Where were you when Bashar al-Assad,the name that sends chills down every Syrian’s spine,was toppled?
Mentally, I was not here. Allow me to rephrase, I was not meant to be here. But I was. It was me, watching this live. I was sitting on the floor and my mother was blowdrying my hair. It’s safe to say we were truly none the wiser until I got an Al Jazeera alert on my phone.
Within seconds, every single household device was switched onto Al Jazeera. Homs, Hama, Halab (Aleppo). City after city, district by district, the map shifted. And then, Shaam,Damascus, where my family is from.
Heart palpitations. How should I feel?
Thankfully, my emotions were like the folded laundry from my childhood.They were,not so, neatly laid out for me.
With every phone alert and every grassroots Syrian Instagram post, I was overwhelmed. I felt encumbered by endless thoughts and endless realities. Infographic after infographic — leftists, Arabs, self-proclaimed political analysts, and politicians, rushed to make statements.
All this commotion, and yet, one voice was so demonstrably absent… where were all the Syrians?
Drowned out in our own discourse, the louder the voices, the less they seemed to understand Syria. The narratives flooded in:
“Assad helped the Palestinian people, how could we pray for his toppling?” If that was truly the case, what about Yarmouk, and the thousands of Palestinian-Syrians killed, wounded and forced into exile again?
“Life under Assad was never that bad. The war could have been prevented if people just stayed quiet.” I thought of the phrase that falls so naturally off the lips of Syrians: the walls have ears.
“These are not rebels!! They are Islamist terrorists!!”
“This is just a plot conspired by the US and Israel. This is a FALSE revolution!”
I wonder what it’s like, to be so unaffected that you have the luxury of a well-founded political analysis. The neopatrimonial Assad family had caged Syria for over fifty-four years, bleeding it dry,along with my people. Need I remind you of the circumstances in which this revolution-turned-civil-turned-proxy-war was born? With a boy and a wall. Mouawiya Syasneh and his friends were just fourteen when they spray-painted a message of defiance on their school wall in Daraa in 2011. The regime retaliated mercilessly, arresting and brutally torturing them. With that, the camel’s back was broken.
Silence was no longer an option. One by one, Syrians tore the tape off their mouths, resisting the blood-thirsty regime. But protests were no longer simply a fight for rights. They became a fight for life. Demonstrations turned into mass graves. Schools became shelters. Bloodlines severed. Buildings levelled. The air, thick with sarin gas. Paranoia prevailed over trust.
2011: The UN issues a statement.
2012: The regime’s crimes are condemned, and the war is named.
2013: …
2014: 4.25 million Syrians displaced. The death toll erased. Peace talks fail.
2015: Hope is officially lost, the “international community” turns away, abandoning Syrians to fend for themselves. A collective amnesia plagues the world, and Syria is now nothing more than another tragic conflict in the Middle East. Just another refugee crisis.
…
2024: Ahmed al-Sharaa, leader of the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham orchestrates a surprise military operation. Assad flees to Russia. The regime collapses after fifty-four years.
Prison doors in Sednaya and other regime torture grounds creak open. Survivors stumbling to reunite with their families, who had long mourned their deaths. Some prisoners still believed Hafez al-Assad,who died in 2000, remains in power.
Scenes of men, women, and children celebrating in the streets. Some celebrate with the waving of the old revolutionary flag, others eye the new rulers with dread. Has one iron fist simply replaced another?
Syria re-enters the world, and the world re-enters Syria. Ambassadors pour into Damascus, talks of embassies and borders reopening, and politicians fly in to shake the hands of al-Sharaa.
Oh, so this is what it takes for the world to “help” Syria. It’s okay, I understand now. The world pretends to care, through its countless condemnations and UN resolutions, through symbolic and ultimately meaningless gestures. They impose sanctions, then put a pin in it.
All the while, Syrians suffer war crime after war crime. They are bombed, killed, and tortured, left with the perilous choice of permanent exile from their homeland; or death.
But, have no fear. Never mind the decades-long gap in their resume, the West arrives just in time for the victory photo-op. They will shake hands, deliver speeches, call each other friends and allies, and of course, rewrite the history books. A liberation story, starring them, produced by them.
It’s a tale as old as time itself, to colonise, to exploit every resource, and to plant the ever-lasting seeds of division through any means; ethnic, religious, class. They abandon us, but not before ensuring the war never truly ends. The borders, the factions, the scars; they fester beneath the surface, waiting for the next explosion.
Forget them. The world will move on, as it always does, tallying up the victory and rewriting the narrative. But we, the people of Syria, will carry the weight of our history with us, forever, we will tell the generations to come. For we know it is not in the hands of diplomats or politicians, it is in our hearts. In the way we talk, laugh, cry. It is in the hands of the mothers who buried their sons, the fathers who searched for their daughters, the ones who never came back, and the ones who somehow, against all odds, persist. It is in the hands of my grandparents, jido and teta, whose tears I watched fall like raindrops in an ocean. It is in the hands of my mother, who longs to be surrounded by the rhythm of the Syrian dialect on the streets.
We will not be erased.
For every erased city on the map, for every lost soul in the rubble, there will be a voice that calls out. We were here.
This, perhaps, was the real revolution all along.
