Syria is freed from Assad. But the country is more deeply divided than ever. Impressions from a trip to my homeland

My last trip to Damascus wasn't easy. Neither were the first two, and perhaps all future trips. Once you lose your place of origin, you lose it forever. That's what I'll keep telling myself whenever I need to get my memory and recollections under control.

How often have I begged my mother over the past fourteen years to stop being homesick and instead be content with a certain amount of longing. She simply shouldn't think excessively about her city, her apartment, her neighborhood, and her neighbors. Because this longing is insidious. The loss isn't compensated for by returning, and the place is no longer the same as the one we left in 2011. Just as we are no longer the same.

The long-gone era has not passed us by silently, and we have not been mere innocent bystanders. It has changed us, disfigured us, shattered our sense of confidence, destroyed our homes, annulled our identities, and shattered our sense of belonging. We have become political prisoners, tortured, and victims of violence and chemical weapons, refugees reported on in the news, used by politicians in election campaigns, and whose fates are squabbled over by political parties.

We have become widows and mourners, we have escaped death, we are traumatized, insecure, and sick. We have become a story and an image. We have become "Caesar Act," art exhibitions, films, and documentaries.

My last visit in May was a test of my memory, history, emotions, and even motherhood. I traveled with my son Saad. He had left Damascus at the age of six and was now returning at the age of twenty. Fourteen years in which I had believed he was comfortable with the situation and had resigned himself to living in many cities and apartments.

I watched him grow older year after year, observing him without wishing him to mature quickly and without challenging his affiliations and his identity. I had considered him a child of his time, combining multiple cultures, languages, and temperaments. And it wasn't until December 8, 2024, that I noticed how urgently he was searching for his identity and belonging.

This need had been suppressed, hidden, perhaps he had ignored it, until he regained his identity that night when Bashar al-Assad fled, taking with him a dark era in Syria's history. I had believed that a person belonged to the place where he lived, where he went to school, and whose language he spoke. I had believed that identity was a formality.

I was amazed by the immense joy radiating from his eyes as he spoke to me via video from his student room in Leeds. Where had he hidden the idea of ​​home all these years? And this sense of belonging, what shape did it take, what smell, and what color? My mother longed for the past, for seven decades of living in Damascus; she longed for the theater stages and the apartments she had lived in and the neighborhoods she had walked through. She longed for her work, her friendships, and her memories.

But what did a twenty-year-old boy long for, who had left his city at six and perhaps couldn't remember anything at all? I believe his longing resembles my mother's, a mixture of imagination, fantasized places, fond memories, and the need for a landmark that we guard like our eyesight so we don't get lost.

When I left Damascus for the last time, I realized that reclaiming places didn't mean reclaiming a sense of belonging and home. And that the sense of alienation I had felt during all those years in Syria hadn't gone away either.

A week ago, we—my mother, my husband, my friend Itab, her family, and I—were sitting around a large table for dinner. We were in the garden of a Victorian-style house where Itab and her British husband, Jack, live. Itab's father is the famous Syrian writer Mamdouh Azzam, with whom I have been friends for over twenty years.

We were connected by writing, shared friendships, and our opposition to the Assad regime. We dreamed of change and believed in writing as a means of resistance against this overwhelming alienation in the land of despots. In mid-2012, I fled with my family to Beirut, and from there to London in 2017. As a result, we met only rarely, and our conversations mostly revolved around the diaspora and asylum, the horrors of arrest and kidnapping, the lack of security, the lack of electricity and water, the cold in winter and the heat in summer, the inadequate supply of basic foodstuffs, and the shortage of gasoline.

Mamdouh continued to live in Syria with his wife, Dunja, partly in Suweida, partly in the house he had built brick by brick in his Druze village of Taara 50 years ago. I still remember him complaining exactly 10 years ago that he could no longer live in his village because of his resistance to the regime.

At that time, the Druze were torn between opposition and regime loyalists. Numerous armed conflicts broke out in his village. Mamdouh could no longer stand living among a majority of regime supporters, the so-called Shabiha. He moved to the town of Suweida, where people are lost in the crowd and the familiarity of the villages is nonexistent. Whenever they visited us in London, I tried to persuade them to apply for asylum.

I did it out of fear for them and the desire to have them with us. I begged them to come to Great Britain, or at least to Europe, where they would be closer to us, because the past few years have taught me that friends mean home and security. But Mamdouh firmly refused. He looked me straight and confidently in the eyes and said he couldn't possibly leave his house unless he was forced to.

But was it even possible to live there under those conditions? It had been possible for the two of them, at least until mid-July of this year. Is it credible that someone who survived the horrors of the war between 2011 and 2024 and braved the inhumane living conditions, as he always described them, couldn't find safety after liberation?

Can you believe that Mamdouh Azzam, who longed for the end of the regime for 14 years, has now become a refugee? And that I, who dreamed of returning for 14 years and couldn't, can now return and don't want to? Even my mother, whose grief and homesickness for her homeland we have nurtured for a whole decade, refuses to return. She's afraid, she says, and what she hears from her friends about Damascus confirms to her that it is no longer the Damascus she left behind and longs for.

I asked Mamdouh what compels him today to flee to a country whose language he doesn't speak and whose changeable, gloomy weather he dislikes. He replied bitterly that he had nowhere to return. Bedouin tribes had overrun his village and others, along with security forces under the new Syrian government. They had destroyed houses, set fire to plants and trees, and demolished the house he and Dunja had built with their own hands.

They also set fire to the books in his library. To which house should he return? To which village, and to which country? His siblings fled their homes on a dark night, in their pajamas, under the impression of gunshots, screams, and cries for help. They fled at a time when we thought the time for fleeing was over, when the flight itself had fled with its inventor, Bashar al-Asad, on the night of December 8th.

To this day, I haven't dared to visit my father's village on the Syrian coast. While the dividing lines were clearly visible before and during the revolution, these lines have now disappeared. Across Syria, anything is possible at any time. The fear that once had clear contours has become diffuse, and it's difficult to determine who we should be afraid of. The Shabiha are still wreaking havoc, only now they are no longer supporters of the Assad family, but of Ahmed al-Sharaa's government and his men.

Freedom of speech is becoming increasingly difficult, and freedom of expression is constantly threatened by accusations of treason. These are precisely the same offenses that any opposition figure could be accused of for decades under the Assad government. Once again, Syrians are condemned to watch. They are neither allowed to help shape change nor to interfere politically, intellectually, or socially in public life.

I've been to Damascus three times. I never dared to visit my relatives in the coastal village where I had been outlawed during the revolution. But this time, I was afraid not only of my family, the villagers, the neighbors, and the shabiha, but also of the members of the new government. Some of them make no distinction between the old regime and the Alawites.

I was afraid of the road connecting Damascus to Tartus, passing through Homs, where numerous clashes had broken out in mixed Sunni-Alawite neighborhoods after the liberation. I was afraid of the street robbers, whom the Assad regime had called "uncontrolled gangs" that threatened security, while the new regime—much like the old one—called them "armed" and "uncontrolled elements."

Nine months after the liberation of Syria, I now write about warring religious communities, about the fear that has grown following the attack on the Mar Elias Church in Damascus and the violent clashes in Suweida and that threatens to engulf us all.

My cousin was perhaps the only one in his village who opposed the Assad regime. The night the Assad regime collapsed, he spoke to me in a voice trembling with joy and choked with fear. Three months after the liberation, his voice trembled with fear, and it remains so to this day. At first, I thought his fear was exaggerated. But the testimonies of the population in the coastal region and the reports of massacres against the Alawites silenced me.

How can we sleep when even a single Syrian fears and expects to be slaughtered, arrested, or kidnapped simply because they belong to a religious community that was transformed into a political community by the policies of the previous regime? How can life continue under the pressure of these narrow affiliations? How can a country be rebuilt without a professional and independent media, without transparency—and without bringing the criminals to justice?

During the revolution, Syrians were divided into opposition and regime supporters, into Syrians living inside and Syrians living abroad. But today we are witnessing far more dangerous divisions that go far beyond "for" and "against." Today, people are pigeonholed according to their religious affiliation. The Alawite is considered a "relic of the old regime," the Druze a "traitor," and opponents of the new regime an "orphan" of the Assad regime. And anyone who supports the policies of the new regime is denounced as a backward IS supporter who accuses others of disbelief, approves of oppression, and rejoices when Syrian blood is shed.

The new and complicated conditions are a grim legacy of the two Assad regimes. They committed all kinds of destruction, exploitation, robbery, marginalization, oppression, imprisonment, murder, and torture.

I'm sitting with friends, some of whom I've known for three decades. What brought us together was the courage to embrace diversity and the resistance to injustice. Today, I notice how they have withdrawn into themselves and their religious communities. People from Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, whose sense of Sunni belonging has intensified and who, after decades of marginalization, have now become a political religious community.

Alawites, who have become a minority more than ever before and who are revisiting their traditional narratives of victimhood, who are entrenched in their regions and fear the strangers on their territory. They cannot be convinced that this stranger is also Syrian.

Druze, who see the new government as another Assad regime, which they feel threatened by because it seeks to destroy their unity and abolish their independence. Kurds, who only want to recognize their own leader as the leader of all of Syria, with its many religions and denominations. Christians, who are frightened and still reeling from the shock of the terrorist attack on a church in Damascus.

And in the background stands a large group of Syrians who don't care what's happening, neither on the coast, nor in Suweida, nor in the Palace of the Republic. This is the same group that slept soundly while the outskirts of Damascus were attacked and wiped out with chemical weapons. An observer might say that President Sharaa today attends events, appears in public spaces, receives delegations, and gives speeches just like Bashar al-Assad, who back then strutted around while his troops wiped out the Syrians.

Sharaa is not Bashar al-Assad, and hostility toward Israel has lessened since the war in Gaza, the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the Iranian intervention in Syria. But the fact remains that Syria has not belonged to the Syrians for decades, and the Assad family's dictatorship has left the country fragmented and vulnerable. The new government, despite its intention to liberate the country, has exacerbated divisions. Perhaps it believed that "Sunni partisanship" alone would be able to suppress diversity and silence dissenting voices.

The question today is clearer, more real and more painful than ever: To which Syria will we return?

Dima Wannous , born in Damascus in 1982, is a writer and has lived in exile in London since 2017. – Translated from Arabic by Larissa Bender.