Syria: Assad’s sacrificed generation

Saturday, September 10, 2016, near Damascus, Syria. It has been five years now since dictator Bashar al-Assad nipped his people’s desire for democracy in the bud. The civil war continues: it would claim between 500,000 and 600,000 lives in 14 years, including some 25,000 children, and leaving almost 150,000 missing. Some of the civilians would be gassed with sarin and chlorine.  

A voice crackles through the walkie-talkie of Mohamed, 20, a volunteer rescue worker with the White Helmets, a civil defence organization active in rebel regions militarily crushed by the regime. His boss orders him to go to a place to wrap the body of a “young martyr in a shroud,” as required by the Muslim funeral ritual. When Mohamed arrives on the scene, he sees his father crying. The martyr is his 16-year-old brother, killed when their house was bombed. “He was in pieces,” Mohamed tells me with emotion almost 10 years after the fact.  

“We prayed, then buried him... My brother’s name was Yaman, which means ‘auspicious’ [in Arabic],” Mohamed adds.  

He also tells me that, for him, being a rescue worker from the age of 19 and risking his life for others was his way of committing himself to “freedom and giving [something] to [his] country.”  

Mohamed, now 28 and still a rescue worker, belongs to this generation of hundreds of thousands of Syrians, mainly Sunni Muslims, whose childhood, adolescence and early adulthood were sacrificed and whose future was mortgaged to the war that ravaged their country from 2011 to December 2024. 

A generation bombed, gassed, starved during full sieges of various towns, imprisoned in Assad’s jails, displaced or condemned to exile. So now, for Mohamed, Hatem, Abdel Raman, Rafik, Yasmine and all the others, this Liberation — as the Syrians call the overthrow of the Assad regime — is inevitably bittersweet.  

At the end of winter, L’actualité travelled through part of Syria to meet this “Assad generation.” The result is a journey back in time through poignant stories, to the roots of the revolution that began in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011. This peaceful revolution, initially galvanized by young people, soon turned into armed rebellion and, just as quickly, civil war.  

“I feel like my entire country gives off a smell of death. When I walk through the ruins, I remember every corpse I’ve recovered, every wounded person I’ve rescued,” says Mohamed.  

After 14 years of repression by the regime, it took just ten days in December 2024 for a coalition of Islamist rebel groups — led by the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement of Ahmed al-Sharaa, alias Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — to put an end to five decades of authoritarian rule by the Assad dynasty. First there was Hafez, the father, who took over the country after a coup d’état in 1970, before Bashar, one of his sons, succeeded him upon his death in 2000.  

From their stronghold of Idlib in the north of the country and Deraa in the far south, the rebels captured several key towns in the blink of an eye, before storming through the gates of Damascus on the night of December 8, 2024. The capital fell almost without a shot being fired, as Bashar al-Assad and his family had just fled by plane to Russia. 

“Never in Assad’s time would we have thought that this regime would one day fall. It was clear that we, the youth, would never have a future. Then, in a matter of days, everything collapsed. As if by magic,” says a still amazed Wajeh, a 19-year-old Christian studying French literature in Damascus. 

Today, the rebel Ahmed al-Sharaa, a Sunni Muslim, has abandoned his combat uniform and nom de guerre to don the suit and tie of the self-proclaimed interim president of a Syria in search of international recognition. 

The 40-year-old insists he has left his heavy past as an icon of armed jihad behind him. Having left for Iraq to fight the Americans in 2003, he returned to Syria to found the Al-Nusra Front, a jihadist group, around 2012. A year later, he refused to merge with the then-expanding Islamic State group and pledged allegiance to rival al-Qaeda. He left the group in 2016 to create the HTS, which would gradually become the de facto Islamist government of the Idlib region, an enclave of at least 3,000 km² (10 times the size of the Island of Montréal) along the Turkish border. 

Since December, these new masters of the country have been quick to take over former seats of power, from ministries to police stations. At the Lebanese-Syrian border, flanked by an imposing gate “Welcome to Syria,” bureaucracy is back in full force when we cross in February, after weeks of virtually free movement. Stamps are once again affixed to passports. But with no baksheesh (bribe) to pay, as was the case with the men of the deposed regime, my taxi driver is delighted. 

The ex-rebels are, however, keeping a low profile in the streets of Damascus. Often young, they can be recognized by their black combat uniforms embroidered with the words “General security,” their trimmed beards and their AK-47s slung across their shoulders. They patrol the city on foot or in new pickup trucks and, at the capital’s main entry points, visually inspect each vehicle, but in a blasé manner.  

When asked about their new lives, most of the capital’s inhabitants have smiles on their faces, despite the poverty (which, according to the UN, afflicts up to 90% of the population), the political and economic uncertainty and the mistrust of some toward the interim president. Not to mention concerns about the risk of sectarian clashes, such as those experienced at the end of February on the Mediterranean coast between Alawite militiamen (from the Shiite ethnic group of the Assad clan) and the new regime’s forces, during which more than 700 civilians are thought to have perished. 

Damascenes appreciate the end to the extortion and corruption, which had become a system under the former regime, and the end to fuel rationing. They say they are happy to no longer see streets and neighbourhoods off-limits to the public, to have the freedom to set up fruit, vegetable or bread stalls on the sidewalks to make ends meet — and to use dollars. So many small things that were prohibited not so long ago. Above all, they enjoy the ability to talk politics without the risk of being spied on by the sinister mukhabarats, members of the Assad-era secret police. They no longer fear joining the tens of thousands of Syrians who have disappeared in jails transformed into sordid torture and execution factories. 

At al-Rawda café, in the heart of the capital, intellectuals, artists, journalists and politicians have been meeting since the 1940s to philosophize amid clouds of hookah smoke. The owner recalls the prohibitions imposed by a desperate regime, paranoid about broadcasting soccer matches for fear that customers would then take to the streets to protest. And the exorbitant taxes and sums (up to 50,000 US dollars) demanded to keep his café open. A racket disguised as a contribution to an obscure “Martyrs’ Fund.” 

Today, Damascus vibrates. The capital, with its 2.5 million inhabitants, is bustling with activity, thanks to the freedom regained by older generations after half a century of dictatorship. A freedom and peace hitherto unknown to younger Syrians. Especially those from the “rebel” regions, which were hit the hardest by the 14 years of war. 
  
“Before, we were afraid to even say hello to certain people, for fear that they wouldn’t like the tone of our greeting and we would get into trouble,” notes Fadel, 33, from Idlib, a teacher and waiter at al-Rawda café. “Hope for a better future is here, Inshallah, and I tell my friends in exile abroad to come back.” 

Seven million Syrians, out of a total population of around 35 million at the start of the war, fled to neighbouring countries (Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey) and as far afield as Europe. Nearly 100,000 ended up in Canada, including some 5,000 in Quebec. 

From Damascus, it takes almost two hours to drive south, through plowed ochre fields and olive groves, to reach the town of Deraa. The dual carriageway, which is virtually deserted in both directions, is dotted with abandoned concrete sentry boxes in the colours of the former regime and a few burnt-out military vehicles. 

Located on the borders of Jordan and Golan, a mountain range occupied by Israel (since 1967), this city of around 70,000 inhabitants (mostly Sunni Muslims) before the war is considered the cradle of the Syrian revolution. The spontaneous protest movement, inspired by the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, quickly spread from Deraa to other parts of the country. 

It all began in March 2011 with a sarcastic graffiti, “It’s your turn, doctor” — an allusion to Bashar al-Assad’s profession as an ophthalmologist — drawn by teenagers on the wall of their school. A joke that led to arrest, imprisonment and over a month of torture for these teenagers seen as suspects by the regime’s secret police, led locally by one of Assad’s cousins. This dramatic event led to increasingly and harshly repressed demonstrations in the central square and at Omari Mosque. This led to a cruel siege of the rebelling neighbourhoods. 

Even today, the inner walls of the school’s courtyard are covered with political graffiti, recently drawn there: “The revolution will not end” and “The doctor fled,” thumbing a nose at Assad’s fate. A tribute to these young pioneers who unknowingly changed Syria’s destiny. 

“I know the story of the children thrown into prison,” says Omar, 10, proudly, amongst his friends playing soccer and marbles. 

In front of the mosque, Hakam, 32, spreads his arms wide to the sky when asked about his current feelings: “All the doors are open now... I was there on March 18, 2011, when the regime’s forces appeared with armoured vehicles and fired on us. The first person to die in this revolt was 18... We never imagined we could be killed by our own government.”  

The youngest child in this revolution, arrested during one of the demonstrations and tortured to death, was just 13 years old. 

Hakam went on to fight the regime in the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a Western-backed nationalist rebel group founded by ex-military members in the summer of 2011. On December 6, 2024, when government forces abandoned his town, Hakam unhesitatingly joined a group of fighters rushing to Damascus to ally with HTS elements from Idlib in the north. 

The euphoria and sense of revenge felt in the midst of a jubilant Damascene population could not, he says, conceal the “enormous tragedy” of the past. “I’ve lost friends and family. All my dreams are gone. Many young people like me grew up and discovered the world in the midst of bombing.” 

Around us, several parts of the city considered hostile to the regime at the time still bear the scars of intensive bombardment, mainly by the Russian air force, notably from 2014 to 2018, and again in 2021. Local activists are calling for March 18 to become a day of national commemoration. 

“There was this brief moment when young people saw themselves as the vanguard of the revolution. Then they were supplanted by the new actors in the revolt [editor’s note: official political opposition, then rebel and jihadist groups]. They lost their political destiny, which is why many are cynical about politics,” says Sarah Anne Rennick, head of a research project at the Paris-based Arab Reform Initiative (ARI) think tank. The project focuses on “Youth trajectories in Syria, Libya and Iraq” in conflict and post-conflict contexts. 

Nearly 70 Syrians aged between 18 and 32 (average age 24.5) were interviewed as part of this wide-ranging study, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, to “understand not only their actions and their ongoing process for decision-making, creating ways to survive in a war situation, but also their aspirations or vision of politics,” says the researcher and deputy director of ARI. 

And for many of the young people we interviewed, like Mohamed, involvement in local humanitarian action on a voluntary, unpaid basis was “an essential value from which they could see a concrete impact in their community.”  

As soon as one reaches the limits of the old city of Damascus, surrounded by imposing medieval fortifications, the desolation is obvious. We drive for miles to the northeast through the martyred region of Ghouta (“oasis” in Arabic), and its towns of Zamalka, Jobar, Harasta and Douma. Everywhere, the same dusty, post-apocalyptic scenery leaves you speechless: a grey-beige sea of collapsed or devastated buildings, decapitated mosque minarets, trenches and shells of cars that have become the territory of skeletal dogs. 

Ghouta will remain synonymous with the ferocity of the war waged by the former regime, supported by the Russian air force, against the civilian population.  

All the buildings still standing are shells of raw concrete. As though only the shell had been completed. Doors, windows, furniture, copper pipes, electrical cables and even ceramics have all disappeared — the result of a systematic raid by soldiers from the fourth armoured division. This unit, commanded by Bashar al-Assad’s younger brother Maher, was known for its looting of devastated areas, intensive production and trafficking of captagon (amphetamine pills) and extortion, including at the border. 

The Ghouta region, covering some 100 square kilometres, was home to almost 400,000 inhabitants before the war. Today, only a handful have returned to the few areas that were wholly or partially spared by the Assad regime’s repressive machine. 

In the cemetery in Jobar, surrounded by destruction, 13-year-old Bashir, almost the same age as the war, stands frozen in front of his grandfather’s grave. The moment is uninterrupted by any sound. It is the first time this shy boy has come here since his family returned, in mid-December, to the town they had abandoned in 2013. Bashir’s father, a gentle-looking mechanic in his forties, recounts how they kept moving around Ghouta to escape the relentless bombardments that took his father, brother and cousins from him. The hardest part, he confides, was wondering every time he left the house whether he would ever see his family again “alive or otherwise.” 

Most of the graves were damaged by bombing. Even the dead were not spared. An elderly volunteer caretaker with a craggy face and a keffiyeh painted red numbers on the headstones and recorded everything in a small notebook to help families find the graves of their “martyrs.”  

The region had been under siege since March 2013. Its inhabitants were starved and, in the height of horror, suffered several chemical weapons attacks, including two major ones: rockets filled with sarin gas in 2013 and helicopter-dropped barrels of chlorine in 2018. These attacks were confirmed by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and denounced by Canada, which condemned “the Assad regime for its repeated use of chemical weapons, which is a flagrant breach of international law.”   

Hatem, 17, escaped the worst of it. He and his father, Wael, owe their survival to Yasser, a volunteer rescue worker, who hammered on the door of their house in the middle of the night on August 21, 2013, to wake them up. The regime had just fired rockets containing sarin gas — a deadly, odourless nerve gas — at Jobar and several other towns in the region. 

“My father immediately carried me in his arms to the roof where we could breathe uncontaminated air [editor’s note: this gas tends to stay close to the ground]. The rescue workers were throwing water on people, and even napkins soaked in Coca-Cola,” says Hatem, surrounded by his father and their guardian angel. 

In a neighbouring house, a couple in their fifties give the same account of this “end-of-the-world” night. They too survived because they had the reflex to lock themselves and their children in a bedroom, with damp cloths under the door and in front of their faces. The gas still had time to have some effect. “Our eyesight was blurred,” says Fawzi, the father. “We were hallucinating. I could hardly move. To this day, I still have lung problems like those of an asthmatic.” 

A perfect disaster scenario, as 56-year-old rescue worker Yasser summarizes it: “It was a very hot night, so everyone was sleeping with their windows open. And the lack of wind meant that the gas stagnated. Those affected fell to the ground, foamed at the mouth and went into convulsions. We can never forgive those killers.” Nearly 1,000 civilians died of suffocation and almost 6,000 were injured in this August 2013 attack, which has since been the subject of several international legal proceedings.  

Sitting on a chair in front of his hardware store, 67-year-old Jamal relives those images of families in the neighbourhood decimated by sarin, as well as the grass and even sawdust that residents gathered and ate to survive the famine when his town was under siege. “Assad let barley in, because it was donkey food... We had no other choice but to endure it. The international community abandoned us.”  

On the eve of Ramadan, the covered alleys of the souk in old Damascus are packed. In this maze, people form a compact crowd, passing each other, brushing up against each other, jostling each other between the stalls of merchants, who call out to them. The air is fragrant with the scent of spices and dried herbs, and the smell of pastries wafting from ovens. 

Abdel Raman, 16, works six days a week at a confectionery table for a neighbouring shopkeeper and family friend. His youth in Ghouta resembles that of tens of thousands of other young Syrian Sunnis, under bombing and as victims of a total siege of their region for around five years. 

“When the regime finally opened an evacuation route [editor’s note: a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians to leave a besieged area],” he recalls, “my family and I arrived in Damascus, and that’s when I saw bread for the first time. I devoured a piece and hid two in my pocket for the next day.” 

According to the United Nations, almost 50% of Syrians between the ages of 6 and 15 are now out of school as a result of the conflict, either because their schools are no longer accessible or functional (40% of the 20,000 schools are closed), or because their families can no longer afford to pay for them to go to school or they have to work. 

For the older children, already at school at the start of the war, their path often came to an abrupt end. Like Abdel Raman, who left school at the age of 10. “I love my job, and what else do you want me to do? School didn’t work out,” he replies, almost embarrassed, when asked if he would be tempted to go back to school now that the war is over. 

“Access to education and schools is seen by most children and young people as a luxury,” says Bujar Hoxha, Syria Response Director for the international NGO Save the Children, who has just returned from a tour of the country, where he was struck by “the scale of poverty and devastation.” 

“There is an urgent need,” he says, “to create accelerated learning programs to help young people catch up with their education. Children and young people are the only hope for building a diverse society whose components can coexist peacefully. It will take three to five years of donor support to rebuild schools and invest in education.” 

Hatem, the survivor of the chemical attack, now dreams of going back to school, after years of interruption, and obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Arabic or mathematics, his two passions. But above all, he wants to live in a country “free from war.” “They [the former regime] destroyed our humanity and wrecked our future.” 

“Keep your head up, you are a free Syrian.” ”One, one, one, Syria is one.” ”No to confessionalism.” On February 28, hundreds of Syrians of all ages gathered in the centre of Douma, in Ghouta, to sing and chant these slogans between speeches. 

“Finally, we’re taking our country back,” one of them exclaims into the microphone. A frenzied round of applause begins. A smiling young rebel lets himself be swept along by the crowd, his automatic weapon brandished in the air. On a rooftop, teenagers wave the rebel flag, now the country’s official emblem, making a V for victory.  

“Before, they imprisoned or killed us when we demonstrated,” says Omrane, 19. Having had to drop out of school during the first half of the war, he is committed to the hope of “seeing a new, strong and sovereign Syria built.” 

Standing by the loudspeakers, Rafik, 22, a student and aspiring physics teacher, believes in this new regime that “listens to them” and understands that young people “must have their place” in all strata of governance. “Democracy is not just about the right to demonstrate,” argues this sturdy fellow. “It goes hand in hand with taking the demands being expressed into consideration. In several ministries, they are already opening their doors to young people. They are even recruiting from universities.” 

This question of youth participation in the “sustainable peace-building process” also emerges from the interviews conducted by Sarah Anne Rennick’s team as part of their IDRC-supported study. This participation varied according to whether they were in a region spared from the war or not. In hard-hit regions, young people’s ability to be “political actors,” one of their priorities, was supplanted by the urgent and understandable need for “economic sustenance,” with the exception, she continues, of young people who became members of the local councils set up in most “liberated” areas to manage local issues and services in the absence of the state. “They acquired political and public administration experience.” But every time the Assad regime regained military control over some of these regions, “it was all over,” she adds. 

When these young people looked to the future, none of them imagined that things would get better, either politically or economically, observes Sarah Anne Rennick. “Their future was only conceivable outside their country. And reconciliation was out of the question. Disillusioned, they also expressed feelings of abandonment by the international community. Especially those who lived under the regime’s bombing.” 

In Deraa, at the foot of the memorial to the first demonstration on March 18, 2011, Yasmine, 18, Sham and Rahaf, 19, students studying science and Arabic, “savour [their] newfound freedom” and the end to the fear of being “killed or kidnapped.” 

Although “young people’s futures were destroyed,” laments Sham, the three friends, their veils lightly draped over their hair, want to remain confident about the place for women in this new Syria. “If they are represented [politically], our rights will be protected and respected,” Rahaf believes. (Only one female activist, a Christian, will join the new government announced a month later.) 

President al-Sharaa wants to reassure both the country’s various religious minorities (Alawites, Christians, Druze and Kurds), who are worried that it will henceforth be governed by the Sunni majority, including its more radical Islamist components, and the international community. 

“We are used to living together... as long as politics [does not interfere in interfaith relations] and foreign countries do not interfere,” stresses the Christian manager of a restaurant in old Damascus, near a table where Muslim and Christian employees are sharing a meal to break the Ramadan fast (iftar).  

In addition to guaranteeing the “social status of women” and protecting them from “violence and discrimination,” the transitional constitution ratified in mid-March by al-Sharaa, although based on Islamic jurisprudence, establishes equal rights without discrimination on the basis of race, religion or gender. 

Nevertheless, the road ahead looks set to be a bumpy one for the interim president. Presented as a pragmatist, al-Sharaa has aroused mistrust, particularly among the wealthy Damascene bourgeoisie, who used to get their money’s worth under Assad. Frustration is also mounting among some Sunnis, including those in the Deraa region who, despite their role as initiators of this revolution, feel abandoned by the ruling power.  

The new regime will also have to take into account the traumas that gnaw at the survivors of these years of horror. Mohamed, the White Helmet, is still haunted by this not-so-distant past. In his sleep, before waking up in tears, he sees Assad’s soldiers chasing him or kidnapping his two children, aged 18 months and two and a half years, to murder them. 

Sarah Anne Rennick laments the fact that the international community has no response adapted to this post-conflict challenge. “Yet, the young people we interviewed were unanimous. They spoke spontaneously about their traumas in our interviews.”  

The director of Save the Children – Syria makes the same “shocking” observation about the poor state of mental health of young Syrians. “They have seen many loved ones murdered, devastation, the most horrific assaults, and they have become distrustful of other communities. [...] Visiting their old homes or destroyed apartments provokes flashbacks of those terrible days. So much so that many of them prefer to stay in displaced persons camps for longer.” 

As for how to forgive, and whether it is even possible, these questions have already been asked in the wake of the civil and intra-communal wars in Kosovo, Rwanda and Lebanon. And they are already being asked in Syria. The interim government granted amnesty to Assad’s ex-soldiers, police officers and prison guards, at least those whose “hands are not stained with blood.” But it promised to set up a “transitional justice” system to punish those responsible for the crimes committed and recognize the suffering of their victims. 

Masha, a 40-year-old widow and mother of three, whom we encountered in Ghouta, dressed all in black, is already thinking about it. “Our country has been drowned in blood. All those children orphaned... It will be hard to forgive. Those who killed did not know why they were killing, and those who died did not know why they were dying.”  

Sarah Anne Rennick observed this recurring need for justice in her research. “But this is rarely the case [that justice is dispensed],” she says. “Often, it is decided that it will be easier to forget and forgive. In Syria, the time to act is now. The archives [of the prisons, etc.] and the bodies are still there!” 

Now a happy father, Mohamed, the White Helmet, believes, like many others, that any forgiveness is “premature.” And there can be no forgiveness without justice, insists this man who stands between resignation and hope, “I have no future, because my generation is lost. All we saw was death. In my last school photo, there were 30 of us. Today, only five of us are still alive. But I want to rebuild for my children... And it is us, the young people, who will build a new Syria.” 

Fabrice de Pierrebourg visited Syria at the invitation of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). This report was produced in collaboration with Zein Khuzam. 

This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of L’actualité, under the title “Les sacrifiés d’Assad.”