Syria Through the Eyes of the People Who Live There and Their Hope for What Happens Next

The war artist-reporter and founder of Action Syria returns to the streets of Damascus and Aleppo 12 years on from when he was last there. Here, he captures the stories of the people he meets and their cautious hope for a free Syria under a new government

Nearly 60 days later since the start of the new era: Syria has a new president, international flights are landing in Damascus, Beethoven has been played in the Opera House, lifting sanctions seems inevitable but slow, old flags are being painted over, and a new currency will surely be printed to replace the ones still displaying the Assad family.

"But…" is the word on everyone’s lips. It’s always easy to be cynical about Syria’s prospects for peace. Syria's new president Ahmed al-Sharaa has vowed to "pursue the criminals who shed Syrian blood and committed massacres and crimes" in his first address to the nation since the fall of ousted leader Bashar al-Assad.

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Certainly, Syria’s new leader has delivered a change of leadership that international governments were never capable of doing, and that carries huge favour with Syrians on the street. The Syrian transitional government will need this goodwill in the face of alarming administrative, economic and social challenges. We owe it to the civilians in Syria not to write them off before they start.

This month, I was in Syria for the first time in 12 years. It found a place in my heart when I visited the war-stricken town of Azaz with the Free Syrian Army in 2012. I felt such affinity with some of those I met, that with three friends I started Action Syria, which has raised £9m for humanitarian work in areas the regime would not help.

On the streets of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs I found a narrative of excited and cautious hope. Hadell Ali, a 26-year-old dentist from Damascus, captures this feeling when she says: "We are so old that we have white hair on our heads waiting for this moment," paraphrasing a Tunisian activist celebrating the fall of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011. "I feel the same way, I am shaking with joy," she says. "I feel a mourning for everyone who died for no reason… but we are finally free."

Those euphoric scenes witnessed in December of a "free Syria" partnered with many unresolved traumas. Only now, for the first time, has it become possible for Syrians to tell their stories after decades of oppression. For every one of these stories I heard about prisoners, the disappeared, the dead and the silenced there must have been 100,000 more. Here are just a handful of firsthand accounts of what the Syrian people have endured, and vitally, what their hopes are for the future.

Salaheddin el Essa, 31

Footballer, prisoner, son; East Damascus

Salaheddin walked with a limp, had scars on his knuckles and in his hair, chipped teeth, wide deep sunken eyes as if they were still adjusting to the light and skin noticeably whiter than his father and brother, who welcomed me into their home.

He was released from Sednaya prison on 8 December. Once he dreamt of being a professional footballer, but now prison time and his torture injuries make that impossible.

This is his story: In 2013 Salah fled the Syrian army to Idlib, where for two years he fought with several groups of rebels against his old colleagues. But football was his dream and he made his way to Turkey, where he tried out for Konyaspor and Beşiktaş. His career was short-lived. As a deserter of the Syrian army, he had no paperwork and he was turned away.

For the next two years, he returned to Aleppo and a presidential pardon excusing deserters of the army allowed him to return to Damascus. This plan was delayed when he was caught in a mine explosion, which put him in hospital. As he talked and I drew, each disfiguration on his body was slowly explained. A canvas of injuries, catalogued on his face.

In Damascus, he was reassigned to the army immediately and without punishment, but seven days later he was caught sneaking home to see his family and arrested by the infamous Far' Falastin intelligence branch.

"I had only one investigation session… the investigator said to me: 'Are you going to talk?... Where have you been these seven years?' I told him I was in the army. Then he went away and returned with a green pipe… he hit me only one strike on my back… I could hear the screams of a woman being tortured next door, I was afraid, and because there were also two people hung on the walls next to me, I knew my fate would be similar to theirs or perhaps worse, so I said: 'OK, I will tell you everything,' and he stopped hitting me."

In January 2020 he was transferred to Sednaya prison. "And now our torture lives began… I will never forget this day, the scars will never heal… when we entered Sednaya they asked us to get completely naked… then they sent us to the underground cells." The cell was 2.5 m square, and in Salah’s "janseer" (an Arabic word for a chain of people all handcuffed together) there were 24 people.

We paused as Salah’s father brought out a blanket to make sure I was warm enough — electricity in Damascus is irregular and winter is setting in. Salah described how they sat in human waste from the toilets a foot deep for three days, on the fourth day they were taken to the normal Sednaya cells.

One prisoner explained to him: "Your only job here is to eat and get beaten — you’re not allowed to speak with anybody or about politics, just being beaten and eating." But their food was used as a torture method, too, it was up to the guard to decide who ate. "There was one occasion when we didn’t have food for eight days, some of us started crying from hunger. There was another guard who tortured us a lot, when the guards used to hear a sound in the cells they would ask some of the prisoners to put their hands out of the small window in the door and they would beat them up with a stick.

"The scars on my hands are from the hitting in Sednaya, they came with the cables from aeroplanes and sticks and they hit us everywhere. On one occasion, in the same way, they cut the tongue off of a prisoner called Abu Ali, miraculously he survived Sednaya."

With his family gathered around, for two hours Salah recounted the horrors of that prison. Every two months, he explained they gathered people in their janseers to be executed. They would be kept naked and without food for 3 days. "We used to hear the sound of a hydraulic 'pressurer' when there was an execution, and when we heard this sound we used to say ‘Allah Yerhamu’ meaning God bless his soul — as we knew he was dead."

I was drawing Salah’s broken teeth as he explained the last few days of the Assad regime. In the last two weeks, the guards were working double shifts, and they heard prisoners being removed in trucks, they assumed those prisoners were important to the regime, but they don’t know where they went.

Then on that day, which at the time they didn’t know was Sunday 8 December, they heard the guards shouting: "Wake up everybody and get ready, everybody should wake up." When they heard guns shooting and helicopters landing they were petrified it might be the end. "We thought there had been an order to eliminate all the prisoners of Sednaya, everybody was crying and saying their last prayer." And then silence…

"After the guards fled, we heard footsteps in the hallway and suddenly the window in the door was opened and a voice asked us 'What are you?' We said, 'We are prisoners here!' Then we asked them 'Who are you?' They then said 'We are the Free People of Qara and Talfita,' they are two nearby cities. This man shot the locks of the doors with his machine gun… and opened the doors for us and he said 'Syria now is free and you are free — go out'."

Tawfiq Ali Diab, 45

Mechanic; Douma, East Damascus

On Saturday 18 April 2018 at 7 pm, a missile exploded in Douma, a small city east of Damascus that would soon become a household name. It was a chemical attack, which Russia said was staged and later vetoed a proposed U.N. mission to investigate the incident. It was a significant event which led to cruise missiles being launched by America, the UK and France on four Syrian government targets. For those that lived there, it was a living hell.

On the street near Martyr’s Square, several people came to share their stories on the car bonnet I was standing beside, but it was Tawfiq Ali Diab’s that rang out that evening.

When they heard the initial aerial strikes that day, six years ago, they had as normal sought shelter underground. However, the chlorine canister that fell from the helicopter seeped into the building everywhere. Ali Diab lost his brother, four children and his wife, Hanadi. "I was with them — underground, I could only breathe out, and not in, my eyes popped out and I went bright red. The next day I found three dead people on my doorstep and there were 42 at the health checkpoint. We tried to clean them, but all the water was gone." It’s generally agreed there were 43 deaths in total from the strike. "No one came to help because they were too scared, even the health point didn’t know what to do."

One man chipped in from our little huddle on the street. In between scrolling through family photos on his smartphone. Ali Diab described how the next day the regime soldiers arrived on the street with the Russian media and he was ordered to hold a microphone and say to the camera that the strike was done by "the terrorists." It was this counter-narrative that had become so familiar in this war.

When it became too dark to write, Ali Diab invited me inside his home, he was joined by his youngest daughter, Joudy, dressed in bright red. He had remarried after the attack and had three more children — describing the unbearable loneliness. "I used to be lonely, no one to eat with, or to fast or to break fast, no one to buy new clothes for… I had surgery on my heart — because of the stress and sorrow." I looked away for a moment to draw and when I looked back I found tears running down his cheeks. He said, "I have a pain in my heart, even now at night I don’t want my new wife to see my pain, I just cover up and cry."

Drawing allowed me time to listen to Ali Diab. It’s easy to visualise the mechanics of war and the intimidating statistics but much harder to imagine the human costs. "I used to make six coffees in the morning, now I only make one," he said tearfully.

Abu Ahmed, 55

Mechanic, father, pigeon keeper; Al Sakkari, Southern Aleppo

I noticed Abu Ahmed’s mechanics shop before I noticed him. It was ordinary-looking enough with neat rows of spanners and a workbench, but emerging from the gloom — on the vice, and on the generators he was mending sat pigeons; some ornamental, some quite plain and they pottered peacefully. On the walls hung little bird cages with canaries and finches flapping about inside.

"I don’t really like talking to people much so I keep birds instead," Abu Ahmed, who was in his late fifties, said. Ironically, for a man who didn’t like people, it was notable how many of the little street in Al-Sakkari, southern Aleppo, liked him. He chatted constantly, providing a chair for anyone who hesitated. Including me.

I have found that kindhearted people or those who have known suffering often keep animals or gardens, especially on the fringes of atrocity. I couldn’t resist making a drawing.

Abu Ahmed (meaning literally father of Ahmed) is perhaps one of the more common names in Syria, but it was the way he repeated it that first alerted me to the sadness he held. To start though, as is customary when interviewing strangers, we started talking about the mundane — the costs of war and the prices of eggs.

These were very relevant metrics for Ahmed’s life: "I have been saving up to build a second room in my house for 10 years, I still haven’t done it… but the cost of eggs has dropped to 35,000 Syrian pounds a pack rather than 75,000, and the Syrian pound is up on the dollar this morning. Sometimes I can sit for five days without work." These are the realities for many in Syria at the moment, 90 per cent of whom live below the poverty line.

"I have six daughters and one dead son. He was 14 years old, he was called Ahmed Osama. He was killed by a mortar round in 2012 — it was 12 years ago in an area called Al-Hamdaniyah in Aleppo, would you like the address?" He explained that the mortar was from the Syrian army but that they always denied it saying it was the "terrorists" — a catchall term for anyone who opposed the Assad regime.

"This week has come as a spiritual relief," he said, miming the weight being lifted off his chest and heart. For the first time ever he will be able to visit his five grandchildren who live close by but were divided by the war: "Until this day I have never met them." This story is commonplace in Syria, where thousands and thousands of people are reconnecting with loved ones after many years. Some live close by, others now many miles away as refugees or internally displaced people.

Abu Ahmed returned to talk about his son: "He [Ahmed] was the only one who could support me, he was my wings…"

At that moment a pigeon flapped its own wings frantically inside the shop and a man pulled up with a generator on a truck to mend, Abu Ahmed got up, smiled and continued his day.