‘Was Syria Worth This Price?’ – OpEd

By Thanaa Jebbi

Throughout the years of the Syrian revolution, I never managed to enter any regime-held areas. This was partly for security reasons - and partly because I had sealed those cities in my memory as if they were black holes, one that should never be returned to. Although I was among those who dreamed of the regime’s fall, one of the early voices out in the streets, the final years before its collapse were so heavy that the dream felt distant, almost impossible. I nearly lost hope of ever seeing Damascus again.

But on September 15, 2025, I returned to Damascus for the first time since the fall of the Assad regime, after more than a decade away. It was an IWPR work trip - to attend the launch event of the Syria Prisons Museum together with our partner, the organisation Alshare Media Foundation. 

As I left my home in London and headed to Heathrow Airport, I did not fully understand my feelings. When the plane from Amman took off toward Damascus, the sense of strangeness only deepened. Around me were Syrians carrying flags, on their way to enter their homeland for the first time in years, while I sank into a complex mix of fear, longing, and grief.

When Damascus appeared from the airplane window, a wave of emotions overwhelmed me. From above, I saw a devastated, wounded country. Images of martyrs, detainees, and cities shattered by Assad flooded my mind. 

I asked myself a painful question, “Was Syria worth this price? One million dead and tens of millions displaced?”

My mind could not absorb the weight of that memory all at once, so I told myself, “This is just a work trip. I cannot open this dark door now.”

When I entered Damascus International Airport—for the first time since 2009—I encountered another surreal moment. After the regime’s fall, people began welcoming their loved ones with the song Ya Mayyet Halla - which with the line “thousands welcome, you have returned to my chest of life,” became one of Syria’s biggest viral trends – in reunions filled with tears, laughter, and emotional outbursts. 

The airport worker helping me with my bags jokingly said, “Give me your luggage so you can film your family welcoming you!”

I smiled and replied, “No one is waiting for me… my family is in Idlib.”

He stared at me in surprise, and exclaimed, “No one will play Ya Mayyet Halla for you?” 

I laughed to myself at the surreal lightness of the moment. Then I left Damascus heading north, toward Idlib—where the place knows me, and my emotions know their way.

This week, I returned to Syria for an event coinciding with the anniversary of the regime’s fall. Many of my friends travelled to Damascus, to Homs, to Latakia, even to areas once thought impossible to enter. But I chose to stay in Idlib. I knew I could not bear to be in Damascus on that day; my heart could not hold the weight of that moment.

Idlib, for me, is not just a city. It is the place that rose up from the beginning, paying terrible prices in killing, bombardment, and displacement. It became, at one point, a miniature Syria, home to countless exiles expelled from their towns simply because they said the word “freedom.”

Yet the anniversary was heavy.

The first blow was the absence of those who accompanied our first cry for freedom.  Many were tortured to death, others killed in airstrikes or forced into exile. The celebration felt incomplete without them; nothing in the world can fill that void.

Then came the disappointment of delayed justice.

A year after the regime’s fall, its top criminals remain unpunished. Some figures involved in grave violations are being publicly rehabilitated. Meanwhile, Bashar al-Assad likely lives comfortably in a luxurious residence in Moscow, while we continue to carry the scars of imprisonment, torture, and displacement on our bodies and in our daily lives.

There have been reports of human rights violations in the coast and sectarian violence in July 2025 left hundreds dead in the Druze-majority city of Sweida. Stumbling transitional processes, lack of transparency, and failed communication with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces mean that in conditions eastern Syria have remained nearly identical to those before the regime’s fall. 

And yet, on the anniversary, Idlib celebrated. People needed a moment of happiness —even if their joy came mixed with bitterness, even if the laughter carried the shadow of tears.

I also remembered a paradox I could not ignore - the raising of the revolutionary flag in Idlib. In 2016 and 2017, we ran from extremist factions who chased us simply for holding it. Today, some of their leaders stand proudly before crowds waving the very same flag, as if they had never hunted us for carrying it.

At dawn, at the exact moment of the regime's fall at 6:18am, I went out to celebrate in my own way. I walked to the spots where we first raised the flag years ago, and to the places where we had been forbidden from lifting it, like al-Saa’a Square and Abu Zaar Mosque. 

I raised the flag high and shouted, “The dictator has fallen!”

I looked at the flag for a long time, and in it I saw the martyrs, the detainees, the destroyed cities and the chants that never died. The flag felt like an extension of my memory and our collective pain. I joined the celebrations in Idlib’s streets for a short while—celebrations that lasted several days—then returned home carrying one wish; that next year, we celebrate the regime’s fall in a united Syria—without sectarianism, without armed factions, without fear.

That justice returns to its rightful owners, that every criminal is held accountable, and that we finally move toward the democratic country we dreamed of - the country for which the martyrs gave their lives.

• About the author: Thanaa Jebbi is Syria Program Manager for IWPR
• Source: This article was published by IWPR