‘Thank God, the nightmare is over’: A Syrian returns home to Damascus to witness celebration and struggle

Amr al-Azm: You have to understand, I [had] come to terms with this situation over a long period, and I’d convinced myself that I was never going to go home again. I was never going to be able to walk into my house. I was never going to be able to touch my personal belongings ever again. And the idea that somehow in a space of less than 10 days, everything would change and I would find myself walking up that hill where our house sits and then literally putting the key in the door and feeling that lock and that little glitch, because you have to kind of tweak the key a little, which was exactly the same as it was 14 years ago. And then walking into the house for the first time, it’s just not something I’d imagined I’d be able to do.

Just having that moment, it was both real and unreal. And we hugged. We kissed. One of my relatives broke down and cried. And it was just an amazing sensation and remarkable in itself.

Just how worn out it was, how sad it was, how dilapidated everything was. The decline had been quite dramatic. It was just run down, you know, and it’s going to need a lot of work to put it back together again.

Most people were asking very simple questions like what’s our future going to look like? What kind of government are we going to have? What kind of rights are we going to have? What kind of representation are we going to have? But then, there were other questions that were much more basic like when do you think we can expect to have normal electricity; most people in Damascus and in the country as a whole have less than two or three hours of electricity a day. And you could have a meeting like that for the first time, probably in over 50 years in Syria, without fearing repercussions from the police or the security services barging in and just arresting everyone or attacking you as you walk out and beating you up as would have been the norm. In fact, I remember even in the early 2000s when I was living in Damascus, if more than four of us were sitting around a table talking, on the way out, we would be stopped by the security service, a patrol car parked outside who would demand to know what we were discussing.

Well, obviously, the group that is in charge now has strict Islamist identity, if you will. And we do have a model of what it would be like to live under them, if you think of Idlib, because Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and their leader ran Idlib, and we kind of know what that looked like. But at the same time, we’ve also seen not so much a moderation of behavior, but a pragmatism. So, you have now a whole range from extreme, strict Islamic interpretation to pragmatic. And the pragmatic part is very much driven by the need to adapt to the new environment. You know, people are obviously afraid because they know what they’ve seen and heard from how this group ran Idlib. But we have yet to see this fully come to be in Damascus. So, what I’m trying to say is this is not Taliban. This is not Kandahar. At least, we haven’t seen any of that. I went to the Old City with some friends when I was there. We went to the Christian Quarter. The bars were open. They were serving alcohol. I didn’t hear anybody come to anyone and say, “Cover your head,” or, “No mixing of the sexes.” Yet, at the same time, we also do see concerning signs like, for example, what’s going to happen to the female judges. They’re going to be reforming the judicial system. Will they allow female judges to sit? The revision of the curricula, and, you know, will they segregate schools? Public schools have always been segregated in Syria. Will they segregate private schools? Will they require the wearing of head scarves, head coverings in certain public buildings, for example?

There was this vibrant mood to it and a life that was kind of where everybody around me felt like they were rediscovering their city again in a new light, in a light that felt free. In the 10 days I spent in Syria, the one constant thing that I felt every single day from morning to night, from the minute I woke up to the minute I went to bed and with everybody I spoke to, was this overwhelming sense of relief. Despite all the concerns, the fears, the worries, even with people who were not against the regime, and even they expressed relief that the nightmare is over. And I think that’s the constant that you feel across the city as you walk around.