thousands of Syrians broke the barrier of worry and risked their lives to demand political change.
Syrians described taking part in protest as the primary time they breathed or felt like a citizen. One man advised me that it was higher than his wedding ceremony day. A lady referred to it as the primary time she ever heard her personal voice. “And I told myself that I would never let anyone steal my voice again,” she added.
It was not solely the sensation of freedom that was unprecedented but additionally the emotions of solidarity as strangers labored collectively, of satisfaction as individuals cultivated the abilities and capacities essential to maintain revolution, and, most of all, of hope that Syrians might reclaim their nation and decide their very own destiny.
“We started to get to know each other,” an activist recalled of these heady days. “People discovered that they were photographers or journalists or filmmakers. We were changing something not just in Syria but also within ourselves.”
Hope eclipsed by despair
From their begin in March 2011, nonviolent demonstrations met with cruel repression. That July, oppositionists and army defectors introduced the formation of a “Free Syrian Army” to defend protesters and combat the regime. As this and different armed teams pushed the regime from giant swaths of territory, new types of grassroots group and native governance emerged, indicating what society might accomplish if permitted the possibility.
Nonetheless, as years handed, hope turned eclipsed by despair.
The individuals I met described their despair witnessing the regime escalate bombardment, hunger sieges and different conflict crimes to reconquer areas from opposition management. Despair when Assad killed 1,400 individuals in a 2013 chemical assault, violating the US’ purported “red line” however escaping accountability. Despair as tons of of hundreds of individuals disappeared into regime dungeons, condemned to a destiny of torture worse than demise. Despair because the quantity killed in Syria climbed by tons of of hundreds, and in 2014 the United Nations gave up counting extra. Despair as over half the inhabitants was compelled to flee their houses, and the phrase “Syria” turned caught, in minds all over the world, to the phrases “refugee crisis.”
After which there was the despair as an entity referred to as the Islamic State introduced itself in 2013 and trampled on Syrians’ democratic aspirations in a newly horrific manner.
“We don’t know where any of this is leading,” a insurgent officer advised me at the moment. “All we know is that we’re everyone else’s killing field.”
Trying to find residence
With the assistance of exterior allies and the remainder of the world’s inaction, Assad clawed again about 60% of the nation by 2020 and penned the opposition in an enclave within the northwest.
Syria dropped from the headlines, at the same time as regime bombing continued to kill civilians, financial meltdown plunged 90% of the inhabitants under the poverty line and the regime rotted right into a narco state sustained by drug trafficking.
A lady I met throughout these years of stalemate summarized issues bleakly: “The most important thing at this stage is to protect the last bit of hope that people have left.”
Syrians residing in Essen, Germany, collect to have fun following the collapse of regime management within the capital, Damascus, on Dec. 8, 2024.
Hesham Elsherif/Anadolu through Getty Photographs
In the meantime, thousands and thousands of Syrian refugees, the lion’s share of them within the international locations neighboring Syria, suffered poverty, authorized precariousness and native populations who more and more demanded their deportation.
The tales that I recorded regularly got here to heart on a special theme, which I made the main focus of my second e book: residence.
For these compelled to flee, the phrase “home” connoted twin challenges: First, creating new lives the place they could by no means have imagined stepping foot; and second, mourning previous houses misplaced, destroyed or emptied of family members.
Many described the agony of reconciling their attachment to Syria with the sense that they had been unlikely to see it once more.
“You try as hard as you can to forget the homeland, but you can’t because it’s even more painful to be without any homeland at all,” a person lamented.
Discovering residence in refuge, in different phrases, was not solely a matter of integration. It additionally meant discovering a solution to transfer ahead when the hope for freedom in Syria, it appeared, couldn’t.
For this reason it’s awe-inspiring to witness hope surge once more. As I messaged Syrian buddies and interlocutors this week, I used to be struck by how their jubilation echoed with tales that I used to document about 2011, however now on an much more astonishing scale.
Repeatedly, individuals mentioned that their feelings had been “indescribable” and “beyond words.” That they had been concurrently “laughing and crying.” That they “just couldn’t believe” that it – the it that they as soon as didn’t dare voice out loud – lastly occurred.
Since Assad’s fall, many overseas governments and analysts have voiced foreboding warnings in regards to the future. They needn’t; Syrians know higher than anybody that the trail forward won’t be simple.
For now, nevertheless, the function of these watching from afar is to not doubt, critique or speculate, however to honor this triumph of human hope.
Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous famously mentioned in 1996, “We are doomed by hope, and what happens today cannot be the end of history.” Those that refused to surrender over the lengthy years of violence, oppression and disappointment had been proper. Syrian historical past is simply starting.
