The Current - After Assad, Syrians reimagine their country’s future

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

In Syria, celebrating has shifted to planning, as the country maps its future after nearly 14 years of civil war. We hear from a Syrian national once detained by the Assad regime and the CBC’s Margaret Evans about the country’s cautious optimism.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Thank God, thank God, we've got rid of the oppressor. That is a Syrian refugee lined up at the Turkish-Syrian border, waiting to return to his homeland. And in Damascus, thousands of people chant and set off fireworks celebrating the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It has been nearly a week since opposition forces toppled Assad's regime, forcing him to flee to Russia. Now talks in Syria have shifted to the future as the country looks toward moving forward from 13 years of civil war.

Aza Kondakji is a Syrian once detained for protesting against the Assad government. She is in Homs as a hello. Hello. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm very good. Very good. Describe the scenes in your city when you got the news that Bashar al-Assad had fled government and fled the country. Well, it's quite overwhelming.

the country? Well, it's quite overwhelming. We're still like, it's the fifth day and we still cannot believe that we are the generation who witnessed this epic moment that we have been waiting for too long, even before the Syrian revolution has started. What was the reaction like on the streets? When people found out, how did people respond? Well, people went out to the streets the next day immediately and started celebrating. People started to meet their beloveds who were out of the government, the previous government besieged areas. Like the celebrations are still ongoing on a daily basis. But as you mentioned, it was hard for people to believe that this was true, right? Yeah, of course. Having someone ruling you, a family ruling you since 1971, and now they are gone with all the injustice that they did,

it's very overwhelming to still believe that it's gone. And we are actually witnessing this. What was life like for you and your family under the Assad regime? Other members of my family have been detained too. My father had a travel ban even before the Syrian revolution because of having opinions against the Assad regime. Assad regime. So it used to be a country with no justice, no dignity, and no free of speech. So we're hoping now for the better for the country. What about you, yourself? I said in the introduction that you,

yourself, had been detained for protesting against the Assad government. What happened? Well, I was detained for protesting. Well, I was detained three times, actually, knowing that the demonstrations ended years ago. But the government have been always scared of people who know how to write, who know how to speak, which is the most weapon that the government have been scared from. What do you think the government was afraid of from those people, as you said, who know how to write and know how to speak?

Yes, because we have opinions. We know, like, because the word, like, it's way stronger than the actual weapon. And this is what the government was the most scared of, that you go out and you demand your rights. And this is what scares dictatorships. It must have been terrifying to have been detained, as you said, three times. Yes, it was. Yes, it's very terrifying. Knowing that your family doesn't know where

you are because the family, like, here you don't have the right to know where the detainees are taken to. So, yes, it's been scary for both of us, for me and for my family as well. We're seeing these extraordinary images of people being freed from prisons, people like yourself who had protested, who were detained. What is it like knowing what you went through? What is it like to see those images? Well, I was released on March 2020, but I was still in prison until the day of the fall of Assad.

It's the day I called that I was freed from Assad regime on the 8th of December. Even though you were out of detention, you were still kind of living in detention under that regime. Of course. Every day. Every single day. I was scared to be detained again every single day. Every time I see a car parking under our, like by our building, I used to be scared that they are now coming to take me.

But now I am, finally, I am now out of prison. You know, there were millions of Syrians who left Syria and came to places like Canada because of what they lived under. Why did you stay in the country? Because I wanted to witness this day,

regardless of all the hardships that we went through, besiege, detention, hunger, but I wanted to witness this day with me, with my family. This is a really difficult time. There's a lot of joy, but there's a lot of fear as well about what might come and what the future of Syria will look like. What are you worried about right now? Well, having to move out from a messy and dirty home to a new home takes a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of patience. And we have to have this.

But the thing is that I am very optimistic about what is coming. But it's going to be easy? No, it's not going to be easy. But it's going to be for the better for Syria. But as you say, this is going to take time for that messy home to be cleaned up. Yeah. What are you most hopeful for? I mean, if you think of the future of Syria, this is a moment that, as you said,

you stayed in the country to live through. What are you hopeful for? I hope for a Syria for all Syrians, dignity for everyone, free of speech, like just to be treated as actual civilians who have rights. Could you have imagined this day coming? Never. Never. I thought that maybe the children of our children might witness it and might not.

So that's really powerful for you to be there in the middle of it. Yeah, very much. We're still overwhelmed. We still cannot believe. Azza, I'm glad to talk to you. Thank you very much and all the best. Thank you for hosting me. Azza Kandachi is a Syrian once detained three times, as you heard, for protesting against the Assad regime. She was in the city of Homs.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. The CBC's senior international correspondent Margaret Evans is in Damascus. Margaret, hello to you. Hi, Matt. We just spoke with a young woman in Homs who said she couldn't quite believe what

was happening, that she thought it would be the children of her children that would witness this moment. What is it like today in Damascus? Well, it's been easy for the past couple of days. You know, there were those really joyous, obviously, scenes at the beginning, but there was also a lot of tension as well because of the uncertainty. Now, I'm not saying that uncertainty has gone away, but the moves that the opposition forces,

the rebel groups that are now in control, at least here in Damascus and much of the country, are making or seem to be giving people a sense of greater ease to move around the city. So shops are open. There had been a curfew in place. That curfew is lifted. The banks are open and people are being told to go back to work. So in the center of Damascus, there is a real sense of normalcy, although you see lots of people running around putting up the new Syrian flag, which is the flag of the opposition. And you see, you know, you'll pass a garbage bin and it'll have the old Syrian flag, which there's a difference in terms of the number of stars and the color of stripes, but the old flag was a representation of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar al-Assad's father. So that's the kind of mood you got right now. There have been these extraordinary scenes that people have seen around the world of family members showing up at prisons, one in particular,

looking for their loved ones who were detained, people who had spoken out against the regime, people who had somehow offended the regime. What did you make of that? It's really hard to describe the sense of just how highly charged the atmosphere was. This is on the grounds of a prison on the outskirts of Damascus, the most notorious prison in Syria, nicknamed the slaughterhouse. And it's the place where political dissidents would be taken, but not just activists, but somebody who had maybe written something online. It was a vast number of different kinds of people taken there,

estimates of thousands of people being executed in that prison, according to a report by Amnesty International in 2017. But it's the place where people, if your loved one was taken, that's the first place you worried that they might have gone. And I think the thing that struck me most talking to people who, you know, they surrounded us because they saw the camera. And they'd come up and they'd show you, you know, passports or ID cards or pieces of paper saying, please take this picture, you know, trying to find their loved ones. Many of the people that we spoke to hadn't seen their loved ones, you know, since 2012, not allowed to visit, not allowed to have any communication with them. And then there were

lots of people who didn't know if that's where their loved ones had gone because prisoners were moved. And the al-Assad regime relied on a vast network of prisons and not just big monolithic ones like the one we were at, but secret prisons. We have colleagues here in the city who just over the past few days were filming in a government building and found somebody detained on that premises. And so the prison that we're talking about, you know, as the opposition forces came down from Aleppo in the north, in each city they went to, they went to the prisons to free the prisoners. But, you know, there are rumors that there are secret prisons or secret levels.

And even though rescue workers have come in and said, we've released everybody that we think, you know, has been imprisoned here, people still believe that there are secret places where people are being held. This is why people are bashing through the walls and the floors looking for these secret chambers where they think their loved ones might have been. That's right. Yeah. One of the other things that we saw were, you know, there were a lot of papers flying around records. And, you know, there are apparently rooms in there full of records,

and some of them are accurate and some of them aren't. So you would see groups of people all crowded around, leaning down, looking at these big sheaves of paper with handwritten names and fingerprints beside them. And, you know, trying to ascertain what might have happened. One of the other things we saw was one of the opposition fighters leaving the grounds with a big kind of pile of papers. And that had the names of soldiers and prison guards who'd worked there. And asked, what are you going to do with that?

He said he was going to give it to his leaders. He wanted the international community to come in. And, you know, one of the other things I would just mention is that, you know, going down into those cells, those cramped cells, seeing the tiny little, you know, box between this prison door and that tiny cell. No light, no windows. And they were coming to the understanding of what their loved ones had been living with. So it was almost like people were greeting their greatest fears and many people kind of coming out of there were just kind of collapsing or weeping. So it's extremely emotional and very reflective of just how deeply wounded this country is. People that you're talking to saying about this rebel group, HTS, Hayat Tariq al-Sham, that's currently in charge. There's jubilation, but also uncertainty about what the aims and the goals, the true aims and goals of this group are. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of that. You know, overall, there's a sense, and again, I'm speaking for Damascus.

I haven't visited other parts of the country, but that people are taking this moment of freedom, the surprise, etc. But there is an underlying sense for many of not sure what to do, you know, just not wanting to be too optimistic, but not wanting to be unhopeful. who said that they watched the way that the opposition came down that main road from Aleppo to Damascus, as well as the way that the leader of HTS, Abu Muhammad al-Jilani, functioned as a leader, as the head kind of government, if you want to call it that, in Idlib province, which is where the main opposition has been for years. And he's credited with creating order there, but he's also been accused by rights groups of human rights abuses in keeping that order. That said, we met a man holding his little son, so the future of the country, saying there was order in Idlib. He cared about people. When they went to Aleppo, it was very organized. When they came

to Hama, it was organized. And that gave him hope, he said. He said, that's what we want for our country. And then the messaging from the opposition groups is very much, it's time for us to take care of the Syrian people. But there is, you know, people are hoping for the best. And of course, people who might be worried because they worked for government agencies or, you know, have received their positions because they were in part of the, say, the Alawite sect that might have, Bashar al-Assad,

that might have, you know, given them a step up in their career. Those people are worried. And we were speaking this morning with someone who works for one of the big international aid agencies here who said a lot of the regime members are still in the country and they will be very fearful of the future. And of course, people who respect the secular nature of Syria will be worried because of al-Jalani's Islamist roots and his past as, you know, leading a branch of al-Qaeda. Let me just ask you two final things.

One is just, and you've hinted at this, but what is the hope that people have for their country, a country that's been through so much over the last 12, 13, 14 years? I think they want to stand up. The hope is that Syria can become great again in the way of real pride. You know, I started coming here in the early 2000s. And even then, people were conscious of it. They talked about the deep culture, the Syrian culture, about how cultured and civilized the people are here. So I think that they are hoping that the ideals that we're hearing coming out from the revolutionaries, the rebels, are adhered to. But they also want the outside world to help. They want their country back. I think they also want justice.

I'm not sure how easy it will be for them to get them. They want people to come home, but they also want a country that is able to actually allow that to happen. What is it like for you to be back in that city? I mean, again, you are in one city, not the entire country, but you know the city well. And given what it's gone through, what's it like just for you to be there? There are lots of different emotions. I've thought a lot about, you know, when I was here, there was a lot of hope surrounding Bashar al-Assad, who'd taken over from his father in an uncontested election. You know, it's a dynasty.

But he was seen as a younger leader he had this you know british wife and and it was you know there was a sense that maybe he would actually liberalize the country and i remember talking to dissidents at the time political opponents you know advocating for change you know saying give him a chance you know he it might get better for us and i worry about civil war if if worry about civil war if the opposition gets too strong. And I spoke to people who had been jailed in the prison system that existed in Hafez al-Assad's regime and understood the torture that they had experienced even then. Then you go to the Civil War 2011,

the opposition rising up and that brutal crackdown. And people talk about this country being broken and it has been so brutal, the tactics that have been used. and it has been so emptied out of civil society you know it's you know i don't know a lot of people here anymore because the people i met when i used to come more regularly to cover it are scattered around the world they're in germany or they're in lebanon or they're, you know, some of them, I'm sure, in Canada. So, you know, I'm very optimistic, but I'm also extremely fearful because it's a really complicated picture. There are many people with different aspirations. And when people's security is threatened, you know, and people's livelihoods, people forget that Syria is a country where a lot of people are living below the poverty line. So, you know, I think there are huge challenges ahead.

But I've always had a love in my heart for this country and this amazingly beautiful city. It is, it does have deep roots. It is a very cultured place at its heart, but it has been brutalized. Margaret, I'm so glad to talk to you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. The CBC's senior international correspondent, Margaret Evans, is in Damascus.