خواطر دمشقية (1)

I couldn't hold back my tears while on the road from Damascus Airport to the city center, after we entered the neighborhood of "Harasta" and its surroundings. It was a painful tour, filled with deep sorrow among the ruins, debris, remnants, and ghosts that no imagination could conceive. We witnessed so much documentation of the horrors that occurred in Syria, but one can only truly understand what happened by seeing it firsthand. We wandered around with the specter of death looming from every corner, as if we could hear the echoes of the screams of those who were struck by barrels of destruction falling from the sky, and heavy shells raining down from armored vehicles, burying their remains under the ashes of their homes. I don't believe any filmmaker wanting to depict the end of the world could create something as profound as what Bashar al-Assad's regime has done in Syria. We left that neighborhood, thinking the tale of destruction had ended in its vicinity, only to find its disgusting chapters continuing everywhere. Honestly, I cannot describe the feeling that overwhelmed me throughout the journey; it is harsher than shock, and more intense than pain. Beside me was a colleague who had previously visited Syria and went to other areas. He said to me when he saw my features: "How would you feel if you saw what happened in other places?"

Damascus, the legend of beauty and the enchantress of history, seemed to me as if it had just returned from a painful and sinful time, where it was left in the care of a cruel and ignorant guardian. It was gathering itself from chronic pain, urging what remained of its life cells to multiply quickly to return to the world of the living, desperately trying to pump the water of life into the jasmine gardens and the orange blossom orchards that gunpowder had killed. The people there want to replace the dirges of sorrow with chants of hope. They are determined to race against time towards a beautiful future and to draw the curtain on the pains of the past. Despite the harshness of life, one finds the Syrian, whether a child, youth, or elder, possessing legendary optimism, a people endowed with exquisite human qualities and immense potential and abilities to rebuild life.

The Syrian people have lived for more than half a century under the yoke of a sadistic tyrannical regime that used the most brutal and despicable means of intimidation and psychological siege, monitoring breaths and stalking thoughts, interpreting them in its own way, with the punishment being death in the depths of prisons. And when the people rose up saying enough, and went out raising their voices against the rampant injustice and the long, bitter suffering, the regime punished them for 15 years with hell from the sky and the earth.

Now there is a beautiful glimmer of hope, but it is surrounded by apprehension from the traps that do not want the Syrian people to build their present and future, nor do they want Syria to be stable. It is a highly sensitive phase that requires the Syrian brothers, in all their components, to have great awareness of all the dangers and to prioritize the homeland and its unity and cohesion over any other considerations.

And tomorrow I will tell you why I went to Damascus.