ROAD ΤΟ DAMASCUS

Returning to anewly liberated Syria, veteran war correspondent JANINE DI GIOVANNI discovers a nation wary of its untested leaders, haunted by five decades of trauma, and yet imbued with hope and possibility

- JANINE DI GIOVANNI

THE LONG AND brutal reign of the Assad regime finally ended in December with a stunning two-week revolt. A coalition of insurgent factions, led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), swept across Syria, taking city after city, largely unopposed. As the capital, Damascus, was about to fall, the dictator Bashar al-Assad fled the nation he had held captive to terror for so long. He was granted refuge by Russia's Vladimir Putin, his longtime protector.

Overnight, the Syrian people emerged from decades of darkness with a profound collective trauma. For more than half a century, they had been forbidden to speak, protest, or engage in any meaningful activity against the state—ever since 1971, when Bashar's father, Hafez, came to power. Suddenly, everyone found themselves in a new world led by rebels who were ideologues but hardly civil servants or technocrats. HTS had no experience running a country, let alone one gutted by war and on the verge of economic meltdown.

And yet, on a recent trip through the country, I found Syrians, one after another, expressing a sense of hope. I found Syrians—despite an inventory of despair and their current wariness toward the new, untested authorities—finding their voices, able to speak about the years of silence and secrets.

In this fragile postwar place, peace is not yet a given. Most aspects of life feel uncertain. And not unlike those tenuous months in 2003-after Saddam Hussein was overthrown in neighboring Iraq-the cycles of vengeance have begun to flare.