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Significant parts of the Middle East are now in deepening chaos. In some sense (including Great Britain's establishment with its Palestinian "mandate" of what became Israel), the Middle East was long one of the major European colonial regions on this planet, whether it was the British in the Persian Gulf, the French in Lebanon and Syria, or somewhat later the Soviet Union (and then Russia) in Iraq and Syria. And much of the region still seems to be in a state of ongoing disintegration in the wake of those colonial moments and the rise of Israel as a military power. Most recently, Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad fled his country for asylum in Moscow as his dictatorship collapsed (and perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that Israel promptly moved from the Golan Heights into a neighboring part of Syria and, at least for the time being, took possession of it).
It still remains to be seen what a post-Assad Syria will actually look like, given that 6.7 million Syrians have been internally displaced in these years, while food prices have reportedly surged 800%. At this moment, the country remains in disintegrative chaos and the new Sunni Arab regime there, led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the head of a former militant extremist group (that did, in the end, break with ISIS and al-Qaeda), has been trying to bring it together. Still, the collapse of a dictatorship is always a moment of hope and, with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Helen Benedict, author of Map of Hope and Sorrow: Stories of Refugees Trapped in Greece, take you into the world of Syrian exiles and refugees scattered, among other places, across Europe, at a moment when everything is changing in a Middle East in ever greater chaos. Tom
"The Lion Has Fallen!"
The End of Syria's Brutal Regime Brings Joy and Uncertainty to Refugees
Six years ago, at the time of the first Trump administration's Muslim ban and its initial round of vicious anti-immigrant policies, I visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos to see how Europe was handling its own immigrants and refugees. Within a day, I met two Syrians, Eyad Awwadawnan and Hasan Majnan, who had fled Bashar al-Assad's brutal dictatorship only to end up in a filthy, overcrowded camp in a country that didn't want them with a future they could not foresee.
That was June 2018 and I've kept in touch with them both ever since. So, when Assad's regime fell on December 8, 2024, ending two generations of perhaps the most murderous dictatorship in the modern world, I contacted Eyad and Hasan to see how they felt.
"How am I feeling?" Hasan said over WhatsApp that day. "I'm flying in the sky! I have been watching the news for the last 24 hours. I'm feeling proud. I was on the right side of history. Finally, we won! The lion has fallen!"
In Arabic, Assad means "lion," although that wasn't his real name. Hafez, Bashar's father, had adopted it to look strong.
Hasan was born in the northeastern Syrian city of Manbij, 18 years before the 2011 revolution and civil war that left some 580,000 civilians dead and displaced at least 13 million more.
Because Manbij sits in a strategic position near the border with Turkey, as soon as the first signs of revolution stirred in its streets, it became a battleground between multiple forces. First, it was under the control of Assad, whose military occupied the city until 2012. Then it fell to the revolutionary Free Syrian Army, which held it until 2014. Next, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seized and controlled it until 2016, only to lose it to the Syrian Democratic Forces, who, in turn, lost it again to the Syrian Army (then backed by Russia). Recently, Manbij has fallen under the control of Kurdish militias and their allies. And that is only a rough summary of the city's grim and complex history.
For Hasan, growing up in such a political football of a place affected every aspect of his life. Yet many of his memories of Syria before the civil war are remarkably sweet. "In my school we had Christians and Muslims, we had Kurds and Arabs and Turkmen," he told me. "We were friends, in the same class with the same teacher. I want Syria to be like that again. I don't want different religions, with each of us hating one another because we've lost a brother or a friend. I don't want any of that to come between us. And I don't want ISIS to prevail either. I want us to live like before, or even better. To live in peace and build Syria together, be happy and help each other."
In 2013, Hasan and his identical twin, Hussein, joined the Free Syrian Army to fight Bashar, as they liked to call him, and free Syria from his grip. Hasan was then captured by ISIS, who hung him from a ceiling and whipped him in public. After three weeks of such treatment, they let him go as long as he agreed to beg their forgiveness, attend Sharia lessons for 15 days, and then join them as a fighter. They took his ID and told him that, if he refused, they would arrest him or a member of his family. Appalled by their cruelty and narrow ideology, Hasan decided to flee to Turkey and, with his mother's blessing, he did.
Shortly after that, his brother was killed in a battle with ISIS. They were both only 21 at the time and, even today, Hasan hasn't fully recovered from his twin's death. He showed me a photograph of Hussein in his coffin. It was like looking at Hasan himself.
After living hand to mouth in Turkey for a few years, Hasan caught a flimsy, overladen rubber dinghy to Greece, ending up in the Samos camp where we met.
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