The Return

My darling Sammour,

After years of silence, I began writing you a letter last October. I gave it the title “Guardian of Hope,” since your absence is bound up with my sense of hope, both personal and public, slowly eroding for the last eleven years. But I stopped after a few lines, for there was nothing I could tell you about the situation. You are the situation. What could someone who has no part in your absence tell you about yourself? Only you experienced it all, and only you can provide full testimony. All this while I have made every effort, Sammour, somehow to forget your disappearance, so as not to spend every minute in its company. Still, it would attack me unawares at odd moments, snatching me away just as you were snatched away eleven years ago. 

Yet now I am taking up this letter again, writing with what would have been the best possible news had you been with me. The regime has fallen! Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia! Without a single word to his supposed constituency or to Syrians at large. Within days a rhyme began to circulate: “Our leader till doomsday/skedaddled on Sunday!”

Something astonishing happened, Sammour: Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or the Al-Nusra Front as it was still called when you disappeared, launched a military operation in tandem with other rebel groups to reclaim areas controlled by the regime, though among them were the deescalation zones set out in the agreement of 2017 between Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The fighters rapidly gained control of Aleppo and moved on to Hama, which fell into their hands after some resistance, and from there to Homs and then on to Damascus, which was liberated on the morning of December 8, 2024, at 6:18 AM, as one can see emblazoned on stickers on the windscreens of people’s cars—which is to say, a day before the anniversary of your disappearance. An incredible leap of courage, all over in barely twelve days. It was marked by good coordination, discipline, and limited violations. 

I was afraid that, as the rebels set out from Hama toward Homs, a major massacre would occur and what remained of the city would be destroyed, but none of that happened. People who left Homs for fear of sectarian violence and reprisals, including some of our loved ones, returned after two or three days. Your sister Najat and her daughter Lulu stayed in the city and did not encounter any trouble. I mention only them because Afif sadly passed away a few months ago. How I wish he could have witnessed the day of liberation! And I didn’t tell you that Dr. Munif died suddenly two years before that. Afif lost the will to live after he lost his brother, after his two eldest daughters had to leave the country, and after a decade during which the national mood had festered into despair.

Waad was able to go to Homs to say goodbye to her father and stand by her mother and sister. Juju could not. I visited her in Kemnitz to pay consolation. Did I ever tell you that Juju has been living in Germany these last years? That she married a loving Palestinian man, Fajr, and that they have a daughter called Tamara, now about three years old? Thaer and Waad have a son who is almost nine today, named Assi. They were finally able to move to Berlin after years of precarious living in Beirut. The regime fell shortly after they arrived. 

Things moved quickly, driving Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher, and his intelligence chiefs to flee each in their own way. People thought that they saw Ali Mamlouk, head of the National Security Bureau, boarding a dinghy at Arida to cross over into Lebanon, as if he were a Syrian refugee heading to Europe from the coast of Turkey or North Africa. It appeared later that it was another officer, a less important one. And the top brass of the killing machine seems to have scattered across Russia, the Emirates, and Lebanon. 

The new rulers made every effort to be accepted both at home and abroad, although neither the Arab countries nor the leading international powers were happy with the upheaval. Had they had more time, I suspect they would have stepped in to maintain the blood-soaked status quo, as they have done since 2013. The miracle that transpired was not simply the overthrow of a regime of fifty-four years but its lightning speed—it happened before anyone realized what was going on. I imagine the new rulers themselves hardly expected the regime to collapse, but they held their nerve and took charge of the four major cities, the backbone of the country, in record time and with very few losses.

I was in France when all this happened, Sammour. I had a book published in French, and the publisher organized a lovely evening for the occasion in a Parisian bookshop, with many of our friends and loved ones in attendance. I was also making arrangements, with the help of others, for the second iteration of the prize that bears your name. I haven’t told you about this yet. The idea is to celebrate a woman from the Arab or Mediterranean world who is doing something important in the field of literature, art, or human rights activism and who is not already well-known. The first year, 2023, we held the ceremony on International Women’s Day and gave the award to Reem al-Ghazzi, a Syrian documentary filmmaker. You know her name at least, I’m sure. 

This last time the event took place on the anniversary of your disappearance—and that of dear Razan, Wael, and Nazem. Two people shared the award: Ne’ma Hasan, a poet and novelist from Gaza, and Garance Le Caisne, a French journalist who wrote two books, one about the Caesar files and another about Mazen al-Hamada, the young activist from Deir ez-Zor who was arrested and subjected to brutal torture that left him with profound physical and psychological scars. After his release he traveled around Europe to raise awareness about the fate of detainees in the regime’s prisons, but he mysteriously returned to Syria in 2020. His body was found in a hospital morgue after the fall of the regime, and it appears that he was killed only days before. Garance also made a film about European citizens of Syrian origin trying to seek justice for relatives who were killed or disappeared by the regime. In addition to the two honorees we included a special mention for Zeinab al-Ghunaimi, a lawyer and human rights activist from Gaza.

Because the ceremony took place two days after Bashar fled, and because it was understood that his escape meant the regime’s total collapse, the mood shifted from a solemn remembrance of you and your comrades to a joyful concert featuring Abo Gabi, a Palestinian-Syrian singer and musician, and the singers Rasha Rizk and Harith Mouhaidi. Among those present were your friends Wijdan, Afaf, Hind, Doha, and Lina. This was a celebration of the fall of the regime. It went on for about three hours, men and women eagerly joining in the singing and dancing. The evening brought together Samira and Syria, at least one of whom seemed to be returning from her absence.

For my own part, Syria will not return for good without you, Sammour. This leaves me almost paralyzed. I share in the joy of my friends, but something sticks in my throat. Thousands have been released from Assad’s horrific prisons, but as long as your absence continues, a part of Syria will not be liberated. This concerns not only you and me, or your partners in absence, but tens of thousands of others, over 113,000 people whose fate is unknown, according to the most reliable human rights sources.

One of the most astonishing scenes after the fall of the regime was the liberation of detainees from Sednaya Prison. They were barely 1,500 in total—bad news. It meant that the killing machine had been operating at maximum capacity for years and that the families who came in search of their loved ones had no choice but to hunt through mass graves. The most wrenching story of such cruel hope was that of a mother in her seventies. Finding no sign of her disappeared son, she took away a noose stained with blood, as if to hold onto the last thing her martyred child was likely to have seen. Pictures show her with the rope draped around her shoulders. The things hearts have to bear!

An acquaintance of mine from Damascus wrote to say that the first thing he did upon returning to his native city was to visit the grave of his father, who died twelve years ago. After that he went to what used to be the Violations Documentation Center in Douma, where you and Razan Zaitouneh were working when I left Eastern Ghouta for the last time, and where you were both later kidnapped with Wael and Nazem. The man said that the door had been replaced and that no one answered when he knocked. This door, riddled with shrapnel and bullet holes, has lodged in my mind, kept there by a picture of you opening it from the outside, a white shawl draped around your shoulders. The image became famous after you disappeared, and even appeared on banners and posters.

I want to go there, to make a pilgrimage to the last place you cared about. In a few days I’ll be in Damascus, Sammour, after nearly eleven years and nine months away from the city of our shared life, our love, our first kiss, our marriage. The city where we were wanted by the secret police. We know they started to hunt you down only after you left the city on April 3, 2013. We seem to have earned—you and I, along with Thaer, Waad, and Dr. Munif—a security report ordering our arrest before the end of 2012, but for some reason they didn’t begin searching for you until Thaer was arrested, just after I was smuggled out to Eastern Ghouta. You’ll never guess how I found that out. In the first days after the fall of the regime, a Syrian journalist working as a correspondent for an American newspaper was able to enter Branch 215 of Military Security, a detention center that had been a symbol of terror. He spotted the report, photographed it, and sent me pictures of its pages. That such a thing could happen was well and truly a sign that the regime had fallen.

The report takes us into the jungle of Assad’s security branches. The first pages are addressed to Branch 261, requesting that they provide Branch 294 with a copy of their letter No. 128148, dated 11/18/2012, “relating to the so-called Yassin Haj Saleh and his co-conspirators.” Then the signature of the head of Branch 294. Four of the five names mentioned in the report—you, Waad, Thaer, and me—are preceded by the adjective “so-called.” Dr. Munif, exempted from this sobriquet, is referred to by his title: The Doctor. 

The report claims that you and I share ideas, and that we reside outside the country, though a security check at the border revealed that we had neither left nor returned. Of course we hadn’t. The report also states that we work “for armed groups in Qatar” and that we are active “on behalf of Gulf newspapers on the Internet and on social media.” What’s more, we receive “financial support from abroad in exchange for incitement and mobilization.” The address at which we receive this financial support is a link to my Facebook page. The report includes your cell phone number, not mine, which was not in the possession of the author, whose identity we know today. As for Thaer and Waad, they are “furiously active on behalf of the armed groups.” 

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Pages from a report discovered at Branch 215, the detention center in Damascus, after the fall of the Assad regime, December 2024

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Pages from a report discovered at Branch 215, the detention center in Damascus, after the fall of the Assad regime, December 2024

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Pages from a report discovered at Branch 215, the detention center in Damascus, after the fall of the Assad regime, December 2024

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Pages from a report discovered at Branch 215, the detention center in Damascus, after the fall of the Assad regime, December 2024

Yassin al-Haj Saleh

Pages from a report discovered at Branch 215, the detention center in Damascus, after the fall of the Assad regime, December 2024

The funniest part of this blend of the banal and the tragic was the story that I was living at the American embassy in Damascus with other dissidents. Do you remember, Sammour? When I was in Eastern Ghouta, I received some questions from a journalist I did not know, and had it not been for the report, I would not have remembered his name. He asked about the allegation that I had stayed at the American embassy in Damascus, which was closed at the time due to the suspension of American and Syrian relations following the regime’s brutal suppression of peaceful protests. You’ll remember that a fourth-rate Assadist journalist had spread this story as early as 2011 with the purpose of slandering me and other dissidents—among them Razan and Riad al-Turk—and trivializing our cause. By the way, dear Riad died on the first day of 2024, at the age of ninety-three. How I wish he could have witnessed these days! 

When I read the email I was annoyed by this question and was about to ignore the journalist and his website, Asia News. Then it occurred to me to play the game and turn it against the questioner. You surely remember this interview, as it was published in late May 2013, just days after your arrival in Eastern Ghouta. I replied, as you know, that I wanted for nothing in the embassy of the great power, where we were blessed with uninterrupted electricity and Internet, excellent facilities, and the company of other well-known dissidents. The interview caused a rare scandal. Opponents of the Syrian revolution read it as an admission that we were agents of the Americans. Some of our friends were mystified. I had responded in a tone of complete seriousness, but using uncharacteristically pompous language whose sarcasm was hard to miss. 

The intelligence report handled the story in a confused manner. It quoted my original answer without comment and also mentioned what the website had reported about the perplexed reactions of dissidents and loyalists. The reason for this, in my view, is that members of the party that controlled the life and death of Syrians were neither authorized nor qualified to think for themselves nor to rationally judge the validity of the material they received. They were simply gatherers of information. Naturally they did not ask themselves whether the Americans would really hand over the keys to their shuttered embassy to a bunch of Syrian dissidents. In fact not a single question was asked, yet it became a story to tell.

After eleven years, eight months, and twenty-six days away, I crossed the Lebanese border and arrived in Damascus in the afternoon of December 29, 2024. With me were two friends, Leyla Dakhli, a Franco-Tunisian academic living in Germany, and Justine Augier, a French writer, as well as Joseph, a French journalist from Mediapart. I hadn’t been so close to you since we parted on that miserable day, July 10, 2013, when I left for Raqqa, five months before you disappeared. To the extent that it was a time of joy and celebration, Leyla and Justine were keen to share it with me, but a part of me held back. Syria will not be liberated as long as the better part of her, you, remains a hostage of this long-drawn-out captivity. 

That evening the four of us went to Al-Rawda Cafe, which you know well, and which I used to frequent before the revolution. There I met Azza Abo Rebieh and other friends in a festive atmosphere, dense with singing and cheering, hookah smoke, cameras and phones snapping away, and tears.

What strikes one first in Damascus is the state of dilapidation and disrepair. You see it in the streets, the buildings, the taxis, and in the hotel where we stayed. Time and neglect have teamed up against the oldest inhabited city in the world. Then there is the widespread poverty, embodied by large numbers of beggars, including women and children, and by the countless commercial stalls that have popped up everywhere and make walking almost impossible in some areas. Syria suffered under a tyrannical regime of rare selfishness and corruption, utterly devoid of patriotism, whose clique had a bottomless appetite for money, power, and material things. It also suffered from international sanctions, which instead of harming the regime immiserated the majority of civilians, like all similar precedents. 

Damascus today has very polluted air, which prolonged the cough I was suffering from before I arrived. This pollution, according to some, has been exacerbated by the vast numbers of cars that have come from Idlib and the liberated areas in the north. The city is now so congested during the day that the car that brought us from the Lebanese border took half an hour to get from Umayyad Square to our hotel, Burj al-Firdaws, a journey that would have taken ten minutes in the past. 

One of the first things I did, with the help of a young friend, Shirine Hayek, was to obtain a Syrian mobile phone number and buy a small shoulder bag in which to carry money. Cash can no longer be carried in pockets—that is how much the lira has depreciated. On the day we arrived a hundred dollars was worth 1,300,000 Syrian pounds, or 260 five-thousand-pound notes, the highest available bill. At the ubiquitous money changers you see bricks of cash wrapped in rubber bands, worth half a million lira apiece. A joke I heard: Bashar promised not to leave power until every Syrian became a millionaire. He kept his promise and left. 

The following day the four of us headed to Sednaya, which had become a guarded security site. Joseph managed to acquire the special permission needed to enter, though something was off: the permit said it was for press coverage in Quneitra and Latakia, not Damascus province—public administration was in disarray and clearly lacked experience. Even so, we were eventually permitted to enter that terrible fortress. 

We saw the collective dormitories, each containing ten cells. They reminded me of Aleppo Central Prison, Al-Muslimiya, where I spent eleven years and four months in the “political wing” between 1980 and 1992. But a good number of these interior walls were made of metal, not of cement, and the doors too were made of solid metal, not the grid of iron bars we had in Al-Muslimiya. I can’t find a better phrase to sum up Sednaya than what Umm Hazem, who lost her husband and two brothers, would later say when she made her own way to that human slaughterhouse: “A foul smell, damp, blood, and no one around.” 

The impression given by this walled, heavily guarded area, of which the prison itself represents no more than 5 percent, is the impression one gets from Assad’s Syria as a whole: a blend of shabbiness and carnage, of dilapidation and cruelty. The place is miserable, but it is sealed off by strong walls and defended with weapons. You know that its inmates were starved and there were weekly executions. It is a place of absolute despair, a place to abandon all hope, like Dante’s Inferno. 

What comes to mind, Sammour, as I walk today before the General Staff building, fenced round and guarded, or the military administration sites in Damascus, or the heavily defended security headquarters, or the radio and television building, fortified like a castle, is that the regime was taking precautions against the possibility of an armed raid on these nerve centers. But no battle took place. The regime collapsed without a bullet being fired in Damascus. It had become a paltry thing, worn out from within, lacking a cause of any kind. It simply melted away, even as regional and international powers appeared to be normalizing relations with it again, despite its record of horrific crimes. 

On the first day of the year I was at the door of the Violations Documentation Center. Some friends and I had called for a two-hour sit-in in front of this office, where a young family now made their home. The place had been renovated and looked more livable than before. But the door at the building’s entrance hadn’t changed, contrary to what I had been told; it had just been painted sugar-white.

I knocked on the office door. With me were Lina Sinjab, whom you know and who still works for the BBC, a British photographer who works with her, and Lulu. A young man barely in his thirties opened the door, and I explained the situation to him. He had only moved in seven months before and knew nothing about your case, but he was kind enough to let the photographer, Lulu, and me look around, except for one room, which had been Razan’s office, where his wife had hidden herself away. The house had been completely refurbished, but its structure was intact. The living room where we worked had new, elegant furniture, and our bed was no longer in the inner room. The backyard where we would all sit in the summer evenings was still there, but it too had been made over.  

Outside the house a good number of people had assembled, including your friend and fellow prisoner Buthaina and her husband, Nizar. We held up posters with pictures of the four of you together, and individual pictures of you, of Razan, of Razan and Wael, and of the cover of your book, Diaries of the Siege in Douma 2013, which I have told you about before. 

There were many journalists and media professionals from all over: Syrians, Arabs, Europeans… I think I gave twenty interviews before, during, and after the sit-in. I told your story and named the accused party, Jaysh al-Islam, whose leaders have returned to Douma by the way, including its religious leader, Samir Kaakeh, the essence of evil. I am not sure whether the second-in-command, Omar al-Dirani, is among the returnees. They had been displaced since 2018 to the Al-Bab area in northern Syria. I said in the interviews that we were looking forward to learning the full truth about what happened to you and to achieving justice by holding the perpetrators accountable. I said that your fate was the measure of progress on the path to justice in Syria, and the issue of enforced disappearance in general, since it was the most extreme form of impunity in this broken country of ours. 

After nine days in Damascus I headed up to Homs with Najat and Lulu in a car they rented. It was not lost on me, Sammour, that this was my first visit to the city without you. We arrived around three in the afternoon. Najat decided that I should stay with Fatima and Bassam that day so that she and Lulu could prepare the house, from which they’d been away for a while; I would join them the following day. Seeing your younger sister Fatima was emotional: we cried on each other’s shoulders. How much you resemble her! We stayed up until after one in the morning, talking and drinking arak. You, your absence, filled our long conversations. 

Only after you had been gone for years did one of my most painful discoveries gradually emerge: the story of your disappearance is not well known, and there has been a tendency among some of our relatives and acquaintances to hold me responsible for it without asking me questions or reading anything I wrote about the case and about you, or even reading your book, all of which are easily available. Conflicting political positions, personal discord, the rotten path the revolution took after you disappeared—these things had conspired to turn the matter against me. Now, though, we spent nine hours talking, and our hearts were cleared. But it came home to me, after the exhaustion of the day and the long conversation and the things left unsaid, how cruel it is that I should be held to account for your disappearance. 

The following day Bassam took me for a drive along the outskirts of the destroyed Baba Amr neighborhood, the street between the old and new clocks, and Brazil Street. The city was bustling with life. Restaurants and cafés were quite busy, cars crawling the streets, and almost everybody was smoking. What was new to me was the relatively large numbers of bikes—fuel was pricey, I was told. Like Damascus, Homs is in an advanced state of shabbiness and dilapidation. 

Bassam had arranged a meeting for some men and women he knew to discuss public affairs; I wanted to come and he warmly agreed. Across the street from his shop, which sells herbal products, soaps, ointments, and creams that he produces himself, we sat on the sidewalk in the January sun, some of us on chairs and some on cement blocks, discussing what had happened, what was happening, and what was to be done. We were three older men in our sixties, all former political prisoners, and three young women and three young men, all in their twenties. This small open-air conference on January 8, 2025, one month after the fall of the regime, was characteristic of the new situation and would have been impossible a few weeks earlier. 

The young people want to do something. They need orientation and organization, and they think we can help. After this sidewalk conference we went to the house of amida Najat, who decided we should all spend the night: Lulu, Fatima, Bassam, me, and Thaer, who had arrived from Berlin after visiting his father in Yabroud. Now it was Thaer who wept—this was the first time he was seeing this house in Afif’s absence. 

Murad was there too, and he told us a good story. Walking through Homs, where he was born, after more than ten years in Germany, he was overcome by emotion. He took off his shoes to honor a vow he had made if he ever returned, and sat on a sidewalk with his head in his hands. A young man came up to him, thinking he was homeless—understandable, given Murad’s bohemian appearance. The man offered to help, but Murad said he was just exhausted after a long absence. Where had he been? “Germany,” Murad replied. The man retorted: “then it is you who should give me money!” 

We stayed up until two in the morning, talking politics, drinking arak, and telling our stories. The general feeling in the country, according to Abed al-Rayyes, a young friend from Homs, was relief, respite, and deliverance from fear. He invited me to speak to a small audience at the Jesuit Fathers Monastery, which I did for about two hours on January 9. It was a discussion on ideas, politics, and the role of intellectuals. Lulu is now an activist in a newly formed organization concerned with civil peace in Homs, a city whose suffering you knew something about before you disappeared: many casualties and widespread damage to the urban areas, especially to the social fabric of the city, not least between Sunnis and Alawites. The Alawite neighborhoods had just been combed for weapons, wanted persons, and proof of attendance at an Alawite demonstration during which sectarian slogans were chanted (followed the next day by a Sunni demonstration during which sectarian slogans were chanted). This sweep had ended the day before we arrived, but things remain fragile and unsafe, and the streets of the Alawite neighborhoods are empty after sunset. Destruction remains widespread in the Sunni neighborhoods, but those that are not destroyed are busy until close to midnight.

This is all in contrast to Latakia, where I went after three days in Homs. During the first half of the journey we passed multiple armed checkpoints; at two they asked for the driver’s ID and mine. Once we were asked to open the trunk of the car and once if we were carrying weapons. The only other checkpoint was at the entrance to the city, and the single gunman who manned it did not stop us. The driver explained that there were gangs of thieves and kidnappers in the countryside west of Homs, whom the checkpoints were targeting. (A few days later fifteen former regime soldiers were killed in the town of Fahil, though apparently they did not resist and some were retired.) The security situation is obviously volatile, with seemingly no established rules for dealing with the problems that arise. 

In Latakia I stayed with Haitham and Zubeida in the same room you and I used to sleep in when we visited. The evening I arrived we met Haitham and the novelist Nabil Suleiman in a small bar in the American neighborhood; Dr. Munif’s son Amer al-Marei, his young girlfriend, and other friends were there as well. We were joined for a while by a singer from Latakia named Samer Ahmed. He has a satirical song about Bashar al-Assad called Allah yarihna minno—“God deliver us from him.” It’s a phrase he said he had been using for years before it became an anthem sung in the Syrian dialect. 

The following morning Amer organized a meeting for me with about thirty people interested in public affairs, and we shared our assessments of what was happening and possible paths forward. I said that, because of the nondemocratic constitution of the new ruling party, we were not moving toward democracy, but I ruled out the likelihood of an Islamic state. A more probable outcome was a kind of rule of notables, in which various communities—confessional, ethnic, or tribal—would be represented by their organic leaders, as was the case for years after Syria’s independence in 1946. Such a policy would exclude from the public sphere those, like us, who represent real pluralism, or at least limit our presence in it. My view, I said, is that we should push for laws banning torture, which in our historical experience has been associated with the brutalization of not just individuals but the society, with sectarianism, and with the ultimate collapse of the country. 

The attendees were diverse in gender, age, and background, and the prevailing spirit was positive, both toward each other and regarding the country’s new conditions. You sense people’s favorable outlook in their general interactions. This may partly explain why there has not been widespread violence in the cities, despite the chaos and turmoil. A sense of relief expands the public sphere amid all the poverty and deterioration. 

After two days in Latakia I returned to Damascus. Farouk Mardam-Bey, Subhi Hadidi, and Ziad Majed had arrived in the capital just before me. Farouk was visiting his city for the first time in half a century. Subhi was returning to Syria for the first time in thirty-eight years. They were welcomed in front of the Umayyad Hotel by a marching band playing the aradah shamiya, a traditional wedding dance. One of the singers lifted Ziad onto his shoulders amid chants for Syria and freedom and against the Assads. At the invitation of the Damascene woman who had organized the dance, the four of us had dinner along with the journalist Zeina Shahla, the writer Colette Bahna, and two activists from Idlib, all of whom had stayed in the country through the terrible years after 2011. On Zeina’s arm is a tattoo: 12/8/2024!

The next morning I headed to the Shaalan neighborhood to make a pilgrimage to the house where I hid for about a year, most of which you were with me. I couldn’t recognize which entrance led to the apartment, so I took pictures of all three and sent them to our dear Rashad, who had lent me the house, owned by his sister, at great risk to his safety. Rashad, by the way, has married a Syrian woman as beautiful and capable as he is, and an artist as well; they live in Troyes, France. Within minutes he replied that none of the three entrances was right. He reminded me of something I never should have forgotten: that behind the apartment was a mosque. I went there the next day and took a picture of the entrance—that’s the one, said Rashad. But when I rang the bell no one answered. The building looked abandoned. Rashad said his sister had sold the apartment, and he didn’t know who owned it now. 

While still in Shaalan I looked for the Stefanel clothing store where Adnan M. worked twelve years ago. You used to buy my clothes there, taking advantage of the discounts he offered, to the point that I became known for my elegance among our friends. But I couldn’t find it now—another company is there instead. Adnan disappeared after the revolution and remained in hiding with his family for five years before they were smuggled to Lebanon. They were then granted refuge in Germany, and remained for three years in a heim, in conditions so appalling that he asked to be returned to Syria in protest. But things improved after that, and the family settled in a decent house with good neighbors in a town not far from Munich. 

I couldn’t find the first place I hid, either. Remember that on the evening of March 30, 2011, after Bashar al-Assad’s first speech, which was a declaration of war, I took my computer and a few clothes and began a life of hiding that I never expected would last more than two years. I didn’t say goodbye to you properly then, and in any case you knew where I was, and we met every few days.

You know that my sense of place is as impaired as my sense of time is acute. Yet our friend Farouk, now eighty, managed after fifty years away to find the houses that he lived in or were familiar to him in his youth. Frankly, Sammour, I won’t try to find the house we lived in for three months in Al-Muhajireen; that neighborhood is just too unfamiliar. By the way, Hani and Salma, who lent us that house, are here in Damascus. One evening in January, as Abdul Hay Al-Sayyed and I were discussing the question of justice and forgiveness at an event at the Al-Rawda Café, I saw Hani sitting alone in the audience. The hall overlooking the street was filled with all sorts of people, and I whispered to Abdul Hay that it was the first time I had spoken before a Syrian audience in Syria. Then I remembered that in fact I had spoken to one at the Atassi Forum in December 2004. Three months later I was heckled and beaten in the street in front of the old Palace of Justice on Nasr Street by Baathist students; the forum itself was closed shortly after.

On Friday, January 17, I went to Sweida with Ula Ramadan and the psychiatrist Jalal Nawfal, both of whom were also in the country for the first time in more than a decade. We headed straight for Al-Karama Square, where people have been protesting since August 2023 and celebrating since December 8. There we met your friend and fellow prisoner Wijdan Nassif, now a leader in the women’s political movement, and my friend and fellow prisoner, Akram Marouf. After two hours in the square and many photos, we were invited to the home of a well-known figure in Sweida, Adnan Abu Assi, one of the “square activists.” He insisted it would only be for a quick cup of coffee, but you know the generosity of the people of Sweida. The coffee led to fruit and good wine, and friendly conversation for over an hour. There were about twenty people. 

Then on to the house of Wijdan’s family in Shahba, where we were served fatayer: spinach, chickpea, and potato. On the advice of Tawfiq, a former political prisoner and one of your comrades, we returned to Damascus before sunset because there was a stretch of the road that was not safe. Tawfiq, who was driving, recalled how it was during the regime: “There was a bad checkpoint here, and there was a worse one here.” And that was before we passed the brutal “Palestine Branch,” one of the most notorious military security headquarters, fenced round on all sides like a fortress.

The following Sunday I went with Abu Luay—our friend Adnan, you remember him—to the last house we lived in before my life of disappearance, the only house I could call home after the one where I spent my first eleven years, in the care of my mother. You and I rented this house in 2004 and stayed there together until March 30, 2011, and you stayed there intermittently when you didn’t join me in one of the four houses I hid in. This was until the landlord threatened to throw our belongings in the street if we didn’t vacate the place. But by then, the last month of 2013, you had disappeared, and I was in Istanbul.

There I was at the entrance after fourteen years away. The buzzer wasn’t working because of a power outage. As I took some pictures of the building with my phone, I noticed that there were more cars now in the opposite yard, and that the wooded area separating this yard from the street was beautiful and full of trees. Then the building’s front gate opened and Samer, our neighbor, recognized me right away. I would not have recognized him. We embraced, and he invited us into his house. I met his wife, Samar, and his youngest daughter, Zeina, who was now nineteen. Maya, the eldest daughter, was at work in a medical center. As we drank coffee I noticed the sofas we were sitting on, which seemed familiar. Embarrassed, I asked Samar, who said: “They are your sofas! Samira told us to take them after you left.” Samar said they also had a carpet, a rug, and an electric heater of ours, and that they were keeping them for us. 

I sent Juju some pictures from Samer and Samar’s house, and our eyes welled up. Oh this absence, how it hurts the heart, Sammour! 

I asked Samer to talk to the neighbor so I could take a look at our old apartment. The man agreed, but it was clear that he did not understand why a former tenant would care to see the place he had lived in all those years ago. He allowed me to see the entrance and the guest room, which had changed a lot. It seemed that the family living there now was well-off, and that our old home, Sammour, was more luxurious than it was in our days; I didn’t get to see the room that had been my office. From outside the building I had noticed that the balcony was now surrounded by a glass wall. There you would sit with some of our guests, especially Iyad, drinking mate. The kitchen window overlooking the street on the other side was now made of bluish glass, and looked out onto an unbuilt area, and beyond that to the mountain where snow would settle in late December or early February.

From there we returned to the market closest to our old house, which was the only market in the suburb until 2011. It used to be just a few shops; now it is a real market, and quite a busy one. The suburb, which was more populated, seems to have flourished, unlike the neighborhoods I had seen in the heart of the capital. Its air is clean, unlike the air of Damascus. Part of me was detached from the good company of Abu Luay, Samer, Samar, and Zeina—an angry, resentful part. In Abu Luay’s car, as we were driving back to Damascus, I told him that there was only one person in the world whom I thought I could kill: Samir Kaakeh, the religious leader of Jaysh al-Islam, the man primarily responsible for kidnapping you, Razan, Wael, and Nazem. The world would be a less squalid place without that vicious person. Abu Luay made no comment. I think he doubted my ability to kill that wretch.

The three days I spent in Aleppo, where I studied and was imprisoned, were an exercise in breathing easy and walking freely in a city where I had lived for three years before prison and three years after. You know the feeling when a place is cramped, when the atmosphere is hostile or even dangerous. I think it is the feeling that women in our countries have in some public places where they are harassed and stared at. We had lived in such an atmosphere, besieged by constant, hypermasculine abuse. Have we finally closed this ugly chapter, Sammour? It is difficult to say. 

On the bus to Aleppo two Egyptian friends and I struck up a conversation with a young woman, a local journalist covering social affairs, who seemed to welcome the new atmosphere. She invited us to share the taxi that was waiting for her, only for us to discover later that she had paid for the whole journey. 

The next morning I walked to the public park where I used to love to stroll. I asked the coffee seller for a cup—and realized that I had left behind my Syrian money. “Don’t worry about it!” he said. Then I remembered I was carrying some Euros and paid him what I could. The generosity of Aleppans is captivating, and they like to show it off, in contrast to the supposedly stingy people of Damascus. 

I was upset to see that there was now a narrow metal door to the public garden that seemed to be closed at night—in the past it had always been welcoming. Elsewhere, too, the doors have grown narrower, like the country did in the bloody years after 2011.

That same evening Marcelle Shehwaro and I were in conversation at the Cultural Center in Azizieh. As we stood outside to greet the audience, a man of my generation looked me in the eye and asked, Do you recognize me? I looked at him for a few seconds and regretted I did not. He said, I am so-and-so. We fell into each other’s arms. It had been nearly thirty-four years since our last meeting. He was my comrade in Aleppo Central Prison, released after eleven years. When I was released five years after that, I made an effort to see those of my fellow prisoners who would agree to meet me, but this man was not among them—understandably. He wanted to avoid any headaches the regime might make for him, and perhaps for his family, if he kept up relations with his fellow prison graduates. But at the first opportunity after the fall of the regime, there he was, attending a public event in which his old friend was taking part. This is our whole story, Sammour. Tyranny divided people from each other and forced them into small, closed circles—now opened up by the loosening of its grip. He and I were in our early thirties when he got out of prison. We are in our mid-sixties now.

You know Marcelle Shehwaro by name. She was one of the revolutionaries of Aleppo and its university. Her life and activism are a rich story that will be told in a book in English soon. That evening we talked onstage about how to restore politics in Syria. She put most of the questions to me, and I put a few to her. Then we began a conversation with the audience that filled the two halls of the center, many standing. So encouraging and moving, Sammour! I wished you were there, though of course you were present throughout—in my introduction, in the questions friends and acquaintances put to me, and in the content of some of my answers. 

This was the first such public event in Aleppo since the liberation, also known as “the fall.” People use one or the other of these words, “liberation” to imply that the regime was a colonial power and “fall” to emphasize that Bashar fled shamefully. I feel certain that you would prefer the former. Bakr told me that Tuhama corrects him every time he says the fall, pressing for liberation instead. They are still in Gaziantep, Turkey.

The next day I went to eastern Aleppo with Nisma and Halim, a young activist couple. They showed me the al-Quds hospital, which was the last functioning medical facility in the area when it was reoccupied in late 2016 by the regime and its allies: the Iranians (headed by Qasem Soleimani), Hezbollah, and the Russian air force. The last doctors and activists debated whether to burn down the five-story building as they were displaced, so that enemies would not use it, or to leave it safe with the hope that some civilians would benefit. As it happened, the least stable person among them set the hospital ablaze. Close to nine years after those days, you see the gray color of old fire marks on its facade.

In the whole area, the destruction was overwhelming, stirring a mix of grief and despair. How can all this rubble be cleared? How can the destroyed homes of people living in camps be rebuilt? The poverty in the eastern part of the city is heartbreaking.

I returned to Damascus with Marcelle on the morning of January 24. She was attending a conference on justice in which several Syrian organizations were participating. Half of the attendees were women, she told me in the evening. Some of the members had returned from their exile in countries near and far, while others came from inside the country. This is a polarizing point among secular activists that needs to be addressed carefully. The return home of those coming from abroad is spectacular, but the insiders are not satisfied with being less visible: they feel they are being written out of the story. You sense a buried tension and a difficulty in communicating between the two parties. Something similar happened in Palestine after the Oslo Accords, and before that in Spain after Franco left, and in Greece after the junta fell. How alike people are, Sammour!

The opposite may be true for the Islamists. The insiders have a story to tell—of toppling the regime and liberating the country. The outsiders, the Muslim Brothers, seem to be excluded from the scene, which of course they do not like.

Every day in Damascus there are new activities held at hotels or cafes, especially Al-Rawda, or at cultural sites that were less active before the liberation. I wonder if the city isn’t one of the most active in the world today on the level of public debate, film screenings, lectures, conferences, and seminars. Our friend Ossama Mohammed screened his film Stars of the Day for the first time in Damascus, and the place was packed. In Jaramana, Our Terrible Country was screened. You and Razan are in it.

While in Damascus I met friends and journalists. I also bought souvenirs, including socks with a picture of Hafez al-Assad in his underpants, flexing his muscles, and a caricature of Bashar with his long neck. In the chaos of the first days after the fall of the regime, some people obtained pictures of the family, including two pictures of the father and son in briefs, and published them on social media. The family was nicknamed the Underpanters.

On the morning of January 29 I went to Sweida again, with Wijdan Nassif and Jalal Nawfal, to conduct a seminar. Our host there was Akram Marouf, who had become an engineer after his release from prison and had married and had three children, two of whom, a son and a daughter, now live in Germany. Our first meal in the city was mleihi: large pieces of lamb on the bone and rice underneath, all cooked in yogurt, which is also served on the side, along with fried kibbeh stuffed with minced meat. 

About fifty people attended our seminar, including seven women. The attendees were mostly older, in their fifties at least, except for one woman in her twenties, a well-known activist in Sweida. In the evening we were invited to a soirée at Adnan Abu Assi’s house with oud, music, and locally made wine. Adnan, his wife, and their children are all dissidents, among the most active in Al-Karama Square since early August 2023. One of the sons was arrested for a while when he was sixteen.

That evening we learned about Ahmed al-Sharaa’s meeting with the military factions that decided to dissolve and join the new army. This news arrived shortly after that of the dissolution of the Baath Party, the People’s Assembly, and the previous army; of al-Sharaa’s appointment as interim president; and of his warrant to choose a temporary legislative council. We seem to be facing a transitional dictatorship, which could turn into a permanent dictatorship. In Umayyad Square that same night, the loyalists of the new government chanted: “Jolani forever/in spite of you, Assad!” This seems to be chiefly directed toward the past, but it could establish a dangerous future, an Assadist future without Assad. 

The next morning, after a large breakfast, we returned to Damascus. At four o’clock, Jalal was to speak with a fellow psychiatrist at Al-Rawda Café about current political and psychological problems in Syria. Wijdan was following the situation with the usual Syrian mix of glee and apprehension. She said what bothered her was that, in the face of fresh difficulties, so many of us were quick to throw our hands up and complain. I agreed with her completely.

On my last day in Damascus I went with friends to Douma again. We hung a small sign at the entrance to the building that was the last place where you, Razan, Wael, and Nazem were free: “In this building lived Razan Zaitouneh and Samira Khalil, then Wael Hamada and Nazem Hamadi, until they were kidnapped on the night of December 9, 2013.” We knocked on the doors of the apartments in the building asking for permission to hang the sign, which Moawia Hamoud—a man in his forties from Moadamiyeh—and Shirine Hayek had helped me order a few days earlier. Not all the residents appeared, but none of those who did objected, and Moawia went ahead. It was a strange scene, about fifteen men and women climbing the stairs, equipped with cameras, microphones, and mobile phones. Perhaps some forty people stood on the sidewalk outside, documenting the moment.

I asked Shirine to take a picture of me walking out the metal door riddled with shrapnel, my hand raised as if in support, imitating the picture of you in the same position. I must admit that your picture is prettier, and your movement as you appear to leave, bringing with you the light that shines through the holes, gives the picture a unique quality. Mine is the opposite: the peepholes look into the darkness and the light comes from outside.

You know, the sugar-white color of the door is similar to the color of the satchel that you brought with you to Eastern Ghouta on the afternoon of May 18, 2013. Dr. Muhammad Kattoub delivered it to me in Gaziantep in 2018. He was sensitive enough to leave quickly after handing over that heavy burden: for the first time I had something of yours in my hands. It contained your ID card, a document stating that you worked at the Violations Documentation Center, some jewelry, papers, pictures of you and me in a small wallet, beads, hair clips, and even a worn-out tissue that I left in the bag, which I treat as holy—or like a bag of dynamite. Don’t be angry at me, Sammour. I’m afraid of opening it, certain it would unleash sorrows that I have tried to bury for years. Nothing hurts more than this sacred, explosive relic that embodies your distance and your absence. I keep the bag high up, out of reach in my Berlin apartment.

As we put the sign up near the door, there were a number of journalists, Syrian and foreign, taking pictures. Some of them knew almost nothing about the case and hadn’t bothered to find out. Others knew but didn’t have the necessary sensitivity to the families of the disappeared, of whom I was the only representative present. In their pursuit of material, they failed to grasp how draining it can be to talk about a case like ours. I couldn’t hold back my agitation in the face of uninformed or thoughtless questions. A journalist from a French right-wing platform kept trying to direct the conversation toward the European right’s favorite subjects: Islamic fanaticism, the fight against terrorism, and minority rights. He had been on good terms with the Assad regime for years, and asked how things were going for me. I answered with a single word: fine.

Shirine and I left for Beirut in the early morning to avoid the border congestion. On the Syrian side I was told that I had been placed on a “departure ban.” I said I knew and volunteered that it dated back to September 2004. Do you remember that ban, Sammour? I was traveling to Beirut then to participate in a conference, when I was stopped and given a paper referring me to the Officers’ Affairs Branch in Damascus. You may also remember that I never found out the reason for the ban, nor could I have it lifted. 

The clerk at the border said that he could not decide on the matter and that I should wait for the officer to arrive. Less than ten minutes later I was directed to the desk of another employee, who stamped a special card on which I had written my name, my parents’ names, and my place and date of birth. This man seemed to be familiar with my case. According to our Lebanese driver he was one of the experienced former border people who had been reinstated. I still don’t know if the ban has been lifted for good. The new administration is struggling to do its work, and it will likely take some time before things get back on track.

A few days before this trip to Beirut I met a European journalist who told me that he couldn’t cross the border into Syria for some reason I didn’t understand, and that he had finally gotten in through the old mechanism. Bribery? I asked him. Yes, he said.

Today, February 2, is your birthday. I remember it in the morning over coffee at Samer and Livia’s house in Beirut, where I arrived yesterday. You remember them: we were wedding guests when they married in 2004 in Aleppo, in a beautiful old house called Khan al-Shuna. Livia is an American who speaks fluent Arabic, and Samer is a Syrian from Aleppo. Today they have three children. 

I have celebrated your birthday alone all these years, recalling your loving presence, your enormous tenderness, your generous spirit, and our evenings with friends on February 2 or February 1, my alleged birthday, one day before yours. The fact that my real birthday is unknown, and that the one recorded is not genuine, never bothered you. You loved that we were registered on consecutive days, and you always wanted us to celebrate with friends at home, with a glass of red wine or gin and lime that I would prepare for you, and arak for me and most of our friends.

You have now been gone for as long as we lived together, a little more than eleven years. How I have struggled with this long, silent absence, Sammour! We experience presence with distracted attention, we are absent to some extent, and so when real absence like yours returns we regret that we did not fill up on presence as much as we should have. We are forever working to summon it up, and forever it slips out of our hands. It is as if presence were the result of absence, and as if we were only truly present in our absence. 

I formulate this thought as a general idea, not only because I cannot bear to admit that this has been my personal experience with your presence but also because I am trying to come up with some sort of guide. All these years I lacked one that might help me cope with this ordeal, some way of orienting myself. There is no doubt that many have shown solidarity and support, but the combination of my own exile and the violent collapse of our country has left me facing your absence alone, defenseless. 

Your absence is an original experience in the strongest sense of the word, an experience without a precedent. I am not sure I know how to put it into words. I feel I am in the same situation as mothers who have lost children and do not find enough support from those around them, lacking language to express what they feel. Like that mother who was draped in the red-stained noose, which may have been the last witness to her son’s life. Such original experiences are unbearable; they can kill. Mothers die of grief, and fathers, too. But these experiences live on, if we know how to derive meaning, laws, and guidelines from them. Your husband has tried to make meaning out of your long, silent absence. He succeeds and fails.

On February 2 I am in a friend’s house in Beirut, thinking like a survivor. It falls to the survivor to narrate. To not stop talking and remembering, as long as absence persists.

I returned to Berlin via Paris after about forty days on the road in Syria and Lebanon. With no routine of any kind I missed my daily regimen, my “cell,” as I told friends. I need time to process and organize what I witnessed in those uncommon weeks—the spirit reviving today in the body of our dilapidated country. 

A day and a half after my return a question came to me: Why didn’t I stay in Syria? What am I doing in Berlin? Why did I leave you alone and come back to the far country? It was as if I needed to return to Berlin in order to realize that I had to return to your side. To stay there to gather information, to investigate the paths of justice for you. Why is my residence in Berlin the place of “ordinary life”? Why do I choose an ordinary life when you have been deprived of both life and death, and when I have the power to choose?

Kisses to you, my heart,

Yassin