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“Welcome to your homeland.”
At the Lebanon-Syria border crossing, glossy posters address Syrian expatriates descending from all over the world. A family of happy returnees snaps photos under the green-striped flag—that which revolutionaries adopted in 2011 as an alternative to the government’s red-striped flag and now flows boldly as the official banner of state.
The family members rotate, each taking turns with the flag or behind the camera. Within seconds, I am sure, the photos will post to social media accounts and WhatsApp groups, along with words of disbelief that they are actually there.
I am astonished that I am there, too. I had not spent years denied my homeland, as the sign implied. Instead, I had spent 14 years interviewing people just like this family. And over the course of more than 500 such interviews, I developed my own strong personal bond with Syria. This was a relationship that was both deeply intimate and oddly vicarious. It was built with the bricks of other people’s life histories, filtered through the vicissitudes of how they recalled the past and chose to represent it to me.
And now, here I am, crossing into Syria and from the realm of other peoples’ stories into that of lived experience, including my own.
I had started interviewing Syrians in 2012, one year after the launch of what became known as the Arab Spring. Armed only with their courage, Syrians joined street protests calling for freedom, dignity, and good governance. Their regime, founded by Hafez al-Assad in 1970 and then inherited by his son Bashar, vowed to burn down the country rather than relinquish power. The state carried out merciless violence, the uprising militarized, other states and non-state actors intervened, and Syria became globally tied to the words “civil war” and “refugee crisis.” At least half a million people were killed and vast swaths of the country destroyed before violence settled into what analysts dubbed a frozen conflict. Photographs of Syria’s bloodied children and ferocious battles slipped from the news, as well as from the attention of much of the world.
I had begun to research Syria at the outset of its popular uprising, captivated by the question of how ordinary people overcame repression and fear to demand change. But because I was too fearful to travel inside the country myself, I decided to interview Syrians who had sought safety across its borders.
This was the inception of the forced migration of some seven million people who, along with the seven million who were internally displaced, made Syria the largest source of global displacement for much of the 2010s. As the war dragged on, I followed refugees’ stories from makeshift camps to semi-permanent camps, poor urban neighborhoods in the Middle East, perilous journeys across the Mediterranean, integration courses in Europe, and even destinations further afield, like Brazil and South Africa. By 2024, I had recorded the testimonials of Syrians all over the world and written three books and dozens of articles sharing their voices.
My interviews traced how refugees’ lives moved steadily farther from Syria in time and, if they could wrestle the resources and luck, also in space. Still, Syria itself remained ever-present in our conversations. It was palpable in people’s memories of the past, their increasingly hybrid sense of identity in the present, and their hopes for the future. Whether they longed to go back, lost belief in that possibility, or concentrated on fulfilling their aspirations wherever fate had thrown them—Syria was always a part of how they negotiated the world and their place in it. Sometimes, the presence of this tortured homeland was haunting and traumatic. Sometimes, it was nostalgic and cherished. Often, it was both.
These survivors of dictatorship, revolution, and war had endured more than my American life allowed me to comprehend, and they had endured it for the sake of a country that most could not stop continuing to love, despite it all. And so, Syria seized my heart too, and never really let go. The country that took shape in my mind was the embodiment of all that was both precious and painful for the people who narrated their extraordinary experiences to me. That Syria was thus not only secondhand; it was also larger than life.
Most of the people I interviewed believed that they would never see Syria again. Then, suddenly in late November 2024, the seemingly frozen conflict thawed and boiled over.
Rebel groups, quietly growing their military capacity over several years, broke out of their last remaining enclave and conquered one town after another from government control. The regime-turned-narcostate had become so financially, politically, and morally bankrupt that soldiers shed their uniforms and went home rather than defend it. Meanwhile, the external allies that had once propped up Assad—namely Russia, Iran, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah—were too weakened by other wars to come to his aid. After just eleven days, Assad grabbed all the riches he could and fled the country, while his associates scrambled to do likewise.
On December 8, Syria stood bloodied and plundered, but freed from the family rule that had literally claimed itself to be eternal. Men, women, and children poured into streets across Syria and the diaspora to celebrate with song, dance, and tears. I exchanged messages with Syrian friends all over the world, overwhelmed by the intensity of their emotions that combined euphoria with disbelief, hope, and trepidation, as well as heartbreak for the loved ones who were not there to witness that day.
More than anything else, people said that their feelings were “indescribable.” It was precisely the same word that I had heard in hundreds of interviews when I asked people to tell me about their first experience protesting in 2011.
I became glued to a trickle and then a stream of videos of Syrians returning to the country after long absences, each recounted with a precision hinting at a lifetime’s worth of sorrow and redemption: “Today I return to Syria after thirteen years, one month, and twenty days of exile,” “Today I kiss my mother’s hand for the first time in eleven years, eight months, and four days,” “Today I lay flowers on the grave of my cousin after being prevented from doing so for nine years, three months, and fifteen days” …
Should I go, too? After years of imagining Syria via others’ words, I felt a need to encounter it with all five senses. But I was scared. This was partly due to the country’s still-tenuous security situation. But it was also because Syria had taken on such mythic proportions in my mind that I could not fathom setting foot on its actual soil. Visiting was not simply a matter of buying a plane ticket and arranging logistics. It meant transforming Syria from the depository of all that I had absorbed of others’ experiences into a real society that existed in real time and space, on its own terms.
I put it off. Some Syrian friends, glued to news about sporadic violence, kidnappings, and then horrific sectarian massacres in March and July 2025, cautioned that Syria was not safe and I should wait. Others warned that conditions could get worse rather than better, and that I should not wait any longer.
Another Syrian colleague tipped the scales when he told me, “I think that there is an ethical obligation for people like you to go,” with “people like me” being foreigners who had built no small part of their careers on writing and speaking about Syria. He was not saying that my research was unethical, but that it was incomplete. If the country was integral to my own work, life, and identity, I had to come face-to-face with it.
My entry over land from Lebanon in August 2025 is smooth. During the second trip that I make that November, I run into trouble at the Aleppo airport for not having obtained an advance e-visa, though that requirement was not announced anywhere, and the e-visa portal still remains inoperative. The kind-eyed airport director explains that I must wait until his superior officer answers his cell phone to approve my entry. It happens to be Friday midday, and the officer is praying, which means an hour of wide-ranging conversation in the airport administration’s dilapidated office before I am allowed through.
Over the course of these two visits, I start to get to know Syria. I travel much of its length, meeting with friends returned from exile, their friends who had never left, and new friends altogether. I hug in the flesh a woman whose story I had recorded over Skype. I drink tea with the extended family of a young man I once interviewed in London, while he joins by video call to feel part of the gathering. I spend a few nights with a Syrian family whom I had met in Tokyo, now resettled in Syria. Their kids, like many other returned children, are still navigating the foreign environment of their parents’ homeland and getting their Arabic to the level needed to restart school. Meanwhile, they exclaim each time they mentally convert the price of potato chips from yen to Syrian pounds, delighted at what their allowance can now buy.
On a jouwla bayn al-umuhat, a tour of mothers, I make rounds among aging parents of people whom I have come to know in Turkey, Germany, North America, or elsewhere. Many of these displaced Syrians cannot visit themselves, due to precarious legal statuses wherever they have settled. It is painful for them to witness the disappearance of the barriers once posed by Assad rule but know that, if they leave the countries where they have spent years building new lives, they will be denied reentry. Few who have attained any degree of security, income, basic services, or future for their children abroad are ready to book a one-way ticket to a Syria that cannot yet guarantee any of those necessities. My US passport allows me to come and go, so I visit their families before they do and sometimes shuttle gifts back and forth.
As weighty as my visits with people are visits to places. So many towns and villages carry legendary histories of rebellion and war, and they are the backdrops of testimonies that I have recorded over the years. Comparing their images in my mind’s eye to the reality before my actual eyes frequently leaves me awestruck. How could Daraya, a town whose revolutionary resourcefulness and resilience are of mammoth proportions, be this small suburb? How could cars get tangled in Homs’s clock-tower square, as if it were a regular traffic circle rather than the site of a turning-point vigil and massacre? How could the dreaded Palestine security branch, where some of my interlocutors had undergone unspeakable torture, be that nondescript building on the highway? How could I walk from what had been government-controlled western Aleppo to what had been rebel-controlled eastern Aleppo, both of which existed in my mind as distinct universes separated by the infamous “death crossing”—which is now just a road?
I documented tales of unforgettable bravery and loss transpiring in these and other places but would not have recognized them had a local not pointed them out. These stories will always be epic, but now I can also envision them in their everyday context.
Reminders of the horrors of war are everywhere. In Aleppo and Homs, destroyed buildings half-stand in the center of town, their markers of death a striking juxtaposition to the bustling life of traffic, commerce, and strolling families that circle around them. In Damascus, the center of town is frozen in time unscathed, while its outskirts form a ring of annihilation. Walking amid the rubble confirms what I had heard others insist; videos and photos can only take you so far because there is nothing like witnessing kilometer upon kilometer of ruin for yourself.
The carcasses of hollowed, looted buildings with collapsed roofs and abysses for walls raise questions about displacement: Who had lived here? Did they survive? Where did they go? The same buildings sometimes present questions about return. Among the seemingly unlivable remnants of apartments, I periodically spot drying laundry on a balcony, fresh cement blocks, or newly potted plants. Who had come back? How were they getting by? What circumstances in refuge shaped their decision to choose here, instead?
The Syria I study as a political scientist faces multiple daunting transitions simultaneously: from conflict to post-conflict, from authoritarianism to post-authoritarianism, from economic collapse to recovery, from oppression to transitional justice, and from deep social division to national reconciliation.
Academically, I know that these processes take decades, reversals are as common as progress, and outcomes nearly always disappoint. Varied forms of violence since Assad’s fall have left as many as 13,000 dead, including killings and grave violations against civilians committed by some government or government-aligned fighters. The temporary constitution has centralized authority in the person of interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa, while key posts of state decision-making privilege his loyalists at the expense of greater inclusion, power sharing, and popular participation. If there were free elections today, there is no doubt that Sharaa would win by huge margins. But there will not be elections for several years, and people interested in forming political parties still await a legal framework under which to do so. Meanwhile, stories circulate about corruption and the new authorities’ reconciling with some who accumulated power or wealth under Assad. Grassroots protests voice demands on issues ranging from restrictions on personal liberties to the high cost of living. Eventually, the government announces new regulations requiring prior authorization for demonstrations.
The more time passes, the more the euphoria that followed Assad’s fall gives way to post-euphoria or, for some, despondency. My social media feeds are polarized into heated exchanges between those who cheer the current authorities as the guardians of liberation and those who feel that revolutionary dreams of a free, accountable Syria have been hijacked. My conversations on the ground confirm each of those poles, but more typically occupy a spectrum of gray between them, including an overriding feeling of uncertainty. “We are like orphans,” an octogenarian in Damascus tells me. “When a father is abusive, you might hate him, but at least you know who is in control. Now we have no idea where we are headed.”
I take notes on my encounters, with each fragment of conversation, snapshot of daily life, and exchange overheard in public transportation carrying hints of both the pain of this phase and its dogged sense of possibility.
- Sednaya, Damascus countryside: A family living across the highway from the infamous prison recounts life in the shadow of what has been dubbed the “human slaughterhouse.” In the late 1970s, the regime confiscated some of their orchards to build the terrifying complex, claiming that they were constructing a new university. Believing them, the family had bought more land. “It was a smart investment, as all the students would generate a lot of economic activity,” the father explained. He was among the first to enter the prison along with the rebels who liberated it, witnessing scenes that continue to keep him up at night. He uses the word that might be the best anthem for contemporary Syrian history: “Indescribable.”
- Damascus: A non-governmental organization launches its research on experiences of loss among families of the approximately 180,000 Syrians who were detained or abducted during the war and have not been heard from since. Attendees, overwhelming the wives, daughters, or mothers of the forcibly disappeared, rise one after another to express their anger: at the Assad regime that stole their loved ones; at the current authorities who are acting too slowly on popular demands for transitional justice; at the world that never acted to stop these calamities and now appears to have forgotten their plight entirely. The woman behind me stands up to say that she has no income on which to raise the children of her two children who vanished in dungeon prisons like Sednaya. I look back at her when she finishes, and she extends her hand to offer me sweets.
- Harasta, Damascus countryside: An internally displaced woman returns to her former, bombed-out apartment, where she discovers that her new neighbors, themselves internally displaced from another part of Syria, are stealing and reselling the metal rebar protruding from what had been her walls. This was to be the raw material for her own reconstruction. “Where can I go to secure rights?” she asks in despair. State institutions have neither the administrative capacity nor the material resources to address the millions of grievances like hers. I discover this firsthand when I visit the new Ministry of Interior citizens’ complaints office. The fact that this office exists is testimony to the state’s metamorphosis from the disdain and abuse with which the overthrown regime treated Syrians. But the fact that the patient staff can offer complainants little more than a kind word and a bit of respite in a fanned room suggests how far there remains to go.
- Zamalka, Damascus countryside: A commemoration of the anniversary of the 2013 chemical weapons attack, in which the Assad regime killed some 1,400 civilians as they slept, is an incongruent mix of balloons and patriotic music on the one hand, and survivors crying silently on scattered plastic chairs, on the other. Armed security force officers are perched atop skeletal, destroyed apartment buildings to guard arriving government dignitaries.
- The Syrian coast: A woman turns ashen when I explain my plans to take a minibus to a highway junction, where another friend will collect me. “But there’s a checkpoint with gunmen there,” she warns. “What type of gunmen?” I ask. After some prodding, she finally whispers, “Gunmen from the government.” She, from a religious minority community, is terrified of crossing paths with the officers of her own state. It is lost on neither of us that I, as a foreigner, tour her country with fewer fears than she does.
- Latakia: I sit in a park more intact than other parks that I have visited, where the planks of stools and swings were long ago stripped by locals as firewood. My hosts point to the surrounding neighborhoods. “Everyone here used to be public employees, and most were purged from their jobs when the new government arrived,” they say. “How are they supposed to feed their families?”
- Aleppo: That fall and winter, towns across Syria hold elaborate local campaigns of cultural events to raise funds for reconstruction. In Aleppo, a huge crowd rushes to attend a free play titled “Memory of Detention.” That more people want to attend than can fit the sagging seats of the auditorium, and that this theatrical enactment of regime crimes is being performed in a space once synonymous with its rapacious ruling party, is so tremendous that it brings some attendees to tears. After the performance, we overhear a child saying that he wishes he could donate to the campaign but has only the equivalent of 20 cents. My friend, himself an Aleppine returned after more than two decades abroad, gives the boy some larger bills to place in the collection box. Later, an activist launches a campaign exposing public figures who pledged tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars but did not deliver. He is subsequently detained on complaints that his calls for transparency and accountability amount to defamation.
- Aleppo: civil society groups convene 150 women from urban, rural, and camp communities across the province to strategize how to increase female representation in the parliamentary elections scheduled for fall 2025. Voting is limited to appointed members of electoral colleges, does not include provinces that remain outside government control, and is empowered to select only the two-thirds of the legislature not directly appointed by the president. Still, the enthusiasm in the gathering is electric. Women span three generations, some unveiled and others covered from head to toe to fingertips. All are activists hungry to engage in democratic politics. The space for participatory government is narrow, but these women—like other revolutionaries I meet across Syria—are determined to step in and push its bounds with all the muscle they can muster. Despite the government’s target of 20 percent of seats for women, ultimately less than 5 percent of those elected to parliament will be women. I remember these activists when those results are announced, with full confidence that they will keep fighting.
During my seven weeks in Syria, every conversation in every town eventually circles back to economic despair. The lack of jobs is dire, and minuscule salaries fall far short of high prices and unaffordable costs of living. I know the statistics; more than 90 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line, and more than 14 million are food insecure. But seeing people dig through dumpsters for something to eat brings numbers to life in a different way. How can a country tackle the monumental task of political transformation when its people are surviving only thanks to remittances and, as I hear many say, the grace of God?
And, with more than half the population displaced, everyone I meet is also situated somewhere on the map of migration. Some are temporarily visiting, others permanently returning, and still others thinking of leaving or not leaving but yearning for loved ones who did.
I follow the advice of a Syrian friend now living in Kenya who visited several times before I do. “Walk down the street,” he told me. “You can immediately distinguish between those who never left Syria and those who just came back.” Unremitting, cumulative exhaustion weighs down the former, leaving some as grayed as the buildings that have not seen upkeep in years. The latter, by contrast, are often upright, with bright eyes and quick steps. They still twinkle with the awe that they are home.
Again, I find that conversations fill in the multidimensionality between those two poles. A refugee visiting from Norway tells me that he wants nothing more than to move back to Syria but cannot because he still owes on the student loans that he borrowed to establish his life in Scandinavia. A driver for the local equivalent of Uber explains that he abandoned his residency permit and good job in Egypt to rush back as soon as Assad fell, unable to wait any longer to see his aging mother. He now regrets the decision that he views as emotional, rather than rational; whereas the money he used to send back once sustained his family, his presence is now another financial burden for them to shoulder.
Meanwhile, a woman describes enduring long years of war and siege during which she bathed only with drips of the cold water collected in bottles during the few respites when taps were not dry. “During all those years, I never wanted to leave because Syria is my country,” she says. “Now I want out, because I’m no longer sure it is.”
Yet on December 8, 2025, the first anniversary of Assad’s fall, Syria is aglow with more patriotism than I have ever witnessed anywhere. Leading up to the anniversary, billboards display images of unity under inspirational messages such as “The dark era is over” and “Shoulder to shoulder … hand in hand … we build the nation.” And indeed, in all-night celebrations in streets across the country, strangers dance shoulder to shoulder and hand in hand, in an exhilaration that is, yet again, indescribable. Fireworks fill the sky, and revolutionary songs resound from every direction. The green-striped flag is everywhere: flying atop cars, painted on cheeks, filling public squares farther than the eye can see, and also sold by impoverished children whose clothing is far too thin for the winter cold.
From afar, Syria became a long-distance pen pal to whom I was passionately devoted but never expected to meet. Visiting meant figuring out how to converse in person. It was a halting and sometimes awkward test to discover whether our chemistry could extend past the written page.
Making that transition has made me think of other foreigners who have developed bonds with faraway lands made inaccessible by war and then find themselves, surprisingly, renegotiating the terms of that relationship. I wonder how past generations of Americans who followed wars in Southeast Asia made that shift, or how those today who have come to care deeply about places like Ukraine or Gaza might eventually do so. Our commitments to these countries and their people are real and valuable. They fulfill duties of human empathy and often answer the calls of besieged civilians who, facing abominations at the hands of powerful states, want fellow civilians around the world to act in solidarity.
But when a place comes to double as a cause, it can also flatten. The full texture and jagged edges of life in three dimensions can be difficult to detect in screens and print. Politics can appear to be the whole story, rather than one of multiple plot lines that unfold in the real trajectories of real individuals who also think about other things.
All of this is knowable from a distance, yet easy to overlook. It is important to remember. Long-term solidarity requires patient and steady engagement, and it is stronger and steadier to the degree that it grows roots in soil you can cup in both hands. This is especially the case when a liberation struggle evolves into a kaleidoscope of challenges of state and nation-rebuilding. No country emerging from decades of dictatorship and years of brutal war becomes a prosperous democracy overnight. A people deprived of the right to determine their own fate needs time to come together and determine who they are and want to be.
In Syria, there is much to be done, but finally space to imagine it and work for it. As one of my first interviewees expressed it to me, Assad’s Syria was a place where dreaming was not allowed. In 2011, Syrians dared to dream. Now another difficult stage has opened in the arduous journey of making those dreams a reality. Those of us who have been inspired by Syrians’ stories get to see where the future takes them and also to live out our own stories in the place where it all began.
During my weeks in Syria, I see echoes of what I have long documented in refugees’ stories. Oppression, revolution, war, and forced displacement are not things of the past but rather a complex and violent inheritance shaping every aspect of the present.
This is the larger-than-life Syria that I study and write about from afar, and that I was braced to encounter close up. What I am somehow not prepared to find is the humdrum of the everyday. No sooner do I cross the border than I begin taking photographs of everything. Here is a tree, and it is in Syria! There is a traffic light, and it is in Syria!
Even the most commonplace things are astounding to me because I have come to associate Syria with anything but the commonplace. Much of Syria’s ordinariness, of course, would be extraordinary where I come from: how people automatically scramble to charge phones or run washing machines during the few treasured hours of electricity; how their fingers flip through cash at breakneck speed because hyperinflation means that even small purchases are paid with large stacks of bills; how they can point to a seemingly ordinary field and warn that it remains littered with landmines, and so on.
But there is ordinary ordinary, too. When I travel to Homs, the famed “capital of the revolution,” I am brimming with eagerness to explore the city that, for me, embodies the Syrian story of heroic resistance and ruthless besiegement. Instead, this stop on my tour of mothers hardly budges from the kitchen. Three full days are a blur of an endless stream of visitors, cooking, and gossip. When I later tell a friend how my expectations of revolutionary landmarks materialized into sheer domesticity, he exclaims, “Finally, you had a real Syrian experience!”
These moments slowly help me appreciate a conversation I had earlier that year with the dissident intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh, now in exile in Berlin. Yassin not only spent 16 years as a political prisoner but has also endured the forced disappearance of his wife, Samira Khalil, among countless other loved ones stolen by violence.
Reflecting on his own return visits after Assad’s fall, Yassin told me that it was important for him to “de-dramatize” his homeland. He wanted to rediscover Syria beyond the atrocities and tyranny that he tirelessly elucidates in his writing. Not only as a struggle or a question, but as a country.
I leave Syria nagged by the perennial itch of any academic or author. I should write something. I should pen a commentary on the new government. Or maybe refugee return, sectarianized violence, or transitional justice. I am an American university expert on Syria, and I should be able to offer insightful analysis on the whirlwind of issues that it now faces. But I cannot. Over many years from my desk in Chicago, I became proficient in navigating neat narratives that invited confident political prognoses. Returning from post-Assad Syria, I know that I will need a lot more time listening, and also learning from all that Syrians are producing in every medium, before I earn the privilege to opine. And so, when I do try to write, I focus not on interpreting Syrians’ stories for the West, but rather on trying to make sense of my own story. I compose a letter to my pen pal, saying how nice it was to meet, and that I promise to come back soon.