For over half a century, Syria has endured authoritarian rule, large-scale conflict, and mass displacement. Rebuilding the nation after the fall of the Ba’ath regime will require not only economic development but also the preservation of history and the strengthening of civil society.
As a diasporic Syrian, I have been privileged not to endure the worst of the war. However, my interactions with the regime — both inside and outside Syria — taught me enough to understand the everyday repercussions of authoritarianism from a young age. In 2016, the war had reached such a height that when my family told people we were going to visit Syria, we received long, concerned farewells, even from my school teachers. After a brief, five-day reunion with my grandmothers in the quiet of their villages, I drove to Lebanon with my family, where we would fly back to Canada.
The Shabiha’s long shadow
After our return, my mum enrolled in evening classes at the local college. I would regularly sneak away with the landline, certain a horde of smug Syrian officers had stopped her again, and whisper-call her from the bathroom, just to make sure she was safe. To me, this interaction with the regime demonstrates its expertise in terrorising the populace.
Another comes to mind: a group of border officers snacking on pumpkin seeds and sipping maté, having the authority to extort money from anyone in exchange for their freedom. Behind the visible war — the bombing and the chemical weaponry — a bureaucratic machine of fear commanded the lives of those within the country and those outside, in the diaspora. People constantly disappeared, and their families would pore over the full morgues in search of their loved ones. The shadows on the streets concealed tall skinny men and their tall skinny rifles, dressed in the all-black uniforms of the shabiha, the word for Assad’s militia originating from the term shabah, meaning ghost. There was always a possibility that being interrogated by a border or checkpoint officer could turn fatal if your name was on the wrong list.
When the Syrian refugee crisis peaked, my family began sponsoring refugees. Our circle grew as more refugees fled and settled, each marked with literal and figurative scars from the regime. Every dinner and gathering inevitably led to long mullings over the state of our country, which seemed to decay in perpetuity.
Outside my anti-Assad community, the broader Syrian community was a politically uneasy space. My parents forbade me from openly publishing anti-regime material because Syrians outside the country could still be reported to regime informants in Syria. Those reported were blacklisted, often without their knowledge, and risked immediate arrest upon return. Fear lived in the president-praising songs my parents sang as children, in what we could write from Canada decades after they left the country, and in the photos of burn marks from electrocution torture in the asylum applications I helped translate.
Pull down the posters
On December 8, 2024, during my friend’s birthday party, my parents called. They asked if I had seen the news: Assad was gone. 50 years of Ba’athist military rule were over. More than a hundred thousand people remained missing. The prisons were opened soon after, revealing the brutal physical and psychological wounds from which so many would need to heal from the terror the country had endured. One of the first responses I received when sharing the news was that Syria, “is run by terrorists now.” This outlook, common amongst the international community, that views Middle Eastern politics as unsalvageable cesspools of terrorism is immensely reductive. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the militia that toppled the regime, was an Islamist group and some of its leaders, who plan on participating in the new government, committed violations of human rights when HTS ruled Idlib. Yet those who reduce Syria to a current “terrorist state” fail to recognize the crucial nuance in the political phenomena of the region. Authoritarian regimes have capitalised for decades on exploitative systems set up by colonial powers, creating an atmosphere where peaceful grassroots resistance to repression is almost always fatal. Islamist groups have emerged in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries to fill power vacuums left by weak dictatorships. They cannot be conflated, however, with the general will or political outlook of the Syrian people.
I recognise it would be naive to paint a purely optimistic picture of the current circumstances since Assad’s departure. Over the past year, the new government has publicised its condemnation of former Assadists for the havoc they wreaked upon Syria as government forces carry out extrajudicial executions and massacres of minorities. The increasingly authoritarian approach of al-Sharaa’s government uses collective memory to divide and stoke fear, whilst growing economic investments since international sanctions were lifted heightened uncertainty about an extremely unequal economic hierarchy. New forms of divisiveness and control have emerged; the accelerated economic prosperity induced by foreign assistance risks creating a new economic elite to take the Assads’ place. The Syrian people, from every sect and part of the country, are now left to grapple with the effects of the civil war’s trauma without substantial movement towards democratisation.
No perfect saviours
The people, no matter how divided, want and deserve freedom — just as they demanded in the streets of the Arab Spring. Amidst the current tumult, hope for transitional justice persists. No matter how bleak the state of Syria is or has been, the necessity and possibility for cross-cutting the cleavages instrumentalised against Syrian society cannot be erased. Despite signs of authoritarian re-emergence, the fall of the Assad regime momentarily broke the walls separating Syrians from different sects and regions when they united in celebration on the streets.
The direct aftermath of Assad’s ousting punctured the veneer of isolating authoritarian fear that had occupied the country for 50 years. Plenty of leaders have claimed to save or fix Syria. Now, Syrians find hope in acts of defiant understanding, rather than in a perfect saviour. The notion that one Syrian cannot see past their sectarian or regional identity is only broken through grassroots efforts to establish a nuanced collective memory of Syria’s recent history. Hope for Syrians will not be found in a face to plaster everywhere in newfound adoration and gratitude, but rather in unity and pluralistic understanding amongst ourselves.
