The historic al-Hatab Square had been repaved a few years ago with broad, white slabs of limestone, ringed by a mix of gutted buildings and jarring white storefronts—the residue of nearly 14 years of war and the Assad regime’s failed attempts at reconstruction. For years, Syria had been defined by images of war: the deep bomb craters, the crumbled neighborhoods, the sprawling refugee camps. al-Hatab Square had been a fault line between regime and rebel territory in Aleppo during the particularly brutal years of 2013 to 2016. Many died crossing between the two sides. The regime’s aerial bombardment and the rebels’ underground explosions caused much of the destruction in the Jdeideh quarter, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that includes the al-Hatab Square.
In those moments in the square, you could squint and believe that fate had spared Syria the war. Yet all around me there were reminders; there was evidence. The yellowed stone planters that once held trees were gone. The old silver and gold shops, their facades blackened by time, were gone. What had once been dense and crowded was now open and disorienting. This was my fourth trip to Aleppo since the Assad regime fell in December 2024. Every visit evoked grief and fury, happiness and gratitude, disbelief and mourning. As time passed, these emotions grew quieter, and something new took their place.
Still, as I witnessed scenes like the one in the square unfold across Syria, I found myself wondering: Can we finally live an ordinary life? Every day, I was struck by normalcy. The narrow streets of old Damascus were filled with crowds of shoppers. Cafes in the city were crowded with Syrians watching World Cup matches through the night.
One evening at the citadel of Aleppo, more than 1,800 people gathered in the amphitheater for a musical performance. The Gardenia Choir, a Syrian women’s vocal ensemble, sang tunes that every Syrian child of the 1980s would recognize. A traditional singer from Aleppo performed qudud halabiyeh and muwashahat—Andalusian poems that have been sung for centuries. The crowd broke into carefree dance, singing along. Even the security guards joined in. As dusk settled, fireworks burst above us. I flinched, by instinct, then relaxed. For years, pops and booms had meant death from the sky.
After all that has happened, it is no small thing to feel true joy in Syria. The normal feels radical. But a sense of normalcy is fragile and unevenly distributed. In Damascus, over the course of a single week in July, two bombings shook the city. The first bomb targeted a cafe outside the courthouse, killing nine people, most of them lawyers. Days later, two explosions injured 18 people near the Ministry of Tourism and the Four Seasons Hotel, where President Emmanuel Macron of France was visiting—the first head of state from the European Union to do so since the regime’s fall, a sign of Syria’s extraordinary reentry to the world. The bombings were a stark reminder of how easily life can still be shattered.
From the first session, the differences of tone and practice were significant. President Ahmed al-Sharaa entered the chamber quietly and addressed the new members of the parliament without the choreographed applause of the past. No clapping after each sentence he spoke. No clapping at all.
What do we talk about in Syria?
What was changing in Syria was not only what people were able to do, but what they were able to say. The shroud of silence and fear that enveloped Syria throughout the Assad decades was gone. Syrians were, finally, speaking freely about those dark decades.
In Aleppo, which is 220 miles northwest of Damascus, a kind man sitting next to me at dinner casually recounted how he and his wife—both were jailed for opposing Assad during the revolution—had survived. Their survival and our ability to speak openly about the brutal past felt miraculous. I teared up listening to them. I couldn’t get over what it meant to hear these stories exactly where they had happened. Just being there, bearing witness together, speaking and listening without fear or filter seemed to loosen some of the pain trapped inside us. In Hama, the wounds are 44 years old; the city was hollowed out, every family touched by loss. In Aleppo, in the suburbs of Damascus, across Syria, people and neighborhoods heaved under the trauma of the last 14 years. Thousands of families are still searching for answers about their loved ones—more than 100,000 of whom had disappeared under Assad’s rule.
Careful, beloved Syria
The weight of all this loss can feel like too much for our ancient, newborn country to bear, as it tries to shake off the past while building a future on unsteady ground. There are no easy answers on how to move forward after a war that tore a country apart. In Bosnia, people are still identifying and burying their dead 31 years after the Srebrenica massacre. Such rituals strengthen collective memory and help a grieving community process and find some measure of closure. Syria is still at the beginning of this reckoning, and it will take time to build the forms of justice and remembrance that honor all its people.
For now, people look up in delight rather than terror at a blaze of colors across the sky. Children play soccer in Aleppo on an old battlefield, laying new layers of joyful memories.
I think that’s progress.
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