I spent my childhood summers being driven from Lebanon, where my maternal family lives, to Syria, home to my paternal side. The shift as we drove from one border to the next always felt like stepping back two decades in time. As each kilometer passed, the glossy billboards of Lebanon, promoting local wine brands, summer festivals, and tanning oils — essentially, the good life — gradually gave way to a different form of consumerism. Once on Syrian roads, austere, USSR-style propaganda portraits began to dominate our view, urging a different kind of consumption: the unquestioning embrace of an ideology, embodied by one man, Hafez al-Assad.
“Why are there photos of Hafez everywhere?” I asked nonchalantly from the backseat, my face pressed against the window. My dad would spin around sharply, snapping, “Baba [father] Hafez!” His eyes darted nervously to the driver beside him, gauging whether my careless slip had been overheard — and, God forbid, would be reported later.
Even at age eight, I could read the stakes on my dad’s fear-stricken face. His reverence for Hafez al-Assad, our nation’s “father,” wasn’t born of loyalty; it was a survival tactic, rooted in generational terror that he was passing on to me.
As I learned more about my country’s history, the imposed paternal connection between me and “Baba Hafez” began to fuel my already budding daddy issues. I mean, what kind of father besieges a city for 27 days, massacring tens of thousands of his own “children”?
Of course I’m referring to the 1982 Hama massacre — a dark stain in our nation’s history that left a lasting mark on my father’s then 25-year-old psyche. Shaped by that terror, my father learned to never challenge the regime, raising us in an apolitical household by avoiding any discourse that could make our family a target of Assad’s Baath Party.
After Hafez’s passing in the summer of 2000, we clung to the hope that the torch he left behind would fall into more compassionate hands. After all, his heir, Bashar al-Assad, was a doctor trained in ophthalmology in London — the birthplace of the Spice Girls! How bad could he be?
But as the acclaimed poet and patron saint of brats Charli XCX once said, “I guess the apple don’t fall far from the tree,” and Bashar al-Assad wasted no time proving it. Reinforcing his father’s authoritarian rule, he further consolidated power among his inner circle and loyalists through propaganda, violence, and crony capitalism.
As the Arab Spring spread across the region and reached Syria in 2011, Bashar al-Assad — like any decaying dictator — was quick to reveal that the apple was rotten right to the core. In response to mounting calls for freedom, his regime unleashed a brutal campaign of terror that would define the decade, introducing an entire generation — including my own — to the steep cost of defying the Assads.
Chemical attacks, mass executions, systematic torture, and enforced disappearances were inflicted seemingly indiscriminately, targeting everyone from political opponents to children. Dissidents were snatched from their homes, only to vanish without a trace, leaving their families in a state of endless uncertainty, counting the days without closure, unable to grieve or move on. The aim, it seemed, was not only to crush resistance but to obliterate the faintest flicker of hope for autonomy the Syrian people had once dared to dream.
The Syrian civil war dragged on for 13 years, becoming a battleground for foreign powers — including the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Israel — to pursue their interests without spilling blood on their own soil. Meanwhile, the Syrian people bore the brunt of these proxy wars, with over 600,000 lives estimated to have been lost by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and more than 14 million individuals displaced, according to the United Nations’ Refugee Agency, which has called it the largest refugee crisis in the world.
Watching my people traverse oceans in search of safety, only to drown in indifference once they arrived on the shores of nations that viewed them as an inconvenience, radicalized me. The apolitical stance passed down by my father — though rooted in understandable caution — was no longer a path I could follow.
By my mid-20s, with the war showing no signs of abating, I had come to the painful realization that there is no such thing as being apolitical. Politics seep into every aspect of our lives, and only the privileged can afford to stay disengaged. Through my anonymous platform, Saint Hoax, I raised awareness about the refugee crisis, donated to relief funds, and campaigned against anti-immigration laws. Despite the shield of anonymity, though, I still lacked the courage to openly denounce the regime responsible for the suffering.
Since becoming politically active, one of the greatest sources of my unease was the possibility of my identity being exposed. I never critiqued the Assads, but I lived in constant fear that one misstep or bad take could cost my father the freedom he had long protected through silence.
In the end, the “fallen apple” analogy rang true for me as well. Like my father — and his father before him — I found myself trapped in the unyielding grip of the same family that had haunted ours for generations.
But on December 8, 2024, that fear was eradicated. Bashar al-Assad fled the country, relinquishing control of the presidency. Waking up to an Assad-free Syria, after 54 years of tyrannical rule, was a reality I never thought I’d witness in my lifetime, let alone my father’s. Scenes of Syrians overtaking the presidential palace stirred a profound sense of schadenfreude in me, allowing me to fully grasp the depth of that almost unpronounceable word. As they ransacked private bedrooms, closets, and Louis Vuitton boxes, I couldn’t help but imagine the Assads watching, experiencing the same violation they had long imposed on a nation they robbed of its dignity.
As with any historic event, the internet has been flooded by conflicting opinions, split between those celebrating and those critically evaluating the aftermath. While the latter, understandably, remain skeptical about Syria’s future and the regional ramifications of this seismic regime change, no one should deny Syrians their long-overdue right to rejoice in the fall of their dictator. Seeing thousands of freed prisoners — some of whom may have been born in captivity — emerging into freedom is unambiguously a good thing.
We are more than pawns in a geopolitical game. We are individuals with hopes and dreams who have been brutally stripped of our humanity by both our own “leader” and the foreign powers with vested interests in our land.
Many Syrians are overcome this week with a renewed sense of optimism as they reunite with loved ones they once mourned as lost. Allow them the space to savor this moment, for it is undoubtedly worth savoring. Fueled by this collective hope, we can, for the first time in more than five decades, begin to envision a future where democracy thrives, authoritarianism is nipped in the bud, and, above all, no child is coerced into calling their oppressor “baba.”
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