For 54 years, Syria existed in the shadow of a silence so profound, it swallowed entire lives.
The Assad regime thrived on erasing memory. Forced disappearances, propaganda and violence weren’t just tools of control; they were weapons aimed at obliterating the past. Anti-regime demonstrations were said to be fake news, and innocent civilians kidnapped or killed became “terrorists.” The regime’s vast network of informants, known as the Mukhabarat — its intelligence apparatus — turned neighbor against neighbor, making Syrians fear not just the regime but also one another. Phones were widely believed to be tapped, and a careless word could lead to a midnight abduction. Conversations were often guarded and stilted. Without a way to speak of what was happening around us, Syrians lived in a constant state of historical amnesia. Fear became a national language. Forgetting was a form of protection.
I grew up in this Syria. When I was a child, I remember, my father scolded my brother for telling his friends that Hafez al-Assad had imprisoned my uncles. When his son Bashar al-Assad took over his father’s vast empire of oppression, there was hope he could be different; he wasn’t. But when the Syrian revolution ignited alongside my rebellious teenage years, some Syrians began telling their own stories, the ones the regime didn’t want us to speak. I joined the movement and helped spread the word about protests and demonstrations. By the time I was 17, I fled Syria without my family, fearing the Mukhabarat. When I arrived in the United States, telling the story of Syria was no easier: My country became the subject of alternative facts and disinformation. I felt the weight of the silence back home in every call with my family. They became experts in using coded words to hint at what they witnessed daily as the war tore our country apart.
As long as the regime was in power, Syrians lived in a story the regime told and controlled. But as anti-Assad forces entered Damascus in December, the regime finally collapsed, and the oppressive silence began to lift. Syrians are finally able to speak about the enormity of what we endured for the past five decades.
While most Syrians lived in fear of speaking the truth, some resisted and documented the crimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad as they happened. Among them was Samira Al-Khalil. A human-rights activist and political dissident, she opposed the Assad regime long before the revolution. Imprisoned for opposing Hafez al-Assad, she was tortured and detained from 1987 to 1991. After her release, she remained a tireless advocate for others who were imprisoned. Two years into the revolution, fearing arrest, she sought refuge in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus called Eastern Ghouta. Eastern Ghouta endured a brutal siege for five years, sealed off for months at a time as Assad forces relentlessly bombed it from above. Ghouta was where Bashar al-Assad unleashed some of his most ruthless violence, where chemical gas killed innocent people in their sleep.
From Ghouta, Ms. Al-Khalil kept a diary, fragments of her experience under bombardment and siege. Like some 113,000 Syrians who have been forcibly disappeared since 2011, she was abducted, on Dec. 9, 2013. We still don’t know where she is or if she is even alive. Her neighbor found the pages from her diary strewn around her home after her kidnapping. For Syrians, memory is often a messy room filled with scattered papers, fragments of time and experience in need of a narrative.
Ms. Al-Khalil’s husband, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a writer, helped publish her diaries into several languages and entrusted me to translate them into English. The act of translating her writing helped give words to the story I, in exile, could never tell about my country. Her chronicles from Ghouta are an account of the crimes committed by the Assad regime, and they also serve as a testament to the power of bearing witness. It’s as if her diaries say: This really happened, and Syria won’t forget. “These images will not be erased by other life memories,” she wrote. “They can only be erased from my mind by death.”
Ms. Al-Khalil reached Ghouta in May 2013. These are excerpts from her diaries — some handwritten, others posted on her social media — after her arrival there. Within weeks of reaching the besieged, rebel-held suburb, she had witnessed hunger, malnutrition and bombings.
July 18, 2013
Today marks the end of my second month in Ghouta. Here, one hour equals many hours in the outside world where there is no siege. Life bears no resemblance to life. I used to think that my memories of prison were the most horrifying and cruelest violations of the soul and body that my eyes would ever see. But to witness an entire area with its homes, streets and people violated, to feel utterly helpless and unable to protect your family, to have your child starve while you’re unable to provide him with food, sick with no medicine, to witness a shell break through the walls of your house, unable to stop it from stealing one of your children, everything that I have seen and heard will not be erased from memory and remain etched in the soul.
A few weeks later, Ms. Al-Khalil writes of witnessing weapons-grade nerve gas attacks on Ghouta.
Aug. 5, 2013
This morning, at 5 a.m. in Ghouta, there was a knocking on the door accompanied by voices: “They bombed us with chemical weapons! They bombed us with chemical weapons!”
There were sounds of rampage in the street. Ambulances. People fleeing with their children. Youngsters putting on a vinegar-soaked towel that is said to be useful. Some suggested grinding a piece of charcoal and placing it with a cloth on the nose. When faces got smeared with charcoal, others started laughing. There were shouts for people to go to the upper floors, away from the chemicals.
After a little while, there were sounds of a plane and mortar shelling and those who had run up the stairs fleeing the chemicals running downstairs to flee the bombs.
Aug. 21, 2013
A mass graveyard was made for those martyrs whose names remained unknown and for those who are here in search of their loved ones. Here, we find both the witness and the martyr. … They didn’t know it was going to be their last night, their last sleep. They didn’t know that the sky’s airplanes would cast its poison at night. …
It is said that, in some places, there are people who haven’t been reached yet. Those people are still sound asleep in their homes, left in peace in an eternal rest. They departed and left the world in its eternal disgrace.
Chemical attacks like these remain contested, making testimonies like Ms. Al-Khalil’s all the more vital — offering rare, firsthand accounts that preserve truths others have tried to erase. The attacks on Aug. 21 might have killed more than 1,000 people. At the time, the Assad regime claimed these attacks occurred at the hands of opposition groups. Human Rights Watch found that the attacks were most likely chemical attacks delivered by weapons that were probably Syrian made and that it is very unlikely that opposition groups carried out the attack. Years later, another chemical attack in the area killed about 43 people. The Assad regime not only denied that attack; some of its survivors were too afraid to admit that their children were killed by the poisonous gas.
If they weren’t fleeing chemical attacks, the people around Ms. Al-Khalil were starving after Assad forces blocked all roads that led into Douma.
Undated
The standard of living is worsened in eastern Ghouta … because of the military authorities’ measures to close the checkpoints. Entry of raw materials into the area have been prevented. Beans, medicine, milk and other things. … The price of a loaf of bread is 100 Syrian pounds and no more than a quarter of the size of a loaf in places not under siege. Poor people can rarely afford it. Only middle-class people can.
People have begun to starve for real. …
As the conditions of the siege worsened, Ms. Al-Khalil wrote often about her memories from prison in the ’80s and early ’90s. The trauma of war, it seemed, awakened memories from her time in one of the regime’s notorious prisons.
Undated
We got out of prison, but it did not leave us. … Memory still lives here as if it were a memory from yesterday. … I am out of prison now and in the heart of the siege with its people.
Sept. 27, 2013
People lived here once. It was once stirring with life. This place had a soul. …
I feel suffocated while I walk here. I stumble upon my steps, my body shivers, my heart sinks, and I feel as though the floor will swallow me. My soul becomes one with this destruction. I am experiencing feelings like nothing I have felt before. … I used to think my memory of four years in detention was the harshest thing my eyes had ever seen and the heaviest thing my memory had ever carried. … But the brutality I am seeing now far exceeds that.
Dec. 3, 2013
When we were in prison, some of us would have bruises and wounds after being tortured. Those of us who received less torture would feel guilty and would be scared of gossip about being a traitor. One day, one of the women thought of committing suicide.
Today, the destruction in some places has reached levels we haven’t imagined even in our worst nightmares.
***
That was her final dated entry. Ms. Al-Khalil was abducted six days later, taken along with three other human rights activists: Razan Zaitouneh, Wael Hamada and Nazem Hammadi. They became known as the Douma Four, and their locations — and whether they’re alive or dead — are unknown. Many believe Jaysh al-Islam, an extremist religious rebel group, was behind their disappearances. The group is one of many that proliferated across Syria in the years since the revolution began. It has denied involvement.
That Ms. Al-Khalil’s decades-long fight against the oppressive Assad regime probably ended with a militant group that was also fighting against Mr. al-Assad is emblematic of the intertwined ways trauma has touched millions of Syrians. Ms. Al-Khalil, who was tortured and imprisoned by Assad forces, was from the same Alawite minority as the Assad family. And while the regime is responsible for most of the pain we’ve experienced for decades, it was not the only group accused of committing crimes against humanity. Despite the democratic organizing that emerged in areas free from Mr. al-Assad’s control during the revolution, in some places, oppression took new forms.
Many Syrians were hopeful that the fall of Assad’s regime would bring an end to the violence these groups wrought. But in early March, reports that Assad-aligned forces executed a coordinated attack on the interim government’s security forces in Syria’s coastal region began emerging. Soon after, according to war monitoring groups, a counterattack escalated into sectarian revenge killings against hundreds of civilians in Alawite communities.
As violence in Alawite towns increased, Aisha al-Debs, one of the interim government’s new leaders, tweeted a photo of children who died of a chemical attack in Ghouta. They might even be children who died in the attack Ms. Al-Khalil wrote about. “For those sensitive souls raising their voices on social media today,” she tweeted, mocking people who called for an end to violence against the Alawite minority, “remember the horror and brutality of Bashar’s chemical massacres.” The tweet has since been deleted, but it was just one of many I saw on Syrian social media.
The devastating killings last month are why reading Ms. Al-Khalil’s diaries feels so urgent today. The immense weight of carrying our collective memory lies on the shoulders of those of us who are able to speak now. Now, with the regime toppled, we Syrians face the daunting task of writing our own history. Memory is our weapon against erasure, our protection from further division.
After the fall of the Assad regime, I called my aunt to ask about my uncles who were detained when Hafez Assad rose to power. “Tell me everything,” I said. And for the first time, she did. Her voice trembled as she recounted stories she had buried for decades.
My aunt is one of many Syrians finally able to speak their truth, just as Ms. Al-Khalil did in her diaries. I wished she were with her loved ones to witness the victory she so passionately believed in, to see Syrians reclaiming their streets, their voices and their memories. Her voice, her words, her memory — these are the tools we will use to rebuild Syria. In reclaiming our stories, we are rewriting not just Syrian history but also a Syrian future that refuses to forget.
Sarah Hunaidi is a Syrian writer who is working on a book about the disappearance of Samira al-Khalil and her life under siege.
Source photographs by Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Ammar Al-Arbini/Shaam News Network/AFP, via Getty Images and Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times.
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