The new Syrian government changed the sign at the border to read “Welcome Home.”
Marketplace in Damascus
Batteries help people living with unstable electricity.
Province of Latakia
A view from the city of Jablah
Someone’s bombed-out house
A traditional Syrian tea vendor
Marketplaces are alive again.
Photos from top: Mustafa (1, 4, 5, 6),
“Ibrahim” (2, 3), Ayham AlMalek (7, 8)
For our December newsletter, we’re honoring an important milestone, the one-year anniversary of the end of Syria’s brutal civil war. Since then, several of our friends and colleagues have returned to their homeland. Below, you’ll find reflections from two of them. “Ibrahim” moved back to his hometown of Damascus (we’ve changed his name for privacy). Mustafa lives in Greece and visited his family in Syria over the summer.
“Ibrahim”
Coming back home was a huge decision, with both positive and negative sides. When I decided to leave the EU permanently, I imagined a few things:
On the positive side, I knew I’d see my family and friends again, walk in Damascus, and be back in the streets where I grew up. That really gives me a lot of happiness. I also thought that, since Syria is cheaper and my family [members who live overseas] could help from outside, I’d at least be comfortable financially.
I expected to suffer from things like bad electricity, but honestly it didn’t affect me as much as I thought. I was lucky that I could afford some alternatives like solar panels.
What’s harder is people’s mental state. I expected everyone to be completely miserable, but it’s more mixed.
Many people are very worried financially and economically, and a lot of people—especially minorities and non-extreme Muslims—are scared about what might happen in the future.
Women suffer a lot. Every time I see a girl who doesn’t wear hijab or “typical” conservative clothes, I can’t help imagining the harassment she might face on a daily basis.
You also hear totally different stories depending on people’s beliefs. Some say there’s no more corruption or bribes; others say corruption still exists but in a more hidden way. For example, you still often need to bribe someone to get a document, but now employees are more scared and do it secretly. In some ways that might sound better, but in reality it makes the process more confusing. You have to find a trusted person who can connect you, which complicates everything.
Of course, we’re against corruption in principle. But, in real life, if you need a legal document and the only way to get it in days instead of months is to pay a bribe, the ethics become very “grey.”
Is it wise not to bribe? Of course.
Is it wise to lose months and maybe your business because of delays? Of course not.
It’s better for society to stop bribes, but for the individual, it can be a disaster not to play along.
About safety: in some ways it is safer than before, and nobody can deny that. But as we’ve seen in places like the coast and Sweida, the situation can change in a minute. You can leave your house feeling safe and still not know if you’ll come back—whether because of death, injury, or kidnapping. That feeling never fully goes away.
Prices here are insanely high. For example, an average cup of coffee is about 20,000 Syrian lira (around $2), while the average salary is only $100–150 a month. Electricity used to be very cheap, but they changed the price from about 10 lira per kWh (around 1 cent) to 600 lira (around 60 cents). So someone who used to pay about $1 now pays around $60. Syria went from having some of the cheapest electricity to some of the most expensive in the Middle East (as of November 2025).
To be honest, my own mental health is much better here than it was in the EU. At least here I’m not constantly treated like a “10th-class” person. I’m not talking about the people—I’m very thankful to the people in the EU—I’m talking about the laws and rules for refugees. They always say refugees have the same rights as EU citizens, and I can’t believe I once believed that.
Even though I feel better here, there’s a big negative side: If something bad happens again, there’s basically no way out. It looks like the US and EU have better relations with Syria now, which gives some hope that things might improve, but nobody really knows.
The hardest part about being in Syria is the people’s emotional state. Even when they smile, you can feel the depression underneath—the wish that they hadn’t lived through what they did. And although kids seem the least depressed on the surface, they are actually the biggest victims of the war: so much violence, very little education, and many of them never got the chance to live a real childhood. They’re survivors, not children, and that breaks my heart.
Mustafa
Returning to Syria after so many years felt like stepping into a memory that had been rewritten without me. The streets, the faces, even the air felt changed. People smile, but the sadness sits quietly behind their eyes. They want peace, desperately, but they don’t fully trust it yet.
My own city, Jablah, was not destroyed like so many others. There are no collapsed buildings in the center, no neighborhoods turned to dust. But that doesn’t mean the city escaped the war. Instead, it suffered in silence. Years without electricity, without stable water, without internet, without anything that makes a daily life feel normal. Jablah wasn’t reduced to rubble, it was frozen in time. You can feel it in the way people walk, in the heaviness behind their greetings, in the tiredness that lives beneath their smiles.
And yet, the journey to get there reminded me of the other Syria, the one visible from the car window. On the road from Lebanon toward Jablah, we passed through cities and towns that were completely destroyed. Whole areas flattened, whole communities wiped out. Just outside Jablah, some towns are nothing but ghosts now. That contrast stays with you: a city that survived on the surface, surrounded by places that did not.
What struck me most was the mix of exhaustion and resilience, everywhere. People are rebuilding something, a house, a shop, a routine, a life. There is no magic solution, no sudden recovery. Just people doing the work brick by brick. And that’s where I found hope. Not in speeches or politics, but in the ordinary strength of those who choose to stay, choose to care, choose to rebuild even when the world has forgotten them.
Peace is possible. But it will take time. And it will take all of us, inside and outside Syria, believing that our country deserves more than just survival.
We Recommend:
In Crossing the Line, Sarah Towle writes of her journey driving along the US border with Mexico. She began at Matamoros, Mexico, where roughly three thousand people were living in makeshift tents in search of a safe and dignified life in the US. A good third of them were children.
“I committed to lifting up not just the voices of those identified by misleading labels and dangerous tropes,” she writes, “but also those of the ordinary people offering welcome: the folks who never stopped flying the tattered flag of US-American values.”
I found this book both shocking and enlightening. I learned not only about the extreme tactics employed against immigrants, but also about the efforts of so many to provide relief, and hopefully real change.
—Roy Walter, Humanity Now Supporter
