Tears and hope for Syrians in a post Assad world

One week on from the fall of Bashar al-Assad, we went to the clocktower in Homs, Syria’s third city, where people used to gather to demonstrate at the beginning of the revolution. In April 2011, regime forces shot randomly into the crowd, killing hundreds. It was a seminal massacre, one of the acts of cruelty that made Syrians abandon peaceful protest and pick up weapons to fight.

That Sunday, the sun was shining and young women were gathered in groups, taking it in turns to snap pictures of each other holding the revolutionary flag – black, white and green horizontal stripes with three red stars across the centre. When I raised my phone to take pictures too, they giggled and waved. It was around 11am but the clock gave the time as 8.30. It will take Syria a little while to catch up with itself – the end of the regime came so quickly few were prepared.

We decided to have a coffee in an old-style cafe opposite. A battered chandelier hung from the high ceiling and sun filtered in through the windows, which were dark from accumulated cigarette smoke. Red and white woven cloths covered the tables. As we entered, the owner said – despite our protestations – that as honoured guests, we would not be allowed to pay for anything. A group of men called us over to sit with them. Their English was faltering – “Not enough practice!” one explained – but they were desperate to talk about politics with visiting foreigners.

One was Christian, another a Sunni Muslim and a third didn’t say. A woman with short black hair came over to join us. All were keen to impress on us that they wanted Syria to be what they called “a civil state”, where everyone could practice his or her religion freely, not the enforced secularism of Assad’s Baath Party nor the Islamism espoused by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the armed group that swept down from northern Syria and toppled the regime.

Each had a story of arrest and imprisonment. One showed us the form he had signed in which he confessed to being “a terrorist”. It wasn’t clear exactly why he had been arrested, nor why he had been released – in the Assad era the word “terrorist” was a catch all. He had encased the single sheet of A4 paper in a plastic bag for safe-keeping. I’m not sure if he was carrying it now as a badge of revolutionary honour, or whether he had got into the habit of keeping it in his pocket in case the police stopped him and he had to prove that he had been released.

The previous day we had been to Baba Amr, a Homs neighbourhood which had endured an almost complete siege from November 2011 until March 2012. Always an opposition stronghold, many of its men had joined the Free Syrian Army that took up arms against the regime. My friend Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times, and the French journalist Remi Ochlik were killed in a regime mortar attack on Baba Amr in February 2012. A 2019 US court verdict said Marie had been targeted. After the regime retook control, most of the rebels and activists had escaped. They were now returning. We watched as two hugged, reunited after more than a decade. Manhal Nader, who had survived the attack that killed Marie, said, “The Syrian people will never forget anyone’s sacrifice. We will never forget Marie nor anyone killed by Bashar al-Assad.”

Most of the women on the street had never left. Their husbands and sons had been killed fighting on the front line, or “disappeared” by the regime. Ghabsha Khalaf, aged 63, wept as she explained how she and her whole family had been tortured for providing food to the visiting foreign journalists. Assad’s thugs had hung her and her daughter by the arms from a prison interrogation room. They had beaten her on the head. I asked if she blamed Marie and the other journalists for what had happened to her. “No!” she said. “Of course not. They were our guests and Marie was like a daughter to me.”

That was when I cried, of course. As a journalist, there is no greater privilege than to meet people in historic times, when a revolution succeeds and they are full of hope. And nothing more sobering than to hear about people’s suffering, and the unwitting role we may have played in their lives.