❈ ❈ ❈
After the Fall: Hope Amid the Ruins of Post-Assad Syria
Kevin B. Anderson
A few weeks after the epochal fall of the Assad dictatorship, Syria remains in flux. It could not be otherwise after 53 years of the strangulation of civil and political life under one of the world’s most murderous regimes. Nonetheless, some broad outlines of where Syria is going can be discerned.
But before entering into that, it is necessary to savor the moment. First, the fall of Bashar al-Assad (who ruled from 2000-2024, succeeding his father Hafez Assad, 1971-2000), constitutes a major historical turning point for the region and even the world. It shows above all that the spirit and reality of the Arab revolutions of 2011 have been smoldering underground all these years. This should give no comfort to local rulers who have snuffed out the 2011 revolutions in their societies, especially those in Egypt and Tunisia.
Second, the sudden collapse of the Syrian regime, within a matter of days, shows the fragile and brittle character of political class domination in general. Marxists have often repeated that, despite its unprecedented accumulation of wealth, capitalism is inherently unstable, a system where “all that is solid melts into air,” as Marx and Engels once wrote (Communist Manifesto, MECW 6, p. 487). We saw this in the 2008 economic collapse. But this is equally true of the capitalist state, no matter how solid and impregnable it might appear in a particular context, even in our era of state-capitalism. We saw this in 2011 in the Arab world, when the Tunisian and Egyptian governments fell to revolutionary youth and workers in a matter of days, and we have seen it in Syria today. (In 2023, we saw how another “strong” state, Israel, was taken by surprise not by a mass uprising but by a determined attack across one of the world’s most closely guarded borders.)
CLR James stressed, based upon a passage in Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, that radical change is characterized by “leaps” and breaks rather than gradualness (Notes on Dialectics: Hegel-Marx-Lenin, Westport: Lawrence Hill, 1986 [1948], p. 99). The years 2023-25 in the Middle East certainly exemplify that. But this is only part of the truth, for both the state and capital have a deep, structural existence, and such moments of collapse or breaks are rare enough. For as Marx intoned after the old order reasserted itself with a vengeance once the 1848 revolutions had met their defeat: “The tradition of all the dead generations lays like a nightmare upon the brains of the living” (Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 104).
The Unfolding of the New
Keeping all this in mind, let us look at what is new in post-Assad Syria. Few noticed a year-and-a-half ago when the Syrian people surged into the streets for the first time in years with anti-regime, pro-revolution slogans as they targeted economic catastrophe and corruption. Notably, the predominantly Druze town of Suweida joined in in August 2023, breaking with the regime tactic of pitting ethno-religious minorities against the Sunni Arab majority. Demonstrators chanted, “One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.” Across a number of towns and cities, “the flags of the Druze and Kurdish communities were raised alongside the [2011] revolution flag. And there were numerous displays of solidarity with the Ukrainian resistance” (Leila AlShami’s blog, “Syria: Revolution reborn,” Aug. 29, 2023).
As late as last summer, many EU countries, among them Italy, Denmark, Poland, and Austria, were seeking to end the boycott of the Assad regime, to reopen relations with it, and, above all, to force out the hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees who had streamed out of the country during the suppression of the revolution. These EU countries called for “a more realistic” policy, given that “Bacshar al-Assad remains firmly it the saddle” (Jean-Baptiste Chastand, “Plusiers pays de l’UE veulent renouer avec la Syrie,” Le Monde, July 25, 2024).
Jumping to December 2024, when the 53-year-old regime tumbled after a six-day offensive spearheaded by a small Islamist-led force from the northern opposition enclave of Idlib, many have noted the almost complete failure of the large, well-armed regime forces to fight back. According to Middle East scholar Stephen Zunes:
“While it was the advancing military forces of Hayat Tahrir al Sham (HTS) who marched into Damascus as Assad and his family fled, there are indications that it was unarmed civil resistance led by the resurgent popular committees and local councils, which initially came to the fore in the early nonviolent phase of the revolution back in 2011, that actually wrested control of much of the local governance from the regime, particularly in Daraa and Suweida provinces in the south” (Daniel Falcone: interview with Stephen Zunes, “The Ousting of the Brutal Assad Regime Brings Euphoria and More Questions,” Counterpunch, Dec. 11, 2024).
In the town of Daraa, where the revolutionary uprising began in 2011, joy and sadness were mixed as crowds gathered to welcome home exiled revolutionaries. These included Sheikh Ahmad Al-Sayasna, whose sermon had helped galvanize the March 18, 2011, “Friday of anger” after local youths were imprisoned, tortured, and murdered. Too old and frail to give a full speech, he declared in just a few words, “We are a great people who deserve freedom and who know not hatred.” A young woman in the crowd cried out, “Syria is retrieving all its colors.” Another young woman who also experienced exile stated: “The Westerners are worried, but they need to understand that this is the first time decisions are in the hands of the Syrian people” (Eliott Brachet, “À Deraa, l’étincelle ravivée de la révolution syrienne,” Le Monde, Jan. 9, 2025).
In early January, the people of Suweida remained on revolutionary alert, holding onto the weapons they had wielded in December as the regime began to fall. As the Assad regime suffered territorial losses under the blows of HTS-led forces from the north, Suweida also rose up. Its armed networks, which had survived underground, reopened contact with a coalition of rebels from southern Syria, the region where the 2011 uprising first spread widely. “It was coordinated in secret. Once Aleppo fell, we formed the Operations Network [Chambre] of the South. Then, on December 7, we liberated our region as our allies marched on the capital,” stated a commander of the Druze Mountain Brigade, which claimed a force of 7,000 under arms. Also in Suweida, Druze, Christians, and Muslims gathered around a Christmas tree amid revolutionary slogans, especially, “A free, united, civic, and democratic Syria” (Eliott Brachet, “En Syrie, la circonspection des Druzes,” Le Monde, Jan. 7, 2025).
In Damascus, there was a pervasive sense of picking up where things had left off in 2011. At a December 12 funeral procession for a young revolutionary murdered in prison during the last days of the regime, one participant declared, “It is very moving to march again all together with citizens of Syria from all four corners of the country, on the same route that we took at the beginning of the revolution” (Hélène Sallon, “A Damas, les poignantes obsèques de l’opposant Mazen Al-Hamada,” Le Monde, Dec. 14, 2024).
In newly liberated Syria, as the poet Samar Yazbek has observed, the main slogan repeated incessantly by the joyous crowds was, “Syria is one and indivisible, it belongs to all Syrians, and everyone is entitled to the same rights.” She saw this as a clear repudiation of the Assad regime’s divide-and-conquer strategy and also of efforts by Israel, Türkiye, and other outside powers that are seeking to dominate the new Syria, even as others like Russia and Iran were exiting the scene (“Bashar al-Assad est tombé, mais la véritable révolution des Syriens ne fait que commencer,” Le Monde, Dec. 24, 2024).
These revolutionary crowds also entered en masse the regime’s notorious prisons, vile dungeons where tens of thousands met their deaths over the decades, this in addition to the 500,000 Assad and his allies killed in their repression of the 2011 revolution. In December 2024, the people freed those remaining and searched desperately for other survivors or evidence of what had happened to all those who disappeared into these houses of torture.
Summing up upon his return from exile, the noted Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh observed concerning the rapid collapse of the regime, “It’s the best thing that could have happened and it took place in the best way possible, without destruction, without massacres, without a great deal of human suffering” (Hélène Sallon, “Le retour doux-amer de Yassin al-Haj Saleh en Syrie,” Le Monde, Jan. 3, 2025).
Some Syrian Arab intellectuals have also begun to speak out more strongly in defense of the large Kurdish minority (10% of the population) than their earlier counterparts like Saleh. During the civil war the largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) established the progressive, pro-feminist autonomous zone of Rojava, now under threat from the Türkiye-funded Syrian National Army (SNA), which has been allied to HTS. As the young Marxist analyst Joseph Daher writes, “The uprising in 2011 allowed an unprecedented emergence of a deep Kurdish national dynamic in the history of Syria. The Kurdish question raises many other issues about the country’s future, including the potential for a pluralist identity not solely based on Arabness or Islam, as well as the nature of the state and its social model. Ultimately, these are all challenges that are intrinsically connected to the desire for true emancipation of Syria’s popular classes” (“The Kurdish Struggle Is Central to Syria’s Future,” New Arab, Dec. 29, 2024).
Internal Contradictions
Many in the Western media have noted the relative tolerance of minority religious communities on the part of the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), whose quite small armed forces – probably less than 20,000 in a country of some 25 million — drove down from Idlib in the north to Damascus amid only token opposition, as the Assad regime and its military forces simply collapsed. Given that HTS originated as part of the ultra-fundamentalist Al Qaeda network, although those ties were severed about eight years ago, there is much apprehension about its agenda as it has begun to take over the state. This is especially the case within more secular, leftwing, and feminist sectors of the Syrian population. As Al-Haj Saleh asked upon his return from exile, “Who will be oppressed? People like us, democrats, liberals, people on the left.” He added that so far, there has been “a type of religious and cultural inclusivity but not a political one. I fear they may not accept political pluralism,” noting that HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has surrounded himself with like-minded people in his administration (Sallon, “Le retour”).
In the new Syria, the negative role of HTS and other radical Islamist groups during the 2011-13 civil war continues to be noted, even as they seem to have moderated their perspectives somewhat. As Shireen Akram-Boshar noted recently: “Syrians within Syria and in the diaspora are wary of HTS. Syrian activists have long described Nusra and other Islamist groups as a second pole in the counterrevolution, after the Assad regime. Syrian activists for years have lifted the stories of Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, Samira Khalil and Nazem Hammadi — four democratic activists who opposed the Assad regime as well as the Islamist groups, and were kidnapped and disappeared at the end of 2013, most likely by another, similar Islamist militia” (“As Assad Regime Falls, Syrians Celebrate — and Brace for an Uncertain Future, Truthout, Dec. 11, 2024). This connects to one of Raya Dunayevskaya’s key dialectical insights, wherein “the discernment of the counter-revolution within the revolution became pivotal” (Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx to Mao, p. 106).
HTS rule over the rebel enclave of Idlib over the past seven years, while not redolent of Taliban-style reactionary policies, is hardly reassuring. Funded to an extent by Türkiye, HTS developed an authoritarian system in which women’s rights were restricted, open sale of alcohol prohibited, and dissidents imprisoned and tortured. After protests in 2021 against repression, HTS loosened controls somewhat.
Now in control of Damascus, HTS has appointed an old Assad regime bureaucrat as chief of the national police and has tried to confiscate arms from the people, especially the youth. HTS has moved decisively to take control of the legal system, dispatching eleven of its minions from Idlib to take charge of the central body of Syrian attorneys. In response, a petition signed by 400 Syrians, 130 of them lawyers, has demanded that the legitimate purges taking place of corrupt and repressive Assad legal officials does not result in their replacement “by others also lacking any electoral legitimacy” (Hélène Sallon, “En Syrie, des avocats s’inquiètent de la mainmise du pouvoir sur le barreau,” Le Monde, Jan. 20, 2025).
Syrian women have also expressed grave concerns about the future. In Aleppo in December, a women’s demonstration was called off after threatening messages were received by organizers. The HTS-led government has also sent out mixed signals. After an HTS spokesman said in late December that women’s leadership roles would have to be limited to “functions that correspond to their nature and biology,” protest demonstrations broke out in several cities. HTS leader al-Sharaa has expressed a somewhat different line publicly, naming human rights leader Aisha al-Dibs to a bureau of women’s affairs, but the latter has denounced feminism and called for a society based upon Islamic law (Céline Pierce-Magnani, “En Syrie, la méfiance des femmes face au nouveau pouvoir,” Le Monde, Dec. 30, 2024).
The strongest worries about the new Syria have been expressed by the Kurds, who have come under pressure from the Turkish-backed SNA as well as the Turkish military and air force. Kurds have already been forced out of some areas. The town of Kobane, where the SDF and its women’s units held off ISIS in 2014 in a legendary battle that broke the back of those Islamist reactionaries, is again in danger from SNA and Turkish forces. Recently, Commander-in-Chief of the Kurdish SDF’s People’s Protection Forces (YPJ), Rohilat Afrin, expressed concern about the direction of the new Syria, in terms of both Kurdish autonomy and women’s rights: “We believe that the war in Kobane was a war for humanity; a war to protect all women and land. We are confident that a state of public alert on a global scale will be raised and solidarity will be provided should Kobane be attacked again…. The mindset entrenched within the new government makes it clear that there is no place for women there — or only a place where women must accept to cover their heads and adopt a patriarchal mindset. Avoiding the above will require a great deal of organization and struggle. This is a serious danger that we need to recognize” (Rojava Information Center, “Syria: ‘We cannot hand over our weapons while attacks on women and our territories continue’ — An interview with YPJ Commander-in-Chief Rohilat Afrin,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Jan. 12, 2025).
Imperialist and Subimperialist Threats… and Syria’s Future
The fact that the Assad regime since the 2011 uprising has been propped up by Russia, Iran, and the Iran-aligned Hezbollah militias from Lebanon, was shown in how quickly this five-decade-old edifice collapsed once these outside powers began to withdraw in late 2024. Russia pulled out most of its forces by then and refused to do what it had done a decade earlier, conduct indiscriminate air attacks on Syrian rebels and civilians. Here the determined resistance of the Ukrainian people played no small role in weakening Russian imperialism, while Ukraine’s drones gave actual material support. Hezbollah, weakened by Israel’s attacks in the fall of 2024, which had caught its leadership off guard, assassinating them in one swoop, was in no position to aid the regime either. And Iran, reeling from Israeli air attacks and expecting more especially with Trump’s election in the US, also refused to do anything for Assad.
It should also be noted that Russia and Israel had a tacit understanding under Assad, allowing Israel to attack Syria at will. In addition, after the fall of Assad and the weakening of Hezbollah and Iran, some in the Israeli and US governments are under the dangerous illusion that they can now move on to re-order the region by toppling the Iran regime from without.
But even as various imperialist and subimperialist powers – Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah — were leaving the scene, new ones were appearing, or at least appearing with greater force. Türkiye, whose President Recep Tayyip Erdogan harbors neo-Ottomanist ambitions for the whole region, not only backed HTS and its “own” SNA, but has also exercised huge direct influence on the new government. Erdogan wants the new Syrian government to leave the Kurds to him and the SNA, but here he comes up against other forces, not least the Kurds themselves, but also their tacit backers in the US military, who have seen SDF as a bulwark against the resurgence of ISIS.
Israel has intervened in post-Assad Syria in several ways, sinking the small Syrian navy out of the water, destroying from the air many military bases, and taking over a considerably expanded territory around the Golan Heights, which it already occupies illegally. The Israelis have given their usual alibi for their war crimes: fighting “terrorism.”
All of these powers, and others, are seeking to take advantage of Syria’s economic weakness, born of years of civil war and the exploitation of the country by the Assad family amid epochal levels of corruption. These powers are seeking to dismember or divide Syria into regions and enclaves they hope to dominate. Hence, the constant call by Syrians today for the unity of the country.
Some on the left, especially campists, have gone so far as to say that the collapse of the regime was orchestrated by Israel and the US and that all this serves imperialism and reaction, with little or no liberatory content to be seen. This logic is extremely questionable. For as longtime Marxist analyst of the region Gilbert Achcar observed in the wake of Assad’s fall, “There are those who believe that any local actor is but the puppet of some external actor. Such people can’t acknowledge any agency for local actors. That’s, of course, a very poor way of perceiving the situation” (Stephen R. Shalom, “The Collapse of the Assad Regime: An Interview on Syria with Gilbert Achcar, New Politics Online, Dec. 13, 2024).
Such a logic also fails at the human level. Who can defend, excuse, or minimize the brutality of a regime that turned the whole country into a giant torture chamber and death camp? Who can forget the regime’s watchword during the uprising and civil war, “Bashar or we burn the country”? When the time came, in December 2024, the long-suffering Syrian people shook off the regime, with the armed forces melting away as the leaders slinked off to Moscow.
The people of Syria now have an opening, of a type not seen since the early, heady days of 2011. Let us hope that they can make something positive out of this, not only for Syria, but also for the region and the world, which is in such great need of hope at a time when authoritarianism and fascism are descending on us in so many parts of the world. Let us also salute the persistence and the resilience of the Syrian people, who never gave up in the years since 2011, whether inside the country or in exile, and who continue on today amid myriad obstacles. Let that be a lesson for all of us, everywhere.
[Kevin B. Anderson is managing editor of IMHO journal. His authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell). Courtesy: IMHO journal, the journal of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization. It aims to develop and project a vision of a viable, humanist alternative to capitalism, a new human society. It bases its philosophy in the tradition of Marxist-Humanism as developed by Raya Dunayevskaya.]
❈ ❈ ❈
“The Lion Has Fallen!”
Helen Benedict
Six years ago, at the time of the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban and its initial round of vicious anti-immigrant policies, I visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos to see how Europe was handling its own immigrants and refugees. Within a day, I met two Syrians, Eyad Awwadawnan and Hasan Majnan, who had fled Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship only to end up in a filthy, overcrowded camp in a country that didn’t want them with a future they could not foresee.
That was June 2018 and I’ve kept in touch with them both ever since. So, when Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, ending two generations of perhaps the most murderous dictatorship in the modern world, I contacted Eyad and Hasan to see how they felt.
“How am I feeling?” Hasan said over WhatsApp that day. “I’m flying in the sky! I have been watching the news for the last 24 hours. I’m feeling proud. I was on the right side of history. Finally, we won! The lion has fallen!”
In Arabic, Assad means “lion,” although that wasn’t his real name. Hafez, Bashar’s father, had adopted it to look strong.
Hasan was born in the northeastern Syrian city of Manbij, 18 years before the 2011 revolution and civil war that left some 580,000 civilians dead and displaced at least 13 million more.
Because Manbij sits in a strategic position near the border with Turkey, as soon as the first signs of revolution stirred in its streets, it became a battleground between multiple forces. First, it was under the control of Assad, whose military occupied the city until 2012. Then it fell to the revolutionary Free Syrian Army, which held it until 2014. Next, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized and controlled it until 2016, only to lose it to the Syrian Democratic Forces, who, in turn, lost it again to the Syrian Army (then backed by Russia). Recently, Manbij has fallen under the control of Kurdish militias and their allies. And that is only a rough summary of the city’s grim and complex history.
For Hasan, growing up in such a political football of a place affected every aspect of his life. Yet many of his memories of Syria before the civil war are remarkably sweet. “In my school we had Christians and Muslims, we had Kurds and Arabs and Turkmen,” he told me. “We were friends, in the same class with the same teacher. I want Syria to be like that again. I don’t want different religions, with each of us hating one another because we’ve lost a brother or a friend. I don’t want any of that to come between us. And I don’t want ISIS to prevail either. I want us to live like before, or even better. To live in peace and build Syria together, be happy and help each other.”
In 2013, Hasan and his identical twin, Hussein, joined the Free Syrian Army to fight Bashar, as they liked to call him, and free Syria from his grip. Hasan was then captured by ISIS, who hung him from a ceiling and whipped him in public. After three weeks of such treatment, they let him go as long as he agreed to beg their forgiveness, attend Sharia lessons for 15 days, and then join them as a fighter. They took his ID and told him that, if he refused, they would arrest him or a member of his family. Appalled by their cruelty and narrow ideology, Hasan decided to flee to Turkey and, with his mother’s blessing, he did.
Shortly after that, his brother was killed in a battle with ISIS. They were both only 21 at the time and, even today, Hasan hasn’t fully recovered from his twin’s death. He showed me a photograph of Hussein in his coffin. It was like looking at Hasan himself.
After living hand to mouth in Turkey for a few years, Hasan caught a flimsy, overladen rubber dinghy to Greece, ending up in the Samos camp where we met.
At the time, Hasan was so worn down by his ordeals — his hair was partly gray, his face thin and lined — that I took him for a man in his forties. It was a shock to learn that he was only 25.
“Now I Can Go Home Walking, Laughing”
I’ve told Hasan’s story in Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, the book I wrote with Eyad, but suffice it to say that, after many years of struggle, Hasan is now living in Germany and, in the wake of the fall of Assad, is full of hope for his country.
“Today, I remember my brother, my three cousins, a lot of my friends who died,” he told me. “Some were killed by ISIS, some by the Kurdish militia, some by the regime. They were killed by different enemies, but they were fighting for the same cause — to free Syria.”
After a pause, he added, “Yes, I have lost a lot of friends, but now I can tell them: rest in peace, Syria is free. I am proud of you and I know you are proud of me. I know you are watching me from heaven. And I am happy for us. We will join you later, but first we will make sure to build a safe place for every Syrian and a better, democratic future for our children.”
I’ve long been aware that Hasan always wanted to go back to Syria. He has never stopped missing it or his mother, who died while he was in Turkey, or his family, his language, and the city of Manbij. So, in the wake of the fall of Assad, I asked if he plans to return now that so much has changed.
“Going home was always my plan, but I never imagined that Bashar al-Assad would be gone,” he answered. “So, my plan was to write a letter to leave when I was dead alone somewhere in a room in Europe, asking that my body be sent back to be buried in my hometown. So that was my plan on how to go home — in a coffin. Now I can go home walking, laughing.
“The first thing I will do when I get back to Syria is I will kneel and kiss the ground and thank God for being on our side. We are free! We are rising again! Now I can walk the streets and smell the jasmine flower. Yes, I am going back home soon!”
Then Hasan spoke with more hope than I had heard in the six years I’ve known him.
“Maybe I will go and see my mother’s grave. See my old friends and start something good for my community. Maybe I will look for a job in the new government. Or work more on my English and open a small school and become an English teacher. It’s not easy, but it’s possible. I’ve learned in the last ten years that nothing is impossible. You just have to fight for it, stick to it until you get it.”
“First We Wanted Freedom. Now We Want Justice”
For all his hopes for a new Syria, Hasan is deeply disappointed that, in the wake of the collapse of his dictatorship, Assad managed to slip away and claim asylum in Moscow. “I’m sad that we didn’t catch him so he can go to trial,” Hasan told me. “I promise he will get a fair one. He’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison. If not in this life, definitely in the afterlife. One of the reasons I like to believe in God is because I believe in justice.”
My friend and co-author Eyad Awwadawnan, who found asylum in — of all places! — Iceland after a long ordeal in two refugee camps in Greece, is also concerned about justice and what the future might bring to Syria. Eyad was forced to flee Syria with his family after his uncle and several friends were killed, an experience he wrote about in 2018 when he was 23. After Assad fell, he, too, stayed up all night watching the news. Yet, his joy was tempered by concern.
“I can say that my happiness is incomplete because, even in its worst times, the regime has always found a way to benefit from the situation,” he wrote me, echoing the distrust of Assad and his regime felt by every Syrian I know. “There will be chaos now and the chaos could end up covering up Assad’s crimes.”
Like Hasan, Eyad does not want to see Assad and his henchmen, the torturers and murderers, get away without consequence. As he put it, “First we wanted freedom. Now we want justice.”
We then discussed the happiness so many Syrians feel on seeing their loved ones released from Assad’s giant complex of prisons, notorious for their horrendous brutality. Records show that more than 100,000 women, men, and even children were whisked off to those grim citadels without trial or reason, often never to be heard from again. In Samos, I met a woman from the Syrian capital, Damascus, who told me that she had been arrested no less than seven times by the regime, raped and tortured, all for speaking out against Assad.
Yet Eyad, feeling unhappy about the haphazard, spontaneous way the prisons were being flung open, again expressed caution. “It is so unorganized that they might destroy a lot of evidence of the regime’s crimes,” he said. “I was hoping they would keep as much documentation as possible for evidence, take photos, and protect all the documents from the prisons. This chaos reduces our chance of bringing justice to the regime in the future.”
Indeed, Assad’s regime took a page from the Nazis by keeping meticulous records of the people they imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The question is: Where are those records now?
“A Revolution That Doesn’t Free Women Is No Revolution at All.”
Eyad and I also discussed the possible fate of women, something noticeably absent from news reports about Syria that I’ve seen in outlets like the New York Times, the BBC, and National Public Radio. The one exception: a blistering article in the Guardian by Syrian writer Mona Eltawy, suggesting that a revolution that doesn’t dismantle patriarchy and free women is no revolution at all.
The leader of the new government, Mohammad al-Jolani, used to be an Islamist jihadist, not exactly a group known for its tolerance of women’s rights. He claims to have stepped away from such extremism and promises that civilians of all faiths and ethnicities will be safe in Syria. But as far as I know, he has not uttered a word of reassurance to women.
Given the extreme suppression of women in Afghanistan by the Taliban, who also promised to be more tolerant when they first took control in 2021, it’s hard not to be skeptical. Afghan women can no longer study past the age of 12, hold jobs in anything but healthcare, go outside on their own, enter public parks, or even speak in public. Syria is not Afghanistan, and so far, there has been no documented change in the role of women, who are going about their studies and work as usual. But the new government has just appointed a minister of justice, Shadi al-Waisi, who was once a judge for an al-Qaeda affiliate in northern Syria, where he oversaw the public executions of two women accused of adultery and prostitution. One was a mother who, having been forced to her knees, begged to see her children moments before she was shot in the head. This, to put it mildly, does not bode well.
“We’re in Disbelief”
Speaking of women, I had one more Syrian friend to consult, Dunia Kamal. Once a student at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where I teach, Dunia has since worked as a journalist and is now a public school teacher in Washington, D.C. She wrote this to me two days after Assad fell:
“We, my friends, family, and I genuinely don’t know what to feel. We’re having a series of fluctuating and confusing emotions, from joy to fear to happiness, back to flashbacks of starvation in Yarmouk camp, then to images of Hafez’s statue decapitated, back up to hysterical euphoria, then to pain and anger mixed in with anxiety about what’s to come. Yes. All that.”
Yarmouk camp was an area in Damascus that held Palestinian refugees, some 200 of whom were killed by a regime bombing and then a siege in the civil war.
“Having seen many people plucked out of our communities for simply criticizing the regime, never to be heard from or seen again, we all grew up learning how to self-censor out of fear of retribution, even while in the U.S.,” Dunia wrote. “It’s rather jarring to suddenly be able to exchange messages so openly. For example, I wrote my first message to a friend in Damascus inquiring about the rumors that Bashar had fallen in code, only to receive a near-instant surreal reply: ‘YES! BASHAR AND HIS GANG ARE OUT!’
“All those years of bloodshed, torture, and utter disregard for human life. We’re in disbelief. We never thought a day like this would come. We had given up hope, only to hear Eid chants in unison from minarets across Damascus signaling the end of a dark and painful era.”
Now, not even two months after Assad’s fall, the world’s eyes have moved from Syria back to Gaza and the new ceasefire, as well as to the apocalyptic events that greeted our new year here in the United States: the devastating Los Angeles fires, the inauguration of a man with no interest in democracy, and the parade of incompetent, dangerous appointees Trump is now pushing through Congress. But many Syrian refugees have their minds on something else, for whatever happens now — a new Muslim ban in the U.S., more anti-immigrant sentiment around the world, maybe even deportation — one essential part of life for every Syrian refugee has changed. Eyad put it this way:
“For years, we have all been stateless. We were thrown out, we had nowhere to go, nowhere we belonged. Now, we do. Now, whatever happens to us, we once again have a home.”
(Helen Benedict, who is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and the author most recently of the novel The Good Deed, has been writing about war and refugees for more than a decade. A recipient of the 2021 PEN Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History and the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism, she has also written 13 other books of fiction and nonfiction. Courtesy: TomDispatch, a web-based publication, founded and edited by Tom Engelhardt, aimed at providing “a regular antidote to the mainstream media”.)
