Return to Damascus

After fourteen years away, I came back to a home I barely recognized

- STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAMIA MADWAR

THE SINGING AND CLAPPING burst forth before the plane started moving. “Raise your head up high, you’re a free Syrian,” a group of passengers a few rows ahead of me chanted in Arabic. The song has become a classic in the months since the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria last December. A few passengers—some draped in Syria’s new flag, a symbol of anti-colonial and anti-al-Assad uprisings—took turns playing the tune on their phones, along with a few other victory anthems, and called on other passengers to join in. I clapped along in giddy bewilderment. Just three months earlier, I kept thinking, this could have gotten us all killed.

Under the autocratic rule of Hafez al-Assad, who seized power in 1971 following a military coup, and his son and successor, Bashar, any whiff of dissent meant prison and torture. Most Syrians didn’t express their political views beyond a tight circle, and even then, we often spoke in code. We never knew who might be part of the secret police or an informant. In public, we either loudly praised the al-Assads or kept quiet.

Like me, many of those on the flight that February morning, from Doha, Qatar, to Damascus, Syria's capital, were returning to the country for the first time after a fourteen-year war. Several passengers declared it loudly, their tone a mix of joy and grief that captured my own feelings about the trip.

Aside from seeing family, I was eager to soak in as much as I could of the country’s impossibly fragile moment. I wanted to hear from Syrians who'd lived through the war about how they felt now and what they thought it would take to move forward and rebuild. Since I had only a week, I decided to stay in Damascus—it’s where I grew up. For me, it’s still home.