In the “New Syria,” violence and high hopes
CSI | 20th June 2025
Since I left Syria last January, Alawi and Christian friends have sent me almost daily messages about killings, beatings, house break-ins, threats and intimidation. When the dictator was overthrown, Syrians hailed the new leader with such fervor that they lifted him in his car and carried him shoulder-high through the streets of Damascus. Men beating their chests chanted the old Arabic oath of fealty, “With our souls, with our blood, we will sacrifice for you!” That momentous event occurred, not at the end of last year when Bashar al Assad fled to Moscow, but in November 1970 when Bashar’s father, Hafez, overthrew a previous tyrant. An old Syrian friend who witnessed that event told me he watched crowds last December, 54 years later, cheering the newest ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa. The latest transfer of power left him less with nostalgia than foreboding. Assad père, like Sharaa, began his tenure with what…
Read more →Liberation Daze
Harper's Magazine
Hope, fear, and uncertainty in postwar Syria When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from…
Syria’s New Rulers Get a Makeover
The Nation
The country’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, has donned a suit, trimmed his beard, and dropped his nom de guerre. But Syrians are still afraid. The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At…
Beirut Gets a Reprieve—but for How Long?
The Nation
If history is any guide, the latest Lebanese ceasefire may well have broken down by the time you read this. Whenever I hear the word “ceasefire” about Lebanon, I reach for my stopwatch. During the first phase of the civil…