Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the fifth in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
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As I climb out of the microbus and take my first steps in Yarmouk refugee camp, in the south of Damascus, I spot two young boys slowly digging through a pile of garbage and rubble. I ask if I can take their photo, part of documenting what Assad did to this area and its people. They look at me suspiciously, layers of filth clinging to their faces and clothes. “No, go photograph someone else”, one of them says. They look tired, defeated, possibly embarrassed. I sense their eyes on me as I walk away, wondering what my deal is. Eventually, they return to their scavenging. They’re no more than 10 years old. 
According to UN records, Yarmouk was home to around 160,000 people before 2011, overwhelmingly Palestinians. My driver, Ahmad, boasts that it was once one of the most economically vibrant parts of Damascus, with shopping districts, industrial sectors and more. He takes me to visit Abu Saeed Aidi, an old man born in 1945 in the now obliterated Palestinian village of Lubya. He’s lived in the camp for decades and tells a similar story of Yarmouk once being a thriving centre of Palestinian life. His eyes shine with pride when he describes how the camp was designed by a Palestinian engineer from Jerusalem using the most modern ideas available at the time, how it had a democratic structure different from the rest of Damascus, and how generous donations from abroad meant it had the best infrastructure of any suburb. 
There’s nothing left of that now. 
Ahmad drives for over half an hour, winding through the narrow, desolate streets. I try to film, but it’s hopeless. The reality of such devastation can’t be captured with images alone. Row after row, block after block after block of destroyed homes. An old UN school bombed to smithereens. The shell of not one but two enormous mosques, meeting places and cultural centres for a once thriving community. A small garden, its healthy crop of string beans merely highlights the devastation surrounding it. An old playground, a rusty swing, a fading children’s painting of a happy family, one of the kids waving the regime flag. 
Saeed al-Shneeni is keen to talk as soon as he gets in the car. “You need to record this”, he says confidently. He’s a long-term camp resident, and he has stories to tell about every building we pass. “That’s the checkpoint where they used to randomly kidnap people”, he says as we pass a small concrete pillbox on a narrow street. “That’s the line of demarcation, where every building was demolished to give the government a clearer shot into the camp. Then, they stole the steel from the rubble to sell on the black market. Criminals in every way, these people.”
He tells a tale of the five-year siege of Yarmouk, which the regime imposed between 2013 and 2018. Its effects were so brutal, so total, that an Amnesty International report published in 2014 found that 128 people starved to death that year alone. This was collective punishment for the crime of supporting the Syrian revolution. 
Saeed says that a wealthy Palestinian exile eventually bribed the regime to allow an aid delivery. Authorities took the cash but opened fire on those who lined up for food. It became known as the Rijeh square massacre. “It was just like what the Israelis did in Gaza last year”, he says. Seven more people died in that incident, killed while lining up for bread to feed their loved ones.
Yarmouk had also been home to a vibrant Palestinian civil society. “There were more than fourteen [political] factions”, says Ahmad’s nephew, Mohammed, who joins us for lunch. “Each faction had their own organising committees and armed wings ... but that’s all finished now.”
The regime kept them on a very short leash. In fact, they had a special office within the internal security department tasked with abducting, torturing and killing Palestinian organisers who stepped out of line. Referred to as the “Palestine branch”, it attracted some of the most brutal and sadistic people within the Syrian state. They were responsible for responding to the revolutionary uprising that found a strong echo in Yarmouk and the surrounding neighbourhoods.
By the time Assad’s forces retook Yarmouk in 2018, the camp was a wreck, and only a few hundred people remained. The combination of famine and endless bombardment had made the area unliveable, forcing over 100,000 Palestinians into yet another exile. To make matters worse, ISIS and Nusra had overrun the camp a few years earlier. These reactionaries drove out the remaining rebels and spent the next three years terrorising any citizens that remained. 
Undeterred by the scarcity of living beings to harass, the soldiers were ordered to abuse the dead instead. Ahmad takes me to Yarmouk cemetery, where the gravestones have been smashed. “They gave us no peace, even in death”, he says. 
It’s not until we’ve sat down for lunch in Ahmad’s home that Saeed talks about how the arbitrary violence of the Syrian state forever changed his own life.
“At the time, we were still living in our flat on the fourth storey of a building near here”, he says. “But the bombing was so constant that my wife and I had decided to sleep in separate rooms, so that if one of us died, the other could keep looking after the kids.” 
They were eventually forced to move to their parents’ house after a bomb landed on their next-door neighbour’s apartment. A few weeks later, their 16-year-old son, Mahmoud, went missing. “It was strange at the time—nobody was staying outside after dark due to all the fighting. I was up all night worried, and when he didn’t return, I spent the next week looking for him. I looked everywhere, asking anyone if they had seen him.”
After trying everything else, Saeed went to the morgue. “The worker there showed me body after body ... At one point, I thought I had found him, but it turned out to be someone else’s child. I was relieved, but still very stressed.” The mortician told him to try the internal security office, where a database was kept of dead bodies “found” locally. 
Saeed’s eyes glaze over; retelling the story has sent him back in time. “When I got to the relevant room in the security building, [there was] a man sitting behind a computer, with an officer on either side. They were showing him pictures of dead faces, sixteen to a page.” Saeed stood behind them and watched them scrolling through endless pictures. He describes feeling torn between wanting to find his son and yet wanting to cling to the hope that he was alive. Soon, his face showed up. “I yelled, ‘That’s my son!’ They hadn’t even noticed I was there until then.” Saeed was then shown eight pictures of Mahmoud’s body. He’d been shot in the head at close range. That’s all Saeed ever learned about the loss of his precious child.
But this story isn’t finished.
In 2014, two years after Mahmoud’s execution, Saeed’s son Ousama was a month away from graduating high school, having specialised in administration and law. Saeed’s family had moved to yet another apartment—“more space for the kids”, he explains. One day, a government employee came to their house and asked them to go to the mayor’s office to register their new addresses with the local administration. On arrival, both Saeed and Ousama were arrested and thrown into a van. After a few minutes, Saeed was let out and dropped off on the street without charge or explanation. He was never to see his son again. 
For years later, members of the internal security came to his house, promising to get information about his son in exchange for money. “I must have paid out over $5,000”, he says. This was a common practice, Ahmad interjects—a way of extorting cash from desperate people. “I knew they were manipulating me, but I would have done anything to hear something about my boy”, Saeed says. He never got anything in return for these transactions but doesn’t regret trying.
Two weeks ago, he received a message from his daughter. Her friends had sent her a photo of an official document from 2015. It was a photo of a list of names of dead bodies found in the region surrounding Yarmouk. It included his son, described only as “Palestinian” and listed as number sixteen. 
Because Ousama was never officially declared dead, Saeed’s last surviving son Abdullah was almost forced to serve in the same Syrian army that had killed his brothers. The prospect nearly drove Saeed insane. It took another round of bribery—worth another couple of thousand that he didn’t have—to convince the local bureaucracy to sign off on his status as an only child. Today, he’s in Germany, building a new life for himself.
In tears, I find myself apologising to Saeed for his suffering, on behalf of an indifferent world. He shrugs, tells me not to worry. He leaves shortly after with the look of a man who has completed a difficult but necessary task. It seems that sharing this traumatic incident with the world, even just some nobody from Australia, is for Saeed an act of resistance and love. 
Ahmad subsequently tells me that Saeed suffered enormously during the intervening years, the stress and sadness leading to a range of health issues. “The regime took his sons, but they also took the best years of his life.”
By the end, the Assad regime’s sole claim to legitimacy was its supposed support for the resistance to Israel. Of course, those with the most basic knowledge of Syria’s history know about the regime’s treason during Black September, its defence of the far-right, pro-Israeli forces in Lebanon’s civil war, its role in driving Yasser Arafat and the PLO out of Lebanon not once but twice, and how it defended Israel’s borders better than any other Arab state in the region. 
But regardless of this history, what the regime did to the Yarmouk refugee camp, to people like Saeed, should stand on its own as an unforgivable crime. Indeed, Assad’s thugs killed more Palestinians in Yarmouk than Israel did in any one of its wars prior to 7 October. 
As we’re digesting our dinner, Ahmad gets a call from his son in Germany. He announces that it looks like the government might be about to revoke the asylum status of many of the nearly 1 million Syrian refugees in the country. 
Mohammed grimaces. Just minutes earlier, he had explained that he planned to seek asylum in Germany alongside his wife and 10-month-old baby. This news must have broken his heart, but he hides it behind a bitter smile: “The Arab world doesn’t want us, and the West doesn’t want us. They should just send me to Gaza so I can die fighting for my country”, he says.

Omar Hassan

Yarmouk: Assad’s obliteration of a Palestinian refugee camp

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the fourth in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
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“Field executions and random killings [have become] a daily occurrence. Among the most affected areas, the provinces of Hama and Homs were at the forefront of these crimes ... followed by the Syrian coast, particularly in Latakia and Tartous.” These chilling lines are taken from a bulletin by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights released on 3 January. 
It’s a stark reminder that the situation in Damascus, where stability reigns and the right to protest and gather peacefully is fairly unchallenged, is not the experience of all Syrians at this time.
Footage and reports from a four-day siege of the town of Khirbet Al-Ma’azzah went viral in the days before Christmas. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) had subjected its people to daily searches, harassment and interrogations. It was eventually lifted, but only after an entirely apolitical employee of the state electricity company was found shot dead in his house. 
Meanwhile, in Homs, residents have been subjected to door-to-door searches by armed HTS militants. The most terrifying rumours about what was going on quickly spread, some of which were confirmed in a definitive statement released by the Homs Civil Peace group. In careful and nuanced language, they accepted the principle of the operation, which is to arrest and punish senior figures from the Assad regime, but condemned its heavy-handed approach. 
They described incidents of arbitrary destruction of property, physical and verbal assaults of civilians, forcing people to bark like dogs, harassment of some women found not wearing the hijab, arrests conducted without explanation or chance for appeal, and the deployment of tanks in civilian areas. 
Stories of these outrages spread throughout Syria primarily via Facebook, which I’ve noticed is not hobbled by the same censorship that has driven English-speaking activists to other platforms. Posts written in Arabic routinely receive hundreds if not thousands of reactions, followed by furious debate in the comment section. 
At times, these debates can fall into sectarian patterns and discourses. Syria has vast regional variations in economic conditions, ethnic and religious compositions, languages and accents. The old regime expertly pitted groups against each other to expand its profits and power. 
For instance, it is widely understood, both externally and within Syria itself, that the Assad dynasty was a sectarian Alawi operation. There is an element of truth to that, as many key posts in the state and public institutions were given to fellow members of the Assad family and those from its community. This then tended to cascade down in the form of nepotistic hiring practices and so on, which in turn led to hostility from other communities towards the Alawi.
While the top leaders of the transitional government have been careful to avoid saying anything explicitly bigoted, their cadres and supporters have been less restrained. Calls to “cleanse” Syria of supporters of the former regime can sometimes be code for wider attacks on the Alawi community. 
But Nour, a young comrade from the Syrian Revolutionary Left Current (RLC), has a different perspective: “People talk as if the Assad regime was defined by its sectarianism, but that’s wrong; its only religious commitment was to wealth”. This is an important point. Assad’s most consistent supporters were the largely Sunni bourgeoisie of Damascus. There are huge economic, social and political divisions within the Alawi community, as with all others. A number of courageous efforts were made to organise resistance to the regime by Alawis themselves, and the left is filled with figures from that community who rejected the regime for the same reasons as everyone else. 
She made these comments at a public meeting of RLC, in the relatively clean-cut Damascus suburb of Sahnaya. It was a young and dynamic crowd, with women a slight majority of the 35 people present. Nour kicked off proceedings, explaining that it was the first public meeting the group had held since the fall of the regime. The meeting was held in the back room of a house that had been used for illegal meetings through the years of dictatorship. 
British socialist and Middle East expert Anne Alexander addressed the audience on lessons from the Arab Spring, her face projected onto a cardboard screen. 
Later, I attended a meeting organised by the Nissan Women’s Group in the Jaramana Social Forum, previously the local HQ of the ruling Syrian Ba’ath Party. I’m told that Jaramana itself is an interesting part of Damascus, with a strong alternative subculture and a more liberal attitude to relationships and women’s rights. On this night, about 100 people, much older and with more men than the earlier meeting, showed up for what turned out to be fairly technical talks on macroeconomic policy in Syria. 
It was clear, however, that the attendees at both events were far more interested in discussing concrete perspectives and proposals than historical and theoretical issues. Where the talks had a somewhat abstract flavour, especially in Jaramana, audience members wanted to know how to take forward the fight for social and economic justice in Syria today. 
Both meetings saw repeated complaints that there had been no shift in the approach to decision-making from the old regime. “We can sit here and talk about what we would like, but they’re not listening to us”, one man complained in Jaramana. “How do we turn that around?” One young radical responded by arguing forcefully, if optimistically, for a general strike: “It’s the only way to force them to listen”. 
In Sahnaya, attendees expressed similar concerns: “Do [HTS] really need 3-4 years to write a constitution, or is that just a tactic to stall until they have all the power?”, someone asked. Another pointed to the elephant in the room: “How do we mobilise to defend our rights without provoking another civil war?” No easy answers. 
Alexander stressed the need to build and strengthen independent unions that can use their power at the point of production to discipline bourgeois forces like HTS. Such a project is well beyond the capacities of this small group of young revolutionaries at this stage but it helped point the way forward.
Lines are quickly being drawn between supporters and opponents of the new government. For now, its critics are mostly on the back foot, responding to specific incidents and policies rather than setting the agenda. They’re racing to establish institutions and spaces that can allow them to think, organise and resist collectively. 
On the other side, HTS are taking full advantage of their status as the only nationally organised force in Syria. Governing in Idlib gave them time and space to consolidate their political and military machine, assisted by extensive foreign donations. Their leaders are intelligent and battle-tested and are learning to enjoy being at the helm of the Syrian state while being wooed by global capital. 
To justify their unilateral assumption of power, HTS use the slogan, “Those that did the liberating get to do the decision-making”. It would be a lie to say this argument, as anti-democratic as it is, has no purchase among the broader Syrian public. But HTS’s reactionary program—and the brutal, anti-revolutionary actions of many of its leaders during the civil war and its reign in Idlib—mean that many remain wary. 
For now, the majority of Syrians are watching and waiting to see what comes next, willing to give the new government a chance. But that could change at any moment, triggered by an overreach or some other crisis. The transition from a 54-year dictatorship will take months, if not years, to unfold, and there will be many shifts in momentum and the balance of forces. 
As we leave the meeting in Jaramana, my companion, an experienced journalist who has thrown herself into democratic organising, seems a bit down. She asks me what I think will happen to Syria. I tell her I have no idea, but that’s a positive in and of itself. Under Assad, it was guaranteed misery from here to eternity.

In Damascus, leftists continue to organise

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the 
Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to 
report on the situation after the fall of Bahar Al-Assad’s dictatorship.
 This is the third in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
section.
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“This revolution is just getting started”, says Fadi, a man in his late 50s, standing on the steps of the Syrian Ministry of Education. “We have to keep pushing forward. It’s not over until everyone has their rights cemented”. I’m with about 50 Syrians, who are protesting against a move by the new government, led by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), to shift the school curriculum towards a sectarian and conservative Islamist worldview. 
Everyone agrees that the pro-Assad propaganda that saturates the textbooks needs to be removed. But the proposed reforms go further: eliminating lessons on evolution and the Big Bang theory, abolishing all negative references to the Ottoman Empire, and removing all mention of the various polytheistic communities in Syria’s history. The changes would also teach students in primary school that Christians and Jews are “those who have lost their way” from Islam. 
The decree was immediately rejected loudly by many, many Syrians. So much so that the government was forced to walk back the changes even before the demonstration today, which meant it was fairly small. But it was an important gathering nonetheless. For one thing, there were lots of media present, giving left-wing activists a rare opportunity to make their voices heard to the Syrian people about their vision of an inclusive and just society for all. 
More important, however, was the chance for progressive activists to meet each other and share ideas and plans for the future. There were two types of people present. Many were veterans of the underground, aged 60 or more, some having served lengthy jail sentences for their brave efforts. 
“I was an oppositionist against the dad [Hafez al-Assad], I was an oppositionist against the son [Bashar], and I’m an oppositionist today”, says a charismatic older man, who eventually outs himself as a member of the Communist Labor Party. I’m introduced to Haseeba Abdulrahman, an independent socialist and feminist writer, who concurs: “We haven’t won anything yet, we need a stronger left, serious political parties to cement our gains and push for more”.
There was a good number of younger radicals who had been active in the early days of the revolution in 2011, and had been waiting desperately for a chance to take to the streets once again. “We were there from the start, and even in the last years there’s been some organising happening underground”, says Dima, a speech pathologist in Damascus. 
I ask them what they think of those who say to be patient, to give the new government time. Tarek, a computer engineer, interjects forcefully: “How can we give them more time? They sat down for two hours this week and produced this terrible reform of the education system. If we leave them alone, what damage will they do tomorrow?! The first responsibility of a citizen is to hold their government to account”. 
Dima jumps back in: “We’re not seeing different methods of operating from the last regime; they change the policy and we’re just expected to just accept it. Where’s the participation, where’s the democratic Syria we’ve been promised?”
These guys are impressive, but they’re in their 30s and early 40s. When I ask about the lack of representation from students and youth, it was put to me that their generation were too young to have experienced the revolutionary era, and so are less politically engaged. Presumably, the winter holidays don’t help either.
In any case, it’s been less than a month since Assad fell, and people are still finding their feet. Still, there’s been an explosion of political meetings and actions. At the same time as the education protest, a group of former prisoners was rallying to demand justice for those who tortured them in prison. Every day, there are meetings and actions organised by socialists, feminists, liberal NGOs, artists, the families of those who were disappeared in Assad’s prison system, and more. 
It’s not all fun and games. At times, the efforts of this emerging left have been widely criticised and condemned. Partly, this can be due to sincere misunderstandings about their goals because many associate the concepts of secularism and socialism with the old regime. But there’s something more cynical at play too—a serious effort by HTS supporters to discredit any opposition as feloul (“remnants” of the old regime). Dima laughs when I point that out: “No way, it’s the exact opposite. People I know who were total sucks for Assad are now some of the biggest supporters of HTS”. 
Halla, a member of Syria’s Revolutionary Left Current (RLC), made a related point when we met for coffee yesterday. “They call us the feloul, but actually, HTS has incorporated a number of figures from the old regime.” This is particularly the case when it comes to economic policy: the new governor of the central bank was the deputy under Assad. 
Other leading figures from Assad’s economic team, known for privatising everything and cutting as many subsidies as possible, are being tapped to play important roles. HTS is doing this to signal its commitment to playing by the rules of the capitalist system. Halla also explains how, across the country, a number of former regime figures and bureaucrats have flipped their loyalties to HTS, including the top leadership of many trade and student unions. 
It’s early days, but some have already begun organising against the new power. Firefighters in Damascus struck after being sacked and replaced with people from Idlib, winning a promise to be re-employed later. The lawyers’ union has come under attack after Damascene lawyers were indefinitely barred from working, and there’s now talk of establishing an independent union. The reopening of schools and universities in a few weeks could also create new possibilities for resistance. 
At the end of the education rally, someone makes an announcement about an organising meeting scheduled for later that day, the second meeting of a new group called the Syrian Democratic Movement. It takes place in a cavernous cafe that I’m told is an historic haunt of the left. We walk past a classic scene of wizened old men playing cards and backgammon, and take our places in the room beyond. One man, who I subsequently learned has spent sixteen years in one of Assad’s dungeons, set the scene beautifully: “Comrades, we are living through a historic moment and we have a golden opportunity to shape our country’s future. Let’s work seriously”.
What follows is both familiar and extraordinary, as 55 people thrash out a program on which to build a progressive front to intervene in Syrian politics. There’s inevitably a bit of debate about secondary and semantic issues. But everyone is dead serious about trying to make this work and establishing the group on solid political foundations. There is broad consensus about emphasising women’s rights, opposing Israel’s occupation of Syrian land and working towards involving more youth in the movement. 
Abdullah, an older man who translated Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch into Arabic, pipes up about the need to add a section about Kurdish rights, given the ongoing attacks against them by Turkish-aligned militias. He gets some support, especially from the RLC, but it doesn’t seem unanimous. There’s a long history of chauvinism towards Kurds in Syria, and evidently there’s still work to be done on that front. 
If there was something missing from the conversation, it was a focus on economic grievances. Halla had warned me previously of the danger of the left being pigeonholed merely as spokespeople for minorities. “Of course we have to defend their rights, but we also need to speak in universal terms, to push economic demands that can appeal to workers from all religious groups”. Given that Human Rights Watch reported that over 90 percent of Syrians lived below the poverty line as of late 2023, I can’t help but agree.
Still, it is a wonderful experience to sit in a room with people experimenting with open democratic organising for the first time. There is something a bit magical about the golden light coming through the windows, the haze produced by the widespread chain-smoking, and the passion of comrades speaking their minds, constructing an important collective platform, out in the open, after 54 years of dictatorship. 
Tomorrow’s schedule of events includes a public meeting by the RLC arguing that removing the head of a regime is by no means enough to guarantee permanent, progressive change. In a totally different part of town, there’s a lecture being held on Syria’s economic future featuring well-known oppositionist intellectuals, and a documentary screening about the life and activism of Syrian dissident Yassin al Haj Saleh. And that’s just what I’ve gotten wind of. Presumably, there’s much more.
There will definitely be huge challenges and many debates ahead, but the left has well and truly entered the battle for Syria’s future.

‘This revolution is just getting started’: an encounter with the left in Damascus

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bahar Al-Assad’s dictatorship. This is the second in his series of reports, the complete list of which can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a>
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Standing in the ruins of the Syrian suburb of Harasta is an experience like no other. This was a town of tens of thousands of people, a centre of life and commerce in a region known as Damascus’s breadbasket. It’s now mostly rubble. 
Many of the apartment buildings are totally demolished, collapsed in on themselves under the weight of years of bombardment from Syrian and Russian forces. Those that remain standing intact are mere shells—broken concrete facades, all the windows and doors shot out, the steel rods used to strengthen the concrete exposed everywhere. Every block as far as the eye can see is like this, barely standing buildings and mounds of debris and garbage. 
Harasta feels like a ghost town, with most buildings emptied of all life. Every now and again you see the odd sign of life, a family that has nowhere else to go. Their determination to go on living evident in their attempt to turn these broken buildings into a home, plugging holes with cardboard and bricks. Passing through this area does something to one’s soul; standing on the shattered streets I feel rage, disbelief and tears welling up in turns. 
Yet for those that have been forced to eke out an existence here, the situation is far worse than we can ever imagine. For them, this isn’t simply a landscape of anonymous destruction. It is the place where they grew up, played soccer in the streets, messed about in school. Where they first found love, visited their cousins on weekends, and raised their children. They are living in the ashes of a life and community that has been obliterated and scattered to the four winds. I pity the children growing up in this place, who will think this devastation is somehow normal. 
We park the car and approach some locals to talk. They warn us about an unexploded Russian bomb less than two metres from where we stand. “They flattened this whole area”, one man says bitterly, “but some of their bombs didn’t explode. Later, Russians soldiers came through and instead of removing them, they just put up posters warning us not to step there. But these were our homes, and those of our neighbours”. The hatred etched on this man’s face is overwhelming in its purity. 
In the distance, we see a few old men picking something from the ground, carrying huge sacks on their back. “Firewood”, explains our driver. “They either use it to stay warm themselves or sell it to buy food.” He doesn’t say more, but his words can’t hide the shame of living in a country where men old enough to be grandparents must do such things to survive.
One of my companions points out that this is what Gaza must feel like. The comparison is apt. Indeed, Assad killed at least 500,000 people, more than Israel has managed. These scenes are replicated around the country, usually in working-class and poor areas.
Harasta itself is just one small part of a wider zone of annihilation that stretches for kilometres around the eastern outskirts of Damascus. These were one of the heartlands of the revolution, a place where mass protests and demonstrations flourished, where rank-and-file soldiers, forcibly conscripted according to the rules of the country, decided that they could not fire on their friends and families, and so mutinied to form a branch of the Free Syrian Army. 
It took the government roughly seven years to finally wrest this land from the people who loved and defended it. Some areas were fought over multiple times, with the regime capturing them, only to be driven back again, and so on. Eventually, the government enforced a harsh siege that lasted for almost five years. 
By 2016, around 400,000 people were trapped in the area, starved of food and water by Assad’s armies. When that failed, they decided to use chemical weapons, killing 70 people including many children, and sending hundreds more to hospital. 
Eventually, a deal was reached in 2018, and well over 100,000 people were shuttled up to Idlib in the buses normally used for public transport. (To this day, some Damascenes boycott these buses in solidarity.) It was a terrible defeat, symbolising a moment that marked the nadir of the heroic struggle to free Syria. 
There was no upside to being reincorporated into government-held territory. Reconstruction efforts were banned in the area, a reminder of what happens when you do not accept your position as a slave. Food remained scarce, the infrastructure non-existent. 
In one strip, there are huge holes in the road, large enough to fit a car. A local man, who does not wish to identify himself for fear of retribution, explains that the government wanted to redirect the water supply. When they didn’t find what they were looking for, they just moved on and left these cavernous holes in the street. But there are no lights or electricity here, so cars and bikes kept falling in. They found an old bookshelf and used it to cover the hole. “They didn’t care about us”, he says. “They only cared about themselves. So we had to fix the problems.”
He’s hopeful about the future, but cautious. “The new guys seem to be different, treating people with respect”, he says. “Inshallah.”
It’s now dark and freezing cold, so we decide to head back to Damascus. While others chat among themselves, I’m genuinely unable to participate, moved to silence by the sheer barbarity of the capitalist system and those who defend it. 
Campfires dot the highway, families huddling close together, trying in vain to keep warm on a terrible winter’s night.

A Syrian ghost town

Red Flag’s Omar Hassan, a longstanding supporter of the Syrian revolution and a Palestine solidarity activist, is in Syria to report on the situation after the fall of Bahar Al-Assad’s dictatorship. These are his first impressions after entering the country from Lebanon. The complete list of Omar’s articles can be found in our <a href="https://redflag.org.au/category/syria-after-assad">Syria After Assad</a> section.

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Under Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, crossing the Syrian border from Lebanon was an unpredictable process, requiring a bit of bribery and a lot of luck. That was doubly the case for Syrians, who were treated with permanent suspicion by the government. Yet as we approach the border on New Year’s Eve, the taxi driver insists that things will be smooth: “The new system is different—Free Syria is open to all”. Sadly, that doesn’t prevent what should be a 45-minute trip from Chtoura, a Lebanese border town, to Damascus taking well over three hours, most of it spent lining up for car searches and identity checks. 
But the queues give us a chance to talk. Three other passengers in the taxi are Syrians who provide context for the somewhat tedious procedure. “They used to interrogate you until you felt like a criminal. Only money would make them stop”, one says. “It used to cost 300,000 lira just to bribe the border officials to let us through—before you even thought about paying for a visa”, the driver chimes in. 
The youngest of the other passengers is the most politically engaged and articulate. As a member of the Alawi religious sect, which the Assad regime manipulated and used as its shock troops against the 2011 revolution, he was doomed to be conscripted into the military. 
“How could I accept killing Syrians for the sake of that regime?”, he asks. He studied for as long as possible to avoid this because students tended to get exemptions. But when that no longer worked, he paid thousands in bribes to get to Lebanon. He’s been unable to visit his family in nine years. “You would not believe the feeling of returning to a free country, to be treated with respect by the officials”, he says.
Though it’s nearly dark by the time we reach the Syrian side of the border, there is more than enough light to see vandalised posters and symbols of the former regime adorning the highway. When I try to get out to take a photo, the driver objects, though with a smile: “You’ll see plenty of that in Damascus!” (Some things aren’t so easily destroyed: Bashar’s murderous face is on every 2,000 lira note, while the 1,000 note is cursed with a picture of his father Hafez, who governed for 30 years before him.) 
When we reach the capital, New Year’s celebrations are in full swing and masses of people are on the streets. The new government reportedly discouraged fireworks, but the decree has no visible impact; the sounds of these friendly explosions fill the night air for hours. Spirits are high, and in the relatively trendy neighbourhood of Bab Touma, the small number of armed guards seem relaxed.
Yet grievances are raised time and time again. Everyone I speak to says that their relationship to the former government was defined by two things: oppression and economic coercion. “The government was stealing from us constantly”, says one man in a Damascene market. 
“If you looked at a soldier wrong, or just in a bad mood, they could demand you pay a bribe on the spot, else be arrested for a crime you didn’t commit”, a young woman explains. “Every checkpoint was an opportunity to extract money from the public. And there were checkpoints everywhere.”
In recent years, Assad and his cronies relied more and more on the drugs trade for their economic survival, selling weed for domestic consumption and Captagon, a type of amphetamine, in the Gulf markets. Meanwhile, the government pursued an aggressive “war on drugs” policy on the streets of major cities, helping it to raise revenue by arresting and fining lowly traffickers and users.
Wandering through one of Old Damascus’s many markets the next morning, I am accosted by three people with cameras. Two are travel vloggers; the other is Nagham, an experienced revolutionary from Dar’aa, a revolutionary city in Syria’s south. Keen to hear more about Dar’aa, I join them for lunch at a local restaurant. 
On the wall as we enter is a large Free Syria flag and a picture of one of the revolution’s many martyrs—a small reminder of what has been lost and won in the past fourteen years. Before we can sit down, we’re hailed by a young couple, who insist we sit with them. As we order, a revolutionary song comes on the radio and everyone begins to sing. 
The couple turns out to be young doctors from solidly middle-class families. Nour works in a public hospital, earning US$15 a month. “We never had any medicines, any syringes, nothing. We couldn’t even give our patients Panadol. They had to buy it themselves, and people just didn’t have the money”, she says. 
Her hospital had a special wing, the Arabic translation of which is “room of the friends”. In it, fighters from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon (Hezbollah)—who were in Syria to crush the revolution and protect the Assad regime—enjoyed free treatment. Nour says that she once walked in and discovered that all the medical supplies that the rest of the hospital lacked were there in abundance. Now, she says, “the whole hospital has supplies”.
There are echoes of this story everywhere. While there is still enormous poverty, in central Damascus the markets are bustling. One man is at pains to explain the difference in the provision of bread: “Under Assad, we would have to line up for hours, and the bread was stale ... Now it’s more available and much better quality”. He says that the living standards in regime-held parts of the country were much poorer than those with greater freedoms.
They share more such stories. When the feared Sednaya prison was opened, many inmates came to her hospital for attention after years of torture and abuse. The medics did their best, but some of the patients’ problems were beyond their capabilities. “One man came in, he couldn’t speak. He kept repeating the name, ‘Bashar Al-Assad’, followed by ‘there are 44 bodies in the freezer’”, she says. 
What is their vision for the future? After a pause, a young man, Abdullah, speaks up. “In my view, we need to go back to the old ways. We have so many different religions here; they all need to be treated with respect. The only way is through a Caliphate, as was written by the prophet”. He insists that this would still allow women their rights, and people could drink and smoke and so on as they chose. Nour, a trendy young woman who does not wear a hijab, seems to hesitate on that, but agrees that religion should play some role in the new state. Nagham seems to have other ideas, but the conversation moves on.
Islam is clearly a salient part of people’s identity. Perhaps more so now than before the revolution turned into a civil war in which the major players gradually became more influenced by Islamism, for a variety of reasons. But contradictions abound. Nour says that in the summer she wears crop tops even though some people don’t like it. Abdullah whispers that he doesn’t recommend going to Idlib because things are a bit extreme up there. 
Later, I’m lining up to recharge my sim card. What do people in the queue think about the economy and how things should change? Wages need to go up—on that everyone agrees. But after years of government theft, many are content, for now at least, to be free from a system characterised by bribery and arbitrary taxation. I can see why that would seem a step forward after living under a totalitarian regime that, despite demanding endless payments, offered few public services. 
All of this is just first impressions and first conversations. It would be silly at this point to draw conclusions about “what the Syrian people think” or make generalisations about class consciousness. Aside from Nagham, who promises to talk more seriously in Dar’aa (in coming days), none of the people I have spoken to have been politically active in recent years. 
From a handful of Damascus residents, I get a sense that the fall of Assad was something that happened around them, not something they did themselves. After all, it’s been more than a decade since the height of the revolutionary mobilisations, which were crushed so brutally by Assad and his Iranian and Russian allies. Popular protest and democratic resistance survived in some places, but in Damascus, which the regime held, such things were almost impossible. 
Nevertheless, and for now, people are revelling in Assad’s defeat. Who could blame them? After 54 years of a dynastic dictatorship, the Syrian people are enjoying their first taste of freedom. Everywhere, there are joyful expressions. A dragon has been slain. Or, as the people say, a donkey has gone. (Assad means “lion”. So, “donkey” ... you get it.) 
“Finally, we can breathe”, my young companion in the taxi said. “Whatever comes next, nothing can be worse than Assad.” 
“How lucky you are—how wonderful it is to have a liberated country”, replied the Lebanese woman in the front seat, heading to Syria for a New Year’s Eve party. 
“Inshallah, one day it will be our turn.”

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