Years of reporting on Syria, the road to Damascus and the fall of al-Assad | The Syrian War

I have been associated with Syria for years, since the beginning – when the anti-regime protests started in March 2011.

We were in Deraa, in southern Syria. It was Friday and people called it “Shadow Day”. They took to the streets to complain about the death of a large number of people who were killed by the military in the past days.

The protests started due to the arrest and torture of children for spraying anti-Assad graffiti on the wall of their school.

It was almost unthinkable in Syria – a tightly controlled country where people are afraid to speak any word against the regime.

Yet “enough is enough” was what I heard over and over again. Some of the words that people have been chanting are “justice and freedom”. The Arab Spring had reached Syria.

Thirteen years later I found myself returning to the Omari Mosque in Deraa, the center of the protest struggle – where the joy was palpable. The kingdom had fallen; the al-Assad dynasty was over.

I couldn’t believe I was back.

The road to Damascus

December 8, 4am: We left Beirut for the border of Masnaa with Syria because reports came that Damascus had fallen. When we reached the crossing less than two hours later, we saw the Syrians rejoicing at the news. Some were preparing to return home.

I had no idea that we would be able to enter Syria that morning. I didn’t know if the Lebanese border authorities would let us in or what was waiting for us on the other side. Were the state troops stationed at the border? Will the opposition fighters accept us?

I contacted a friend in Deraa who was an opposition activist. I asked him to meet us on the Syrian side of the border and take us to Damascus. “I need an hour,” he told me.

We crossed the border when it opened at 8 am. It is a 40-minute drive to the heart of what was Bashar al-Assad’s seat of power. I last drove this road in 2011.

As we were on our way to the center of Umayyad Square, we saw people tearing down symbols of the empire. Abandoned tanks were left on the highway, military uniforms were scattered on the streets.

The streets were not crowded, however; people were still at home, scared, not sure what they were facing.

We drove to Umayad Square. I had to pinch myself to believe that I was really there.

The ceremonial gunfire was almost non-stop. The opposition forces came from across Syria. They also looked scared. But the feeling you had was that they were breathing again.

That starts live from Umayyad Square

It was time to do our job … to broadcast those images to the world. I think we were among the first international journalists in the square that morning.

But we had big communication problems. I was able to send a few video clips from my phone to the news desk in Doha but we were unable to broadcast live.

Syrian state TV was in Umayyad Square. I asked the resistance fighters guarding the building if they had any means of helping us. “You have to help us,” I told them.

They couldn’t use the satellite truck so they started searching for the crew. After an hour or so an engineer came to work and helped us report live on the history being made.

It is almost surreal that we used the resources of a channel that for decades was used by the regime to control the narrative – to tell the world that there is a new Syria.

Cruelty, and false hope

The kingdom fell and secret doors were opened. The prisoners were released by opposition groups but many others are still missing.

For years I have been reporting on enforced disappearances in Syria, illegal and arbitrary arrests by the police, and the suffering of the victims’ families. We had spoken to them, to human rights lawyers, and to activists for many years.

And then I found myself in Sednaya Prison. The story was before us. It was real.

There were thousands of people on their way to the detention center, which was at the top of a hill. They walked about three kilometers (two kilometers). Everyone had the same story – they came hoping to find a loved one. They came from the other side of Syria.

It was the Second Day since Damascus was “liberated”. Those inside the prison, believed to number several hundred, were released.

Where are the others?

More than 100,000, according to Syrian human rights groups, are missing.

We watched their families – fathers, brothers, mothers, wives and sisters – cling to false hope.

There were rumors of secret rooms and cells hidden underground, although a security volunteer in a white helmet told us that was not true. “We looked everywhere.”

“Then why do you dance?” I asked him.

“Don’t you see them? How desperate they are … we have to do something even if it’s a false hope … just for their sake.”

Families read every paper they could find in the hope of finding a clue.

There was nothing in this pitch black prison except for the horrible things that people told us was the “killing room”.

As we returned to the car, more people were arriving.

“Did they find anyone?” Did they find him?” they would ask us.

If the dead could talk

Many doors have been open to us since the end of Bashar al-Assad’s rule. Many graves were dug.

We were told that there were many in the city of Qutayfa, north of Damascus. After years of silence and fear, the locals are starting to speak out.

Among them was a security guard from this town who told us that he prayed for a number of bodies that were buried by security guards there in 2012. Another man told us that the people of the state were using their tractors and machines to dig graves.

“Yes, I saw them dumping the dead bodies that were in refrigerated trucks inside the cemetery but we couldn’t talk otherwise we will be killed too,” he told us.

He showed us there. We were standing over a mass grave.

Stand up and testify

It was not the first time I reported on the brutality of the regime in Syria. In 2013 in Aleppo, we watched Syrians in the opposition-controlled east of the city remove piles of corpses from a river that flowed from government-held areas in the highlands.

They had gunshot wounds to the head and were handcuffed. Then we watched the relatives trying to see them in the schoolyard.

I had trouble sleeping that night. I also had difficulty sleeping after visiting Sednaya Prison.

I tried to put myself in their shoes and I thought: “How is it possible for you to live all these years without knowing where your loved one is, to think about the torture they went through and to see the execution room, standing in the same room. … and imagine what they had to go through?”

We cannot change what happened. We can only write history and hope that the victims and their families will one day find peace, justice and accountability.