What is life without al-Assad?
Michel Kilo, the Syrian intellectual and opposition figure who died in 2021, once shared a story from his days in an al-Assad regime prison. A jailer asked him to tell a story to a 4-year-old boy whose mother had given birth to him in prison. Mr. Kilo started telling the boy about a bird flying in the sky and the boy interrupted him, asking, “What is a bird?”
What is life without al-Assad? I don’t know yet. I am only three days in.
I was born in the mid-80s under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, our ousted president. I learned early that being a good citizen meant not thinking. If you did dare to think, you didn’t say it out loud.
At school, I learned that if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to be part of the informant system that Syrians have lived with for decades. As students, we imitated it: If you handed in your list of names of your classmates who spoke badly about the teacher, you’d be made head of your class. Everyone thought everyone else was reporting them.
I was in the last high school class in the country that wore military-style uniforms — an olive green suit with a thick belt. I got my military training when I was 15. I used to brag that I could assemble and disassemble a Kalashnikov quickly, and I enjoyed the school shooting trips we did twice a year because I had fun with my girlfriends on the back of the military truck on the way.
To study journalism in Damascus University, I had to learn Hafez al-Assad quotes by heart. We had a textbook called “Nationalism,” which had his picture on the cover and something about Baath Party principles at the beginning, but the rest was about his thoughts and ideology. We were taught by lecturers who had graduated from the Soviet Union that professional journalism is propaganda.
During the civil war that began in 2011, I lived in areas controlled by different rebel groups — including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that finally toppled the regime — in eastern Aleppo and my hometown Idlib. When what would eventually become H.T.S. started to form in Idlib in late 2012, it was just one of the many Islamist groups around, focusing mainly on fighting the regime.
Back then, I could still move around without wearing my head scarf, and if Islamist rebels harassed me at their checkpoints, I would fight back. I wasn’t scared of them: I, too, was fighting the regime in my own way, as a journalist.
But then foreign jihadists, with their extreme ideology, started to join the H.T.S. ranks. They had the upper hand; they had the better funding. To align with them, many Syrian jihadists I encountered dropped their local dialects and started communicating in the modern standard Arabic — Fusha — to give the impression that they, too, were foreigners.
The civil war raged on; barrel bombs fell around me. I watched the bodies of children being dragged out of a nearby school that had been bombed. I kept working as a journalist, but now I had to wear a head scarf and a long, dark coat. I was suddenly required to have a male guardian as I moved around the city. My name was put on lists. I didn’t want to leave, but I finally decided I had to.
In 2016, my second life began, in Britain. For a long time, I blocked out anything to do with my former life. I accepted only work that was not related to Syria, and I deserted my old social media accounts. I suppressed the trauma, the longing, the love and the anger. It was the only tool I had to move on with my life as a refugee in London. And I was good at it. Suppression, after all, is the skill Syria made us all excel at.
What is life without al-Assad? My third life started three days ago.
On Sunday at 3 a.m. my mother woke me with a shaky voice. All our phones were ringing and the TV was loud. “He fell, Zaina, he fell. Assad fell.”
At my mother’s words, the thick, protective walls I had been living with for years collapsed under the weight of a flood of new ideas, led by one:
I can go back.
This piece is published in New York Times on the 11th of December 2024
Ms. Erhaim is an award-winning Syrian journalist, working as a media and gender consultant in the Middle East and North Africa.