In Syria, an Account of Life Under al-Assad

Opinion|Memories of the Past Will Define Syria’s Future

For 54 years, Syria existed in the shadow of a silence so profound, it swallowed entire lives.

The Assad regime thrived on erasing memory. Forced disappearances, propaganda and violence weren’t just tools of control; they were weapons aimed at obliterating the past. Anti-regime demonstrations were said to be fake news, and innocent civilians kidnapped or killed became “terrorists.” The regime’s vast network of informants, known as the Mukhabarat — its intelligence apparatus — turned neighbor against neighbor, making Syrians fear not just the regime but also one another. Phones were widely believed to be tapped, and a careless word could lead to a midnight abduction. Conversations were often guarded and stilted. Without a way to speak of what was happening around us, Syrians lived in a constant state of historical amnesia. Fear became a national language. Forgetting was a form of protection.

I grew up in this Syria. When I was a child, I remember, my father scolded my brother for telling his friends that Hafez al-Assad had imprisoned my uncles. When his son Bashar al-Assad took over his father’s vast empire of oppression, there was hope he could be different; he wasn’t. But when the Syrian revolution ignited alongside my rebellious teenage years, some Syrians began telling their own stories, the ones the regime didn’t want us to speak. I joined the movement and helped spread the word about protests and demonstrations. By the time I was 17, I fled Syria without my family, fearing the Mukhabarat. When I arrived in the United States, telling the story of Syria was no easier: My country became the subject of alternative facts and disinformation. I felt the weight of the silence back home in every call with my family. They became experts in using coded words to hint at what they witnessed daily as the war tore our country apart.

As long as the regime was in power, Syrians lived in a story the regime told and controlled. But as anti-Assad forces entered Damascus in December, the regime finally collapsed, and the oppressive silence began to lift. Syrians are finally able to speak about the enormity of what we endured for the past five decades.

While most Syrians lived in fear of speaking the truth, some resisted and documented the crimes of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad as they happened. Among them was Samira Al-Khalil. A human-rights activist and political dissident, she opposed the Assad regime long before the revolution. Imprisoned for opposing Hafez al-Assad, she was tortured and detained from 1987 to 1991. After her release, she remained a tireless advocate for others who were imprisoned. Two years into the revolution, fearing arrest, she sought refuge in a rebel-held suburb of Damascus called Eastern Ghouta. Eastern Ghouta endured a brutal siege for five years, sealed off for months at a time as Assad forces relentlessly bombed it from above. Ghouta was where Bashar al-Assad unleashed some of his most ruthless violence, where chemical gas killed innocent people in their sleep.

From Ghouta, Ms. Al-Khalil kept a diary, fragments of her experience under bombardment and siege. Like some 113,000 Syrians who have been forcibly disappeared since 2011, she was abducted, on Dec. 9, 2013. We still don’t know where she is or if she is even alive. Her neighbor found the pages from her diary strewn around her home after her kidnapping. For Syrians, memory is often a messy room filled with scattered papers, fragments of time and experience in need of a narrative.

Ms. Al-Khalil’s husband, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, a writer, helped publish her diaries into several languages and entrusted me to translate them into English. The act of translating her writing helped give words to the story I, in exile, could never tell about my country. Her chronicles from Ghouta are an account of the crimes committed by the Assad regime, and they also serve as a testament to the power of bearing witness. It’s as if her diaries say: This really happened, and Syria won’t forget. “These images will not be erased by other life memories,” she wrote. “They can only be erased from my mind by death.”