What do we talk about in Syria?
What was changing in Syria was not only what people were able to do, but what they were able to say. The shroud of silence and fear that enveloped Syria throughout the Assad decades was gone. Syrians were, finally, speaking freely about those dark decades.
In Hama, a city 130 miles north of Damascus, I visited the atelier of one of the last traditional weavers in the city. We drank coffee as he told stories of February 1982, when Hafez al-Assad put the rebellious city under siege and the regime’s army killed tens of thousands in a single month. Others in the shop shared stories of entire families being killed together in their homes. What felt radical was that we were in Hama, openly speaking about the stories of Hama.
In Aleppo, which is 220 miles northwest of Damascus, a kind man sitting next to me at dinner casually recounted how he and his wife—both were jailed for opposing Assad during the revolution—had survived. Their survival and our ability to speak openly about the brutal past felt miraculous. I teared up listening to them. I couldn’t get over what it meant to hear these stories exactly where they had happened. Just being there, bearing witness together, speaking and listening without fear or filter seemed to loosen some of the pain trapped inside us. In Hama, the wounds are 44 years old; the city was hollowed out, every family touched by loss. In Aleppo, in the suburbs of Damascus, across Syria, people and neighborhoods heaved under the trauma of the last 14 years. Thousands of families are still searching for answers about their loved ones—more than 100,000 of whom had disappeared under Assad’s rule.
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