Sleepless nights and lack of appetite, Syrian UvA students fear for their home country
The fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria brought brief joy, but the days that followed have been filled with fear for these Syrian UvA students and their families. “Some countries will do everything they can to portray the rebel group as angels, but nothing could be further from the truth. No one is truly liberated.”
When Omar returned to Aleppo in 2011 after completing his bachelor’s degree in a neighboring country, he and his wife quickly realised that something was wrong. Their house was cut off from electricity and a lack of cooking gas was apparent. Aleppo turned into a ghost town. Millions of people lived in tiny spaces, and the lack of (street) lighting created extremely unsafe situations. This marked the beginning of the Syrian Revolution in Aleppo, sparked by the Arab Spring, with mass protests and uprisings led by various opposition groups against dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was overthrown last week by the rebel group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).
The Arab Spring refers to a series of mass protests, uprisings, and revolutions in various Arab countries that began at the end of 2010 and continued into 2011 and beyond. These movements emerged from dissatisfaction with political corruption, oppression, economic inequality, unemployment, and the lack of democratic freedoms.
These developments ushered in the Syrian Revolution. Syria became a battleground of police and military violence, mass arrests, and brutal actions by the Assad regime, leading to a civil war with hundreds of thousands dead and tens of thousands wounded.
During the Syrian Revolution, several terrorist groups emerged, including the Islamic State (IS), which created a “caliphate” through extreme violence and global attacks, and Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group with jihadist ambitions, from which HTS descends.
Since summer 2012, street battles slowly became the everyday reality in Aleppo. But due to signals like bad security, shortage of cooking gas, electricity, fuel, and kidnapping of children, Omar and his wife fled earlier in 2012 to a border village in Turkey and later to the Netherlands. “The neighbourhood we lived in has been largely bombed. I have no idea if our house still exists. My entire family is displaced. Both my parents passed away, fortunately from natural causes. They didn’t live to see the fall of the Assad regime.”
Omar is studying for a master’s in Leadership and Management at the UvA’s Business School. He also works remotely for a company in Syria that invests in infrastructure in areas where the Assad regime had no influence. When he heard about the fall of Assad, Omar was briefly overjoyed. “Assad has killed a million people, millions have fled, and now fifty years of dictatorship are over. My Kurdish community sees this as a small redemption.” Omar was greatly surprised when the Syrian army withdrew last week and Assad fell. “Even Russia, Assad’s ally, did not intervene. They didn’t even try. I still remember how the Russians did nothing when people rose up in a Kurdish enclave north of Aleppo, where many of my family and friends lived. I’ve never seen anything like this in the last ten years. There was barely any fighting for this ‘liberation’; it seems more like a surrender and an agreement between the rebels and Assad. But that’s just speculation. Now a time of immense uncertainty begins. There are many opposition groups, but somehow someone connected to Al Qaeda has been chosen to take control of Syria. I’m not at all reassured by this.”
Omar hasn’t slept for days, eats little, and can’t focus. The same is true for Yusuf, a student at the Faculty of Humanities. In 2017 he left the western port city of Latakia, where Israel recently bombed a Syrian fleet. He and his family are part of an ethnic minority. “Many minorities have been kept down for decades; we’re not allowed to say anything, criticize anything, we have to ask for permission for everything. And at the slightest disobedience, brute force is used. Everyone I know grew up under oppression.” During the civil war, Yusuf was busy with metal music and made articles and documentaries about it. “Because of that hobby, I was once associated with devil worship and satanism. That made it dangerous, and I had to flee. Under the Assad regime, there’s a saying: your sins are ten times worse under his regime. Kurds, Alawites, Christians, Druze, or any other ethnic group—no one was free. The fall of Assad changes nothing.”
Yusuf is not reassured by the interim government recently elected by the HTS rebel group following Assad’s fall in the political capital, Damascus. “All we see in the media are people in Syria celebrating the fall of the Assad regime and being happy. The Syrian population is so emotional that they can’t really see what’s happening now. Mohammed al-Jolani, the leader of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) rebel group, appears moderate with a trimmed beard and a Westernised look. But in my eyes, he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s been strongly connected to Al Qaeda in the past, says he has distanced himself and become moderate, but meanwhile, he has people identify themselves based on their religion at checkpoints, and his form of persecution isn’t legal process but a bullet to the head. I don’t understand the optimism. We’ve replaced dictator Bashar al-Assad with Al Qaeda. A criminal for a criminal. When the news broke, my almost seventy-year-old father ran to the kitchen and threw every bottle of alcohol away. He was terrified because these people would execute you on the spot for having alcohol in your house. Also, do you think I can go back to Syria and say whatever I want about Jolani? Because that’s what freedom is. Furthermore, all prisoners have been released, including war criminals. Of course, I’m very happy for most of the prisoners, and that’s a good reason to be happy. But at the same time, there’s still a huge dark cloud over Syria.”
Omar is also at his wit’s end. “Right now, there should be a transitional government, right? Jolani brought the same group from Idlib, a Salafist counter-government during Assad’s time, with the same ideology as Al-Qaeda to the table. They want to follow the Quran literally. And if you do that, it calls for the killing of unbelievers. Christians are called unbelievers, Jews are unbelievers. The Alawites, some call them Muslims, but essentially, they’re called unbelievers. The Kurds, we’re Muslims, and most of us are Sunni Muslims, but even we’re called unbelievers because we don’t follow their version of Islam. They want to impose this model, which was already problematic in a small part of one province in Syria, Idlib. I’m very afraid they’ll try to impose their ideology on all of Syria, a country with many different Christian sects, Druze, Kurds, and Alawites. Syria is naturally a very diverse country, and no group should have the power to control everyone and force them to live life their way. The Syrian people have been following the news about Jolani instead, with them there is no hope for a united Syria. Of course, Some countries will try to present them as angels, or anyone else who tries to bring this group to power. But that doesn’t change the facts. These people are bad, and they’ll stay that way. The situation in Syria is determined by powerful countries like Iran, Turkey, the US, and Russia. If they want chaos, Syria will remain in chaos. The regime has spent fifty years trying to divide the people, creating hate between ethnic groups. Only a few are striving for a united Syria. That’s where I place my hope.”
For the safety of the Syrian UvA students, the names in the piece are fictional. The real names are known to the editorial team.
