Assad is gone. However can Syrians go dwelling? : NPR

GAZIANTEP, Turkey — After greater than a decade in exile, Syrians all over the world are asking themselves a as soon as unthinkable query: Is it lastly time to go dwelling?

When the civil warfare broke out in 2011, tens of millions fled Syria. No nation took in additional refugees than neighboring Turkey, which opened its doorways to just about 3 million Syrians, based on the U.N. refugee company.

However that welcome has in some circumstances worn skinny. Lately, many Syrians say they’ve felt more and more solid out of Turkish society — blamed for the nation’s financial troubles and handled as scapegoats in political discourse.

Nonetheless, many stayed. Some wished to stay near dwelling. Others believed their exile can be quick.

Just a few weeks of ready grew to become months. Then years. At a sure level, the concept of returning started to really feel unattainable.

That modified in December 2024, when President Bashar al-Assad fell from energy: After 24 years, his regime collapsed in a matter of days. The door to a brand new period creaked open.

Now, with a transitional authorities in place, hope is stirring — however so is concern. Greater than half 1,000,000 Syrians have returned, based on the U.N. refugee company. However going again requires a leap of religion.

Sectarian violence has flared in latest months. Sanctions are beginning to raise, reconnecting Syria with the worldwide economic system, however roads, railways and houses stay in ruins. Years of battle have decimated fundamental companies. Electrical energy and water are nonetheless unreliable in lots of areas. And doubts persist about Syria’s interim chief, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was as soon as linked to al-Qaida.

So how are Syrians weighing the dangers of return? Can dwelling ever actually be dwelling once more after such devastation — after family and friends have been tortured or killed, after childhood properties had been looted or destroyed?

NPR spoke with 4 Syrians and their households in southern Turkey, every standing at a crossroads.

After leaving one life behind, are they ready to do it yet again?

Adham Aljamous, 32. “Your desires are simply desires.”

An economics scholar, 32-year-old Adham Aljamous speaks extra like a poet.

“Even the stuff you hate,” he says, “when you’re compelled to go away your own home — you begin to love and miss.”

From the rooftop he shares along with his mother and father in Gaziantep, a metropolis in southeastern Turkey close to the Syrian border, Aljamous leafs by a plastic bag of outdated household pictures — one of many few issues his household carried after they fled Syria in 2014.

The photographs seize golden afternoons and household gatherings overflowing with meals — the form of recollections, he says, that solely grew sweeter in exile.

The household got here to Turkey after his older brother Tamam, who ran a humanitarian group in Syria’s capital of Damascus, was focused by the Assad regime. The household thought they’d be gone for just a few weeks. That was 11 years in the past.

Aljamous nonetheless has one other 12 months of college earlier than ending his grasp’s at a college in Gaziantep.

However he says the query he as soon as requested — will I ever return? — has shifted. Now it is how, and at what price?

“When the circumstances are appropriate,” he says, “there will likely be a return to homeland. Inshallah,” God prepared.

However appropriate is a excessive bar. Cities are shattered. Infrastructure is unreliable. And whereas the USA and Europe are lifting most sanctions on Syria, the economic system is a catastrophe.

It is nonetheless unclear what sort of chief Sharaa will form as much as be within the coming months, and years.

None of that deters Aljamous.

“When the regime was in management,” he says of the previous authoritarian Assad authorities, “I’d have adopted the satan if it meant overthrowing them. They had been worse than the satan.”

He is prepared to offer Sharaa an opportunity.

However when requested about specifics, he admits he does not have any set plans but for his return.

He appears down at his toes, and quietly reveals his largest concern — going again to a rustic he barely acknowledges.

“Typically, I simply sit and attempt to suppose who’s left [in Syria] — actually nobody from my buddies. I do not know anybody there. So if I’m going again, I feel it is going to be an enormous drawback for me,” he says.

“Your desires are simply desires.”

Bushra and Hasan. Surviving the revolution, however dwelling with ghosts 

In a distinct nook of Gaziantep, a pair is navigating related questions, with recollections formed by warfare, and a relationship solid within the battle in opposition to it.

Bushra Ajaj and Hasan Ajam, each 35, met within the early days of the rebellion.

She was a college scholar organizing protests. He was a part of the identical underground community. They shared a mission and, finally, a life.

“We met by the revolution,” Ajaj says, smiling. “We survived it collectively.”

In the present day, they reside in Gaziantep with their two younger kids. The new Syrian flag hangs of their lounge — an emblem of each pleasure and ache.

Each had been arrested for his or her activism. Each misplaced family and friends. They fled Syria greater than a decade in the past, and have every returned briefly since Assad’s fall.

Neither one acknowledged the nation they left.

“I visited Syria twice,” Ajam says. “However I have never stepped inside my outdated home.”

In the present day, Ajam works with the Caesar Households Affiliation, a gaggle searching for justice for individuals who disappeared in regime prisons in Syria. The group is known as after a forensic photographer, identified by the pseudonym Caesar, who smuggled out greater than 55,000 pictures documenting torture and dying earlier than fleeing to the U.S. in 2013.

5 years in the past, Ajam recognized his brother’s physique in a type of pictures — affirmation of what his household had lengthy feared. Now, he is decided to return to Syria to seek out the place the place his brother was buried.

For Bushra Ajaj, returning in April meant going through ghosts of her personal. Her household dwelling was in ruins. However what shattered her most was seeing her college once more — the location of so many protests, and of her greatest buddy’s dying

“I cried a lot,” she says. “The recollections simply got here again.”

Their kids, born in Turkey, converse Turkish extra fluently than Arabic.

“Typically I feel it is good,” Ajaj says. “They really feel at dwelling right here.” However the considered shifting to Syria raises new fears. “What in the event that they really feel like strangers there?”

In the event that they ever return for good, Ajaj hopes it will not be to her tiny, broken village. Perhaps it will be town of Aleppo, in northwestern Syria. Perhaps someplace new. Someplace they’ll construct contemporary recollections.

Ahmad al-Taleb: Betting all the things on Aleppo

One man who’s already made his resolution is Ahmad al-Taleb.

A 33-year-old civil engineer — and part-time social gathering clown — from Aleppo, Taleb fled Syria in 2014 after ISIS took over his metropolis.

On the time, he was documenting human rights violations, work that put him and his household in danger. His brother was arrested. Taleb fled to Turkey.

Since then, he is constructed a life in Gaziantep — studied, married, launched an organization, and have become a father.

However in October, when his lease is up, he and his spouse Sahar, together with their 3-year-old son Kamal, will pack their issues and return to Aleppo for good.

“I really feel a lot safer now,” Taleb says, sipping juice constituted of oranges his mom picked in Latakia, alongside Syria’s Mediterranean coast. “I am afraid, in fact. However I am additionally optimistic. It is time to rebuild.”

Taleb is below no illusions. Aleppo continues to be in ruins. Rents are hovering. Providers are patchy.

Sahar, who by no means completed college, hopes to renew her research, however there is no assure she’ll have the ability to.

“Nonetheless,” Taleb says, “we belong to Syria. Turkey is our second dwelling, nevertheless it’s not the place we belong.”

He remembers the euphoria of Assad’s fall final 12 months, which he and Sahar watched unfold from their sofa into the early hours of the night time. Feeling stressed watching the celebrations unfold in Damascus on their TV display, Taleb acquired in his automobile and drove straight to the capital metropolis.

When he acquired there, he was overcome with a mixture of jubilation and agony.

Recollections got here flooding again of the massacres he documented. Pals misplaced. Airstrikes he noticed kill harmless ladies and kids.

“It was a mixture of emotions. Victory and grief.”

Armed with an enormous smile, Taleb says he is maintaining a optimistic thoughts concerning the future. He believes within the promise of the transitional authorities, and in his position as a civil engineer in rebuilding Syria.

“I simply hope my son by no means asks me, ‘Why did you’re taking us again?'” he says. “But when he grows up the place he belongs, perhaps at some point he’ll perceive.”

Mohammed Jamil Alshammary. Dwelling is asking — however is his household prepared?

On the eve of a visit to Damascus, Mohammed Jamil Alshammary is virtually giddy — reciting couplets aloud.

“Like up excessive within the wonderful skies, my angel’s coronary heart shyly lies. To her so candy, celestial sound introduced me right down to the bottom.”

At 44, Alshammary is a seasoned interpreter and literature buff who’s labored in boardrooms from Geneva to Paris, translating for presidents and humanitarian leaders alike.

He quotes the linguist Noam Chomsky, references the film The Hours, and casually drops George Michael lyrics into the dialog.

Regardless of job affords in Canada and Europe, he selected to remain in Turkey for the previous 15 years for his household.

“My spouse did not need our daughters raised in a international tradition,” he says. “Turkey felt nearer to dwelling.”

Now, Alshammary says he is prepared to assist rebuild Syria, albeit cautiously.

“Safety first. Then economic system,” he says. “Even when I had been paid $1,000 a day in Damascus — if it isn’t protected, I will not deliver my household there.”

Alshammary is aware of the challenges that await him. Rents in Damascus have skyrocketed due to housing shortages. His kids, fluent in Turkish, threat cultural displacement in the event that they return.

“I am center class,” he says. “What about the remaining? Most Syrians cannot afford lease or tuition.”

Nonetheless, he says he is able to deliver one foot again into Syria, the place he hopes to open a translation company in Damascus.

“We should not clone the previous,” he says. “No extra corruption. No extra exclusion.”

This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Heart.

Mahmoud Al Basha contributed reporting from Gaziantep, Turkey.