When the Wall Falls: Reflections on Freedom and Fear

By: Sofia Zmarta, revolutionary leftist activist.

June 2025

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

I sat on the balcony of my home on a quiet summer evening when a sudden thought struck me: was my head exposed enough for a bullet to hit it—be it a stray bullet or a deliberate shot? Many had been killed that way recently, for no reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I remembered that gentle young man I knew so well, whose mother shielded from anything that might harm him. Yet they stormed the house, took him away, and shot him in the head.

Many people had been killed without ever knowing what “revolution” meant, without caring about politics, wanting only that the authorities leave them alone—just “minding their own business,” as the saying goes. Each time I heard the news I told myself their deaths were unforeseen, but mine was not. My death was always more likely. I was the one who had entered the struggle knowingly, who had understood the price and expected it each day. Yet I was still alive—a moving target that no bullet had struck by chance.

Lines from a song by the band Half an Apple, inspired by the heritage of the Golan, echoed in my head:

“Syria—love, the dream without end.”

The song sounded like a funeral dirge, like my heart itself, which had become an open house of mourning, a stage where the tragedy was replayed again and again.

Part of the justice we longed for lay in reclaiming the collective consciousness that had been stolen from us. Justice meant loving the country even in its ruin, loving it regardless of who ruled it, loving it as a mother loves her less-than-perfect child—and sparing one another the arrogant saying: “If you don’t like it, leave!”

I was a Syrian woman opposed to the regime, living inside the country, more specifically in areas once controlled by the government. I had never feared anything in my life as much as I feared Assad’s intelligence services, his prisons, his air force, and his army checkpoints. Yet I was afraid even during the advance of the “opposition factions,” though they were presumably on my side. Like everyone in the country, no matter how they viewed events, I feared for the civilians, for my family and loved ones. And in a strangely selective way, I also feared for the young men bearing arms on both sides. I grieved for those displaced into the unknown, facing the terror of what lay ahead.

Four days before the fall of the regime I was moving from my place of study in Homs, to my birthplace Salamiyah, and then to Masyaf where my family lived, a town on the frontline with the coastal area. The sounds of clashes and shelling never ceased. I resigned myself to the truth and told myself that I would pray for God’s protection, but I would not be greedy to ask that no harm touch us at all.

I wondered over and over: With whom would we be classified? Would any of our stances save us? Would I become just another body counted in a report? What were the criteria for survival? Would I be forced to witness factions gloating over the bodies of Alawites because they believed them all to be Shabiha? I knew people of all sects who had lost hope in the fall of the regime and had begun instead to invent mechanisms of adaptation and coexistence. I feared for them all and wished I could hide them in my heart—but my heart had become a mass grave, for people who did not even wish to be buried together.

Two years after the earthquake, I confessed to a dear friend that I missed those days. He would insist back then that “the street belongs to us, the street returned to the people.” My longing was selfish, perhaps, but for noble reasons. I was thirsty for anything new that could bring people together again, anything that could reunite the collective mind. One great calamity, shared by all, was enough to gather us around it—whether in pain or in hope, or both together.

The fifth of December 2024

Fear spread after the factions marched from Aleppo towards Hama. I imagined their arrival dragging on, surrounding people, with the joint air force bombing every area that was freed. My phone rang. The voice from my hometown, Salamiyah, said: “People are shouting happily in the streets!” I cried. We all cried. We could not believe it. It felt like a dream: perhaps we would witness the fall of the regime, perhaps we would die before that, or perhaps we would live only to find ourselves crushed between the hammer of the regime and the anvil of the factions. But my city, in some form or another… was free.

I trusted the young fighters at times and feared them at others. Terror gripped me at the thought of the regime’s shells, which had already struck some areas. 

I had never grown accustomed to the portraits of the two butchers—father and son—hanging everywhere. I asked myself: What would happen to the constitution, to the currency, to their portraits? Would I walk and secretly spit on some new portrait? Would the system of government become Islamist? Would our only freedom be to curse the former regime and the past, while the future was being sabotaged? How would the conflict transform? How could we ever negotiate with them?

My mind tried to soothe me: “We will overcome anything… we will create a language to communicate, even if it takes a lifetime.”

The dawn of the eighth of December 2024

Witnessing the moment the regime fell from within the country was priceless, beyond measure—especially after living a lifetime under the suffocating fear that “the walls have ears.” We had been cut off from the world for days, with an intermittent phone network, electricity being available only fifteen to thirty minutes every six hours. Then the happy shouts in the street overwhelmed everything, shattering the walls of the world I had known, making me lose my mind. I ran out to the balcony and cried, “God is great!” I threw on whatever clothes I could find and rushed toward the source of the sound. “It’s fallen… it’s fallen,” they told me. I ran back to tell my mother and call my father, who had already gone down to sit with the young fighters. But Bashar had fled Damascus before they even entered my second city, Masyaf. My father’s voice was full of laughter. I told him we would come down too. I sang to my cousin abroad: “Syria is ours, not the Assads’,” as we made our way to the place where people were gathering spontaneously.

My heart raced. I opened a video call with my sister and friends in exile so they would not miss the moment. I showed them how the tyrant Hafez’s head was smashed under the feet of the people. The Shabiha were still among us, but people acted as if they had vanished, disappeared with a touch of magic. Friends from across the country all testified the same: the air felt lighter, the streets smelled different. People laughed with one another, congratulated strangers, embraced those they barely knew—but knowing their political leanings was enough reason to hold them and weep together.

All my life I had imagined that moment, wondered how it would be. I almost wished I could relive it every day of what remained of my life: to run, to walk, to ululate, to cry, to chant, to sing, to post a clear video on my own page—from here, from the areas once held by the tyrant, with no fear, no calculation. After hours of walking the streets, on my way home I passed the Baath Party Branch square—the very square where nine years earlier I had been forced to leave my bag at school to attend a celebration of Assad’s loyalists. They had danced then to what I can only describe as noise pollution, and moral pollution. I had not managed to escape that time as I once did when I was younger. Perhaps I had been old enough then to grasp the potential cost and feel fear. All I could do was stand at the edge of that prison’s walls and turn my back to the crowd. It was a clear stance, yet it did not satisfy me. I promised myself it would never happen again—except over my dead body. But now, the regime had fallen and I had grown wings. I said to the Shabiha I saw, “Congratulations,” with the smile of the victor. I could run and shout, unafraid of drawing attention, unafraid to voice my thoughts openly or to have them read.

As soon as I reached home, reason and reality returned. I began to sort through the facts and debate the contradictions. I could not suppress a flash of gloating toward the Shabiha, but the first thought that came to me, and the strongest to my knowledge, was a desire to reassure the Alawites. My awareness that many were afraid—even at the height of my joy—clouded my delight. I wished I could separate myself from reality. I wished I had the authority to tell people the era of fear was over. But all I had was a sudden urge to sit with loyalists whose hands were not stained with our blood, but who had drunk from the cup of fear until they were drunk with it.

We had to break the cycle of fear and lies. We had to open our wounds and try to understand one another; to live the freedom we had been denied for decades. For the first time, I could speak with them without fear of a security report, without others seeing me as a threat—believing that the roles had now been reversed. But the opportunity was lost before it began. The tyrant fled, leaving behind a trap he had laid himself: a sectarian conflict, nurtured for decades, that turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. We had a golden chance to prove otherwise. But disaster struck instead.

I accepted the Syrian uprising as it was, in its entirety, with its flaws and stumbles before its virtues and achievements. I had memorised the religious chants early on, and I did not see them as suspicious, even those chants that addressed Sunnis and Salafis and incited them against the criminal authorities. I did not claim to be like them; I did not share their ideology. But I knew why they burned with anger. I understood them. I understood the context, and it made me weep, just as revolutionary songs that reflected me made me weep. I wished the street had been organised enough to face both Assad and the counter-revolution, to assert itself and its demands. But it had not been. The regime had managed to drag the country into sectarian conflict, and it succeeded in isolating us from one another.

In the years of Bashar’s iron and fire that followed, after the street was defeated, some “comrades in struggle” became as harsh as jailers. They judged us: either we died as martyrs, or we fled as refugees. Anything else was “betrayal.” They could not comprehend the inability to leave hell, or the choice to stay and struggle in one’s own way.

Many inside came to realise they were living in limbo, between life and death, on the margins of history even as they stood at its very heart. No one would write about them, no one would care for their stories. After 8 December 2024, I could clearly understand the motives of those who claimed to be taking revenge, because I knew why we might witness revenge killings. But murder on the basis of identity had never been part of the “natural” or the “expected.” To normalise such crimes was to normalise all our spelt blood.

The truth became stark when some of Assad’s influential Shabiha were restored to prominence, walking our streets accompanied by “New Syria’s security.” And yet that sight did not anger those who justified sectarian killings.

I withdrew into my shell, surrounded by a flock of madmen laughing and playing around me. I laughed with them like one possessed, only to fight back tears soon after, feigning resilience.

I knew well how dictatorships were born. That was why I hated every Shabih. I remembered how they had silenced us, insisting it was the revolutionaries who had ruined the country. And now, yesterday’s revolutionaries silenced us too, insisting that we, once again, would ruin the country. It was madness, absurdity. I hold the two Assads—the father and the son—responsible for all our tragedy, and I curse them each morning. But the greater curse was our capacity to absolve ourselves, while others sought to normalise their crimes. If we did not wake up, history would consign us to its pages as madmen who burned themselves with their own hands after toppling one of the fiercest dictatorships.

We criminalise everyone in uniform after 18 March 2011, then recoile in terror when we become a mirror image of them—refusing to see the resemblance, as though we stared into a distorted mirror that reflected only the enemy’s face.

I was the one who stood in the middle, carrying the griefs of all sides, refusing to become an executioner even to the executioners. I placed myself in the shoes of victim, oppressor, fearful, and fool alike. I witnessed the poisoning of the collective mind as if someone had been secretly pouring venom into the village well.

Every day I train myself to play the role of the one who understands—toward those who see Syria as a hopeless hell, toward those who close their eyes to its destruction, and toward those who pretend it thrives today.

I usually end my words with the defiance I have been carrying in my chest since childhood. But now I end them with a broken heart, perhaps broken enough to step out of this limbo—into a new life, or into a final death.

Yet still, I refuse to lose hope.

Because this is Syria the great, not any one man’s Syria.

And because it would remain, always,

“the love, the dream without end.”

By: Sofia Zmarta, revolutionary leftist activist.