A few days after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria this month, hundreds of mourners processed behind the casket of the activist Mazen al-Hamada as his funeral took place in Damascus. Al-Hamada had become famous all over the world for speaking out against the horrors of al-Assad. Arrested, tortured and imprisoned, he was eventually released and escaped to Europe, where he found asylum in the Netherlands. Once there, he worked tirelessly to raise the alarm about the brutality ordinary Syrians were experiencing in prisons. “We are trying to tell people that we are humans: no more, no less,” he said in one interview. He returned to Syria in 2020, where he was arrested at the airport. His murdered body was discovered in Sednaya shortly after the regime fell, bearing signs, once again, of torture.
As the world wakes up to the almost incomprehensible brutality that Syrians experienced under Bashar al-Assad, it is also a moment in which, if we are wise, we might do an examination of conscience to ask forgiveness for the ways in which we did not listen. Who were we during these last 13 years? What did we know? Why did we fail, so often, to act? Because the truth is that, at best, we simply did not do enough to help the people of Syria in their hour of need. At worst, the world was deeply cruel to them.
I lived in Syria before the war, so this was never a story about strangers to me. I knew that behind the numbers in the newspapers were faces, including my former neighbors, my friends, my teachers. Beginning in 2016, I spent years traveling the globe, speaking to Syrians and other refugees about what they carried with them when they were forced to escape. In the process, I learned a great deal about the rest of us, about our refusal to help those in need, our capacity for cruelty and our willingness to look the other way in the face of suffering. At the height of the war, as an estimated 600,000 Syrians were killed, more than half of Syria’s population became displaced. Millions became refugees. They sought asylum in more than 130 countries, so that their story became the story of all of us.
I met them in camps like Zaatari in Jordan, living in white shipping-container homes, a camp so crowded that it became the fourth largest city in the country. I spoke to them in displacement camps in Iraq. In poor neighborhoods in Istanbul. I met parents desperate to get their children back into school, gardeners who told me the names of their lost trees, and children named after the cities their parents hoped one day to return to.
I also met Syrians in Paris, in Amsterdam, in the French Alps, in Switzerland, outside London, in Greece. They were young men who had escaped conscription into the army because they did not want to murder their fellow citizens; parents desperate to work again and for their children to heal from trauma; artists and writers and doctors and lawyers, who, if they had stayed, risked death by prison or barrel bombs. They often sold their belongings or borrowed money to pay smugglers to cross the sea, knowing that it was almost impossible to find passage any other way.
We cannot say that we did not know why Syrians were fleeing. Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people. A military defector with the codename Caesar smuggled out over 50,000 photos, showing al-Assad’s systematic torture of detainees in Syrian prisons. By 2015, the bombardment of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, made it widely considered the most dangerous place on earth. Those who escaped Syria were fleeing for their lives. To find safety, because the world did not arrange for safe passage, they often had to risk their lives again.
And so, during the war, the Mediterranean became a graveyard, and Syrians who had already lived through bombardment watched as their family, their friends and their neighbors drowned. A photo of a little boy, Aylan Kurdi, emerged, his body lying face down on the shores of Turkey. The conscience of the world was briefly stirred.
Yet it did not last. As the European Union sought to limit the flow of refugees, they set up “hotspots” on Greek islands, where refugees and migrants who were lucky enough to make it to shore safely were forced to wait in terrible conditions for their asylum requests to be processed. I visited Moria on the island of Lesbos in 2017, the same year Pope Francis said that many holding centers had become like “concentration camps.” It was freezing, overcrowded and dangerous.
A Syrian man confronted me, wanting to know why, if journalists came every day to document their mistreatment in the camp, nothing changed. I could not answer him. Everything I saw challenged what I had always believed as a writer: that if people only knew about the horrors that were happening in the world, then they would do something to help.
Instead, as the years passed, the journey to safety was made even more dangerous. The European Union paid the Libyan Coast Guard to prevent migrants from reaching European shores. Human rights groups accused the Greek coast guard of pushing boats back into the water. In 2023, a boat off the coast of Pylos in Greece sank, and 600 people drowned. Many of them were Syrians. In 2017, Syrians were included in the travel ban to the United States issued by then-President Donald Trump.
Yet during those years, we also witnessed the best of what humanity can offer, especially among the Syrians themselves. Syrian classical musicians in Europe formed the Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra. The Syrian master soap maker Hassan Harastani started making his Aleppo soap outside Paris. The Hadhad family of chocolatiers from Damascus founded Peace by Chocolate in Canada. Yusra Mardini, the Syrian swimmer who survived the sea crossing, joined the refugee Olympic team. The filmmaker Hassan Akkad, formerly tortured under al-Assad, worked as a hospital cleaner during the height of Covid-19 to raise awareness of health workers.
Ordinary people also offered solidarity. Volunteers on search and rescue missions saved people from drowning in the sea. Organizations like Jesuit Refugee Service helped Syrians with food and education, while Doctors Without Borders provided lifesaving medical care. Journalists like James Foley and Marie Colvin—alongside so many Syrians—died while giving voice to victims of war. Catholic organizations like Sant’Egidio worked to give Syrians safe passage. Lawyers volunteered to take asylum cases, church communities around the globe banded together to sponsor families.
Now, as Syrians begin to come to terms with all that they lived and lost in these last years, I hope the rest of us will not be tempted to turn the page too quickly. There is so much that we need to confront about what role we played in Syrians’ stories, about how we could have done better, been more responsive to their pleas for help and, most of all, how we might have made the journey safer for refugees.
By June 2024, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency, one of every 67 people in the world was forcibly displaced. We can no longer pretend that their stories are not intertwined with our own. In a global world, the commandment to love our neighbor can no longer be limited to loving the person standing next to us. Our neighbor, knocking on our door, is from Aleppo and Damascus and Deraa, is the mother seeking safety for her children, the young man crossing the sea. He is Mazen, tears streaming down his face, asking for our help.
