Members of Michigan’s Syrian-American community say they’re feeling an intense mix of emotions following the sudden ouster of Syria’s longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad.
A diverse alliance of rebel groups seized the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Sunday after launching an offensive that swept the country in just under two weeks. They forced Assad into exile, and now face the prospect of governing a country that’s been divided and brutalized by civil war since 2011.
Abdalmajid Katranji is a Michigan doctor who’s been active with the Syrian American Council and various Syrian relief efforts since the initial 2011 uprising against Assad’s government. He described feeling “more hope than apprehension” right now — a feeling he said seems to be shared by his family members and other contacts on the ground in Syria.
Katranji said his feelings of hope are bolstered by the actions of the rebel groups who have now seized power. He said they showed remarkable discipline and strategic awareness by not only uniting to launch their offensive at an opportune moment, but also taking pains to avoid damaging critical infrastructure and keep basic systems going throughout the country. And so far, they’ve also provided assurances to Syria’s Christians and other religious and ethnic minority groups that their rights to worship freely will be respected.
But Katranji is clear that there remain many questions going forward. “Right now, there is a very clear, determined effort to create a transitional government,” he said. “There's a determined effort to get as many parties as possible to participate.
“And now the question is: These various factions who have been able to cooperate thus far … can they continue to find common ground to then build and maintain those institutions, or rehabilitate those institutions, that they've now taken over? That remains to be seen.”
Katranji said many of the millions of Syrians displaced, both within and outside the country’s borders, in the past 14 years are now looking to return home. He said that’s a positive development, but could also pose a dilemma in a country whose economy and society have been decimated by years of conflict.
“They're seeking to come back and rebuild,” Katranji said. “[But] that can also add a new dynamic of stress into the situation as people try to return to Syria.”
For Shadia Martini, an Aleppo native who’s now a U.S. citizen living in Oakland County, the day that the Assad regime fell was “one of the best days of my life.” But it’s also been an incredibly stressful time, as she tries to keep tabs on the developing situation from afar.
“I haven't slept in 10 days,” Martini said. “I can't work. I can't do anything. I'm glued to my phone, following up, talking to friends — and most specifically, those who are waiting to hear from their loved ones who disappeared in the dungeons.”
Those “dungeons” are the Assad regime’s notorious complex of prisons, where alleged political enemies were held in horrific conditions, often for years. While the rebels have emptied those prisons as they swept through the country, Martini said no one she knows has managed to find a missing loved one. “Unfortunately, so far, nobody came back alive,” she said.
But while Martini feels an unprecedented sense of hope and relief with Assad now gone, she’s also concerned about aspects of the country’s future governing coalition. A chief concern is that the most powerful faction within the rebel alliance, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is an Islamist group with past ties to Al-Qaeda (which HTS has since renounced).
For Martini, that’s potentially worrisome. “Most people don't want an Islamist state in Syria,” she said. “Syria has always been a very open country. We have many ethnicities, many religions. I'm not going to say nobody, because obviously there's always someone, but very few people want an Islamist state.”
Both Katranji and Martini stress that Syria’s transition toward what they both hope will be a democratic state will be a long, rocky one. Not only has the country been torn apart by years of civil war, it’s spent decades as a family-based autocracy — where people lived in fear of not only the government and its intelligence services, but of neighbors and even family members who might turn them over to the regime.
That’s another of Martini’s fears — that years of unresolved injustices and grievances will spill over into cycles of revenge and chaos. “I talk to many people who say ‘I don't want revenge, I want justice.’ But there will be people who are going to just seek revenge, and that is going to create a lot of issues,” she said.
Martini said the long war has divided not only Syria itself; it divided Syrian communities abroad, and even families, including hers. But at least now she can return to Syria, she said, to visit the graves of her parents, who died in recent years. But the wounds left by the conflict will take a very long time to heal.
“We are traumatized people,” Martini said. “We are all traumatized people.”
