Thousands and thousands 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 gorgeous reversal of a battle seemingly frozen since 2020 emphasize shifts in geopolitics and stability of energy. Some analysts hint how Assad’s essential backers – Iran, Hezbollah and Russia – grew to become too weakened or preoccupied to return to his support as up to now. Different commentators contemplate how rebels ready and professionalized, whereas the regime decayed, resulting in the latter’s collapse.
These elements assist clarify the velocity and timing of the collapse of one of many Center East’s longest and most brutal dictatorships. However these elements mustn’t overshadow the human significance of Assad’s overthrow.
Folks in Damascus have fun the top of Syria’s brutal Assad regime on Dec. 9, 2024.
Murat Sengul/Anadolu through Getty Photographs
Assad’s fall in its revolutionary context
Through 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 world wide poured into the streets to have fun the top of 54 years of tyranny.
To understand the magnitude of this achievement requires historic context, one which I’ve documented in two books based mostly 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 hundreds of thousands of Syrians broke the barrier of concern and risked their lives to demand political change.
Syrians described collaborating in protest as the primary time they breathed or felt like a citizen. One man instructed me that it was higher than his marriage ceremony day. A girl 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 pleasure as individuals cultivated the skills and capacities essential to maintain revolution, and, most of all, of hope that Syrians may 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 battle 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 may accomplish if permitted the prospect.
Nonetheless, as years handed, hope grew to become eclipsed by despair.
The individuals I met described their despair witnessing the regime escalate bombardment, hunger sieges and different warfare crimes to reconquer areas from opposition management. Despair when Assad killed 1,400 individuals in a 2013 chemical assault, violating america’ purported “red line” however escaping accountability. Despair as lots of of 1000’s of individuals disappeared into regime dungeons, condemned to a destiny of torture worse than loss of life. Despair because the quantity killed in Syria climbed by lots of of 1000’s, and in 2014 the United Nations gave up counting extra. Despair as over half the inhabitants was compelled to flee their properties, and the phrase “Syria” grew to become caught, in minds world wide, to the phrases “refugee crisis.”
After which there was the despair as an entity known as the Islamic State introduced itself in 2013 and trampled on Syrians’ democratic aspirations in a newly horrific means.
“We don’t know where any of this is leading,” a insurgent officer instructed 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, whilst 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 girl 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 dwelling 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, hundreds of 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 step by step got here to middle on a distinct theme, which I made the main target 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 properties 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.
This is the 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.
Many times, individuals stated 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 concerning the future. They needn’t; Syrians know higher than anybody that the trail forward is not going to be straightforward.
For now, nevertheless, the position 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 stated 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.