Returning to Syria to reckon with the ghosts of my father's past

Washington Post

05-06-2025

In an Assad torture prison, I saw my father's poem still on the wall.
As my father watched the news, his breath caught. A video of the inside of a prison cell was on the television. Tears streamed down his face. On one of the walls he could make out a poem, one he had written with his own hands.
He watched as the Assad regime, which had imprisoned him in the notorious Palestine Branch, collapsed; watched as thousands fled the dungeons where Syrians had been starved, tortured, killed.
These were memories I longed to forget: the days without my father, the stories of what he endured. But now, as a photographer on assignment in Syria, I had no choice but to confront them.
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The return
I never imagined I'd return to Syria — especially not after my family and I left in 2004, and certainly not after the civil war.
What began in 2011 as peaceful demonstrations — part of a broader wave of uprisings across the Middle East — was met with unsparing brutality by the Assad regime. The scars of its aftermath were everywhere.
Crossing into Syria from Turkey, I felt disoriented. As I drove through the scorched countryside toward Aleppo — the first major city to fall in the final days of Bashar al-Assad's regime — we passed through towns that looked suspended in ruin. New revolutionary flags fluttered above the crumbling walls. Posters of Assad and his father, Hafez, had been torn down by those they had oppressed. Tanks and military uniforms were scattered along the road, evidence of a regime that had fled in haste.
We drove past Aleppo, then Hama, where I remembered taking youth group trips to the old city.
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As we neared the capital, we stopped at Mezzeh military airport, once a tightly guarded area. During Assad's reign, approaching it had been unthinkable. Now, I walked freely through the wreckage there: destroyed helicopters, twisted steel, shattered cockpits — all reduced to rubble by Israeli airstrikes in the chaotic hours after the regime's collapse.
Damascus, though, felt frozen in an earlier time: the narrow alleyways, the ancient stone, the scent of jasmine in the air. Here, I had walked as a boy, laughed with friends, built a thousand memories. But there were also pangs at what lay ahead — I knew had to see the Palestine Branch with my own eyes.
The prison
I found myself standing alone in a dark corridor. I walked through the cells, each more haunting than the last. The stench was suffocating.
On one wall, a man had etched: 'I wish the reality was a dream, and the dream was a reality.' That man was my father. I had found his cell. More than two decades had passed, but his words remained — a haunting reminder of what he had endured.
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The Palestine Branch was one of the most feared security centers in Syria, infamous for its brutal interrogations, arbitrary detentions and systematic torture. For decades, it stood as a symbol of repression.
My father was imprisoned there for seven months in 2000, at a time when Syria was gripped by paranoia and deep mistrust. We had come to Syria as refugees from Iraq, where my father had served in the military, which was mandatory during Saddam Hussein's rule. That was enough for the Assad regime to be suspicious.
My father spent the first few months in Cell No. 4, a space meant for about three people. He recalled being there with 11 others. Later, he was moved to Cell No. 8, where he spent the bulk of his detention and endured severe torture.
Living in Damascus
After my father's release from prison, we settled in a neighborhood called Dwela, a modest working-class suburb of Damascus. I started sweeping up hair clippings and making tea at a barbershop nearby. Later, I worked in the basement of our building, where the landlord — a man named Abu John — ran a tailoring workshop.
It was in that neighborhood that I experienced my first protest. The mass uprisings of 2011 were still years away, but you could already feel the growing anger. The government had announced plans to demolish homes in our area to make way for a highway and a bridge. One afternoon, we gathered in the street, chanting against the demolition. Riot police soon arrived, and before we knew it, we were surrounded by tear gas.
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When I returned to the neighborhood this year, the open fields where we once played were gone, buried beneath layers of concrete and makeshift buildings. Trash spilled into alleyways. After decades of war, residents' faces were etched with grief and exhaustion.
The monastery
One of the places I was most eager to revisit was the monastery where I had spent a significant part of my childhood — St. Ephraim, nestled in the village of Maarat Sednaya, just outside Damascus.
We had lived in the capital for nearly a year when the government intensified its crackdown on undocumented refugees like us. Our Orthodox church stepped in, offering us shelter in the monastery.
We spent about four years there. My parents helped with the cooking, and I worked in the fields alongside a monk named Hanna. Together, we tended to nearly a thousand olive trees that covered the hillside.
Returning after two decades, I felt time had paused.
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I wandered among the olive trees that I had once watered, whose fruit I had once harvested and cleaned. I ate meals with the monks, joined them for morning and evening prayers, walked among the ancient books, and stood once again inside the small room where I had spent years of my life.
A few miles away, across the mountain, a new monastery had been built. The Holy Cross Monastery reminded me of how the place once felt: sacred and untouched by the chaos below. When I visited, I was stunned to find Monk Hanna there.
It was a bittersweet reunion. He barely remembered me. After my family left, hundreds of other Iraqi refugees sought shelter at the monastery. To him, I was one of many — a fading memory buried in decades of faces and names.
When I showed him a photo of the two of us in the olive fields, something flickered, a faint recognition. I held on to that moment. I didn't need more.
The departure
In 2004, I sat in the departure hall of Damascus airport. We were leaving the home we had known for years. I didn't know if I'd return, but I still remember my heart pounding with excitement for what might come next.
Two decades later, walking through the same halls, I was overwhelmed by a flood of memories — of uncertainty, of longing, of a younger version of myself who didn't yet know how long the journey ahead would be.
As our plane lifted off, I looked down at the landscape of Syria — the cities and towns, the valleys and ridges, the scars of war and the quiet strength still holding the country together. I tried to stay in the moment, to reflect on everything I had seen over the past few months: the fall of the regime, the devastation, the resistance, the resilience.
I thought of the people I was leaving behind — the shopkeepers, the mothers, the children, the former detainees, the elderly survivors who held their stories like heirlooms. They had endured so much under the iron grip of the Assad regime.
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I thought, too, about how rare it is for refugees to return. Most never do. But I had been blessed twice: once to return to my homeland, Iraq, and now to my second home, Syria.