Hope, fear, and uncertainty in postwar Syria
When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from Beirut, Syria was a mix of delightful chaos and state-imposed monotony. Christians, Druze, Alawis, and Jews were free to practice their faiths. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, alcohol was legal. Women not only drove cars, they worked in offices, shops, and restaurants. Some chose to wear headscarves, but many chose not to.
At the same time, billboards reminded citizens of their duty to the Baath Party’s founding motto: unity, freedom, socialism. Children wore military-style uniforms at school, and informants spied on their neighbors. The image of Hafez al-Assad, who had been president for just over two years, was ubiquitous. When I visited Damascus some months later, protesters threw eggs at a foreign dignitary. I asked my philosophy tutor at the American University back in Beirut whether he thought the Syrian government approved. “If the Baath Party doesn’t want people to throw eggs,” he said, “the chickens don’t lay eggs.”
That was the Syria I came to know over fifty years, through wars, attempted coups, the death of Hafez, and the accession of his son Bashar. It seemed unchanging, unchangeable, even throughout fourteen years of civil war. And then, on December 8 last year, it all changed. Assad was gone.
Taking his throne in the palace where he had presided for twenty-four years was Ahmed al-Sharaa, the forty-two-year-old leader of the Islamist militant group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). Known previously by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, he began his career as a foot soldier with Al Qaeda in Iraq. After being captured by U.S. troops in 2006 and released in 2011, he and six Al Qaeda comrades infiltrated his home country of Syria in the early months of the Arab Spring protests, helping to transform the uprising against Assad from a campaign for democracy into a holy war.
Sharaa moved back to Iraq shortly before his mentor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared the Islamic State’s caliphate, but quickly returned to Syria to resume the fight against Assad. In 2016, the tide of the war turned in the government’s favor. Its army, with Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah support, pushed the jihadis back to the last rebel stronghold, Idlib province, in the far north, where Sharaa formed a so-called Salvation Government, which ruled over some four million Syrians. The war, while still bloody, became a stalemate.
So it might have remained but for Hamas’s ill-judged rampage on October 7, 2023, and the decision by Hezbollah to attack Israel on behalf of Gaza’s beleaguered Palestinians. Thus began a chain of events that allowed Sharaa to advance into regime territory: Israel’s eradication of Iranian and Hezbollah assets in Syria and Lebanon; its destruction of Hezbollah’s weapons systems; and the assassination of hundreds of Hezbollah members, followed by that of most of its leaders, including its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, in September 2024. The removal of Hezbollah and Iran from the Syrian battlefield, combined with the diversion of Russia’s attention from Syria to Ukraine, exposed Assad’s weakness. Sharaa struck. On November 27, HTS and allied groups probed Syrian Army defenses west of Aleppo and pushed through them with little opposition. Taking the city, they moved south to Homs, Hama, and, within two weeks, Damascus. Syria was theirs.
When I drove into the country from Lebanon a week later, there were only two HTS fighters to wave me through at the border and no one in the vandalized buildings to stamp my passport. The dozen or so government checkpoints I had passed on previous trips during the war were unmanned; I reached the city in an unprecedented twenty minutes. The Iranian consulate on the right of the Mezze Highway lay in ruins, and the embassy next door was gutted and streaked with soot from arsonists’ flames. Old posters of the Assads had been burned or otherwise defaced. The windows of the television station in Umayyad Square were smashed, and a new, three-star flag fluttered on the roof. Apart from that, the city looked the same as it always had…
Read the full article at Harper’s Magazine.
Main image: Syrian president Hafez al-Assad declares war on Israel during a televised address, October 6, 1973. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Thank you for this beautiful article. It GPS ed back 50 years and more your narrative was so precise and correct more than an article. This was a photo of an era.
Thank you, Mr. Charles
Thank you, Charles! Fabulous article and so beautifully written. Tom
Thank you Charles this was such a vibrant article I don’t know how I missed it , a senior moment no doubt.
Keep
Them coming