A blog of the Middle East Women's Initiative
Tara Kangarlou interviews five women from Syria about the fall of the half-century long Assad regime, what it means for their lives and families, and their hopes for and apprehensions about the future of the country.
For over a decade, the Syrian civil war was regarded as the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” leaving millions of Syrians in a relentless struggle for survival. But, on December 8, 2024, a sudden and rapid takeover by Islamic militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which remains designated a foreign terror organization by the US, ousted Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, once dubbed as the “butcher of Middle East,” who left his iron-fisted rule for Russia. Now, what welds this war-torn country is the Syrian people’s loud cry for unity and desperate need for hope, especially among hundreds of thousands of Syrian women, who for years withstood perpetual violence, loss, and displacement inside the country and beyond.
Today, of the country’s pre-war population of 22 million, over 16.7 million people require severe humanitarian assistance. From the brutal onslaughts orchestrated by Assad’s regime backed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia to the barbaric rule of ISIS and the reign of chaos imposed by a host of Islamic and foreign militias, Syria’s protracted conflict has killed an estimated 600,000 people. Over the span of 14 years, civilians bore the brunt of the violence, including tens of thousands of children and women killed in airstrikes, shelling, and chemical attacks. The ferocity of the Syrian war led to more than 100,000 detentions and forced disappearances, 7 million Syrians internally displaced, and 6 million who took refuge in neighboring countries of Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. All the while thousands braved the perils of crossing to Europe—some by way of the Mediterranean convinced that the untamed sea is safer than their war-ridden homeland.
Over the years, ordinary Syrians found themselves ensnared in a crucible of violence and despair. As their shattered cities, homes, and lives attest to the tragedy of this prolonged nightmare, millions of Syrian people witnessed another grim reality—the haunting feeling of being forgotten by a world that once pledged solidarity.
Now, amidst the ruins of Syria and despondence of life as refugees, Syrians’ cries for peace and democracy echo alike—with the hope that this time they are heard.
“I always had the hope to go back to Syria. Now, that dream will come true,” said Lana, a 33-year-old mother of two who fled her hometown of Zabadani in Syria in 2013 to Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, an area largely targeted and heavily damaged by the Israeli attacks that began in August. Like hundreds of thousands of other Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Lana endured years of discrimination and hardship. These days, she takes pride in how despite all the obstacles of life as a “refugee” in Lebanon, she managed to complete her degree in psychology.
“My dream is to go back to Syria and support my people. I can’t practice nor have a clinic in Lebanon, but in my own hometown, I can do what I love. I can serve those who need my help.” Married to a Lebanese-Syrian man, Lana’s only chance for access to higher education was by way of her husband’s Lebanese status.
Lebanon, home to the largest number of refugees per capita in the world, including 1.5 million Syrian refugees (including those who are unregistered this figure is likely closer to 2 million) in addition to the nearly 500,000 Palestinian refugees, faces an acute humanitarian crisis, exacerbated by the country’s economic collapse, political instability, and recent Israel-Hezbollah war that displaced more than a million people. Both the Syrian and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon face systemic restrictions on employment, education, movement, and property ownership, trapping many in cyclical dependency and vulnerability. In addition, Lebanon’s crumbled state of affairs have for long harbored ground for systematic discrimination against the refugee population.
“With the recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon, the same trauma I experienced in Syria came back,” explained Lana, adding how hard she tried to work on her own trauma while being strong for her children and elderly parents.
Lana recalls leaving her studies at Damascus University in 2013 after threats of detention by the Assad regime’s Internal Security Forces. She, as well as other classmates and friends, were targeted for sharing anti-regime posts on Facebook—a charge so simple, yet detrimental for Syrians under Assad’s ferocious police state.
“So many of my friends and classmates were arrested—with some still missing. I have friends in Sednaya prison, including one who disappeared right after our last meeting.” Lana’s voice trembled as she talked about her friend, a journalism student who just two days after his initial release from detention was arrested again by the security forces and taken to what many are calling “Assad’s slaughterhouse.” “He told me he’s going to his mother’s house, but on his way home, they took him. I was the last person to see him since.”
Charged with an exuberant joy since Assad’s fall last Sunday, Lana is counting the days until she can return home. “I want to leave tomorrow if I can, but I know we need some planning.” She explained as she underscored the enormous travails her family undertook to pay insiders in Syria in an effort to remove her name from the regime’s “security list.”
“I wasn’t successful. I’m still on that list,” said Lana. However, in the past few years, her now 6-year-old son Mohammad-Ali has visited the ruins of his mother’s home during his few visits to Zabadani with his father.
“I always wanted him to see my hometown, where I came from. Then the morning of Assad’s fall, when Mohammad-Ali found out that I can now go back, he turned to me and said, Mama let’s go home—let’s go.”
High on the promise of a new dawn for Syria, Lana shared her trust for HTS. “Assad did brutal things to his fellow Syrians; anyone other than Assad is better. I hope all Syrians would live in peace, and I think the free army will protect people. From my heart, I hope this. I believe this.”
Miles away in Killis, Turkey, 32-year-old Baraa’s joy mirrors that of Lana’s. “I am Palestinian, but I was born in Syria, so if Palestine is the heart, Syria will be the soul,” said Baraa, taking joy in Syria’s presumed liberation post-Assad while grieving the fate of Palestine.
“Assad’s fall means that I may have the hope of seeing my family again in Syria or maybe visiting my dad’s grave. It means that for the first time, my children will know the meaning of grandfather or grandmother. It means that maybe, just maybe, I can return to Damascus, to Yarmouk, to my memories.” Though for this once computer engineering student the pain remains multifold.
Baraa is one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who was born and raised in one of the most crowded refugee camps in the world, Yarmouk, a densely built, so-called safe space for Palestinians that in 2015 was regarded as “the worst place on earth.” Yarmouk evolved into a besieged battleground between opposition groups, extremist militants such as Al-Nusra and later ISIS, and Assad’s forces that subjugated the camp to extreme deprivation and unimaginable violence. To this day, Baraa explains how she can’t escape the horrors of life in Yarmouk, especially from 2014 until she left for Turkey in 2016.
Since the eruption of conflict in Syria, Turkey has hosted nearly 3.2 million Syrian refugees of whom nearly 70% live below the poverty line with limited access to formal employment. According to United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), access to education remains a concern, with nearly 40% of school-aged refugee children out of school due to “language barriers, financial constraints, and early marriage.”
Baraa, while grateful for the security and stability of life outside of a war zone, cannot escape the perpetual pain of discrimination and abandonment. “People—whether here in Turkey or anywhere else—have always had a limited view of Syrian or Palestinian refugees and that hurts. That is wrong.”
With only their Palestinian ID cards, the future remains ambiguous for Baraa and her young family. Yet one thing is certain: she will not give up “hope.”
“I have so much hope for Syria. For going back and rebuilding it with my children. I want unity for all Syrians. That’s the only thing that’s going to rebuild this country. But I’m also telling my kids that we have a promise from God—that one day, Palestine too will be free—one day we’ll go back home.”
In a suburb of Damascus that endured one of the “deadliest massacres” of the entire civil war, 28-year-old Farah recalls how she and her entire family stayed in the bathroom of their home for 21 days in order to shelter from heavy bombings and shelling. “I’d never forget when the Assad forces put their weapons in the faces of my father and brother. I saw my mother kissing their hands so that they would spare them, knowing that we have no support other than them.” She recalled the days that followed: “we then stayed in the bathroom for weeks going through extreme cold, extreme hunger, and extreme fear of them harming me and my brothers.”
Farah is now a housewife but has a degree in financial and banking sciences. She lives with her two daughters and unemployed husband in Adra, which was one of the six areas hit by Assad’s deadly and illegal chemical arsenal in 2013.
“I feel free—absolutely free,” said Farah, while emphasizing on the severe “oppression of life” in the previous regime. “We were not able to even speak or express our opinion due to fear of the lion. Even if you mentioned his name you were threatened to be imprisoned or disappeared.”
Farah added how she trusts HTS and their promise of change for Syria. “Since they came, they didn’t interfere in our lives. They didn’t take our freedom. They’re making us feel that we are one people and one nation, here to rebuild this country.”
Underneath her jubilant smile, Farah suffers from partial blindness. A severe inflammation damaged her cornea that required a replacement—an impossible operation at a time when most Syrians lived under severe humanitarian, financial, and medical crises.
“I may not see with my eye, but I see with my heart,” said Farah, who while hopeful about the future of her country, has taken to heart the many years that they seemed “forgotten by the world.”
“Now is our time. We will rebuild, and we need the world next to us—this time it has to be real support.”
were two essential needs for 32-year-old Judy during her 8-year-long marriage to her now ex-husband, a soldier in the Assad army during the war. “It was a nightmare. My feelings are impossible to express.” Battered by years of trauma, violence, and the devastating economic impact of the war, Judy works in a small room in her humble apartment in Latakia designing and sewing handicrafts to make ends meet for her three young children.
“My husband changed over the years, and when I left, he threatened to hurt me in every way imaginable.” Judy’s husband accused her of “insulting the president,” a ‘crime’ for which she could have been imprisoned or even disappeared. “I could have easily ended up in Sednaya prison. Over the years, I was arrested and released so many times, but I don’t know why. Maybe it was the mercy of God that led them to finally let me go for good.”
Praising HTS, Judy says how the group deserves the Syrian people’s “appreciation, respect, and the opportunity to showcase what they can deliver next.”
“I feel the joy of victory over surviving a lifetime of oppression under the shadow of Assad’s repression, hunger, humiliation and slander,” said added.
Survival is a loaded word for 66-year-old Manal, who has been the sole caregiver for her younger sister battling breast cancer since 2016. “The situation was very difficult. We went through various phases in this civil war. From the blockade, deprivation of water, food, electricity, rationing, internet outages, power outages, and lack of heating in winter—we saw it all,” said the retired engineer and mother of one. She explained how the catastrophic shortage of medicine, lack of medical infrastructure, and healthcare providers affected the lives of ordinary citizens, including her sister who continues receiving treatment for breast cancer.
“The day after Assad’s departure, when I stepped out into the streets for the first time, I cried tears of joy—as if I was living a dream. I stared at his torn pictures and to this moment am still in a state of shock and disbelief,” said Manal. Her sister was due for her routine injection at the hospital just three days after HTS’s takeover of Damascus. Wary and anxious that there would most likely be no one at the hospital, Manal received a sudden call. “Come to the hospital; we have her medicine,” which can cost patients up to $2000 per shot in the black market.
As seen in many other parts of the world, including Iran, Western and international sanctions against Assad’s regime have only had adverse impact on the lives of ordinary civilians while creating a lucrative black market for regime insiders and criminals. “The world worked to impoverish the Syrians, and the policy of boycotting the country had the opposite effect. The president and his gang were the biggest beneficiaries of it,” she added.
A secular, educated, and well-traveled woman, Manal is suspect of the new militants in charge whilst elated by Assad’s departure.
“They ruled the city of Idlib with a religiously strict grip, and I am not convinced that they will act differently now. I am very scared, and I can't comprehend this transformation, and I cannot trust the Islamists.”
More so, with her daughter in Lebanon, she is worried not only for Syria, but also the region at-large and Syria’s defenseless position against Israel. “Israel destroyed everything that could serve as a foundation for rebuilding a national army. We are now a country without national defense…in the grip of Israel.”
The views represented in this piece are those of the author and do not express the official position of the Wilson Center.
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