Just after 10 p.m. on December 7, 2024, hundreds of people gathered in the parking lot of Ridgeway Plaza, a strip mall on the outskirts of Mississauga, Ontario. Pick-up trucks blared Arabic music, and shopkeepers passed out knafeh and sahlab. Police directed traffic as car horns roared.
The new Syrian flag, with three red stars, rather than two green ones, was rippling through the cold winter air. In the middle of it all, a group of men stood huddled in a circle, shoulder-to-shoulder, their arms wrapped around each other, chanting, in Arabic, “Raise your head high, you are a free Syrian.”
An hour earlier, the former president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, was ousted from office, ending his 24-year-long grip on power. Under Assad, Syrians became accustomed to mass arrests, torture, forced disappearances, indiscriminate bombing and the use of internationally prohibited chemical weapons. The Syrian war created the world’s largest refugee crisis, with 14 million Syrians fleeing their homes.
Now, for the first time in years, Syrians across Canada were able to envision a future for themselves on Syrian soil.
Since the fall of Assad six months ago, 500,000 Syrian refugees have returned home, according to the UN Refugee Agency. A survey from February revealed that 80 percent of Syrian refugees wished to return to Syria someday, with 27 percent wanting to go back within the following year.
The war brought more than 100,000 Syrians to Canada. The triumph of finally being able to go back, contrasted with the successful lives they have built, presents them with a tough decision. Are they willing to sacrifice what they’ve established to return to their homeland?
For some, the decision seemed easy, at least at first.
After the regime fell, Salam Khorshid decided to go home. She had lived in Canada for nine years as opposed to the 28 years she spent in Syria. However, as time progressed, she realised that she may have made that call too early.
Salam — a classically trained violinist, violin teacher and choir conductor — started her Arabic music group, Nawa Choir, for women in Toronto just two years ago.
Now, she’s scared that musicians are no longer welcome in Syria. A friend who supported the revolution, hiding in alleys with her to escape the regime forces, recently told her that music goes against Islam, knowing that music is her life.
To consider returning to live in Syria, Salam needs to be able to work in the music industry. She admits that while the new government has not issued or discussed any bans on music, “the problem is people.” She has family members telling her to stop her music career. But, she wants to maintain her personal freedom and be able to speak her mind without fear —something she couldn’t do under Assad.
“I would love to go back, but I need to go back and be myself,” she tells The New Arab.
Leen Hamo is more hopeful. Also a musician and one half of Kazdoura, a Toronto-based Arabic indie band, Leen is excited to bring her music career to Syria. She came to Canada in 2016, and while she started her band in 2020, singing in Canada was never part of her plan. Her dream has always been to sing in Arabic to her people.
Kazdoura released an Arabic fusion album, Ghoyoum (Arabic for "clouds"), which has been performed in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, and has amassed over three million views on TikTok. Their music centres around the feeling of homesickness. “Being displaced is the highlight of my life,” said Hamo.
After finding success in Canada, she now wants to organise music events in Syria, meet and collaborate with Syrian musicians and perform with her band in her country of origin.
Meanwhile, Sedra Alshamaly, a 17-year-old who fled Syria at the age of four and came to Canada at eight, fears moving back to Syria might mean facing instability and poverty.
Currently, 70 percent of Syrians need humanitarian assistance, and 90 percent live below the poverty line. Israeli attacks on Syria, violence and executions in the coastal regions, and clashes in the south threaten safety within the country.
Sedra also recognises that while Syria was her original home, Canada was the first place that welcomed her after leaving. She’s made a name for herself in Canada as a youth advocate for Syrian refugees and displaced people. She co-founded the art foundation, Elegant Art, with her younger sister at the age of 11 to support internally displaced Syrian children living in refugee camps.
Still, she remains optimistic about Syria’s future and plans to visit this summer. She has memories of her family gathering every Friday at her grandfather’s farm for barbecues.
Before the war, her grandfather began building a playground with a swing set and a sandpit. Cats would linger by the grass, and Sedra and her cousins would sit and play with them. Persimmon, fig, and Janerik (also known as greengage) trees surrounded the area. Bombing from the war wiped out the farm and her hometown of Al Mleha, forcing her family to relocate, but she’s hopeful about rebuilding it someday.
Abrar Mechmechia didn’t think she would survive six months outside of Syria when she left in 2017. Abrar, a Canadian-born mental health counsellor, had spent most of her life in Aleppo, Syria. Now, she has a whole new life in Canada, running her own mental health non-profit. She’s not sure if she can relocate again. However, just like Sedra, she plans to make a trip this summer and wants to visit her old neighbourhood as well as the house she lived in for 20 years.
Lila Mansour, an articling associate, was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in Canada, but spent many summers in Syria as a child. Last year, she received her Doctor of Law degree, and previously, she founded a legal support centre for Arabic speakers in British Columbia.
Lila sees Syria as her ancestral homeland, not a place she can live full-time. While she speaks Arabic casually, she isn’t proficient enough to work in Syria. But she wants her future children to have a strong connection with the country.
Her husband, Khaled Abdulwahed, was born and raised in Damascus, but was forced to leave at the age of 17 in 2011 because he was wanted by the government for his political activism. He fled to Lebanon, where he began volunteering with the Syrian aid group Molham Team. When he was accepted as a refugee to Canada in 2016, he led the registration of the group’s Canadian arm as a non-profit, and now manages the team as a prominent voice in the Syrian community in Canada.
Less than two weeks after the regime fell, he was already back in what he called “liberated Damascus.” His exile from his homeland ended after 13 years, 5 months, and 6 days. He visited his hometown, Qaboun, but returned to find that everything had been reduced to rubble. Khaled didn’t have a home to return to.
Now he wants to help rebuild the country. Many Syrians do. Whether by contributing on the ground in Syria or helping from afar, Syrians want to bring prosperity back to their country.
Alongside the Molham Team, Khaled has already been playing a part in the effort. Recently, they’ve been conducting renovations for schools in Deir az-Zor, Damascus, and Idlib.
For her part, Sedra wants to bring her art foundation to Syria, starting art therapy programmes for women who were wrongfully imprisoned and providing mental health resources to children in refugee camps.
Abrar wants to open a branch of her non-profit in Syria — the first of many more to come, she hopes, and Lila is exploring ways to support Syria through the legal system, whether by drafting laws or advocating for the Canadian government to implement aid policies, with the most important being the removal of sanctions.
Above all else, though, there’s something intimately pulling them to Syria. The park behind their parents’ house, the university where they studied fine arts, a monastery nestled in the mountains or the historic Umayyad Mosque. Syrians living in Canada dream of rediscovering the places that once held meaning for them.
Lama Alshami is a Syrian-Canadian journalist based in Toronto, with a focus on politics, Islam, and women's rights. She is currently completing her bachelor's degree in journalism
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