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Damascus Dispatch: Fear and Hope in a Divided Syria
The new masters of Sayida Zaynab, a famous Shia shrine in the countryside outside Damascus, strode with confidence across the nearly empty marble courtyard, ignoring audible grumbles from the few remaining pilgrims and staffers.
Abu Omar, the shrine’s new head of security, wears his beard long and ragged, in a style often associated with purist Sunnis. He was a fighter from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and a founding member of the new regime’s intelligence service, which is replacing the plethora of competing secret police agencies that ran Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and made it into one of the world’s most predatory and violent regimes.
The shrine, on the outskirts of Damascus, holds a special place of veneration for Shia Muslims. Historically a site of pilgrimage and refuge for the displaced, during Syria’s civil war it became something else: a staging ground for Shia militias that fought for Assad, and a symbol of the regime’s most sectarian elements.
Today, the shrine is a sign of a new order, characterized as much by hope as by fear. Before the fall of the regime, the shrine received an average of 5,000 pilgrims per day. The day we visited, there were fewer than one hundred.
In February, only a few dozen visitors could be seen at the Sayida Zaynab Shrine, which usually draws 5,000 or more pilgrims daily. Source: Thanassis Cambanis
New Masters
The hope is embodied by Abu Omar (a nom de guerre) and his small team of Sunni gunmen, who take pride in keeping the shrine and surrounding areas safe not only from attack by supporters of the deposed regime who might target the new government, but also from anyone who might want to harm members of the Shia minority who live near the shrine.
His manner was genial as he nodded at the Shia staff of the shrine, but he was focused. “Remnants of the regime are everywhere,” he said. “We are hunting them every day. We must not relax.”
The tensions in Sayida Zaynab represent, in a microcosm, the fissures that erupted into sectarian violence in Syria’s coastal villages in early March. Syria struggles with multiple fault lines: between the Sunni majority and the minorities that supported Assad; between revolutionaries and regime supporters; even between opponents of Assad who were displaced and those who managed to stay in their homes. The thirst for accountability can tilt into a quest for revenge.
In the shrine security office, Abu Omar rested on the floor by a space heater, his rifle across one knee. “We are men of faith, we are Syrian. It is our job to protect these people,” he said.
“We are men of faith, we are Syrian. It is our job to protect these people,” Abu Omar said.
He noted that his younger deputy, Abu Mariam, harbored no sectarian resentment even though Shia militiamen killed his nephew in Aleppo. “It’s our religious duty, and an order from the nation,” Abu Mariam said. “We are building a state. We cannot pursue revenge.”
But it’s revenge that supporters of the old regime fear, especially those from the minority communities most closely tied to Assad: Christians, Shia, and Alawites.
Anxious Old Guard
One of the shrine’s young professional Shia managers, Deeb Krayem, tried to strike an upbeat note about the new regime, whose revolutionary flag was prominently hung in the main public office of the shrine administration. “They used to have sectarian ideas,” he said of Syria’s new rulers. “But now they come with new slogans. Maybe half of them have changed their minds. Half have not.”
After a few minutes of conversation, however, he confided his fears. On a recent day on his commute home, his car was struck by two other vehicles. No one was hurt, but he was convinced it was a warning. “I am sure I was targeted,” he said. “We are living between two eras. We live in fear of the masked men.”
In the graveyard by the shrine, four Shia women mourned their relatives—Syrians who died fighting for the former regime under the banner of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
“We have no future here, but we have nowhere else to go,” said one of the mourners, whose son, Zain Abideen Hussein al-Ajami, died fighting in Idlib in 2015. No one had bothered them in their neighborhoods since the Assad regime fell, they said, but they had removed all the Hezbollah bunting and martyr posters from their homes.
Zain’s mother, the eldest of the four women, said that the Assad regime and Hezbollah had nothing to atone for, and had only fought for their rights. She still referred to the now-victorious Sunnis running Syria as “sectarian terrorists.”
“Our sons, who killed them?” she said. “The other side. Let us all live in peace now. I’m all for accountability, but only if it’s for their side as well as ours.”
Several Alawites I met in Damascus were afraid to have their names published. Several said they trusted their neighbors and colleagues to treat them fairly, but feared sectarian reprisals from Sunni Islamists who did not personally know them. One senior civil servant, whose views were representative of many Alawites I met, said she had no regrets about supporting Assad, because in her view Assad protected minorities. She denied the Assad regime’s incontrovertible record of mass murder and sectarianism, and still embraced Assad’s sectarian rhetoric. “The new government, they’re terrorists,” she said. “Scratch them, and beneath the polite surface you’ll find a jihadi.”
A few weeks after we met in person in Damascus, this same civil servant flooded our text chat with videos of sectarian violence against Alawites in coastal villages. “I told you not to trust them,” she wrote.
Deputy Brigade Commander Abu Hashem Abdelrahman Taha at his temporary headquarters in Douma. Source: Thanassis Cambanis
Return to Douma
Tensions run across different lines in the suburb of Douma, east of Damascus—a conservative, almost entirely Sunni agricultural area that doubled as a capital of the anti-Assad resistance from 2013 to 2018. In Douma, returning revolutionaries mistrust their neighbors who stayed behind under Assad’s control.
At its pre-civil-war peak, an estimated 700,000 people lived in Douma. Assad’s forces subjected Douma to a siege and withering assault until only 150,000 people or fewer remained in the city. Half or more of the housing stock was destroyed. People starved, until rebels signed a surrender agreement in 2018. Fighters were ignominiously sent in green buses to rebel enclaves in the north. Some of their supporters fled with them, but others stayed behind in their shattered community.
The new masters of liberated Douma are a group of rebels who originally fought in Douma as the Jaysh al-Umma, or Army of the Muslim Nation—a relatively weak, nationalist faction that lost out to more-Islamist groups. The faction fled in 2018 and regrouped under a new banner, ultimately joining with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in time for this winter’s march on Damascus. The brigade’s second in command, Abu Hashem Abdelrahman Taha, toured us around his hometown. The Assad regime’s municipal officials had fled, but “the sons of Douma” were back in charge and trying to manage the steady flow of returnees: maybe 350,000 or even 400,000 people were living in Douma now, creating traffic jams in the city center and steady business at new kebab and vegetable shops.
“I’m optimistic,” he declared as we drove through town. “Everyone knows his role: the soldier at the base, the policeman at the station, the civil servant at the ministry.”
His to-do list, however, suggested the many worries that could yet unravel the Syrian transition. Taha’s soldiers, like most public employees, haven’t received their salaries in months. In Douma, troops are rounding up common criminals released by the Assad regime in its final days from the sprawling Adra Prison Complex, while also hunting for “remnants” of the former regime who might attack. Returnees need housing, and are filing claims to regain confiscated properties. Taha and his brother are trying to persuade local men to sign up for the new military, in which members of the Sunni majority will no longer be second-tier cannon fodder. “The army, in the past, was a sectarian army, an Alawite army. But no longer,” he said. Without seeming to notice the contradiction he added: “Maybe the decision will be, no more Alawites in the army and police.”
Imad Abdulrazak Khabie, 46, on the floor of his temporary home in Ghouta, near Damascus, with his youngest child, and friend in the rebel militia. Source: Thanassis Cambanis
Distrust in a Resistance Capital
Taha had left his own wife and children in the north, where electricity runs twenty-four hours a day and housing is plentiful, comfortable, and affordable. In half-destroyed Douma, rents have skyrocketed because of the shortage. Still, thousands have returned with their children—locals like Imad Abdulrazak Khabie, 46, who could barely make ends meet as a day laborer on construction sites in the north and said he prefers to be poor back home in Douma, near his mother, rather than staying in Afrin, which still felt like a strange place even after many years.
Khabie is glad to be back, in a temporary, rent-free home secured for him by his friends in the militia. But he’s shocked by the degraded living conditions in Douma. “We were surprised by the bad condition of the infrastructure, the roads. Everything is worse than we expected,” he said. “There aren’t enough houses, and we have no money to build.”
“People who went abroad are tired of sending money to their families after fourteen years of war,” Khabie said. “Everyone here is so poor.”
He has confidence, though, in part because of his connections—he’s trusted by the new regime because he was with them for seven long years of exile in the north. That confidence isn’t shared by friends and neighbors who supported the revolution but stayed behind after the rebel defeat in 2018. Those locals are now considered suspect; maybe they too are felool, or remnants, which in Syrian slang now refers to anyone who still supports Assad, even if they have no real connection to the regime.
The director at a local elementary school, a Sunni who lived in Douma throughout the war, has accommodated returnees even as some classes have doubled in size to fifty students. She asked not to be quoted by name because she fears retribution from suspicious returnees.
Under the Assad regime, intelligence officers would visit the school and subject her and her teachers to humiliating interrogations: “They would ask us, ‘Why are your relatives with the rebels? Why is there dust on the portrait of the president?’”
Now, she said, she faces similar questions from the returning families. “‘Why did you stay?’ they ask me. They assume I am pro-Assad, that I am a sympathizer.”
The problems in Douma, like everywhere in Syria, are legion, ranging from the most prosaic, like where to live and how to pay for food, to the most strategic, like how Syrians who fought a bitter and heavily sectarian civil war for fourteen years can now coexist.
There are convincing reasons to worry—all the more so after the sectarian violence against Alawites on the coast in early March. But the residents of Douma serve as a reminder that despite the obstacles, and the many divisions within Syria, the end of the Assad regime is more than a moral triumph. It has removed by far the deadliest threat to Syrian lives and livelihoods, a regime whose motto, “Assad or we burn the country,” motivated a scorched-earth campaign that killed hundreds of thousands, displaced more than half the country, and threw Syrians by the thousands—without charge or due process—to die in a sprawling gulag.
“I am not afraid,” the commander, Taha, said. “The remnants of the old regime, they will not dare say ‘poof.’ We will build a state, and people will get their rights.”
Header Image: The grave of Zain Abideen Hussein Al Ajami, a Syrian fighter for Hezbollah who died in 2015, at the Shia cemetery beside the Sayida Zaynab Shrine outside Damascus. Source: Thanassis Cambanis
Thanassis Cambanis is an author, journalist, and director of Century International. His work focuses on U.S. foreign policy, Arab politics, and social movements in the Middle East.
Damascus Dispatch: Fear and Hope in a Divided Syria
The new masters of Sayida Zaynab, a famous Shia shrine in the countryside outside Damascus, strode with confidence across the nearly empty marble courtyard, ignoring audible grumbles from the few remaining pilgrims and staffers.
Abu Omar, the shrine’s new head of security, wears his beard long and ragged, in a style often associated with purist Sunnis. He was a fighter from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and a founding member of the new regime’s intelligence service, which is replacing the plethora of competing secret police agencies that ran Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and made it into one of the world’s most predatory and violent regimes.
The shrine, on the outskirts of Damascus, holds a special place of veneration for Shia Muslims. Historically a site of pilgrimage and refuge for the displaced, during Syria’s civil war it became something else: a staging ground for Shia militias that fought for Assad, and a symbol of the regime’s most sectarian elements.
Today, the shrine is a sign of a new order, characterized as much by hope as by fear. Before the fall of the regime, the shrine received an average of 5,000 pilgrims per day. The day we visited, there were fewer than one hundred.
New Masters
The hope is embodied by Abu Omar (a nom de guerre) and his small team of Sunni gunmen, who take pride in keeping the shrine and surrounding areas safe not only from attack by supporters of the deposed regime who might target the new government, but also from anyone who might want to harm members of the Shia minority who live near the shrine.
His manner was genial as he nodded at the Shia staff of the shrine, but he was focused. “Remnants of the regime are everywhere,” he said. “We are hunting them every day. We must not relax.”
The tensions in Sayida Zaynab represent, in a microcosm, the fissures that erupted into sectarian violence in Syria’s coastal villages in early March. Syria struggles with multiple fault lines: between the Sunni majority and the minorities that supported Assad; between revolutionaries and regime supporters; even between opponents of Assad who were displaced and those who managed to stay in their homes. The thirst for accountability can tilt into a quest for revenge.
In the shrine security office, Abu Omar rested on the floor by a space heater, his rifle across one knee. “We are men of faith, we are Syrian. It is our job to protect these people,” he said.
He noted that his younger deputy, Abu Mariam, harbored no sectarian resentment even though Shia militiamen killed his nephew in Aleppo. “It’s our religious duty, and an order from the nation,” Abu Mariam said. “We are building a state. We cannot pursue revenge.”
But it’s revenge that supporters of the old regime fear, especially those from the minority communities most closely tied to Assad: Christians, Shia, and Alawites.
Anxious Old Guard
One of the shrine’s young professional Shia managers, Deeb Krayem, tried to strike an upbeat note about the new regime, whose revolutionary flag was prominently hung in the main public office of the shrine administration. “They used to have sectarian ideas,” he said of Syria’s new rulers. “But now they come with new slogans. Maybe half of them have changed their minds. Half have not.”
After a few minutes of conversation, however, he confided his fears. On a recent day on his commute home, his car was struck by two other vehicles. No one was hurt, but he was convinced it was a warning. “I am sure I was targeted,” he said. “We are living between two eras. We live in fear of the masked men.”
In the graveyard by the shrine, four Shia women mourned their relatives—Syrians who died fighting for the former regime under the banner of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
“We have no future here, but we have nowhere else to go,” said one of the mourners, whose son, Zain Abideen Hussein al-Ajami, died fighting in Idlib in 2015. No one had bothered them in their neighborhoods since the Assad regime fell, they said, but they had removed all the Hezbollah bunting and martyr posters from their homes.
Zain’s mother, the eldest of the four women, said that the Assad regime and Hezbollah had nothing to atone for, and had only fought for their rights. She still referred to the now-victorious Sunnis running Syria as “sectarian terrorists.”
“Our sons, who killed them?” she said. “The other side. Let us all live in peace now. I’m all for accountability, but only if it’s for their side as well as ours.”
Several Alawites I met in Damascus were afraid to have their names published. Several said they trusted their neighbors and colleagues to treat them fairly, but feared sectarian reprisals from Sunni Islamists who did not personally know them. One senior civil servant, whose views were representative of many Alawites I met, said she had no regrets about supporting Assad, because in her view Assad protected minorities. She denied the Assad regime’s incontrovertible record of mass murder and sectarianism, and still embraced Assad’s sectarian rhetoric. “The new government, they’re terrorists,” she said. “Scratch them, and beneath the polite surface you’ll find a jihadi.”
A few weeks after we met in person in Damascus, this same civil servant flooded our text chat with videos of sectarian violence against Alawites in coastal villages. “I told you not to trust them,” she wrote.
Return to Douma
Tensions run across different lines in the suburb of Douma, east of Damascus—a conservative, almost entirely Sunni agricultural area that doubled as a capital of the anti-Assad resistance from 2013 to 2018. In Douma, returning revolutionaries mistrust their neighbors who stayed behind under Assad’s control.
At its pre-civil-war peak, an estimated 700,000 people lived in Douma. Assad’s forces subjected Douma to a siege and withering assault until only 150,000 people or fewer remained in the city. Half or more of the housing stock was destroyed. People starved, until rebels signed a surrender agreement in 2018. Fighters were ignominiously sent in green buses to rebel enclaves in the north. Some of their supporters fled with them, but others stayed behind in their shattered community.
The new masters of liberated Douma are a group of rebels who originally fought in Douma as the Jaysh al-Umma, or Army of the Muslim Nation—a relatively weak, nationalist faction that lost out to more-Islamist groups. The faction fled in 2018 and regrouped under a new banner, ultimately joining with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in time for this winter’s march on Damascus. The brigade’s second in command, Abu Hashem Abdelrahman Taha, toured us around his hometown. The Assad regime’s municipal officials had fled, but “the sons of Douma” were back in charge and trying to manage the steady flow of returnees: maybe 350,000 or even 400,000 people were living in Douma now, creating traffic jams in the city center and steady business at new kebab and vegetable shops.
“I’m optimistic,” he declared as we drove through town. “Everyone knows his role: the soldier at the base, the policeman at the station, the civil servant at the ministry.”
His to-do list, however, suggested the many worries that could yet unravel the Syrian transition. Taha’s soldiers, like most public employees, haven’t received their salaries in months. In Douma, troops are rounding up common criminals released by the Assad regime in its final days from the sprawling Adra Prison Complex, while also hunting for “remnants” of the former regime who might attack. Returnees need housing, and are filing claims to regain confiscated properties. Taha and his brother are trying to persuade local men to sign up for the new military, in which members of the Sunni majority will no longer be second-tier cannon fodder. “The army, in the past, was a sectarian army, an Alawite army. But no longer,” he said. Without seeming to notice the contradiction he added: “Maybe the decision will be, no more Alawites in the army and police.”
Distrust in a Resistance Capital
Taha had left his own wife and children in the north, where electricity runs twenty-four hours a day and housing is plentiful, comfortable, and affordable. In half-destroyed Douma, rents have skyrocketed because of the shortage. Still, thousands have returned with their children—locals like Imad Abdulrazak Khabie, 46, who could barely make ends meet as a day laborer on construction sites in the north and said he prefers to be poor back home in Douma, near his mother, rather than staying in Afrin, which still felt like a strange place even after many years.
Khabie is glad to be back, in a temporary, rent-free home secured for him by his friends in the militia. But he’s shocked by the degraded living conditions in Douma. “We were surprised by the bad condition of the infrastructure, the roads. Everything is worse than we expected,” he said. “There aren’t enough houses, and we have no money to build.”
“People who went abroad are tired of sending money to their families after fourteen years of war,” Khabie said. “Everyone here is so poor.”
He has confidence, though, in part because of his connections—he’s trusted by the new regime because he was with them for seven long years of exile in the north. That confidence isn’t shared by friends and neighbors who supported the revolution but stayed behind after the rebel defeat in 2018. Those locals are now considered suspect; maybe they too are felool, or remnants, which in Syrian slang now refers to anyone who still supports Assad, even if they have no real connection to the regime.
The director at a local elementary school, a Sunni who lived in Douma throughout the war, has accommodated returnees even as some classes have doubled in size to fifty students. She asked not to be quoted by name because she fears retribution from suspicious returnees.
Under the Assad regime, intelligence officers would visit the school and subject her and her teachers to humiliating interrogations: “They would ask us, ‘Why are your relatives with the rebels? Why is there dust on the portrait of the president?’”
Now, she said, she faces similar questions from the returning families. “‘Why did you stay?’ they ask me. They assume I am pro-Assad, that I am a sympathizer.”
The problems in Douma, like everywhere in Syria, are legion, ranging from the most prosaic, like where to live and how to pay for food, to the most strategic, like how Syrians who fought a bitter and heavily sectarian civil war for fourteen years can now coexist.
There are convincing reasons to worry—all the more so after the sectarian violence against Alawites on the coast in early March. But the residents of Douma serve as a reminder that despite the obstacles, and the many divisions within Syria, the end of the Assad regime is more than a moral triumph. It has removed by far the deadliest threat to Syrian lives and livelihoods, a regime whose motto, “Assad or we burn the country,” motivated a scorched-earth campaign that killed hundreds of thousands, displaced more than half the country, and threw Syrians by the thousands—without charge or due process—to die in a sprawling gulag.
“I am not afraid,” the commander, Taha, said. “The remnants of the old regime, they will not dare say ‘poof.’ We will build a state, and people will get their rights.”
Header Image: The grave of Zain Abideen Hussein Al Ajami, a Syrian fighter for Hezbollah who died in 2015, at the Shia cemetery beside the Sayida Zaynab Shrine outside Damascus. Source: Thanassis Cambanis
Tags: syria, bashar al-assad