Life Without al-Assad

Opinion|Life Without al-Assad

What is life without al-Assad?

Michel Kilo, the Syrian intellectual and opposition figure who died in 2021, once shared a story from his days in an al-Assad regime prison. A jailer asked him to tell a story to a 4-year-old boy whose mother had given birth to him there. Mr. Kilo started telling the boy about a bird flying in the sky and the boy interrupted him, asking, “What is a bird?”

What is life without al-Assad? I don’t know yet. I am only three days in.

I was born in the mid-80s under the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the father of Bashar, our ousted president. I learned early that being a good citizen meant not thinking. If you did dare to think, you didn’t say it out loud.

At school, I learned that if you wanted to get anywhere, you had to be part of the informant system that Syrians have lived with for decades.If you handed in your list of names of your classmates who spoke badly about the teacher, you’d be made head of your class. Everyone thought everyone else was reporting them.

I was in the last high school class in the country that wore military-style uniforms — an olive green suit with a thick belt. I got my military training when I was 15. I used to brag that I could assemble and disassemble a Kalashnikov quickly, and I enjoyed the school shooting trips we did twice a year because I had fun with my girlfriends on the back of the military truck on the way.

To study journalism in Damascus University, I had to learn Hafez al-Assad quotes by heart. We had a textbook called “Nationalism,” which had his picture on the cover and something about Baath Party principles at the beginning, but the rest was about his thoughts and ideology. We were taught by lecturers who had graduated from the Soviet Union that professional journalism is propaganda.

During the civil war that began in 2011, I lived in areas controlled by different rebel groups — including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that finally toppled the regime — in eastern Aleppo and my hometown Idlib. When what would eventually become H.T.S. started to form in Idlib in late 2012, it was just one of the many Islamist groups around, focusing mainly on fighting the regime.