In the years after the Syrian revolution, as the country unraveled, I would ask two questions of the Syrians I met — inside Syria or displaced, regardless of when or why they left. “Was it worth it? What were we supposed to have learned from all that had happened, from all that had transpired between us?”
I posed this question to a Syrian in Gaziantep, Turkey, in 2023. Yusef had movie star looks and, at 27 years old, had already lived multiple lives. He dropped out of school in Aleppo at 12 to work in a glass factory. When the revolution started a couple of years later, he at first took part in the protests, but later joined an armed Islamist group — a response, he said, to seeing Bashar al-Assad’s forces open fire on the unarmed civilians who were demanding reforms of the regime. He told me he had his arm and leg blown off in a rocket attack, and was assumed dead until he started to stir and was fished out of a black plastic bag on the sidewalk.
Yusef never fought again. In Turkey he had a small shop and volunteered in aid and relief. When I met him, an earthquake had recently destroyed his house and shop, and he was considering trying to reach Europe. He didn’t have the money yet, and he acknowledged that his rudimentary prosthetics would probably not serve him well if the boat capsized. Besides, he admitted, he really couldn’t swim.
I asked him the questions. He took a drag from his cigarette and said, with a bitterness that I had come to recognize, “We taught the world. We taught them that if you are not fit to do something, don’t do it.”
“Hamdallah,” praise be to God, he said, “we are now a lesson.” As if, at least that.
In 2023, no one could have blamed him for his pessimism. After all, at the start of the Arab Spring, when nationwide protests erupted in Syria demanding reforms, and later — when it became clear reforms weren’t coming — Mr. al-Assad’s ouster, the regime had offered Syrians an infamous choice: Mr. al-Assad, or we burn the country. Then, of course, Mr. al-Assad stayed and set Syria alight.
For more than a decade, Mr. al-Assad remained in power, employing vicious means to do so while enjoying an obscene amount of impunity. In recent years he was even beginning to be welcomed back to an international community eager to move on and to return Syrian refugees, despite clear evidence that Syria was not safe.
Much of the world did not properly grasp what was happening in Syria. The regime and its allies maintained that the uprising was the work of foreign powers, sectarian elements and armed gangs who were trying to oust a popular secular leader. Disinformation was rampant, and even many well-intentioned commentators described what was happening in terms of a global cast of characters behind the unrest: Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State. Syrians, when mentioned, were usually described in terms of foreign-sponsored sects, factions, fighting groups, victims or refugees. The idea that they might be protagonists in their lives and not just pawns in geopolitical jockeying was lost.
All of this of course suited Mr. al-Assad, and resulted in the international community failing to effectively respond to Syria’s implosion, which destabilized the immediate region, as well as the countries that took in its fleeing people.
As Syria takes its first faltering steps after Mr. al-Assad’s fall, it’s imperative that Syrians are not written out of their story again.
When the Arab Spring that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Yemen and Egypt began, in 2010, the al-Assad regime had already ruled Syrians through fear and repression for some 40 years, most of it under martial law. When power passed from Hafez al-Assad to his son Bashar in 2000, the regime appeared to rebrand. Bashar promised reforms. He was supposed to be mild-mannered, and had reportedly specialized in ophthalmology because it was bloodless. He had trained in London and married a Syrian-British woman who was glowingly, infamously profiled in Vogue. But the government remained corrupt, and Syrians knew the nightmares that defiance could unleash: detention, torture and disappearance.
Despite the risks, in 2011, Syrians started to courageously and peacefully protest to demand concessions. Syrians have often told me that the days of the thawra, the revolution, were the most beautiful days in the country, days of possibility and solidarity. The protesters were farmers, college students, housewives, pharmacists, interior designers, schoolteachers, bakers and shopkeepers. They came from all parts of the country. They had different politics. They were of all sects. In late 2011, a Christian Damascene confided in me that he was secretly going to protests. He would meet at mosques with other like-minded friends, both Christian and Muslim, before heading out to the streets. He beamed with joy and told me that he felt alive.
That year, many spoke as if the future had finally arrived for Syria. There were secret salons to think about future constitutions and economic systems, the nature of citizenship, the development of laws and what role civil society should play. Not everyone had the same vision: Some wanted a religious state, others a secular one — for some “secular” was a dirty word, tainted by a regime that claimed to be so. These weren’t politicians — how could they be, in a country where political parties other than the ruling Baath were banned? They were just normal Syrians, giddy at the possibility of inhabiting a role long denied them in their governance and destiny.
Mr. al-Assad’s regime responded by opening fire on peaceful demonstrators. Killing many, arresting and torturing more, even children. Many fled to other countries, unable to return because they were wanted by the government, which took revenge on entire families, neighborhoods and cities.
“Sho il badeel,” or “What is the alternative?” the regime asked, lest Syrians get any ideas as the Arab Spring spread. It was a kind of taunt. The implication was that without Mr. al-Assad there would be only chaos, violence, sectarianism and fundamentalism, as if Syrians themselves weren’t the alternative. “Sho il badeel” was also a threat. In 2011 in Damascus, the capital, I heard it uttered sincerely by anxious Syrians, and I came to understand what they already did: The government would do anything to hold on to power, including fomenting the chaos it claimed it was combating.
It released hardened jihadists from prison and arrested civil society activists. Mr. al-Assad wanted to discredit the revolution and show that the “alternative” to his secular rule was jihad. Later, Al Qaeda affiliates and the Islamic State arrived, hoping to replace the barbaric rule of Mr. al-Assad with their own. Eventually, Syria became the morass we had been told it was.
Since 2011, Syrian civilians have died in so many ways, at the hands of many perpetrators. They have been killed by conventional weapons, chemical weapons, bombardment, starvation, torture — even by drowning at sea. More than half a million Syrians are dead, including more than 200,000 civilians; millions more have been displaced; and millions made refugees. Syrian human rights groups list more than 100,000 missing, disappeared into the nightmarish innards of the regime’s dungeons. Syrians were not only written out of their story, they were also erased from the country itself.
Mr. al-Assad lost control of parts of the country, but what remained under his control descended into an impoverished, unlivable narcostate. He sought normalization, and in recent years his efforts started to bear fruit: He was readmitted into the Arab League in 2023 in part to try to curb the flow of captagon, an illegal amphetamine that his associates and relatives were producing and trafficking. Some European Union member states were reviewing their relationship with Syria — Italy even appointed an ambassador to Damascus in July.
For years, Syrians’ answers to my question — What did we learn? — were often bleak; full of blame but also self-reflection. They said they’d learned that human life is cheap and the international community was pointless. That they’d been naïve and failed to protect the revolution and its values. They said that the best they could hope for in the foreign lands where they’d become refugees was that their children would not be killed by the state and might have a chance at a future.
Then, suddenly, the regime was gone. Syrians were jolted from resignation and the routines of survival to shock and joy. For more than 50 years, a tab had been left open between the al-Assads and the Syrian people. Now that it was closed, the costs would finally be tallied, and the sum of that grief was as soul-crushing as the relief was overwhelming (even as people knew there were missing pages from the ledger and anguish still to come). It was catharsis, it was exorcism, it was whiplash.
Sober international observers were quick to counsel caution against joy, or even hope. An Iraq-like or Libya-like future, a resurgent Islamic State, external domination and dark days are ahead, they say, even as evidence continues to emerge as to just how dark the days have already been.
But Syrians were present for their and the region’s past. And Syrians have been thinking of their future — the day after, in particular — for 14 years, at least. Syrians do not need to be told that the fall of Mr. al-Assad will not usher in utopia but rather a new, complicated chapter. They know that their lives are irrelevant to foreign powers that view their country as a proxy — relief that Iran and Russia were potentially out was quickly replaced by concern that Turkey and Qatar are now in; and apprehension about Israel, which has seized and occupied territory near the border and conducted hundreds of airstrikes, destroying the navy, air bases and other military equipment.
Nor are Syrians unfamiliar with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group now in charge. They know how it consolidated power and ruled in Idlib, where people rose up against its use of torture and imprisonment. They have not forgotten that Ahmed al-Shara, now the head of the coalition governing Syria, was Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of H.T.S. Many Syrians know what life is like under jihadists, and they are included in Syrians’ calls to hold perpetrators accountable. I have spoken to many Syrians since the regime fell who are adamant that they will not cede their governance to H.T.S., but have sought to engage with them rather than refuse to work with them.
Similarly, Syrian civil society did not simply pause for more than a decade. People documented atrocities despite being refugees who were building new lives in other countries — and they had some success. While displaced, they helped to meet many of the basic needs of their compatriots both inside and outside the country, providing humanitarian aid and medical services, even education. Why would they stop now when they can accomplish so much more working in the open and — in many cases — back in the country? Already, Syrians have begun arriving from abroad. Some were on flights to Syria only days, even hours, after Mr. al-Assad got on a plane to Moscow. They greet this new phase in the same spirit that they met 2011 (myself included — I moved to Damascus that year). But it is bittersweet. They could have been at this moment of building their nation years ago, instead of suffering the destruction and loss wrought by wasted time.
In Gaziantep, Yusef told me that he did not regret wielding a weapon, even though he had come to see it as a time when he “had no soul,” and even though he lost limbs. “I got here because of it,” he said, referring to finding a purpose in helping others. “That’s enough to not have regrets.”
It is easy to look at a dark past and warn of a dark future, but we should not mistake that for seeing the future. What did we learn from Syria? That we misread it, and condemn it to misery, when we do not listen to the people at the heart of it
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