I recently travelled back to Damascus, after 14 years. The last time I had been at the Masnaa-Jdeidat Yabous Lebanese-Syrian border crossing was in early 2012.
In 2011, I had been covering the outbreak of the Syrian uprising against the Assad regime. I witnessed first-hand what was probably the most hopeful phase of the mass upheaval, characterised by peaceful demonstrations and an extremely diverse Syrian opposition. I also lived and worked in north-eastern Syria in 2013, but by then the uprising had become much more militarised and fragmented.
I had no official press accreditation back then, as working under a pseudonym was the only way to attend peaceful anti-government demonstrations in the capital. As a group of young foreign freelancers, we would even carry swimsuits on taxi journeys to pretend that we were going to the pool and go unnoticed at regime checkpoints near demonstration sites.
The alternative would have been to travel across Assad’s Syria on a press visa and be taken around on a controlled tour specifically organised for international media. It was the filtered lens through which few foreign journalists were allowed to report back then.
Much of the news coverage throughout the uprising and the subsequent armed conflict, was consequently done by brave Syrian citizen journalists.
Persona non grata
I left in late 2011 and had very slim hopes of returning to Damascus in 2012. During this time, my foreign colleague had been incarcerated for a few days for his alleged “undercover” journalism, and while in detention, Syrian intelligence officers questioned him about our working relationship. Unsurprisingly, once I arrived at Jdeidat-Yabous, I was declared ‘persona non grata’. They took my fingerprints and returned me back to the Lebanese side of the border.
Because of my Western passport I was neither imprisoned nor tortured to death, unlike many of my Syrian counterparts.
To then journey back through Jdeidat-Yabous with my first press accreditation after 14 years, was already something I would have never imagined. And given I have always associated ministries of information in the region with tools of control, I didn’t expect the current ministry to grant me a permit to travel freely around the country. This included the coastal areas that had recently witnessed some of the worst sectarian killings at the hands of pro-government forces.
I certainly wasn’t subjected to pervasive surveillance during the trip – something not even remotely comparable to working under the Assads. Nevertheless, one wonders if this is due to a genuine embracement of freedom of speech, or to the intelligence apparatus’ incapacity to enforce control over the media. Only time will tell.
No more icons?
The way political landmarks have changed in Damascus since the fall of the Assads, and its revolutionary significance, is something I am still processing. The pillars under the Southern Ring Road (al-Mutahalliq al-Janubi) leading to the al-Midan neighbourhood, which was a hotbed of anti-Assad demonstrations in 2011, and where I used to see green buses packed with Shabbiha (pro-government thugs) getting ready to beat up protesters, are now adorned with revolutionary flags.
The alleys of the Old City bustle with shoppers ahead of Eid al-Adha – although it’s more akin to window shopping due to the economic crisis. I am reminded that even these tourist sites were places of political violence under the Assads. I remember seeing an attack on a peaceful demonstration in 2011, not far from Bab Touma, at the hands of the Shabbiha who were brandishing batons and swords.
Some of the shutters are still painted with the old regime’s flag, possibly the same ones shop owners hastily shut down to prevent demonstrators from seeking shelter.
Credits should be given to Syria’s new authorities for not plastering Damascus with portraits of the interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa, marking a shift from the ubiquitous icons of the Assad family.
However, none of this necessarily means that the strong man personality cult has been all of a sudden eradicated from Syria’s political culture. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) supporters produce crafts with Al-Sharaa’s face and set his image as screensaver on their mobile phones.
Many are still sceptical about HTS’ transition from Salafi jihadism to representative democracy. But they are possibly more worried about HTS’ emboldened supporters, and their sense of entitlement after 14 years spent under bombardments in Idlib, than they are about discriminatory government policies.
Though this is also partly because the authorities have been careful enough to adopt a rhetoric that would not scare away much needed Western donors.
In the eyes of some of his supporters, the new Syrian president could still revive his sectarian jihadist past, if faced with hostility from his detractors. As one car banner I’d passed read: “Al-Sharaa for those who are guided and al-Joulani for those who transgress” (al-Sharaa la min yahtadi, wal-Joulani la min ya‘tadi).
A divided people
Syrian society was already polarised before the downfall of the regime, but now the most dominant divisions aren’t between regime supporters and the opposition, but rather the gap between an embryonic Islamist ruling elite and their critics. And this is rapidly growing.
“Where have you been for the past 14 years?” is the most recurrent slogan used by supporters of the current government to silence critics who are accused of having stood idle while Assad was butchering his opponents. This narrative is even being leveraged against a wide spectrum of long-time anti-Assad dissidents.
In March, Ragheed al-Tatari, the pilot who refused to bomb the city of Hama in the ‘80s and was incarcerated for 43 years under the Assad regime, reportedly faced the same smears. This happened during a sit-in held in the capital in March, during which he had dared to condemn the reprisal against civilians instigated by an anti-government insurgency in the coastal region.
Steep polarisation can easily morph into calls for foreign intervention and, if geopolitical conditions allow it, pave the way for fragmentation. This is something many Syrians would loathe as Assad’s apologists would gloat and argue that dictatorship was the only guarantor of territorial integrity.
Israel normalisation
As Israel strikes Damascus under the pretext of ‘protecting’ Syria’s Druze population, following the latest round of clashes between government forces and Druze armed groups, civil society’s calls for non-sectarian national unity continue to fall on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, Syria’s decision makers pursue normalisation with Israel from a subordinate position, as they are faced with an enemy that resorts to firepower to impose its conditions on a weakened and fragmented Syrian army. And the so-called international community has no means to prevent Israel from dictating its own terms of normalisation through military expansion in a sovereign country.
During my stay in Syria, around a month before the latest wave of Israeli strikes, I sat down with Alawites who, especially in the wake of the March massacres, would openly welcome an Israeli intervention to ‘protect’ them. This was an unspeakable taboo until very recently.
A day later I would be walking around industrial workshops in al-Qadam, a working-class Sunni neighbourhood located south of Damascus, where people would declare their readiness to wage jihad on Israel and reject any form of normalisation.
They would also try to convince me that regime remnants were responsible for the frequent kidnappings of Alawi girls, an interpretation of events that was totally inconceivable for the terrified Alawi families I met on the coast. For them, the current authorities are responsible for not enforcing security at best, and turning a blind eye to these crimes at worst.
Echoes of Hafez al-Assad’s rule
These parallel worlds did not materialise overnight. The Assad regime had long presented itself as the ‘protector’ of minorities, while sowing distrust between them, and the more conservative segments of the Sunni majority.
Alongside political and sectarian rifts, a new geography of power is taking shape across the country, causing resentment in communities that believe they’re being let down by Syria’s new authorities. A new elite of officials who hail from HTS’ stronghold, the province of Idlib, is taking control of government posts and the public sector, which is set to shrink under privatisation plans.
When discussing newly appointed management, a recurrent phrase I heard from dismissed staff was: “They brought in someone from Idlib.”
The north-western province has long been a rural periphery and, given a small circle of trusted aides who built their curricula in Idlib is being appointed to sensitive posts, some even went as far as drawing partial parallelism with how Hafez al-Assad had started from the coastal countryside when he had built the core structure of his regime in the 1970s.
Similarly to what happened under Hafez al-Assad, the rise of the new ruling class will hinge on its capability to forge ties with the more established Aleppian and Damascene urban bourgeoisie, and especially with wealthy diasporas and returnees who had to relocate their business abroad due to the war. Once these ties will be more consolidated, influential families will be less likely to turn up their noses at newcomers from Idlib.
While many activists are frantically working to shape the post-revolutionary transition, those who are less politicised are considering leaving Syria. Some feel that their personal freedoms are at risk under the new government, and others cannot afford to wait years for the economy to recover from war and decades of sanctions.
“Look how long it took Iraq to recover from sanctions!”, one man told me. He spent his life savings on smuggling his son to the Netherlands. Whilst he calls on the government to invest in schools and hospitals amidst a crisis of unaffordable treatment, he’s convinced that his son will have better opportunities outside of Syria.
“My dream is to have an educated son. [...] I am 45-year-old and everybody is telling me I wouldn’t be able to adapt to Europe, but my son speaks English fluently and wants to become an engineer.”
Andrea Glioti is The New Arab investigative editor. He is an Italian-British journalist, editor and researcher who has been covering Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and the Arab-majority Gulf since 2010.
Follow him on X: @andreaglioti or LinkedIN
Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com
Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.