When the jailer leaves, but the prison remains inside

A Syrian woman reflects on the fall of Assad and the unfinished struggle for dignity

By: Samar Kokash, Syrian actress and activist.

June 2025

The poster is designed by the cartoonist Amani Al-ali.

The moment was unmistakable. Assad had fled. The dictator was gone. The air itself seemed to shift, charged with a force I had never felt before. Events raced forward, and in my bones I knew everything had changed, though I hardly dared believe it. Fixed before the TV, breath caught, heart pounding at every new footage on screen, Syria stood suddenly without the butcher, the criminal, the tyrant.

Is this real? Could the torment of all those years be over? Could fear, pain, humiliation now be nothing but memories?

We had waited so long for this day, imagined it, dreamt of it, lost friends to death and exile for it. Joy came, but with it sorrow, an emptiness no celebration could fill. I lay down, as if sleep might steady me. By morning I woke still murmuring the old chant: “Out, Bashar. Out.” Only then did I grasp it: he was gone.

I grabbed my phone, scrolled the feeds; I went from one outlet to another. Yes. Assad was gone, and new reality began to take shape with the prisons opened and the detainees freed. I scrolled through videos desperate for familiar faces. None appeared. If they are not among the released, where have they gone?

More footage was published by the minute. Faces of hope and tears told the story. One video I couldn’t scroll past showed a woman filming inside Security Branch 215, where I had once been detained. Seeing the same walls, the same corridors that had taken years of my life and taken me from my daughters, sent a shiver through me – a surge of the fear and waiting that gripped me there.

Friends began returning or visiting Syria; their eyes sparkled with love for Damascus and for every province, and with fierce enthusiasm to rebuild a country crying out for its children. For Syrians abroad, that became an inevitable question: Did you visit? Will you return? Will you visit? Those questions followed me everywhere and waged a struggle inside me. The reason that had kept me away, Assad’s grip, was gone. So why not? The question pressed hard on me: why was I not willing to go back, not even to visit? Regardless of the risk to my refugee status or to the citizenship application, the truth -bluntly- I don’t want to. Could it be that I’m still afraid?

Days blurred into nights, all alike. I drifted through them in the kitchen, drinking coffee, staring at nothing, feeling nothing, expecting nothing. What changed were my dreams. My cell crept back into them—or perhaps my dreams crept back into detention. Since my release on 11 November 2013, I had rarely dreamt of prison. Now it was constant, as if the prison had invaded every fibre of me, pressing down as though I were still confined, as though I had never been released. Why? Wasn’t it supposed to be over?

I took it to therapy. I talked, opened up. My therapist listened and probed: How do you feel? What’s coming up for you? Then she asked, “Do you miss prison?” The question landed like a blow. I froze. How could I miss the place that had broken me? 

Yet I couldn’t say no. Something in me resisted the denial.

I began to speak about that part of my life: how I would count the hours until visit days; writing letters; threading beads into bracelets for my daughters; waking with a lift I rarely felt in prison; waiting for the guard to call my name; running to hold my daughters; then the time was gone and every visit felt cut short. I would return with scraps of news to share with the others in the cell, and then return to waiting. Always waiting: for visits, for hearings, for release, for reunion, for recovery, for a chance to make up the years lost apart, to catch up on a career left behind. Would I ever return to my work—in theatre, film, dubbing, art? All of that remained only a dream while in detention.

Being released did not bring safety. Persecution followed, and I was forced to flee to Sudan. It was the first step on the route back to my daughters. I stayed there two years before finally reaching Belgium. We were reunited—by coincidence on the same date I had been arrested, 11 November, six years later in 2019.

After six years apart, my daughters had changed. They were no longer little girls. They had grown, and I had missed it. Something changed. Who had changed more—me or them? what was next for us? 

Life in exile: hope gone. drained away.  My therapist helped me see through it. In prison, hope had always been there, one way or another: the hope for freedom, for a life of dignity, for the day when everything just might change. Hope was the fragile scaffolding that gave meaning to the waiting, and gave me purpose. In the face of harsh reality now, the scaffolding gave way.

The ousting of Assad cut short the very struggle for freedom and dignity that had defined our lives. That unfinished pursuit, with all I have been through, has left its mark on my body and soul. My mental and physical health have been deeply shaken, and my life feels as though it no longer has a purpose. 

Exile, the loss of hope, the upheaval of my life—each deepened the strain. Therapy marked a turning point, but I still have a long way to go. Every day, I continue to move in that direction: to find myself, to find purpose. Hard as it has been, I still believe that somewhere ahead there is light.

By: Samar Kokash, Syrian actress and activist.