Before Midnight in New York: The Night My Syria Returned
By Ola Rifai
12/8/2024
At this time last year, Syrians at home and abroad were glued to their screens, closely following the rapid developments on the ground. Hardly anyone slept that night.
Videos of rebel troops marching from Aleppo through Hama and Homs toward Damascus looked surreal, like scenes from a movie.
The fighters were unknown to ordinary Syrians who had not been following every twist of the thirteen-year conflict. They were shocked to see, in the span of ten days, young men in mismatched military gear walking toward the capital. Even those familiar with the militias and the geopolitical map were stunned.
I was one of them, watching from thousands of miles away.
I still remember the moment when Al Arabiya’s anchor announced that famous line:
“It is 6:18 a.m. Damascus time … Syria without Bashar al-Assad”. My eyes filled with tears.
It was just before midnight in New York, I watched the first sunlight touch Damascus on TV, and the camera showed Umayyad Square, and I could see part of my home, the building where I grew up—I haven’t seen it in years—it felt surreal. Broken statues of Assad, the gunfire of celebration, the prayers rising from mosques… a dream unfolding.
A dream coming true.
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I was in my mid-twenties when the revolution began—passionate, hopeful, and naïve enough to believe in the power of civil activism, grassroots movements and peaceful resistance in changing regimes.
We chanted:
“Syrian people are one” and “Death rather than [living with] humiliation”.
Shortly after, when violence escalated, I left Syria to Scotland to study the forces that set the country on fire, to understand how the revolution took the path it did, and why the Syrian people could not remain “one.”
For over a decade, I immersed myself in books, libraries, seminars, and conferences. I spent hours zooming in on the faces of Syrians fighting, protesting, surviving.
I tried to analyse the factors and actors reconstructing identities and reshaping destinies. Up in Scotland, we drafted countless scenarios for “the day after” Assad’s fall, imagining how geopolitics and the armed factions might shape that day.
Yet the day after—December 8th—looked brighter than any scenario we ever predicted.
It defied every theory.
A bloodless surrender. No revenge. No sectarian violence.
Even the chaos seemed controlled.
al-rahma “Mercy” and al-afuw “pardon ” were the mottos spoken by the rebels, many of them young men with masked faces, who revealed only their eyes—sometimes glistening with tears. It was too ideal to be true. Even beyond our wildest dreams.
Syrians were filmed dancing freely and randomly in the streets. Elderly women leaning on canes danced with trembling joy. Men, young and old, moved in surreal, tearful celebration.
Who could blame them? They deserve to dance for another fifty years.
Alas, violence that followed in March and July—against Alawites and Druze—was brutal, though sadly expected. It overshadowed the joy.
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On that night, December 8th, 2024, I called my friends whom we had stood together in the earliest protests in Damascus, Kafrsouseh, Midan and Daraya. And now are all scattered across continents. We were all waiting for one thing: to see Mohammed walk out of prison.
Mohammed Hakim was arrested in July 2013. Security forces dragged him from his home in front of his wife. He was in his early twenties, newly married, and full of life.
He always dressed neatly.
The last time we met was at a café in Damascus with a view of Mount Qasioun. He handed me the manifesto of a political party and asked me to review it. “But Mohammad, what is this? the Assad regime still in power?” I giggled.
He replied passionately:
“Because once the regime falls, we will need political parties. Not all Syrians will agree with us. We must learn how to disagree so no one fears exclusion or marginalisation. I want to have it ready. I want to be fair.”
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For decades, Syria was known as the “kingdom of fear” and the “kingdom of silence.”
Silence was first broken when middle-schoolers in Daraa wrote the famous anti-Assad graffiti on their school wall, words that took down the walls of that kingdom forever.
Those who protested on March 15th 2011 challenged the kingdom of fear. They challenged their own fear, and they kept challenging it despite every atrocity that followed.
But many Syrians still live in fear today.
Fear of execution, retaliation, and exclusion.
The kingdom of fear will not collapse until no Syrian is afraid.
Democracy, accountability, and justice are the only guarantees.
As Mohammed once said:
“We need to be fair to erase fear.”
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The night of December 8th, 2024, will forever remain the best date of my life, the indescribable moment when a dream became reality, when Syria returned to me.
But Mohammed, along with more than 100.000 other Syrians, is not here to celebrate it. Their names were found in government records as “political prisoners,” yet they have vanished. No one knows whether they are alive or dead—whether they endured torture or their end came quickly. Their families continue searching for any remains to bury. A grave to water and weep over may be the greatest hope they have left today.
Our dream has come at an unbearable cost. And yet if we are to prevent this tragedy from happening again, we must continue the fight for justice, and the road toward building a democratic, civil state that values every Syrian.
Syrian people are one can be a reality, not a motto. For the memory of Mohammed and the nearly one million Syrians who lost their life living in the kingdom of fear. Let the wall of it collapse and let fairness prevail.
*Picture by Ola Rifai. Taken during an anti-Assad protest in Kafrsouseh, Damascus. 4/30/2013